Rabbi Leora's Erev Rosh Hashanah Sermon 2018
The Freedom to Pray
Many of you know that this past year, I worked as a chaplain at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston. I served on an interfaith team to respond to the spiritual care needs of the hospital’s patients, their loved ones, and the staff.
The team included Jews, Catholics, Baptists, Evangelicals, humanists, Buddhists. One of our roles was to lead a brief prayer service every day in the Chapel, which is on the first floor of the main Brigham building, in some ways the beating heart of the hospital. Different chaplains lead this prayer service in different ways, drawing from their own tradition or spiritual practice, and including language that makes it open and welcoming to all.
Only one part of the service never changes, and that is reading aloud what are called the “prayers of the community.” On a small board in the corner of the chapel, visitors are invited to write a prayer on a post-it note. The chapel is open twenty-four hours a day, and people do come in at all hours.
Patients come, trailing IV carts. Their loved ones come - parents and grandparents, children, friends, lovers, caretakers. Doctors and nurses come, and food service and maintenance staff, social workers and the people who offer reiki and massage to patients. Many of the people who come to the chapel leave prayers on the prayer board.
During every noon prayer service, the post-its come down from the board, and everyone present is invited to take a few and read them aloud. It is always a striking and moving experience.
Sometimes there is just a name.
Sometimes it says a little bit more: “Prayers for my mom,” “prayers for Larry.” Or “please take care of my baby girl.”
Sometimes the prayers are more specific. “Please let my husband’s heart surgery be successful.” “I pray that Tasha’s body be receptive to the cancer treatment.” “Please, please may the doctors give us good news today.”
When I worked at the Brigham, I would occasionally recognize people in their prayers: recognize the name, diagnosis, or procedure of someone with whom I had visited upstairs in their room, or in pre-op right before surgery. Most of the time, even when signed, the prayers were totally anonymous.
They aren’t always about hospital care. I heard prayers for a court hearing to go well, for housing or a job to be secured, for success in school or in life. I heard many prayers about addiction and its consequences.
Often, the prayers are very religious, addressed to “Lord God in Heaven,” “Gracious Heavenly Father,” “Jesus.” They rebuke Satan, say no weapons shall be formed against you, they call upon the angels. I heard a lot of Christian references I didn’t understand, or eventually learned about.
Just as often, there is no reference to god or gods.
The prayers come in all different languages. Sometimes these ones are read aloud badly. Sometimes, when they are written in another alphabet, like Russian or Arabic, they stay up on the board until someone comes along who can read them, and sometimes they do not get read aloud.
It’s not unusual for the board to include prayers for the dying and the dead. May someone be gathered into God’s embrace, enter into eternal life, or, simply, have a peaceful transition.
And often they offer testimony to pain, fear, endurance, and hope. My mom is in so much pain, someone will write. Please help her feel better. Please ease her suffering.
Always, always, they are beautiful, heartfelt, and full of longing.
One prayer that struck me most deeply said simply, “thanksgiving,” and was signed with a name. No need to be more specific, I couldn’t tell if it was a witness to an experience of gratitude, or an aspiration to feel more thankful. Whatever it was, it was enough to simply name a feeling.
There is an old Jewish story about told about this kind of straight-from-the-heart prayer. It is about a young shepherd boy who traverses the wilderness all day with his flock. As he follows them over the rocky terrain, into caves, and through dry riverbeds, he talks to God. He shares his heart, speaking frankly about his feelings, his hopes, his plans, his desires. He shares his fears, and as he speaks them aloud, they subside. He shares his thanksgiving, and as he speaks it aloud, it expands, filling his heart until he feels it might burst. His prayer is natural and easy. He doesn’t really think twice about it.
One day, a rabbi visits him in the desert. The rabbi hears the boy praying, and is moved by the tenderness and vulnerability the boy is able to express. How beautiful, the rabbi thinks. If only he knew the words of the liturgy - he would be able to sing them with such passion. What a honor it would be, to our tradition and to God, to teach this boy to pray. So he does - he visits the boy for several weeks, teaching him the words that have been passed down from generation to generation, that have poured through the lips of so many. The boy is eager to learn, loves the way the words feel in his mouth, loves how the melodies help quiet his heart and release the tension in his muscles. The rabbi is proud, proud of himself and proud of the boy and proud of the prayer. And then the rabbi leaves, returns to his congregation and his study house in the city.
For a while, the boy revels in his newfound prayers. But before long, he begins to forget. He doesn’t have a book, after all, and it is a lot to remember. For the first time, the boy feels unsure. Is he saying the right thing? Is he praying the right way? And soon, the boy stops praying at all. He doesn’t like how it feels to be so unsure. Better to just let it be, he thinks, than make a mistake. He tries to go back to the old way, but it doesn’t flow easily anymore. Somehow, the words he was taught are like a lid on a box, and he can no longer get into the box where his deepest truths are kept. He wants to reach them again, but he no longer remembers how.
That may be the end of the story. To be honest, I don’t know. It’s what I remember, but that could because when I heard it, I was so chastened and terrified that I, as a rabbi, could potentially get in the way of someone’s prayer like that.
But I don’t want the story to end there. If I were to write a new ending, the boy’s life would be duller and more constrained without his prayer. His fears would build up without anywhere to express them, and his feelings of thanksgiving would get clouded over. His heart would begin to feel heavy, burdened by all of the feelings and longings that got trapped inside with no way out. And then one day, he would be startled by the sound of a shofar blast. The raw sound - almost like a scream, really - would reverberate in his whole being. It would touch that place within him where his fears and his doubts and his thanks and his delight were kept, protected, and he would remember what it feels like to let them flow free. Slowly, he would begin to pray again, each day remembering with his whole body what it felt like to hear that sound.
The prayers in the hospital chapel were like a shofar call for me. A raw cry. Some were beautifully written words. Many were barely more than tears. All were a reminder that all of us can pray. All of us have the ability to reach inside that box where our deepest truths are kept, and all of us have reasons why it’s hard. We learned, from somewhere, that there was a right way and a wrong way. Or we learned, from somewhere, that the truths are too strong, too vulnerable, too much, and it isn’t safe to let them out. Or, we were simply never given the chance to practice. And it does take practice. For some of us, the holidays are a welcome chance to delve into our deepest selves. For others, the most we can do is brush a little dust off the top of our protective lid. All that matters is that we take a step.
We listen to the cry of a shofar, or the gentle melody of a wordless song, and we let the sounds reverberate in our whole being, knowing we are doing it just exactly right.
Many of you know that this past year, I worked as a chaplain at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston. I served on an interfaith team to respond to the spiritual care needs of the hospital’s patients, their loved ones, and the staff.
The team included Jews, Catholics, Baptists, Evangelicals, humanists, Buddhists. One of our roles was to lead a brief prayer service every day in the Chapel, which is on the first floor of the main Brigham building, in some ways the beating heart of the hospital. Different chaplains lead this prayer service in different ways, drawing from their own tradition or spiritual practice, and including language that makes it open and welcoming to all.
Only one part of the service never changes, and that is reading aloud what are called the “prayers of the community.” On a small board in the corner of the chapel, visitors are invited to write a prayer on a post-it note. The chapel is open twenty-four hours a day, and people do come in at all hours.
Patients come, trailing IV carts. Their loved ones come - parents and grandparents, children, friends, lovers, caretakers. Doctors and nurses come, and food service and maintenance staff, social workers and the people who offer reiki and massage to patients. Many of the people who come to the chapel leave prayers on the prayer board.
During every noon prayer service, the post-its come down from the board, and everyone present is invited to take a few and read them aloud. It is always a striking and moving experience.
Sometimes there is just a name.
Sometimes it says a little bit more: “Prayers for my mom,” “prayers for Larry.” Or “please take care of my baby girl.”
Sometimes the prayers are more specific. “Please let my husband’s heart surgery be successful.” “I pray that Tasha’s body be receptive to the cancer treatment.” “Please, please may the doctors give us good news today.”
When I worked at the Brigham, I would occasionally recognize people in their prayers: recognize the name, diagnosis, or procedure of someone with whom I had visited upstairs in their room, or in pre-op right before surgery. Most of the time, even when signed, the prayers were totally anonymous.
They aren’t always about hospital care. I heard prayers for a court hearing to go well, for housing or a job to be secured, for success in school or in life. I heard many prayers about addiction and its consequences.
Often, the prayers are very religious, addressed to “Lord God in Heaven,” “Gracious Heavenly Father,” “Jesus.” They rebuke Satan, say no weapons shall be formed against you, they call upon the angels. I heard a lot of Christian references I didn’t understand, or eventually learned about.
Just as often, there is no reference to god or gods.
The prayers come in all different languages. Sometimes these ones are read aloud badly. Sometimes, when they are written in another alphabet, like Russian or Arabic, they stay up on the board until someone comes along who can read them, and sometimes they do not get read aloud.
It’s not unusual for the board to include prayers for the dying and the dead. May someone be gathered into God’s embrace, enter into eternal life, or, simply, have a peaceful transition.
And often they offer testimony to pain, fear, endurance, and hope. My mom is in so much pain, someone will write. Please help her feel better. Please ease her suffering.
Always, always, they are beautiful, heartfelt, and full of longing.
One prayer that struck me most deeply said simply, “thanksgiving,” and was signed with a name. No need to be more specific, I couldn’t tell if it was a witness to an experience of gratitude, or an aspiration to feel more thankful. Whatever it was, it was enough to simply name a feeling.
There is an old Jewish story about told about this kind of straight-from-the-heart prayer. It is about a young shepherd boy who traverses the wilderness all day with his flock. As he follows them over the rocky terrain, into caves, and through dry riverbeds, he talks to God. He shares his heart, speaking frankly about his feelings, his hopes, his plans, his desires. He shares his fears, and as he speaks them aloud, they subside. He shares his thanksgiving, and as he speaks it aloud, it expands, filling his heart until he feels it might burst. His prayer is natural and easy. He doesn’t really think twice about it.
One day, a rabbi visits him in the desert. The rabbi hears the boy praying, and is moved by the tenderness and vulnerability the boy is able to express. How beautiful, the rabbi thinks. If only he knew the words of the liturgy - he would be able to sing them with such passion. What a honor it would be, to our tradition and to God, to teach this boy to pray. So he does - he visits the boy for several weeks, teaching him the words that have been passed down from generation to generation, that have poured through the lips of so many. The boy is eager to learn, loves the way the words feel in his mouth, loves how the melodies help quiet his heart and release the tension in his muscles. The rabbi is proud, proud of himself and proud of the boy and proud of the prayer. And then the rabbi leaves, returns to his congregation and his study house in the city.
For a while, the boy revels in his newfound prayers. But before long, he begins to forget. He doesn’t have a book, after all, and it is a lot to remember. For the first time, the boy feels unsure. Is he saying the right thing? Is he praying the right way? And soon, the boy stops praying at all. He doesn’t like how it feels to be so unsure. Better to just let it be, he thinks, than make a mistake. He tries to go back to the old way, but it doesn’t flow easily anymore. Somehow, the words he was taught are like a lid on a box, and he can no longer get into the box where his deepest truths are kept. He wants to reach them again, but he no longer remembers how.
That may be the end of the story. To be honest, I don’t know. It’s what I remember, but that could because when I heard it, I was so chastened and terrified that I, as a rabbi, could potentially get in the way of someone’s prayer like that.
But I don’t want the story to end there. If I were to write a new ending, the boy’s life would be duller and more constrained without his prayer. His fears would build up without anywhere to express them, and his feelings of thanksgiving would get clouded over. His heart would begin to feel heavy, burdened by all of the feelings and longings that got trapped inside with no way out. And then one day, he would be startled by the sound of a shofar blast. The raw sound - almost like a scream, really - would reverberate in his whole being. It would touch that place within him where his fears and his doubts and his thanks and his delight were kept, protected, and he would remember what it feels like to let them flow free. Slowly, he would begin to pray again, each day remembering with his whole body what it felt like to hear that sound.
The prayers in the hospital chapel were like a shofar call for me. A raw cry. Some were beautifully written words. Many were barely more than tears. All were a reminder that all of us can pray. All of us have the ability to reach inside that box where our deepest truths are kept, and all of us have reasons why it’s hard. We learned, from somewhere, that there was a right way and a wrong way. Or we learned, from somewhere, that the truths are too strong, too vulnerable, too much, and it isn’t safe to let them out. Or, we were simply never given the chance to practice. And it does take practice. For some of us, the holidays are a welcome chance to delve into our deepest selves. For others, the most we can do is brush a little dust off the top of our protective lid. All that matters is that we take a step.
We listen to the cry of a shofar, or the gentle melody of a wordless song, and we let the sounds reverberate in our whole being, knowing we are doing it just exactly right.
Rabbi Leora's First Day of Rosh Hashanah Sermon 2018
On Membership and Belonging
I was recently frustrated to discover that my Amazon Prime membership had automatically renewed. I got it for free while I was a student, and I set a reminder in my calendar to cancel it before it automatically renewed, but somehow I missed the deadline, and I was chagrined to see a significant charge in my bank account.
I imagine some of you are the type who are meticulous about deadlines and never make this kind of mistake, and some of you, like me, are more scatterbrained about these logistical details. But all of you have been inundated with membership offers, opportunities to join a gym or a rewards program at the supermarket or airline. In these transactions, it’s clear the companies are in it to make a profit. How do you discern what the value of membership might be to you?
Other types of membership - to non-profits like museums or the zoo - help sustain the institution. But still, each of these memberships is commodified - you get access to a product or an experience by paying money. Is there another model where membership means something deeper?
As those of you who attended the Annual Meeting heard, my favorite writer on the notion of membership is Wendell Berry, a small farmer from Kentucky. He writes about the values, challenges, and gifts of living in community. For Berry, the question of membership is urgent. Industrial agriculture and a fossil fuel economy paired with cultural values of profit over people have put us in a dangerous relationship with the land we live on - a relationship where we take and take, and do not consider what we might need to give. Membership is a framework through which we can be in a healthy relationship not only with the land, but also with our neighbors and the larger human community. Without such a framework, without shifting our cultural values from profit and greed to mutuality and commitment, the well-being of our communities and our planet, and thus our very lives, is at stake.
Part of the deep spiritual work we do in a synagogue community is practice what it means to be part of a membership. When I say membership, I don’t mean only those who have filled out the paperwork or paid dues. I mean those who want to learn how to be a committed member of a mutual, sustainable, long-term community. That’s something we cannot learn from being a member of Amazon Prime.
Port William is the fictional farming community in Kentucky where many of Berry’s stories take place. The membership of Port William help each other harvest tobacco, slaughter pigs, make decisions, write their wills. A membership, Berry suggests, always has an economic aspect. In his words, “members must need one another’s help and be practically useful to one another.” It is more than a purely financial model, where you pay dues and you’re in. You have to give more - you give time, resources, love, and presence. And, ideally, you get much, much more in return. Part of what makes this economy sustainable is that not everyone gives the same amount - people stretch, but they give what they can. Moreover, people give different amounts at different times.
In a small community such as ours, this economy of generosity is abundantly clear. We’re not helping one another harvest tobacco or slaughter pigs, at least as far as I know, but we definitely need one another’s help and are practically useful to one another. Some of what people get from this community includes: learning, friendship, a place to celebrate or mourn, a chance to tend to their heart and soul, cross-generational relationships, a connection to their past, a place to be in relationship with people who think differently than they do. Many members of the community do make a financial contribution, but every member contributes in many other ways.
The members of Port William spend a lot of time telling stories. The stories they tell affirm their values, make hard work feel lighter, and connect them with those who have come before. They understand themselves to be in a cross-generational lineage, defined not by family but by choosing to be committed to the place where they live. Each generation is supported by the one that came before, and in receiving that support, they commit to passing it on to the generation that will follow them. It is in the act of choosing to receive and committing to pass on that someone comes to identify as part of the membership.
The idea of a membership that extends across generations is deeply rooted in Judaism. One of the most profound ways that Jews have learned to connect with something larger than ourselves - to witness the presence of a Divine whole that is beyond our scope of understanding - is through Jewish community. By connecting to our ancestors and imagining our descendants, we transcend ourselves. We use the tools of history and memory, imagination and hope. Each of us in this room today brings with us a whole circle of people we are remembering and imagining. The Hebrew word for inheritance shares a root with the word for river. When we say the blessing over wine on Friday night and give thanks that Shabbat is part of our inheritance, hinchaltanu, we are choosing to be part of a river whose source is ancient and which will flow, we pray, far into the future.
Choosing to be part of an ancient and enduring community is a beautiful idea. And, we all know it is also messy. Building a membership necessarily makes us ask - who is in and who is out? Cultivating a sense of who we are necessarily raises the question - who are we not?
These complexities are tangled up in centuries of persecution, when fear has shaped the contours of our community. Fear of assimilation has strengthened the boundaries of Jewish communities in an attempt to keep Jews in the community. Fear of persecution has strengthened the need to keep non-Jews out. In Medieval Europe, conversion to Judaism was illegal under Christian rule. Emphasizing the practice of turning a potential convert away three times was a way of protecting the community against false accusations of proselytizing.
Those fears about Jewish integrity and Jewish continuity are still embedded in our community, and continue to shape the ways we guard our borders. Patterns of being fearful of strangers run deep. We are still working on how to make our communities welcoming to non-Jewish family members. Jewish prayer spaces tend to require a high bar of literacy, and the desire to protect Jewish integrity and authenticity sometimes comes into conflict with the desire to be welcoming and accessible. The demanding nature of Jewish practice often sets up a perceived hierarchy of “good Jews” and “bad Jews.” All of these dynamics influence who feels like they belong, and who does not. My guess is that everyone in this room has felt, at one time or another, that they did not belong in a Jewish community.
And there are other barriers: it’s expensive to be a member of a Jewish community. Our buildings often aren’t accessible to those with disabilities or a non-binary gender expression. Political diversity is often not welcomed. Too many of us assume all Jews are white and treat people of color as visitors at best, threats at worst.
Reshaping these dynamics requires patience and perseverance. Thankfully, in addition to contending with a legacy of fear and anxiety, we also inherit centuries of learning how to navigate multiple commitments - to our Jewishness, and to the many other aspects that make up our multifaceted identities. In many times and places, Jews have managed to belong both to the communities and cultures wherever we have lived, and to the Jewish people, a community which transcends geography and is connected by our sacred texts and stories.
I want to suggest that navigating multiple identities and communities for generations has given Jews a certain wisdom about membership and belonging. We know that particularism makes the universal possible, that having a deep, secure foundation and a strong sense of who we are and where we come from is a powerful set up for connecting with those who are different from us, for engaging in solidarity and mutuality. Something Jewish communities are still struggling to learn is that creating a compelling, loving, and meaningful community, where anyone who wants to can feel a sense of belonging, is much more important than policing the borders of our community. It is the health and vitality inside the community, not anxiety around its edges, that makes it strong.
This community has known that to be true. We have worked hard to make membership in our community something that is deeply valued and has strong integrity; to create a sense of belonging among all of our members; and to keep the door open and welcoming. Much wonderful work has been done over the years, and there is room to grow and improve.
I want to offer a tool, here, for our ongoing work of membership and belonging, a tool that comes from a Jewish mystical tradition known as Kabbalah. If it feels confusing, bear with me - I’m teaching material that the mystics say one shouldn’t study before the age of 40. The mystics imagined a map of reality, which is also a map of the Divine and a map of each of us, that shows ten different qualities, known as sefirot. These qualities serve as channels for Divine energy, and are inherent in reality and within each of us. Today we are going to focus on two of these sefirot, these qualities: hesed, which means lovingkindness, and gevurah, which means strength or judgment. Like each of the ten qualities, hesed and gevurah are inherent in reality, in God, and in each of us, and we are constantly seeking to have them in the right balance. For example, Rosh Hashanah is known as the Day of Judgment, and much of our liturgy today asks that God’s hesed, God’s mercy and love, outweigh God’s judgment, although just to make it more confusing, we use the word din instead of the word gevurah. But it means the same thing!
So let’s explore these two qualities a little more. Hesed is kindness infused with love. Everywhere we look, we see hesed manifested in the world: in familial love, in friendship. In the relationship between teachers and students. In the kindness of strangers. What we call our “mentsches” other communities call a hesed committee - the folks who offer meals, rides, and support when someone is in need. Hesed is also the root of the phrase gemilut chasadim, or acts of lovingkindness, which is the theme of our Hebrew School’s family learning this year. Throughout the year, our students will be visiting seniors at the Branches assisted living and memory care community around the corner.
Though we usually translate hesed as lovingkindness, it also translates as “grace.” There is something unconditional about hesed - it is offered not because it is earned, but because everyone, inherently, deserves to be loved. In that sense, hesed is expansive.
In a community, Wendell Berry writes, members treat one another with “an unconditional neighborliness and compassion.” This is hesed. It means members share a deep commitment to one another’s well-being, and trust that when they disagree or even hurt one another, they will do the work to stay in relationship.
On the other side of the mystics’ map of reality, directly across from hesed, is gevurah, which might be translated as strength, boundaries, discipline, or judgment. Like hesed, gevurah is all around us. Gevurah is calendars and schedules; it is policies and organizational structure. It is laws, and, yes, it is punishment and consequences. Gevurah is constrictive, containing, limiting. People who are good at gevurah don’t miss the deadline on cancelling their Amazon Prime membership.
When we think about membership and belonging, it is clear how necessary both hesed and gevurah are. We need love, generosity, and expansive, welcoming arms. We also need structure, timelines, accountability. As the mystics understood it, our work to heal the world has to do with getting the balance right. Sometimes the balance gets out of whack, and we need to engage in a constant process of teshuvah, of reflection and repair, evaluating and adjusting.
The truth is, Jewish communities are far from the only place where teshuvah is needed around the question of belonging. All over the world today, these questions about how to create a membership with integrity, longevity, and inclusiveness are alive, and they are in the spotlight in the US as we wrestle over our immigration policy. The conversation is characterized by hope and also by hate and fear, and all of those qualities are fueled by questions of belonging.
Using the framework of membership for the US might seem surprising. After all, the question of who belongs here has always been so fraught.
Our nation was founded on a policy of excluding membership from the native inhabitants of the land, who were killed and displaced, and coercing membership on enslaved Africans, who were brought here against their will.
But what if we could cultivate a deeper experience of membership, where everyone is treated with unconditional neighborliness and compassion? Where everyone’s contribution is valued? Where anyone who is committed to the vision of a truly pluralistic and diverse nation is welcome to help realize that vision? One of Berry’s characters says this about Port William: "The way we are, we are members of each other. All of us. Everything. The difference ain't in who is a member and who is not, but in who knows it and who don't." That so beautifully expresses the ethos of this synagogue community; can we take what we have learned here and make our country a place where people are invited to choose into membership, into committing their presence and love and hard work and resources, and in return are guaranteed dignity and kindness and support?
I truly believe that as Jews, we have wisdom and leadership to offer.
We understand the fear that inevitably accompanies talk of belonging. We know the value of belonging, of creating a mutual community that acknowledges our history with both love and honesty, and that is joyfully open to change and evolution. And we know that it is not only possible but wonderful to be committed to more than one community at a time.
We know how important it is to reflect on our balance of hesed and gevurah, to ask: are we being as loving and compassionate as possible? Are we establishing clear and reasonable boundaries? Are those boundaries enforced in a gracious and forgiving way? Although it is about balance, the mystics teach, in the words of my teacher Art Green, “that the judging and punishing side of God [by which they mean reality] has a fierce and nearly uncontrollable character. When not tempered properly by the force of compassion, it becomes the root of evil...The Kabbalah teaches that judgment, when not aligned with love and compassion, can be demonic rather than divine.”
May the deep spiritual work we do here, to make our community one that welcomes, celebrates, and supports everyone who finds themself to be a part of it, inspire, strengthen, and prepare us to do that work in our country.
In this period of teshuvah, may the shofar blast shake us into awakeness, strengthening us to find and sustain the right balance of love and limits, of kindness and strength, as we heal our community, our country, and the world.
Bibliography:
That Distant Land: The Collected Stories (Port William), by Wendell Berry
Conversations with Wendell Berry (Literary Conversations Series), by Morris Allen Grubbs
These Are the Words: A Vocabulary of Jewish Spiritual Life, by Arthur Green
I was recently frustrated to discover that my Amazon Prime membership had automatically renewed. I got it for free while I was a student, and I set a reminder in my calendar to cancel it before it automatically renewed, but somehow I missed the deadline, and I was chagrined to see a significant charge in my bank account.
I imagine some of you are the type who are meticulous about deadlines and never make this kind of mistake, and some of you, like me, are more scatterbrained about these logistical details. But all of you have been inundated with membership offers, opportunities to join a gym or a rewards program at the supermarket or airline. In these transactions, it’s clear the companies are in it to make a profit. How do you discern what the value of membership might be to you?
Other types of membership - to non-profits like museums or the zoo - help sustain the institution. But still, each of these memberships is commodified - you get access to a product or an experience by paying money. Is there another model where membership means something deeper?
As those of you who attended the Annual Meeting heard, my favorite writer on the notion of membership is Wendell Berry, a small farmer from Kentucky. He writes about the values, challenges, and gifts of living in community. For Berry, the question of membership is urgent. Industrial agriculture and a fossil fuel economy paired with cultural values of profit over people have put us in a dangerous relationship with the land we live on - a relationship where we take and take, and do not consider what we might need to give. Membership is a framework through which we can be in a healthy relationship not only with the land, but also with our neighbors and the larger human community. Without such a framework, without shifting our cultural values from profit and greed to mutuality and commitment, the well-being of our communities and our planet, and thus our very lives, is at stake.
Part of the deep spiritual work we do in a synagogue community is practice what it means to be part of a membership. When I say membership, I don’t mean only those who have filled out the paperwork or paid dues. I mean those who want to learn how to be a committed member of a mutual, sustainable, long-term community. That’s something we cannot learn from being a member of Amazon Prime.
Port William is the fictional farming community in Kentucky where many of Berry’s stories take place. The membership of Port William help each other harvest tobacco, slaughter pigs, make decisions, write their wills. A membership, Berry suggests, always has an economic aspect. In his words, “members must need one another’s help and be practically useful to one another.” It is more than a purely financial model, where you pay dues and you’re in. You have to give more - you give time, resources, love, and presence. And, ideally, you get much, much more in return. Part of what makes this economy sustainable is that not everyone gives the same amount - people stretch, but they give what they can. Moreover, people give different amounts at different times.
In a small community such as ours, this economy of generosity is abundantly clear. We’re not helping one another harvest tobacco or slaughter pigs, at least as far as I know, but we definitely need one another’s help and are practically useful to one another. Some of what people get from this community includes: learning, friendship, a place to celebrate or mourn, a chance to tend to their heart and soul, cross-generational relationships, a connection to their past, a place to be in relationship with people who think differently than they do. Many members of the community do make a financial contribution, but every member contributes in many other ways.
The members of Port William spend a lot of time telling stories. The stories they tell affirm their values, make hard work feel lighter, and connect them with those who have come before. They understand themselves to be in a cross-generational lineage, defined not by family but by choosing to be committed to the place where they live. Each generation is supported by the one that came before, and in receiving that support, they commit to passing it on to the generation that will follow them. It is in the act of choosing to receive and committing to pass on that someone comes to identify as part of the membership.
The idea of a membership that extends across generations is deeply rooted in Judaism. One of the most profound ways that Jews have learned to connect with something larger than ourselves - to witness the presence of a Divine whole that is beyond our scope of understanding - is through Jewish community. By connecting to our ancestors and imagining our descendants, we transcend ourselves. We use the tools of history and memory, imagination and hope. Each of us in this room today brings with us a whole circle of people we are remembering and imagining. The Hebrew word for inheritance shares a root with the word for river. When we say the blessing over wine on Friday night and give thanks that Shabbat is part of our inheritance, hinchaltanu, we are choosing to be part of a river whose source is ancient and which will flow, we pray, far into the future.
Choosing to be part of an ancient and enduring community is a beautiful idea. And, we all know it is also messy. Building a membership necessarily makes us ask - who is in and who is out? Cultivating a sense of who we are necessarily raises the question - who are we not?
These complexities are tangled up in centuries of persecution, when fear has shaped the contours of our community. Fear of assimilation has strengthened the boundaries of Jewish communities in an attempt to keep Jews in the community. Fear of persecution has strengthened the need to keep non-Jews out. In Medieval Europe, conversion to Judaism was illegal under Christian rule. Emphasizing the practice of turning a potential convert away three times was a way of protecting the community against false accusations of proselytizing.
Those fears about Jewish integrity and Jewish continuity are still embedded in our community, and continue to shape the ways we guard our borders. Patterns of being fearful of strangers run deep. We are still working on how to make our communities welcoming to non-Jewish family members. Jewish prayer spaces tend to require a high bar of literacy, and the desire to protect Jewish integrity and authenticity sometimes comes into conflict with the desire to be welcoming and accessible. The demanding nature of Jewish practice often sets up a perceived hierarchy of “good Jews” and “bad Jews.” All of these dynamics influence who feels like they belong, and who does not. My guess is that everyone in this room has felt, at one time or another, that they did not belong in a Jewish community.
And there are other barriers: it’s expensive to be a member of a Jewish community. Our buildings often aren’t accessible to those with disabilities or a non-binary gender expression. Political diversity is often not welcomed. Too many of us assume all Jews are white and treat people of color as visitors at best, threats at worst.
Reshaping these dynamics requires patience and perseverance. Thankfully, in addition to contending with a legacy of fear and anxiety, we also inherit centuries of learning how to navigate multiple commitments - to our Jewishness, and to the many other aspects that make up our multifaceted identities. In many times and places, Jews have managed to belong both to the communities and cultures wherever we have lived, and to the Jewish people, a community which transcends geography and is connected by our sacred texts and stories.
I want to suggest that navigating multiple identities and communities for generations has given Jews a certain wisdom about membership and belonging. We know that particularism makes the universal possible, that having a deep, secure foundation and a strong sense of who we are and where we come from is a powerful set up for connecting with those who are different from us, for engaging in solidarity and mutuality. Something Jewish communities are still struggling to learn is that creating a compelling, loving, and meaningful community, where anyone who wants to can feel a sense of belonging, is much more important than policing the borders of our community. It is the health and vitality inside the community, not anxiety around its edges, that makes it strong.
This community has known that to be true. We have worked hard to make membership in our community something that is deeply valued and has strong integrity; to create a sense of belonging among all of our members; and to keep the door open and welcoming. Much wonderful work has been done over the years, and there is room to grow and improve.
I want to offer a tool, here, for our ongoing work of membership and belonging, a tool that comes from a Jewish mystical tradition known as Kabbalah. If it feels confusing, bear with me - I’m teaching material that the mystics say one shouldn’t study before the age of 40. The mystics imagined a map of reality, which is also a map of the Divine and a map of each of us, that shows ten different qualities, known as sefirot. These qualities serve as channels for Divine energy, and are inherent in reality and within each of us. Today we are going to focus on two of these sefirot, these qualities: hesed, which means lovingkindness, and gevurah, which means strength or judgment. Like each of the ten qualities, hesed and gevurah are inherent in reality, in God, and in each of us, and we are constantly seeking to have them in the right balance. For example, Rosh Hashanah is known as the Day of Judgment, and much of our liturgy today asks that God’s hesed, God’s mercy and love, outweigh God’s judgment, although just to make it more confusing, we use the word din instead of the word gevurah. But it means the same thing!
So let’s explore these two qualities a little more. Hesed is kindness infused with love. Everywhere we look, we see hesed manifested in the world: in familial love, in friendship. In the relationship between teachers and students. In the kindness of strangers. What we call our “mentsches” other communities call a hesed committee - the folks who offer meals, rides, and support when someone is in need. Hesed is also the root of the phrase gemilut chasadim, or acts of lovingkindness, which is the theme of our Hebrew School’s family learning this year. Throughout the year, our students will be visiting seniors at the Branches assisted living and memory care community around the corner.
Though we usually translate hesed as lovingkindness, it also translates as “grace.” There is something unconditional about hesed - it is offered not because it is earned, but because everyone, inherently, deserves to be loved. In that sense, hesed is expansive.
In a community, Wendell Berry writes, members treat one another with “an unconditional neighborliness and compassion.” This is hesed. It means members share a deep commitment to one another’s well-being, and trust that when they disagree or even hurt one another, they will do the work to stay in relationship.
On the other side of the mystics’ map of reality, directly across from hesed, is gevurah, which might be translated as strength, boundaries, discipline, or judgment. Like hesed, gevurah is all around us. Gevurah is calendars and schedules; it is policies and organizational structure. It is laws, and, yes, it is punishment and consequences. Gevurah is constrictive, containing, limiting. People who are good at gevurah don’t miss the deadline on cancelling their Amazon Prime membership.
When we think about membership and belonging, it is clear how necessary both hesed and gevurah are. We need love, generosity, and expansive, welcoming arms. We also need structure, timelines, accountability. As the mystics understood it, our work to heal the world has to do with getting the balance right. Sometimes the balance gets out of whack, and we need to engage in a constant process of teshuvah, of reflection and repair, evaluating and adjusting.
The truth is, Jewish communities are far from the only place where teshuvah is needed around the question of belonging. All over the world today, these questions about how to create a membership with integrity, longevity, and inclusiveness are alive, and they are in the spotlight in the US as we wrestle over our immigration policy. The conversation is characterized by hope and also by hate and fear, and all of those qualities are fueled by questions of belonging.
Using the framework of membership for the US might seem surprising. After all, the question of who belongs here has always been so fraught.
Our nation was founded on a policy of excluding membership from the native inhabitants of the land, who were killed and displaced, and coercing membership on enslaved Africans, who were brought here against their will.
But what if we could cultivate a deeper experience of membership, where everyone is treated with unconditional neighborliness and compassion? Where everyone’s contribution is valued? Where anyone who is committed to the vision of a truly pluralistic and diverse nation is welcome to help realize that vision? One of Berry’s characters says this about Port William: "The way we are, we are members of each other. All of us. Everything. The difference ain't in who is a member and who is not, but in who knows it and who don't." That so beautifully expresses the ethos of this synagogue community; can we take what we have learned here and make our country a place where people are invited to choose into membership, into committing their presence and love and hard work and resources, and in return are guaranteed dignity and kindness and support?
I truly believe that as Jews, we have wisdom and leadership to offer.
We understand the fear that inevitably accompanies talk of belonging. We know the value of belonging, of creating a mutual community that acknowledges our history with both love and honesty, and that is joyfully open to change and evolution. And we know that it is not only possible but wonderful to be committed to more than one community at a time.
We know how important it is to reflect on our balance of hesed and gevurah, to ask: are we being as loving and compassionate as possible? Are we establishing clear and reasonable boundaries? Are those boundaries enforced in a gracious and forgiving way? Although it is about balance, the mystics teach, in the words of my teacher Art Green, “that the judging and punishing side of God [by which they mean reality] has a fierce and nearly uncontrollable character. When not tempered properly by the force of compassion, it becomes the root of evil...The Kabbalah teaches that judgment, when not aligned with love and compassion, can be demonic rather than divine.”
May the deep spiritual work we do here, to make our community one that welcomes, celebrates, and supports everyone who finds themself to be a part of it, inspire, strengthen, and prepare us to do that work in our country.
In this period of teshuvah, may the shofar blast shake us into awakeness, strengthening us to find and sustain the right balance of love and limits, of kindness and strength, as we heal our community, our country, and the world.
Bibliography:
That Distant Land: The Collected Stories (Port William), by Wendell Berry
Conversations with Wendell Berry (Literary Conversations Series), by Morris Allen Grubbs
These Are the Words: A Vocabulary of Jewish Spiritual Life, by Arthur Green
Rabbi Leora's Kol Nidre Sermon 2018
Mystery and Meaning: Exploring Unetaneh Tokef
A friend of mine, a rabbi, told me about leading services once on Rosh Hashanah. After the service, a woman he didn’t recognize came up to him. “Rabbi,” she said, “how can I say these words? They’re horrible. I can’t even bear to listen to these words about a God who judges us, who takes our loved ones away. My dad died five months ago. Are you telling me God wanted it that way? My sister couldn’t even stay in the room, and I don’t think I’m coming back tomorrow.”
Whew. Hard words for a rabbi to hear, but as they did for my friend, they resonate deeply for me.
The truth is, the high holiday liturgy is really difficult. In fact, I want to invite you to raise your hand right now if, at some point, you have ever felt challenged by what is written in the mahzor.
The liturgy is challenging because it’s unfamiliar; we only say it once a year. We don’t wrestle with it as much as we do with the Shabbat liturgy, saying it on different days and in different moods when the meaning itself can shift and deepen. It’s also some of the most theologically challenging liturgy in our tradition.
There is perhaps no prayer as difficult as Unetaneh Tokef, in which we sing, “On Rosh Hashanah it is written, and on Yom Kippur, it is sealed: Who will live and who will die? Who by fire and who by water?” This evening, I want to take the opportunity to expand on the words I shared last Monday as I introduced Unetaneh Tokef.
As I was doing some research for this dvar Torah, I came across a glossary of important Jewish words to know during the High Holidays. The definition for Unetaneh Tokef was, “a religious poem… that is meant to strike fear in us.” This is the moment when I wish we had an organ and could play some scary backup music. Right? Yikes. Is prayer meant to make us feel afraid?!
Unetaneh tokef kedushat hayom, the prayer begins. Let us lend power to the holiness of this day. This prayer is intended to raise the stakes; to remind us of the awesome nature of what we are confronting today. It was written by a poet, and I’m certain the poet intended us to feel startled, awed, and even troubled. My childhood rabbi shared a story about his father, who used to say to his rabbi: I trust you enough to sleep through your sermons. This prayer is intended to keep us awake, to get our attention, and to get us to take our inner lives seriously. It does so with striking imagery: An all-knowing and all-powerful figure sits on a throne, facing an open book. Filling the book are our stories; our pasts and our futures. The book contains the ultimate story of life on earth, and the individual story of each human life that graces the earth. Sefer Hazikhronot, it is called, the Book of Memories. Chotem yad kol adam bo, the signature of each person is in the book.
It’s an image both awesome and scary: each of our tiny human lives are recorded in a cosmic book, suggesting that each of our lives matter in the great story of human life.
Offering a few different metaphors for God, the prayer suggests that our lives are overseen by a Divine power that knows all. This is the heart of what many people find troubling about it. But in reality, the prayer mostly asks questions. Who will live and who will die? Who will be rich, and who will be poor? In doing so, Unetaneh Tokef asks the deepest existential questions humans ask: does my individual life matter? Is there justice? Is what happens to me completely arbitrary, and if so, is there any way to make sense or meaning of it?
The point, for me, is less that God knows, and more that we don’t know. Someone recently said to me, describing a lifelong spiritual journey, “I know now that God is just a metaphor for mystery.” Unetaneh Tokef asks us to recognize that element of mystery that characterizes all of our lives, and invites us to face that mystery with eyes wide open.
Who will live and who will die, our prayer asks.
We don’t know.
We don’t know and it can feel agonizing not to know.
How many shall pass on, and how many shall be born? The truth of this prayer is the profound uncertainty it acknowledges. Who will die in their time, and who not in their time? Who by earthquake, who by sickness? We don’t know. And we also don’t know why - why them and not us, why us and not someone else. Why now and not later?
It is in real life that we confront this mystery - we don’t actually need the high holidays to tell us it is true, because we face it all the time. Anyone who is sick or has a loved one who is sick knows it to be true. Anyone whose house was burned in a gas explosion, anyone whose home has been flooded by a hurricane. Experiencing or hearing about these things reminds us that though we strive for control, we ultimately don’t have it.
We chant this prayer during the High Holidays because it returns us to our essential human-ness. It levels us, in the sense that mortality is equalizing: we are all born, and will all one day die. It also levels us in the sense of stripping away distraction, and pointing right to heart of the matter: our time here is limited. Our uncertain future, paradoxically, engenders within us a greater sense of agency. Not knowing how long we will live, we are compelled to live fully and deeply while we are here.
And that is what the prayer demands of us. On Rosh Hashanah it is written, we chant, and on Yom Kippur it is sealed, and teshuvah, tefilah, and tzedakah can mitigate the severity of the decree. Teshuvah - the work of personal and relational accountability and repair that we do during the high holidays and all year round; tefilah - prayer, self-care, and reflection; and tzedakah - giving to those in need and pursuing justice - these are how we respond to our existential questions, though we can’t
actually answer them. We respond to a confusing, unpredictable, and often arbitrary world by living aligned with our values, and taking care of ourselves and each other. By insisting that yes, what we do does matter.
In the twenty-first century, the idea that what happens to us is random only partly rings true. Certainly, a great deal of what happens to us is random and unpredictable. But we also understand, more than ever before, that so much of the suffering in our world is generated by humans and shaped by who we are. “Black infants in America are now more than twice as likely to die as white infants... a racial disparity that is actually wider than in 1850, 15 years before the end of slavery.” And “Black women, [including those who are not facing poverty and a lack of education,] are three to four times as likely to die from pregnancy-related causes as their white counterparts.” We don’t know who will live and who will die, it’s true, but we don’t entirely not know either.
Moreover, we are not powerless to change it. In 2017, a record number of people died from drug overdoses, but drugs and the war on drugs have been ravaging American communities for decades. And we have failed, at so many levels, to respond to it. From the drug companies who advertised falsely, to hospitals reducing addiction programs, to the willful neglect of state and federal governments. The systemic issues that created this crisis are extensive.
For individuals and families dealing with addiction, the uncertainty expressed in Unetaneh Tokef is devastatingly familiar. We don’t know who will live and who will die this year, who will experience tranquillity and who will be tormented. But there is so much we can do to limit new addictive prescriptions, to provide harm reduction and treatment options to people who are dealing with addiction, and to support the communities where loss of jobs and environmental destruction are causing the underlying despair that leads to drug use.
The number of overdose deaths last year exceeded the number of deaths due to HIV at the peak of the AIDS crisis. I’m not old enough for my own community to have been devastated by AIDS, but no queer person in this country can forget what happens when there isn’t political will to adequately deal with a public health crisis.
I think this awareness changes the way we are able to pray Unetaneh Tokef. I think it asks more of us. Teshuva, tefilah, and tzedakah - living aligned with our values, taking care of ourselves and each other - become even more significant tasks. It’s not just our own selves and our personal relationships that need our attention. It’s our collective well-being, our society. Teshuva, tefilah, and tzedakah - reparations, soul-searching, and justice work. In an age when we reject a conception of God as a judge who rewards and punishes, we are called into responsibility and accountability. The roar of the shofar and the voice of slender silence are not God’s voice alone, but God calling to us through the voices of all those who are suffering unjustly.
It’s so hard to live in the space between these two truths, between accepting impermanence and confronting our own agency and responsibility.
It’s hard to hold either one alone. On the one hand, to live in a way that doesn’t deny our mortality. On the other hand, to live in a way that takes seriously our opportunity to make a difference in this world, not to downplay or diminish the significance of our actions.
Holding them together is even more difficult - it’s a paradox each of us faces every day. But Unetaneh Tokef invites us to see that we respond to mystery by making meaning, and we accept both impermanence and responsibility in the same way - with teshuva, tefilah, and tzedakah. With teshuva, committing to being our best selves, living aligned with our values, and taking good care of our relationships. With tefilah - taking the time for contemplation, rest, and reflection. And with tzedakah - giving generously and working towards justice. In doing so, we care for ourselves, our loved ones, and those we don’t even know, and we live our mysterious, beautiful, sorrowful, and meaningful lives to the fullest.
A friend of mine, a rabbi, told me about leading services once on Rosh Hashanah. After the service, a woman he didn’t recognize came up to him. “Rabbi,” she said, “how can I say these words? They’re horrible. I can’t even bear to listen to these words about a God who judges us, who takes our loved ones away. My dad died five months ago. Are you telling me God wanted it that way? My sister couldn’t even stay in the room, and I don’t think I’m coming back tomorrow.”
Whew. Hard words for a rabbi to hear, but as they did for my friend, they resonate deeply for me.
The truth is, the high holiday liturgy is really difficult. In fact, I want to invite you to raise your hand right now if, at some point, you have ever felt challenged by what is written in the mahzor.
The liturgy is challenging because it’s unfamiliar; we only say it once a year. We don’t wrestle with it as much as we do with the Shabbat liturgy, saying it on different days and in different moods when the meaning itself can shift and deepen. It’s also some of the most theologically challenging liturgy in our tradition.
There is perhaps no prayer as difficult as Unetaneh Tokef, in which we sing, “On Rosh Hashanah it is written, and on Yom Kippur, it is sealed: Who will live and who will die? Who by fire and who by water?” This evening, I want to take the opportunity to expand on the words I shared last Monday as I introduced Unetaneh Tokef.
As I was doing some research for this dvar Torah, I came across a glossary of important Jewish words to know during the High Holidays. The definition for Unetaneh Tokef was, “a religious poem… that is meant to strike fear in us.” This is the moment when I wish we had an organ and could play some scary backup music. Right? Yikes. Is prayer meant to make us feel afraid?!
Unetaneh tokef kedushat hayom, the prayer begins. Let us lend power to the holiness of this day. This prayer is intended to raise the stakes; to remind us of the awesome nature of what we are confronting today. It was written by a poet, and I’m certain the poet intended us to feel startled, awed, and even troubled. My childhood rabbi shared a story about his father, who used to say to his rabbi: I trust you enough to sleep through your sermons. This prayer is intended to keep us awake, to get our attention, and to get us to take our inner lives seriously. It does so with striking imagery: An all-knowing and all-powerful figure sits on a throne, facing an open book. Filling the book are our stories; our pasts and our futures. The book contains the ultimate story of life on earth, and the individual story of each human life that graces the earth. Sefer Hazikhronot, it is called, the Book of Memories. Chotem yad kol adam bo, the signature of each person is in the book.
It’s an image both awesome and scary: each of our tiny human lives are recorded in a cosmic book, suggesting that each of our lives matter in the great story of human life.
Offering a few different metaphors for God, the prayer suggests that our lives are overseen by a Divine power that knows all. This is the heart of what many people find troubling about it. But in reality, the prayer mostly asks questions. Who will live and who will die? Who will be rich, and who will be poor? In doing so, Unetaneh Tokef asks the deepest existential questions humans ask: does my individual life matter? Is there justice? Is what happens to me completely arbitrary, and if so, is there any way to make sense or meaning of it?
The point, for me, is less that God knows, and more that we don’t know. Someone recently said to me, describing a lifelong spiritual journey, “I know now that God is just a metaphor for mystery.” Unetaneh Tokef asks us to recognize that element of mystery that characterizes all of our lives, and invites us to face that mystery with eyes wide open.
Who will live and who will die, our prayer asks.
We don’t know.
We don’t know and it can feel agonizing not to know.
How many shall pass on, and how many shall be born? The truth of this prayer is the profound uncertainty it acknowledges. Who will die in their time, and who not in their time? Who by earthquake, who by sickness? We don’t know. And we also don’t know why - why them and not us, why us and not someone else. Why now and not later?
It is in real life that we confront this mystery - we don’t actually need the high holidays to tell us it is true, because we face it all the time. Anyone who is sick or has a loved one who is sick knows it to be true. Anyone whose house was burned in a gas explosion, anyone whose home has been flooded by a hurricane. Experiencing or hearing about these things reminds us that though we strive for control, we ultimately don’t have it.
We chant this prayer during the High Holidays because it returns us to our essential human-ness. It levels us, in the sense that mortality is equalizing: we are all born, and will all one day die. It also levels us in the sense of stripping away distraction, and pointing right to heart of the matter: our time here is limited. Our uncertain future, paradoxically, engenders within us a greater sense of agency. Not knowing how long we will live, we are compelled to live fully and deeply while we are here.
And that is what the prayer demands of us. On Rosh Hashanah it is written, we chant, and on Yom Kippur it is sealed, and teshuvah, tefilah, and tzedakah can mitigate the severity of the decree. Teshuvah - the work of personal and relational accountability and repair that we do during the high holidays and all year round; tefilah - prayer, self-care, and reflection; and tzedakah - giving to those in need and pursuing justice - these are how we respond to our existential questions, though we can’t
actually answer them. We respond to a confusing, unpredictable, and often arbitrary world by living aligned with our values, and taking care of ourselves and each other. By insisting that yes, what we do does matter.
In the twenty-first century, the idea that what happens to us is random only partly rings true. Certainly, a great deal of what happens to us is random and unpredictable. But we also understand, more than ever before, that so much of the suffering in our world is generated by humans and shaped by who we are. “Black infants in America are now more than twice as likely to die as white infants... a racial disparity that is actually wider than in 1850, 15 years before the end of slavery.” And “Black women, [including those who are not facing poverty and a lack of education,] are three to four times as likely to die from pregnancy-related causes as their white counterparts.” We don’t know who will live and who will die, it’s true, but we don’t entirely not know either.
Moreover, we are not powerless to change it. In 2017, a record number of people died from drug overdoses, but drugs and the war on drugs have been ravaging American communities for decades. And we have failed, at so many levels, to respond to it. From the drug companies who advertised falsely, to hospitals reducing addiction programs, to the willful neglect of state and federal governments. The systemic issues that created this crisis are extensive.
For individuals and families dealing with addiction, the uncertainty expressed in Unetaneh Tokef is devastatingly familiar. We don’t know who will live and who will die this year, who will experience tranquillity and who will be tormented. But there is so much we can do to limit new addictive prescriptions, to provide harm reduction and treatment options to people who are dealing with addiction, and to support the communities where loss of jobs and environmental destruction are causing the underlying despair that leads to drug use.
The number of overdose deaths last year exceeded the number of deaths due to HIV at the peak of the AIDS crisis. I’m not old enough for my own community to have been devastated by AIDS, but no queer person in this country can forget what happens when there isn’t political will to adequately deal with a public health crisis.
I think this awareness changes the way we are able to pray Unetaneh Tokef. I think it asks more of us. Teshuva, tefilah, and tzedakah - living aligned with our values, taking care of ourselves and each other - become even more significant tasks. It’s not just our own selves and our personal relationships that need our attention. It’s our collective well-being, our society. Teshuva, tefilah, and tzedakah - reparations, soul-searching, and justice work. In an age when we reject a conception of God as a judge who rewards and punishes, we are called into responsibility and accountability. The roar of the shofar and the voice of slender silence are not God’s voice alone, but God calling to us through the voices of all those who are suffering unjustly.
It’s so hard to live in the space between these two truths, between accepting impermanence and confronting our own agency and responsibility.
It’s hard to hold either one alone. On the one hand, to live in a way that doesn’t deny our mortality. On the other hand, to live in a way that takes seriously our opportunity to make a difference in this world, not to downplay or diminish the significance of our actions.
Holding them together is even more difficult - it’s a paradox each of us faces every day. But Unetaneh Tokef invites us to see that we respond to mystery by making meaning, and we accept both impermanence and responsibility in the same way - with teshuva, tefilah, and tzedakah. With teshuva, committing to being our best selves, living aligned with our values, and taking good care of our relationships. With tefilah - taking the time for contemplation, rest, and reflection. And with tzedakah - giving generously and working towards justice. In doing so, we care for ourselves, our loved ones, and those we don’t even know, and we live our mysterious, beautiful, sorrowful, and meaningful lives to the fullest.
Rabbi Leora's Yom Kippur Sermon 2018
The Joy and Value of Being Wrong.
When I was eighteen years old, I traveled with other young adults on a group volunteer program. It was a small group, about twelve people, and we lived together in close quarters for almost two months. In the first few weeks of the program, I was judgmental of the other participants. I felt that they were on the program for the “wrong reasons,” and I didn’t see us becoming friends. There was one person in particular who I had a hard time with. Tamar was not like me, she was a New Yorker, she was in a sorority. I judged her as shallow, and I kept my distance.
A couple of weeks into the trip, we took a break from our volunteer project to go for a hike, and Tamar and I found ourselves alone on top of a mountain. No one else had climbed all the way to the top. Tamar confronted me, on the top of that mountain, about why I was keeping my distance from the group. In reality, I was probably mostly just being shy. But I must have told her that I felt different from everyone, that we weren’t interested in similar things, that I didn’t think they would understand where I was coming from. And she said, well why don’t you share your interests with us? Why don’t you give people a chance?
I don’t know that I had ever been confronted so directly before, and it was a very humbling experience. I realized that I was wrong, and it was hard to hear. I felt bad and guilty, I questioned myself, I was embarrassed. But I also, somehow, managed to open myself to the invitation she was offering - to recognize that I was wrong, and to change - and it changed not only my experience of that trip, but really my whole life. I ended up making great friends. I won’t say I have completely stopped making judgments based on first impressions, because I’m human, but I’m much better at noticing when I’m doing it and stopping. And, I am still friends with Tamar, who remains one of my bravest, most honest friends.
Although I wish I hadn’t been a jerk and was just a friendly open-hearted person from the beginning of that trip, I’m also thankful for the experience of being wrong, because I grew so much from it.
In her book Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error, Kathryn Shulz passionately advocates for the value of being wrong. Making mistakes is essential for our growth. And the experience of coming to realize that we were wrong and admitting it makes us more compassionate people.
I think this is part of the logic behind Yom Kippur. Taking the time to reflect on ways we may have been wrong in the past year is valuable. Doing it in a hopefully supportive and loving communal context, we hope, will let us maximize the ways we can grow from being wrong, and minimize the guilt and shame we feel.
Shulz points out that when we talk about “being wrong” in regular conversation, we can mean wrong in the sense of error, and we can mean wrong in the sense of iniquity. As she puts it, “it is wrong to think that the earth is flat, and it is also wrong to push your little brother down the stairs…” Her book is about the first kind, about intellectual and factual errors. She explores our cultural beliefs about making this kind of error, the psychological, sensory, and intellectual mechanisms that allow us to get things wrong, and what the experience of being wrong feels like.
Mostly, she says, being wrong is really hard. Why is it so hard to be wrong?
Sometimes, being wrong destabilizes our sense of self. Even as a teenager, I thought of myself as someone who was a good judge of character. But Tamar proved me so wrong about her, it made me question myself deeply.
Being wrong can also be scary. When I was a kid, maybe eight years old, I was playing outside my great aunt and uncle’s condo in Maryland. Needing to use the bathroom, I ran inside alone. I remember bursting through the front door, only to find myself in a strange kitchen, facing a stranger - I was in the wrong house. I was lucky that the stranger was in fact a kind neighbor, but the experience was terrifying in addition to being humiliating.
Being wrong can also be confusing. Shulz writes, “...recognizing our errors is such a strange experience: accustomed to disagreeing with other people, we suddenly find ourselves at odds with ourselves. Error, in that moment, is less an intellectual problem than an existential one - a crisis not in what we know, but in who we are. We hear something of that identity crisis in the questions we ask ourselves in the aftermath of error: What was I thinking? How could I have done that?”
The Torah is filled with examples of both error and iniquity, and the sometimes hazy space between. I want to share a story from the Torah about another Tamar, another brave and honest woman who helps someone see the error of their ways. I’m sharing it today because it is one of the most poignant stories of forgiveness and transformation in the Torah.
The story begins with Judah, one of Jacob’s 12 sons. You may remember that Jacob favored his son Joseph, and Joseph’s brothers beat him up, sold him into slavery, and brought his technicolor coat, covered in goat’s blood, to his father, to convince him that Joseph was dead. Immediately following this upsetting scene, Judah marries and has three sons. Judah’s eldest son marries a woman named Tamar, but soon dies. At that time, if a man died without any heirs, his brother would impregnate his widow, so the child would become heir to his dead father’s land. Tamar is given to her brother-in-law, but he also dies. There is a third son, but Judah, fearing that his third son will also die, sends Tamar back to her father’s house, saying “wait until Shelah gets a little older.” Judah isn’t honest with Tamar - he doesn’t tell her he has no intention of letting her get anywhere near his third son - but she understands.
Some time later, Tamar learns that Judah will be near her father’s house. She covers her face with a veil, wraps herself up, and sits at a crossroads. Judah, passing by, takes her for a prostitute and propositions her.
She asks what he can pay, and he says, “I’ll return later with a kid goat.” She says, “you better leave something with me as a pledge - give me your cord, your signet ring, and your staff.” This is like asking him to leave his drivers license and belt with her until he can return with payment. Judah agrees. They sleep together, and Tamar conceives a child. Later, Judah sends someone with the kid goat for Tamar, but she is gone. Wanting to keep the whole encounter private, Judah doesn’t search for her, though she still has his belongings.
After three months, Judah receives word that his daughter-in-law is pregnant. As a widow, she isn’t allowed to be sleeping with anyone, so he calls for her to be brought out and burned. Tamar sends Judah’s cord, seal, and staff to him, saying, “I am pregnant by the man to whom these belong.”
What happens next is shocking. Judah responds, immediately, with empathy. He correctly perceives that Tamar knew he had no intention of letting her sleep with his youngest son, thus denying her the possibility of having a child, and condemning her to the limbo of widowhood forever. He realizes he was wrong, and says, “she is more righteous than I am.”
So the rabbis ask - why was Judah able to be immediately empathetic? Why wasn’t he defensive? How was he able to acknowledge being wrong so quickly and easily? They point to Tamar’s actions: she could have brought Judah’s belongings out in public. She could have shamed him, showing everyone what he had done. Instead, she placed the power in his hands, and in doing so, she invited him to effect his own transformation. She invited him to take responsibility for his own actions, rather than be publicly shamed for them.
I find it very powerful that Judah, who is a public figure and a leader, is able to admit to being wrong. The past several decades of American public life has mostly featured leaders who have struggled to admit to being wrong. What is striking, I think, is not that our leaders - politicians, artists, celebrities of all kinds - have been wrong - that is because they are human. What’s striking is that whether it has been about sexual impropriety or weapons of mass destruction, overprescribing opiates or failing to acknowledge that there is lead in the water pipes, there have been so few moments when we have seen leaders speak frankly and openly about being wrong.
The problem with this resistance to being wrong is that only by acknowledging and learning from error can we get better at avoiding it. Shulz offers examples from hospitals and the airline industry, fields where even minor errors can cause catastrophic damage and which are at the cutting edge of learning how to avoid error. The best ways, it turns out, is to get really honest every time an error is made, and to make sure everyone learns from it. This is, she writes, also a characteristic of democracy; democracy as a form of government was created in resistance to authoritarian regimes where the people in power were never wrong. Democracy’s checks and balances recognize that all of us make both factual and moral errors, and need systems that hold us accountable. Also at the heart of democracy is the idea that it is important to experiment with many different ideas, some of which will be wrong. Only in this way can we get closer to what’s right.
The way to avoid future error is to embrace errors as we make them. This promotes a healthier government and society, and it helps us become more compassionate, more forgiving people. And so it was with Judah. It is ultimately Judah who is able to lead his brothers in reconciliation with Joseph, whom they had sold into slavery. It is his humility, compassion, and sense of honor that convinces Joseph to forgive them. The midrash is clear; it would not have been possible without Judah’s transformative experience with Tamar. Moreover, the child that Tamar gave birth to (one of two, actually - she had twins!) becomes the ancestor of the lineage to which the messiah, tradition teaches, will one day be born. From being wrong will come, eventually, ultimate redemption.
All of us are capable of this kind of transformation, and it is vital for our individual, social, and political well-being that we create a culture where we can admit to being wrong and learn from it. We must do this from the bottom-up, learning to do it ourselves and in our communities, so that one day it will be a given for our leaders to admit their mistakes, too.
In the mishna, the rabbis teach that Yom Kippur is one of the most joyful days of the year. I think it’s because learning from our mistakes can be a satisfying, transformative, and joyful experience. The mishna also teaches that Yom Kippur alone does not absolve us of our mistakes; anyone who says “I will sin, and then repent, and then sin again, and then repent” will not have the opportunity to atone on Yom Kippur. And further, for transgressions against one’s neighbor, Yom Kippur cannot atone, until one appeases one’s neighbor.
Yom Kippur doesn’t absolve us of being wrong; it gives us the opportunity to celebrate recognizing and repairing our mistakes. Growing from our mistakes. It’s a day that reminds us that deep down, we are all good, we are all holy, and we always have the opportunity to learn from our mistakes.
I hope that each of us encounters many women like the two Tamars, the Biblical Tamar and my friend, who can help us see the error of our ways with honor and dignity, and I hope we all have long lifetimes of making mistakes and learning from them.
When I was eighteen years old, I traveled with other young adults on a group volunteer program. It was a small group, about twelve people, and we lived together in close quarters for almost two months. In the first few weeks of the program, I was judgmental of the other participants. I felt that they were on the program for the “wrong reasons,” and I didn’t see us becoming friends. There was one person in particular who I had a hard time with. Tamar was not like me, she was a New Yorker, she was in a sorority. I judged her as shallow, and I kept my distance.
A couple of weeks into the trip, we took a break from our volunteer project to go for a hike, and Tamar and I found ourselves alone on top of a mountain. No one else had climbed all the way to the top. Tamar confronted me, on the top of that mountain, about why I was keeping my distance from the group. In reality, I was probably mostly just being shy. But I must have told her that I felt different from everyone, that we weren’t interested in similar things, that I didn’t think they would understand where I was coming from. And she said, well why don’t you share your interests with us? Why don’t you give people a chance?
I don’t know that I had ever been confronted so directly before, and it was a very humbling experience. I realized that I was wrong, and it was hard to hear. I felt bad and guilty, I questioned myself, I was embarrassed. But I also, somehow, managed to open myself to the invitation she was offering - to recognize that I was wrong, and to change - and it changed not only my experience of that trip, but really my whole life. I ended up making great friends. I won’t say I have completely stopped making judgments based on first impressions, because I’m human, but I’m much better at noticing when I’m doing it and stopping. And, I am still friends with Tamar, who remains one of my bravest, most honest friends.
Although I wish I hadn’t been a jerk and was just a friendly open-hearted person from the beginning of that trip, I’m also thankful for the experience of being wrong, because I grew so much from it.
In her book Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error, Kathryn Shulz passionately advocates for the value of being wrong. Making mistakes is essential for our growth. And the experience of coming to realize that we were wrong and admitting it makes us more compassionate people.
I think this is part of the logic behind Yom Kippur. Taking the time to reflect on ways we may have been wrong in the past year is valuable. Doing it in a hopefully supportive and loving communal context, we hope, will let us maximize the ways we can grow from being wrong, and minimize the guilt and shame we feel.
Shulz points out that when we talk about “being wrong” in regular conversation, we can mean wrong in the sense of error, and we can mean wrong in the sense of iniquity. As she puts it, “it is wrong to think that the earth is flat, and it is also wrong to push your little brother down the stairs…” Her book is about the first kind, about intellectual and factual errors. She explores our cultural beliefs about making this kind of error, the psychological, sensory, and intellectual mechanisms that allow us to get things wrong, and what the experience of being wrong feels like.
Mostly, she says, being wrong is really hard. Why is it so hard to be wrong?
Sometimes, being wrong destabilizes our sense of self. Even as a teenager, I thought of myself as someone who was a good judge of character. But Tamar proved me so wrong about her, it made me question myself deeply.
Being wrong can also be scary. When I was a kid, maybe eight years old, I was playing outside my great aunt and uncle’s condo in Maryland. Needing to use the bathroom, I ran inside alone. I remember bursting through the front door, only to find myself in a strange kitchen, facing a stranger - I was in the wrong house. I was lucky that the stranger was in fact a kind neighbor, but the experience was terrifying in addition to being humiliating.
Being wrong can also be confusing. Shulz writes, “...recognizing our errors is such a strange experience: accustomed to disagreeing with other people, we suddenly find ourselves at odds with ourselves. Error, in that moment, is less an intellectual problem than an existential one - a crisis not in what we know, but in who we are. We hear something of that identity crisis in the questions we ask ourselves in the aftermath of error: What was I thinking? How could I have done that?”
The Torah is filled with examples of both error and iniquity, and the sometimes hazy space between. I want to share a story from the Torah about another Tamar, another brave and honest woman who helps someone see the error of their ways. I’m sharing it today because it is one of the most poignant stories of forgiveness and transformation in the Torah.
The story begins with Judah, one of Jacob’s 12 sons. You may remember that Jacob favored his son Joseph, and Joseph’s brothers beat him up, sold him into slavery, and brought his technicolor coat, covered in goat’s blood, to his father, to convince him that Joseph was dead. Immediately following this upsetting scene, Judah marries and has three sons. Judah’s eldest son marries a woman named Tamar, but soon dies. At that time, if a man died without any heirs, his brother would impregnate his widow, so the child would become heir to his dead father’s land. Tamar is given to her brother-in-law, but he also dies. There is a third son, but Judah, fearing that his third son will also die, sends Tamar back to her father’s house, saying “wait until Shelah gets a little older.” Judah isn’t honest with Tamar - he doesn’t tell her he has no intention of letting her get anywhere near his third son - but she understands.
Some time later, Tamar learns that Judah will be near her father’s house. She covers her face with a veil, wraps herself up, and sits at a crossroads. Judah, passing by, takes her for a prostitute and propositions her.
She asks what he can pay, and he says, “I’ll return later with a kid goat.” She says, “you better leave something with me as a pledge - give me your cord, your signet ring, and your staff.” This is like asking him to leave his drivers license and belt with her until he can return with payment. Judah agrees. They sleep together, and Tamar conceives a child. Later, Judah sends someone with the kid goat for Tamar, but she is gone. Wanting to keep the whole encounter private, Judah doesn’t search for her, though she still has his belongings.
After three months, Judah receives word that his daughter-in-law is pregnant. As a widow, she isn’t allowed to be sleeping with anyone, so he calls for her to be brought out and burned. Tamar sends Judah’s cord, seal, and staff to him, saying, “I am pregnant by the man to whom these belong.”
What happens next is shocking. Judah responds, immediately, with empathy. He correctly perceives that Tamar knew he had no intention of letting her sleep with his youngest son, thus denying her the possibility of having a child, and condemning her to the limbo of widowhood forever. He realizes he was wrong, and says, “she is more righteous than I am.”
So the rabbis ask - why was Judah able to be immediately empathetic? Why wasn’t he defensive? How was he able to acknowledge being wrong so quickly and easily? They point to Tamar’s actions: she could have brought Judah’s belongings out in public. She could have shamed him, showing everyone what he had done. Instead, she placed the power in his hands, and in doing so, she invited him to effect his own transformation. She invited him to take responsibility for his own actions, rather than be publicly shamed for them.
I find it very powerful that Judah, who is a public figure and a leader, is able to admit to being wrong. The past several decades of American public life has mostly featured leaders who have struggled to admit to being wrong. What is striking, I think, is not that our leaders - politicians, artists, celebrities of all kinds - have been wrong - that is because they are human. What’s striking is that whether it has been about sexual impropriety or weapons of mass destruction, overprescribing opiates or failing to acknowledge that there is lead in the water pipes, there have been so few moments when we have seen leaders speak frankly and openly about being wrong.
The problem with this resistance to being wrong is that only by acknowledging and learning from error can we get better at avoiding it. Shulz offers examples from hospitals and the airline industry, fields where even minor errors can cause catastrophic damage and which are at the cutting edge of learning how to avoid error. The best ways, it turns out, is to get really honest every time an error is made, and to make sure everyone learns from it. This is, she writes, also a characteristic of democracy; democracy as a form of government was created in resistance to authoritarian regimes where the people in power were never wrong. Democracy’s checks and balances recognize that all of us make both factual and moral errors, and need systems that hold us accountable. Also at the heart of democracy is the idea that it is important to experiment with many different ideas, some of which will be wrong. Only in this way can we get closer to what’s right.
The way to avoid future error is to embrace errors as we make them. This promotes a healthier government and society, and it helps us become more compassionate, more forgiving people. And so it was with Judah. It is ultimately Judah who is able to lead his brothers in reconciliation with Joseph, whom they had sold into slavery. It is his humility, compassion, and sense of honor that convinces Joseph to forgive them. The midrash is clear; it would not have been possible without Judah’s transformative experience with Tamar. Moreover, the child that Tamar gave birth to (one of two, actually - she had twins!) becomes the ancestor of the lineage to which the messiah, tradition teaches, will one day be born. From being wrong will come, eventually, ultimate redemption.
All of us are capable of this kind of transformation, and it is vital for our individual, social, and political well-being that we create a culture where we can admit to being wrong and learn from it. We must do this from the bottom-up, learning to do it ourselves and in our communities, so that one day it will be a given for our leaders to admit their mistakes, too.
In the mishna, the rabbis teach that Yom Kippur is one of the most joyful days of the year. I think it’s because learning from our mistakes can be a satisfying, transformative, and joyful experience. The mishna also teaches that Yom Kippur alone does not absolve us of our mistakes; anyone who says “I will sin, and then repent, and then sin again, and then repent” will not have the opportunity to atone on Yom Kippur. And further, for transgressions against one’s neighbor, Yom Kippur cannot atone, until one appeases one’s neighbor.
Yom Kippur doesn’t absolve us of being wrong; it gives us the opportunity to celebrate recognizing and repairing our mistakes. Growing from our mistakes. It’s a day that reminds us that deep down, we are all good, we are all holy, and we always have the opportunity to learn from our mistakes.
I hope that each of us encounters many women like the two Tamars, the Biblical Tamar and my friend, who can help us see the error of our ways with honor and dignity, and I hope we all have long lifetimes of making mistakes and learning from them.
Rabbi Leora's Erev Rosh Hashanah Sermon 2017
Yearning and Receiving
Shana tova. Let’s take a deep breath together.
I don’t know about you, but it takes me some time to sink into these holidays. Even with the weeks of preparation, once the holidays arrive, it takes me some time to arrive.
Let’s take a second deep breath together.
I want to share with you a story. This story was told by Rebbe Nahman, a mystic, and a great teacher. It was translated from Yiddish and beautifully retold by my friend Jordan Schuster, whose version I share with you tonight.
“There once was a young man who lived in a distant city
Built of brick and of stone.
As the trees outside the city gates began to color,
As their leaves began to rustle then glide upon a wind grown colder,
This young man was besieged by dreams.
Night after night a voice would urge him in his sleep:
Gey aroys in vald un sei mevakesh..
Go out to the forest. Begin to search…
8 consecutive nights this dream hounded the man,
Until on the morning of the 9th day,
He felt no option but to leave his home, venture into the woods,
And satisfy the demands of an apparently very persistent unconscious.
Deeper and deeper he penetrated into the heart of the woods,
Looking, wandering, considering but decidedly not searching…
Before nightfall, he sat down to pause,
ate some bread,
And then – in the distance –
He saw something strange.
A figure –
Not quite human in appearance –
Drifting closer and closer to him.
The young man noticed this creature's hair was the color of fallen leaves –
Its eyes were the color of September dusk –
Its coat was the color of dying grass.
And in the hand of this nit-mentsh – this not-man as Nakhman calls him in the Yiddish –
There was a small aron – a small ark –
built solely out of leaves and color.
Handing this ark to the young man, the apparition commanded:
Hold this instrument over the soul of any living creature
And you will hear its longings echoed back to you as melody…
The young man took the ark,
then began what felt to him like a much more purposeful kind of searching…
He set out once again to explore the wilderness of autumn,
Now with the specific intent to hear its music.
Against every living creature he encountered,
This young man held up his ark and listened.
To songs that were wild,
Joyful,
Lamenting,
Aggrieved.
Each life had its own melody.
And each melody resounded through the ark.
For the entirety of that night the man listened to the yearnings of existence…
And as the sun began to rise over the forest,
He decided it was finally time to raise the ark
And hold it over his own chest…
He listened and he wept…
And he left the forest to reenter the world renewed…
At this point in the tale,
Legend has it that Nakhman pulled back,
Looked at his congregation and said:
The prayers, the language and the structures that make up the Rosh Hashanah liturgy –
These are the instruments we have been given to hold over our own souls –
so that through them, we might hear echoed back to us
the selves we have buried, the selves we have lost,
and the selves we have forgotten…
There is so much to be afraid as nature begins to die off around us,
As the daylight darkens –
As the world edges into winter.
Zei nit makhre'a in dem –
But do not surrender to this fear…
Listen instead
to your longings to live,
To longings to reconnect to the life around you,
And longings to build and to sustain that life.
In the language of Tehilim – of the Psalms –
Shiru la-adonai shir hadash –
Sing to God – whatever God may mean to you –
A renewed song…”
We are here tonight, Rebbe Nahman teaches, to seek the selves we have buried, the selves we have lost,
and the selves we have forgotten…
The tools in our hands include
The words and the melodies
The white velvet
The bodies around us
The lingering taste of honey on our tongue.
This is not an easy journey.
Acknowledging that something is missing, or not working, is hard
Let alone figuring out what it is
Let alone figuring out how to get it.
Each of us here tonight has a different longing in our heart. Longing for health, or to be free of pain. Longing for rest. Longing for work.
Longing for patience. Longing for release from conflict, for a way forward that we didn’t see before. Longing for companionship.
We don’t come here because we think God is a vending machine, and we think we’ll put our prayers in the slot, push the right number, and get what we want.
We come because listening for the melody of our longings is the first step on the path to change, to renewal.
Rebbe Nahman teaches us to listen for the longings of our hearts, but how do we actually do that?
In a society of so much consumerism, when everywhere we turn we are besieged by advertisements telling us we should want more, should buy more, should be more, the question of longing can get confusing. I don’t have a magic ark to hold over my heart and hear my own music, to reveal what it is I need to be my fullest, truest self, and what it is I only think I need that in fact I can let go of and still be happy.
But that’s the work we are here to begin.
The question of longing is also confusing in an age of nuclear armament and climate change. Facing the possibility of total destruction, facing a world of increased suffering for future generations, how do we even know what to long for? And how do we distinguish our longing from fear?
I don’t really have the answers to these questions. I return to Rebbe Nahman’s invitation to let the liturgy of our services help us. Maybe saying ancient words that have been repeated for generations can help us feel grounded. Maybe beautiful melodies can help our hearts become more spacious. Maybe confronting impermanence and mortality can help us clarify what is essential.
It is a vulnerable spiritual exercise to try to name what we really want. To do it takes some amount of trust - if not that our needs will be directly met, at least that change is possible. We have to trust in our own agency, our own capacity for change, and we have to trust that we will be met part way - by God, by our loved ones, by the universe.
And so another spiritual practice is required of us during these holidays. In addition to yearning, we have to practice receiving.
When the Israelites and the mixed multitude who accompanied them fled from Mitzrayim - which is generally translated as Egypt, but more literally means constriction or narrowness - they had to make their way across the Sea of Reeds.
These were a people who knew longing. Some of the most evocative language in the Torah describes their cries, their pleas, for freedom. It’s hard to imagine what they were feeling as they desperately encountered that great body of water and then watched as the water parted, and a path of dry land appeared where there had been no way across. They must have been scared, hungry, in shock. A midrash, or ancient rabbinic story, tells that when an Israelite woman was walking through the sea, leading her child by the hand, and her child began to cry, she had only to stretch out her hand and pluck an apple or a pomegranate from the depths and hand it to her child. For God led the Israelites through the sea in just the same way that God would later lead them through the wilderness. In the wilderness, God provided manna, a mysterious and magical form of sustenance. Just as the Israelites lacked nothing in the wilderness, says the midrash, so also they lacked nothing in the depths.
God is not a vending machine, but the power that enables us to find our way across the sea when it appears there is no path. We come here tonight to remind ourselves that even in the depths, we can reach beautiful, nourishing fruit - by reaching out, to one another, and by reaching within.
What are some of the beautiful nourishing things that are available to you when the going gets rough? For me, it includes the woods by my house, rabbinic colleagues, and music. Things that are within reach. Things that don’t solve my problems, but give me the tools and sustenance I need for the way.
Adding a beautiful layer to the story, my friend Rabbi Gray Myrseth imagines the seeds of our ancestors’ fruit trees being passed down to us, seeds we can plant and cultivate in our own lives.
Though it sounds a lot more fun, acknowledging what is available to us and being open to receiving it is not always easier than naming what we are longing for. But in order to confront the depths of our longing, we have to trust that what we need is within reach. These two spiritual practices, longing and receiving, go hand in hand.
I pray that each of our hearts become bold tonight, bold enough to face what we want, and bold enough to receive the gifts that are available to us. May the Rosh HaShana service be our sacred tool, revealing not only the longings of our hearts, but the delicious, nourishing fruit that is within reach. Shana tova.
With deep gratitude to Jordan Schuster for the story from R Nahman and Rabbi Gray Myrseth for loving the midrash about the pomegranate in the depths.
Shana tova. Let’s take a deep breath together.
I don’t know about you, but it takes me some time to sink into these holidays. Even with the weeks of preparation, once the holidays arrive, it takes me some time to arrive.
Let’s take a second deep breath together.
I want to share with you a story. This story was told by Rebbe Nahman, a mystic, and a great teacher. It was translated from Yiddish and beautifully retold by my friend Jordan Schuster, whose version I share with you tonight.
“There once was a young man who lived in a distant city
Built of brick and of stone.
As the trees outside the city gates began to color,
As their leaves began to rustle then glide upon a wind grown colder,
This young man was besieged by dreams.
Night after night a voice would urge him in his sleep:
Gey aroys in vald un sei mevakesh..
Go out to the forest. Begin to search…
8 consecutive nights this dream hounded the man,
Until on the morning of the 9th day,
He felt no option but to leave his home, venture into the woods,
And satisfy the demands of an apparently very persistent unconscious.
Deeper and deeper he penetrated into the heart of the woods,
Looking, wandering, considering but decidedly not searching…
Before nightfall, he sat down to pause,
ate some bread,
And then – in the distance –
He saw something strange.
A figure –
Not quite human in appearance –
Drifting closer and closer to him.
The young man noticed this creature's hair was the color of fallen leaves –
Its eyes were the color of September dusk –
Its coat was the color of dying grass.
And in the hand of this nit-mentsh – this not-man as Nakhman calls him in the Yiddish –
There was a small aron – a small ark –
built solely out of leaves and color.
Handing this ark to the young man, the apparition commanded:
Hold this instrument over the soul of any living creature
And you will hear its longings echoed back to you as melody…
The young man took the ark,
then began what felt to him like a much more purposeful kind of searching…
He set out once again to explore the wilderness of autumn,
Now with the specific intent to hear its music.
Against every living creature he encountered,
This young man held up his ark and listened.
To songs that were wild,
Joyful,
Lamenting,
Aggrieved.
Each life had its own melody.
And each melody resounded through the ark.
For the entirety of that night the man listened to the yearnings of existence…
And as the sun began to rise over the forest,
He decided it was finally time to raise the ark
And hold it over his own chest…
He listened and he wept…
And he left the forest to reenter the world renewed…
At this point in the tale,
Legend has it that Nakhman pulled back,
Looked at his congregation and said:
The prayers, the language and the structures that make up the Rosh Hashanah liturgy –
These are the instruments we have been given to hold over our own souls –
so that through them, we might hear echoed back to us
the selves we have buried, the selves we have lost,
and the selves we have forgotten…
There is so much to be afraid as nature begins to die off around us,
As the daylight darkens –
As the world edges into winter.
Zei nit makhre'a in dem –
But do not surrender to this fear…
Listen instead
to your longings to live,
To longings to reconnect to the life around you,
And longings to build and to sustain that life.
In the language of Tehilim – of the Psalms –
Shiru la-adonai shir hadash –
Sing to God – whatever God may mean to you –
A renewed song…”
We are here tonight, Rebbe Nahman teaches, to seek the selves we have buried, the selves we have lost,
and the selves we have forgotten…
The tools in our hands include
The words and the melodies
The white velvet
The bodies around us
The lingering taste of honey on our tongue.
This is not an easy journey.
Acknowledging that something is missing, or not working, is hard
Let alone figuring out what it is
Let alone figuring out how to get it.
Each of us here tonight has a different longing in our heart. Longing for health, or to be free of pain. Longing for rest. Longing for work.
Longing for patience. Longing for release from conflict, for a way forward that we didn’t see before. Longing for companionship.
We don’t come here because we think God is a vending machine, and we think we’ll put our prayers in the slot, push the right number, and get what we want.
We come because listening for the melody of our longings is the first step on the path to change, to renewal.
Rebbe Nahman teaches us to listen for the longings of our hearts, but how do we actually do that?
In a society of so much consumerism, when everywhere we turn we are besieged by advertisements telling us we should want more, should buy more, should be more, the question of longing can get confusing. I don’t have a magic ark to hold over my heart and hear my own music, to reveal what it is I need to be my fullest, truest self, and what it is I only think I need that in fact I can let go of and still be happy.
But that’s the work we are here to begin.
The question of longing is also confusing in an age of nuclear armament and climate change. Facing the possibility of total destruction, facing a world of increased suffering for future generations, how do we even know what to long for? And how do we distinguish our longing from fear?
I don’t really have the answers to these questions. I return to Rebbe Nahman’s invitation to let the liturgy of our services help us. Maybe saying ancient words that have been repeated for generations can help us feel grounded. Maybe beautiful melodies can help our hearts become more spacious. Maybe confronting impermanence and mortality can help us clarify what is essential.
It is a vulnerable spiritual exercise to try to name what we really want. To do it takes some amount of trust - if not that our needs will be directly met, at least that change is possible. We have to trust in our own agency, our own capacity for change, and we have to trust that we will be met part way - by God, by our loved ones, by the universe.
And so another spiritual practice is required of us during these holidays. In addition to yearning, we have to practice receiving.
When the Israelites and the mixed multitude who accompanied them fled from Mitzrayim - which is generally translated as Egypt, but more literally means constriction or narrowness - they had to make their way across the Sea of Reeds.
These were a people who knew longing. Some of the most evocative language in the Torah describes their cries, their pleas, for freedom. It’s hard to imagine what they were feeling as they desperately encountered that great body of water and then watched as the water parted, and a path of dry land appeared where there had been no way across. They must have been scared, hungry, in shock. A midrash, or ancient rabbinic story, tells that when an Israelite woman was walking through the sea, leading her child by the hand, and her child began to cry, she had only to stretch out her hand and pluck an apple or a pomegranate from the depths and hand it to her child. For God led the Israelites through the sea in just the same way that God would later lead them through the wilderness. In the wilderness, God provided manna, a mysterious and magical form of sustenance. Just as the Israelites lacked nothing in the wilderness, says the midrash, so also they lacked nothing in the depths.
God is not a vending machine, but the power that enables us to find our way across the sea when it appears there is no path. We come here tonight to remind ourselves that even in the depths, we can reach beautiful, nourishing fruit - by reaching out, to one another, and by reaching within.
What are some of the beautiful nourishing things that are available to you when the going gets rough? For me, it includes the woods by my house, rabbinic colleagues, and music. Things that are within reach. Things that don’t solve my problems, but give me the tools and sustenance I need for the way.
Adding a beautiful layer to the story, my friend Rabbi Gray Myrseth imagines the seeds of our ancestors’ fruit trees being passed down to us, seeds we can plant and cultivate in our own lives.
Though it sounds a lot more fun, acknowledging what is available to us and being open to receiving it is not always easier than naming what we are longing for. But in order to confront the depths of our longing, we have to trust that what we need is within reach. These two spiritual practices, longing and receiving, go hand in hand.
I pray that each of our hearts become bold tonight, bold enough to face what we want, and bold enough to receive the gifts that are available to us. May the Rosh HaShana service be our sacred tool, revealing not only the longings of our hearts, but the delicious, nourishing fruit that is within reach. Shana tova.
With deep gratitude to Jordan Schuster for the story from R Nahman and Rabbi Gray Myrseth for loving the midrash about the pomegranate in the depths.
Rabbi Leora's First Day of Rosh Hashanah Sermon 2017
Monumental Teshuvah
So I’ve been thinking a lot about statues and monuments recently.
The discussion about monuments honoring the Confederacy has been active in the United States for decades, but we have seen a reprise of the conversation and renewed efforts to remove statues. It is much more than a conversation about what stone structures do or do not grace our cities’ public squares. it is a conversation about what memory looks like in public and about how institutions tell stories about the past in order to communicate something about the present and future. And it is about how we share space and live together.
I have been thinking about these questions since my trip to Hungary and Poland last summer. We visited many monuments and public memorials, and I discovered that these statues of stone or bronze not only represent the past. In expressing a public, institutionally-supported narrative, they shape how we understand the present and envision the future. They are not only symbolic; they play an active role in a society’s wrestling with history, a process that is always fraught.
Outside of the Polin Museum in Warsaw, which documents one thousand years of Polish Jewish life, there is a monument honoring the Warsaw ghetto fighters. It is carved, in part, from a huge slab of gray stone which was brought to Warsaw by Hitler’s chief architect. Our tour guide told us Hitler planned to erect thousands of these slabs in a continuous monument stretching from Moscow to Berlin.
I knew that Hitler’s goal was world domination. But confronting the size and weight of that enormous slab of stone and imagining a cruel line of them marching across Europe allowed me to internalize that possibility in a whole new way. Seeing the stone itself allowed me to understand the scope of Hitler’s goal in a way no history book or lesson had before.
Seeing the stone transformed into a memorial honoring Jewish and non-Jewish Poles who fought back against the Nazis was very powerful. At the same time, as we learned about the ways anti-Semitism continues to affect people in Poland, we understood that the transformation we saw symbolized in the monument has not fully manifested in Polish society. There is more work to do.
In Budapest, the city’s official World War II memorial depicts Hungary as the archangel Gabriel being attacked by a German imperial eagle, and is dedicated to “all the victims” of the Nazi occupation of Hungary. The story it suggests is that Hungary was helpless under the German attack, when in reality, the Hungarian government collaborated with the Nazis. Moreover, the memorial makes no mention of the millions of Jews, Roma/Gypsy people, gays and lesbians who were targeted by the Nazis.
As a Jew and a queer person confronting that statue, I felt hurt and angry by the distorted history it tells. I also felt scared, because by denying my historical experience, it sent a message that I’m not safe now. A government that is unwilling to face the truth of its cruelty in the past offers no reassurance that it will not engage in more cruelty in the future.
Something very powerful has happened at that monument in Budapest. Hungarians have created what is known as a “living memorial” surrounding the statue. They have brought artifacts, mementos, and signs, and created a kind of altar all around the statue. There are shoes and suitcases, laminated letters, handwritten signs, and photographs. The images tell the stories of people - stories of the vitality of their lives; stories of courage and solidarity; as well as stories of the horror of their deaths.
Where the official statue made me feel troubled and alienated, the living memorial made me feel seen and connected. I felt kinship with everyone who contributed to it, who shared stories of their family members, neighbors, teachers, friends. Maybe their loved ones knew my loved ones who lived in Budapest! The stories were tender and vulnerable, stories telling hard truths but also stories of hope.
It was as if the living memorial illuminated a vast network of people who are committed to telling the truth about the past so that we can do the present and future differently.
This capacity of public monuments to create both disconnection and connection among people is something the writer Rebecca Solnit highlights in her essay about monuments honoring the Confederacy. What they do, she says, is identify an “us” and a “them.” A stone obelisk in New Orleans which was removed this past spring celebrated a white supremacist riot and the November 1976 national election which, as the plaque reads, “recognized white supremacy in the South and gave us our state.” The us, of course, is white people only. The statue calls into being a public, a society, that belongs to white folks.
Solnit writes that a monument, like a city more broadly, is “a text that favors one version of history and suppresses others, enlarges your identity or reduces it, makes you feel important or disposable depending on who you are and what you are.” She quotes Maurice Ruffin, a writer and lawyer who lives in New Orleans, who said about his city’s Confederate monuments, “‘The statues — a lot of them physically beautiful — argue that if you’re white, you’re human, and if you’re not, you’re not.’”
It is tempting, to some, to say that Confederate monuments should be preserved on the basis of being historical. But the ideology of white supremacy that Confederate statues were built to honor is not historical; it continues to shape the institutions of our country and the lives of all of us who live here.
The idea that physical objects can be endowed with significance and power and the question of how that power can be transformed are extensively discussed in classical Jewish literature. In the Talmud, a whole tractate, or volume, is devoted to discussing idolatry, known as avoda zara in Hebrew.
The background of this discussion is that the prohibition against idolatry is one of the most severe in the Torah. In the Talmudic volume on avoda zara, idolatry, the rabbis are concerned with the extent to which a Jewish person must go in order to avoid idolatry. For example, they consider how one might benefit from idolatry - by selling something to a pagan for use in a festival; or - in another example - they consider how one might passively participate in idolatry, by drinking from wine which had been offered as a libation to another deity.
In further examples, they wonder about the carved images or statues that exist in the towns they share with pagans. The rabbis wonder: How can a Jewish person tell if these statues are idols or merely decoration? They wonder: if the statue is holding a bird in its hand, does that imply that it grasps the whole world in its hand like a bird, making it an image of a deity? If the statue is holding a sword, is that the emblem of a robber, or does it imply that the statue is an idol with the power to slay the whole world?
And if a statue is an idol, not mere decoration, is there any way to invalidate its power? What about when statues are broken; does a broken statue lose its power as an idol, or are the broken fragments themselves still somehow dangerous?
Rabbi Yohanan’s opinion is that the only way a statue can be rendered invalid, stripped of its dangerous power, is if someone who considered it sacred willfully defaces it. If it breaks by accident, its fragments are still considered dangerous. A Jew cannot “undo” the power of an idol; only someone who worships the idol can do that.
This is a powerful idea. Only someone who is invested in an image’s power can take away that power.
Resh Lakish, on the other hand, reasons that if a person worshipped a statue and then saw that statue broken, the person would think to himself, “'It could not save itself, so how can it save me!” and this feeling would invalidate the image as an idol even if the person did not expressly deface the statue.
This line of thinking suggests that there can be a kind of external intervention that dismantles the idol and invalidates its power.
A conservative journalist arguing for the preservation of Confederate statues notes that most were built fifty years after the Civil War, by the descendents of the hundreds of thousands of Confederate soldiers who died in the war. The monuments, he insists, were an expression of grief and a remembrance for a whole generation. Removing the statues would be dismissive of this experience of grief.
I find this compelling. Ignoring or dismissing the experience of anyone who lives in our country is not only a loss for us, but is dangerous. And I think the journalist is arguing, in line with Rabbi Yohanan, that those who are invested in an image’s power are the ones who can and must transform its meaning.
That is a powerful vision. If the people who are invested in honoring the Confederacy, and if our governments, universities, and other institutions were to dig deeply and uproot white supremacy from their foundations, the statues would no doubt have a different kind of significance, if they were even left standing.
But I think Resh Lakish has a point too: sometimes external intervention can have a powerful impact on changing the status of an image.
The living memorial in Budapest interrupts the implicit claim by the Hungarian government that its monument speaks for all Hungarians. It says - we are people, not a faceless public. History cannot be told in a simple narrative. It is nuanced and complex; it is full of faces, full of shoes, postcards, suitcases, and stories. We resist - or embellish - the simplified narrative our government offers in our name.
I want to see a living memorial around every Confederate statue in the United States. I want them to be not only symbolic, but representative of real work and powerful struggling with history happening everywhere. Bring photographs of your grandparents who were klansmen, along with words about how you reject their thinking; bring suitcases that were carried on the underground railroad; bring stories of real lives, stories of courage and solidarity and resistance, stories of pain and oppression. Tell the truth.
Let the power of these statues to disconnect, to tell some of us that we are not fully human, transform into power to connect, to heal, to build together.
Part of the work of the Talmudic rabbis in their thinking about avodah zarah is to make it possible for Jews to co-exist with pagans. They go to some length to identify certain images - even of Greek gods - as mere decoration, so they can use the same bathhouses and market squares. I think this was pragmatic, not an idealistic vision of a multicultural society. But it was nevertheless about making peace with those with whom they lived. And I don’t want to make peace with white supremacy.
Of course, this whole conversation is really about teshuvah - about how we deal with past wrongs, take responsibility, apologize, make reparations, and change our behavior. The High Holidays teach us, again and again, that this is a communal process and an individual process.
Let us each consider our own stories about the past. How do they shape our present and our future? What images need to be transformed? What stories need new chapters? By doing this work in our hearts and in our relationships, we pave the way to do it on a societal level. And we join that vast network of people who are committed to telling the truth about the past so that we can do the present and future differently.
May this be a year of great and powerful transformation, and a year of deep and gentle healing. Shanah tova.
So I’ve been thinking a lot about statues and monuments recently.
The discussion about monuments honoring the Confederacy has been active in the United States for decades, but we have seen a reprise of the conversation and renewed efforts to remove statues. It is much more than a conversation about what stone structures do or do not grace our cities’ public squares. it is a conversation about what memory looks like in public and about how institutions tell stories about the past in order to communicate something about the present and future. And it is about how we share space and live together.
I have been thinking about these questions since my trip to Hungary and Poland last summer. We visited many monuments and public memorials, and I discovered that these statues of stone or bronze not only represent the past. In expressing a public, institutionally-supported narrative, they shape how we understand the present and envision the future. They are not only symbolic; they play an active role in a society’s wrestling with history, a process that is always fraught.
Outside of the Polin Museum in Warsaw, which documents one thousand years of Polish Jewish life, there is a monument honoring the Warsaw ghetto fighters. It is carved, in part, from a huge slab of gray stone which was brought to Warsaw by Hitler’s chief architect. Our tour guide told us Hitler planned to erect thousands of these slabs in a continuous monument stretching from Moscow to Berlin.
I knew that Hitler’s goal was world domination. But confronting the size and weight of that enormous slab of stone and imagining a cruel line of them marching across Europe allowed me to internalize that possibility in a whole new way. Seeing the stone itself allowed me to understand the scope of Hitler’s goal in a way no history book or lesson had before.
Seeing the stone transformed into a memorial honoring Jewish and non-Jewish Poles who fought back against the Nazis was very powerful. At the same time, as we learned about the ways anti-Semitism continues to affect people in Poland, we understood that the transformation we saw symbolized in the monument has not fully manifested in Polish society. There is more work to do.
In Budapest, the city’s official World War II memorial depicts Hungary as the archangel Gabriel being attacked by a German imperial eagle, and is dedicated to “all the victims” of the Nazi occupation of Hungary. The story it suggests is that Hungary was helpless under the German attack, when in reality, the Hungarian government collaborated with the Nazis. Moreover, the memorial makes no mention of the millions of Jews, Roma/Gypsy people, gays and lesbians who were targeted by the Nazis.
As a Jew and a queer person confronting that statue, I felt hurt and angry by the distorted history it tells. I also felt scared, because by denying my historical experience, it sent a message that I’m not safe now. A government that is unwilling to face the truth of its cruelty in the past offers no reassurance that it will not engage in more cruelty in the future.
Something very powerful has happened at that monument in Budapest. Hungarians have created what is known as a “living memorial” surrounding the statue. They have brought artifacts, mementos, and signs, and created a kind of altar all around the statue. There are shoes and suitcases, laminated letters, handwritten signs, and photographs. The images tell the stories of people - stories of the vitality of their lives; stories of courage and solidarity; as well as stories of the horror of their deaths.
Where the official statue made me feel troubled and alienated, the living memorial made me feel seen and connected. I felt kinship with everyone who contributed to it, who shared stories of their family members, neighbors, teachers, friends. Maybe their loved ones knew my loved ones who lived in Budapest! The stories were tender and vulnerable, stories telling hard truths but also stories of hope.
It was as if the living memorial illuminated a vast network of people who are committed to telling the truth about the past so that we can do the present and future differently.
This capacity of public monuments to create both disconnection and connection among people is something the writer Rebecca Solnit highlights in her essay about monuments honoring the Confederacy. What they do, she says, is identify an “us” and a “them.” A stone obelisk in New Orleans which was removed this past spring celebrated a white supremacist riot and the November 1976 national election which, as the plaque reads, “recognized white supremacy in the South and gave us our state.” The us, of course, is white people only. The statue calls into being a public, a society, that belongs to white folks.
Solnit writes that a monument, like a city more broadly, is “a text that favors one version of history and suppresses others, enlarges your identity or reduces it, makes you feel important or disposable depending on who you are and what you are.” She quotes Maurice Ruffin, a writer and lawyer who lives in New Orleans, who said about his city’s Confederate monuments, “‘The statues — a lot of them physically beautiful — argue that if you’re white, you’re human, and if you’re not, you’re not.’”
It is tempting, to some, to say that Confederate monuments should be preserved on the basis of being historical. But the ideology of white supremacy that Confederate statues were built to honor is not historical; it continues to shape the institutions of our country and the lives of all of us who live here.
The idea that physical objects can be endowed with significance and power and the question of how that power can be transformed are extensively discussed in classical Jewish literature. In the Talmud, a whole tractate, or volume, is devoted to discussing idolatry, known as avoda zara in Hebrew.
The background of this discussion is that the prohibition against idolatry is one of the most severe in the Torah. In the Talmudic volume on avoda zara, idolatry, the rabbis are concerned with the extent to which a Jewish person must go in order to avoid idolatry. For example, they consider how one might benefit from idolatry - by selling something to a pagan for use in a festival; or - in another example - they consider how one might passively participate in idolatry, by drinking from wine which had been offered as a libation to another deity.
In further examples, they wonder about the carved images or statues that exist in the towns they share with pagans. The rabbis wonder: How can a Jewish person tell if these statues are idols or merely decoration? They wonder: if the statue is holding a bird in its hand, does that imply that it grasps the whole world in its hand like a bird, making it an image of a deity? If the statue is holding a sword, is that the emblem of a robber, or does it imply that the statue is an idol with the power to slay the whole world?
And if a statue is an idol, not mere decoration, is there any way to invalidate its power? What about when statues are broken; does a broken statue lose its power as an idol, or are the broken fragments themselves still somehow dangerous?
Rabbi Yohanan’s opinion is that the only way a statue can be rendered invalid, stripped of its dangerous power, is if someone who considered it sacred willfully defaces it. If it breaks by accident, its fragments are still considered dangerous. A Jew cannot “undo” the power of an idol; only someone who worships the idol can do that.
This is a powerful idea. Only someone who is invested in an image’s power can take away that power.
Resh Lakish, on the other hand, reasons that if a person worshipped a statue and then saw that statue broken, the person would think to himself, “'It could not save itself, so how can it save me!” and this feeling would invalidate the image as an idol even if the person did not expressly deface the statue.
This line of thinking suggests that there can be a kind of external intervention that dismantles the idol and invalidates its power.
A conservative journalist arguing for the preservation of Confederate statues notes that most were built fifty years after the Civil War, by the descendents of the hundreds of thousands of Confederate soldiers who died in the war. The monuments, he insists, were an expression of grief and a remembrance for a whole generation. Removing the statues would be dismissive of this experience of grief.
I find this compelling. Ignoring or dismissing the experience of anyone who lives in our country is not only a loss for us, but is dangerous. And I think the journalist is arguing, in line with Rabbi Yohanan, that those who are invested in an image’s power are the ones who can and must transform its meaning.
That is a powerful vision. If the people who are invested in honoring the Confederacy, and if our governments, universities, and other institutions were to dig deeply and uproot white supremacy from their foundations, the statues would no doubt have a different kind of significance, if they were even left standing.
But I think Resh Lakish has a point too: sometimes external intervention can have a powerful impact on changing the status of an image.
The living memorial in Budapest interrupts the implicit claim by the Hungarian government that its monument speaks for all Hungarians. It says - we are people, not a faceless public. History cannot be told in a simple narrative. It is nuanced and complex; it is full of faces, full of shoes, postcards, suitcases, and stories. We resist - or embellish - the simplified narrative our government offers in our name.
I want to see a living memorial around every Confederate statue in the United States. I want them to be not only symbolic, but representative of real work and powerful struggling with history happening everywhere. Bring photographs of your grandparents who were klansmen, along with words about how you reject their thinking; bring suitcases that were carried on the underground railroad; bring stories of real lives, stories of courage and solidarity and resistance, stories of pain and oppression. Tell the truth.
Let the power of these statues to disconnect, to tell some of us that we are not fully human, transform into power to connect, to heal, to build together.
Part of the work of the Talmudic rabbis in their thinking about avodah zarah is to make it possible for Jews to co-exist with pagans. They go to some length to identify certain images - even of Greek gods - as mere decoration, so they can use the same bathhouses and market squares. I think this was pragmatic, not an idealistic vision of a multicultural society. But it was nevertheless about making peace with those with whom they lived. And I don’t want to make peace with white supremacy.
Of course, this whole conversation is really about teshuvah - about how we deal with past wrongs, take responsibility, apologize, make reparations, and change our behavior. The High Holidays teach us, again and again, that this is a communal process and an individual process.
Let us each consider our own stories about the past. How do they shape our present and our future? What images need to be transformed? What stories need new chapters? By doing this work in our hearts and in our relationships, we pave the way to do it on a societal level. And we join that vast network of people who are committed to telling the truth about the past so that we can do the present and future differently.
May this be a year of great and powerful transformation, and a year of deep and gentle healing. Shanah tova.
Rabbi Leora's Kol Nidre Sermon 2017
Makhloket l’Shem Shamayim Part 1
A couple of weeks ago I was driving in Attleboro and I noticed how many homes had political signs out front for the mayoral race. What struck me more than the number of signs was how often homes next to one another had opposing signs. This is unusual in Boston and other places I have lived. It is much more common to see neighbors - to see whole neighborhoods - supporting the same candidate.
I’m curious about what it is like to live in a place where neighbors vote for different candidates, and whether or not those neighbors get along. And I’m curious about whether that’s true of the places you live. Did you vote for the same candidate as most of your neighbors?
To what extent are you in relationship with people who think or believe very differently than you do? And how does that shape your life?
This summer, the education committee decided that our theme for the school year would be makhloket l’shem shamayim. Makhloket l’shem shamayim is an ancient Hebrew phrase that means “disagreement for the sake of heaven.” It is sometimes interpretively translated into English as “constructive conflict.”
I want to use this opportunity to offer an introduction to this concept, because it is relevant to our community in particular and to our society at large. I couldn’t do it justice in twelve minutes, so this is a two-part d’var Torah, which I will begin tonight and finish tomorrow. My hope is that this will kick off a congregation-wide conversation that will last throughout the year.
The phrase “makhloket l’shem shamayim” is introduced in the Mishnah, a 2nd century Jewish text that was compiled in ancient Palestine.
Let’s start with the word “makhloket,” which means disagreement, argument, conflict, or controversy. The root of this word, the three letters chet, lamed, kof, means to divide or separate. It is made famous as the word describing what the rabbis in the Talmud do - they disagree, they argue, they take sides, they fight it out. Makhloket is one of the basic building blocks of the Talmud, and therefore of the development of Jewish life since the last turn of the millennium. Now, perhaps your impression of the ancient rabbis is a bunch of old men, isolated in their study halls, quibbling - and obsessing - over minute and insignificant details of the law. Or perhaps your impression is of bold, curious, creative leaders, trying to revive their community and make it resilient enough to survive under Roman authoritarian rule. Either way, you know that modern Jews have inherited a legacy of asking questions and wrestling with ideas. This is the legacy of makhloket.
Both of those impressions of the rabbis are accurate, by the way.
So makhloket is disagreement or argument. What is makhloket l’shem shamayim? What does it mean to say an argument is l’shem, for the sake of, shamayim, heaven? The mishnah offers this somewhat vague description: “Every argument that is for the sake of heaven is destined to endure. But if it is not for the sake of heaven, it is not destined to endure” (Pirkei Avot, 5:17). Doesn’t really clarify what it is. The mishnah goes on to give an example of an argument that is l’shem shamayim, for the sake of heaven: the argument of Hillel and Shammai.
Hillel and Shammai were two famous teachers, who lived around the year Zero. They were each the head of a school, and their schools often had conflicting interpretations of Jewish law. Nevertheless, we learn, followers of each of these schools would eat at one another’s homes and marry one another’s daughters. This was a big deal, because if you disagreed with someone about how to keep kosher, you might not want to eat at their house, and if you disagreed with someone about what constituted legal marriage, you might not want your family member to marry them. It might be similar to someone today, who believes strongly in gun control, allowing their child to spend the night at the home of a friend whose parents have guns in the house. Or it might be like someone who believes that the law should only allow marriage between a man and a woman peacefully attending the wedding ceremony of their gay or lesbian sibling.
The point is that despite significant and high-stakes differences of opinion, followers of the two schools maintained relationships with one another. It was as if they said to one another, “Even though I think you are wrong, I trust you and I care about you.”
Maintaining an interpersonal, even loving, relationship with those with whom we disagree changes the nature of the disagreement; it somehow elevates it - it brings Heaven in. It assures us that we are not disagreeing merely because we hate one another, not merely for the sake of argument itself, not merely because we like to win.
The mishnah offers a counter example. What is an example of an argument not for the sake of Heaven? We are told, Korach and his followers. Korach appears in the book of Numbers in the Torah. He attempts a rebellion against Moses and Aaron as the Israelites are sojourning in the wilderness. The dispute is resolved, so to speak, when the earth opens up and swallows Korach and his followers. An 18th century Polish rabbi offered these words in his sermon on makhloket l’shem shamayim: “Shammai and Hillel loved one another and respected one another as lovers and friends. This is a sign that their disagreement is for the sake of Heaven. However, “like the makhloket of Korach and his company,” where they were holding onto enmity and hatred and almost stoned Moshe and the like, this is not for the sake of Heaven.”
Maintaining loving relationships despite their disagreement is not the only criteria that characterized Hillel and Shammai’s argument. The Talmud and later commentaries teach that they engaged one another with a tone of humility and respect. They teach that even as they argued for their own positions, they were open to learning something new. These qualities, too, can make a disagreement for the sake of Heaven.
One of the most famous stories about Hillel and Shammai tells that argued for three years about one point of the law, and then a Heavenly voice, a bat kol, called out: “These and these are the words of the living God: elu v’elu divrei elohim chayyim hen” (Talmud Bavli, Eruvin 13b).
This has become a very important idea in Jewish tradition; that our communities contain a multiplicity of voices and perspectives, and not only can we learn to live with those contradictions, but the contradictions and complexity - within communities and even within individuals - can be a source of great creativity.
Disagreement has always been a Jewish value, even as we are in an ongoing process to learn how we can disagree in ways that that uplift, that connect, that are generative and fruitful.
I’ve been reflecting on how this idea might be relevant in our congregation. Over the past several months, I have heard many of you reflect on the limits of your social community and express a desire to come into relationship with more people who are more different from you. This might be about political difference, or it might be about other kinds of difference. Is there a way we could do that as a congregation? What might that look like?
I also know that there is disagreement among members of our community - about politics, about Israel, about immigration, and other issues. I have noticed that we mostly stay away from controversy. I wonder what it would look like to lean towards it a bit more. This may be the opposite of what many rabbis say on the high holy days - let’s make things more controversial! I didn’t ask any more experienced rabbis if it was a bad idea to say this from the bima. But in all seriousness, I want to encourage us not to be afraid of controversy, but to trust that the relationships that are the foundation of our community are strong enough to hold difficult, even painful, conversations. We have Hillel and Shammai’s example to begin with, to teach us some strategies for lifting up the fruitful and even sacred aspects of conflict. Are there difficult conversations you hope we might have together?
I want to acknowledge that in addition to thinking about difference and conflict in society and in our congregation, we each experience it in our interpersonal lives. Maybe you have a relationship in your own life that is stuck in conflict that doesn’t feel like it is l’shem shamayim, for the sake of Heaven. Does the conflict eclipse the relationship? What would you need to do to transform it? What would the other person need to do? Not all conflicts can be l’shem shamayim, and that is important to acknowledge, too, for example if there is a power difference, or if there is violence in a relationship.
We experience disagreement and conflict at all levels in our lives. Our tradition teaches us not to be afraid of conflict, but to embrace it - with care and attention, with humility and respect. In a world so full of conflict that is not for the sake of heaven, conflict that is violent or disrespectful, conflict that is encouraged for the sake of ego and power, it is important that we each practice engaging in makhloket l’shem shamayim, conflict that is constructive. Whether that is working on a personal relationship, initiating a difficult conversation in the congregation by bravely offering your own opinion and inviting others to share theirs, or reaching out to your neighbor whose lawn sign differs from your own, I encourage you to find ways to practice it this year.
I’m looking forward to the process of engaging together, as well as the creativity that we will generate, and I pray that the fruit of our small labors will ripple out beyond our community and contributing to transforming our world.
A couple of weeks ago I was driving in Attleboro and I noticed how many homes had political signs out front for the mayoral race. What struck me more than the number of signs was how often homes next to one another had opposing signs. This is unusual in Boston and other places I have lived. It is much more common to see neighbors - to see whole neighborhoods - supporting the same candidate.
I’m curious about what it is like to live in a place where neighbors vote for different candidates, and whether or not those neighbors get along. And I’m curious about whether that’s true of the places you live. Did you vote for the same candidate as most of your neighbors?
To what extent are you in relationship with people who think or believe very differently than you do? And how does that shape your life?
This summer, the education committee decided that our theme for the school year would be makhloket l’shem shamayim. Makhloket l’shem shamayim is an ancient Hebrew phrase that means “disagreement for the sake of heaven.” It is sometimes interpretively translated into English as “constructive conflict.”
I want to use this opportunity to offer an introduction to this concept, because it is relevant to our community in particular and to our society at large. I couldn’t do it justice in twelve minutes, so this is a two-part d’var Torah, which I will begin tonight and finish tomorrow. My hope is that this will kick off a congregation-wide conversation that will last throughout the year.
The phrase “makhloket l’shem shamayim” is introduced in the Mishnah, a 2nd century Jewish text that was compiled in ancient Palestine.
Let’s start with the word “makhloket,” which means disagreement, argument, conflict, or controversy. The root of this word, the three letters chet, lamed, kof, means to divide or separate. It is made famous as the word describing what the rabbis in the Talmud do - they disagree, they argue, they take sides, they fight it out. Makhloket is one of the basic building blocks of the Talmud, and therefore of the development of Jewish life since the last turn of the millennium. Now, perhaps your impression of the ancient rabbis is a bunch of old men, isolated in their study halls, quibbling - and obsessing - over minute and insignificant details of the law. Or perhaps your impression is of bold, curious, creative leaders, trying to revive their community and make it resilient enough to survive under Roman authoritarian rule. Either way, you know that modern Jews have inherited a legacy of asking questions and wrestling with ideas. This is the legacy of makhloket.
Both of those impressions of the rabbis are accurate, by the way.
So makhloket is disagreement or argument. What is makhloket l’shem shamayim? What does it mean to say an argument is l’shem, for the sake of, shamayim, heaven? The mishnah offers this somewhat vague description: “Every argument that is for the sake of heaven is destined to endure. But if it is not for the sake of heaven, it is not destined to endure” (Pirkei Avot, 5:17). Doesn’t really clarify what it is. The mishnah goes on to give an example of an argument that is l’shem shamayim, for the sake of heaven: the argument of Hillel and Shammai.
Hillel and Shammai were two famous teachers, who lived around the year Zero. They were each the head of a school, and their schools often had conflicting interpretations of Jewish law. Nevertheless, we learn, followers of each of these schools would eat at one another’s homes and marry one another’s daughters. This was a big deal, because if you disagreed with someone about how to keep kosher, you might not want to eat at their house, and if you disagreed with someone about what constituted legal marriage, you might not want your family member to marry them. It might be similar to someone today, who believes strongly in gun control, allowing their child to spend the night at the home of a friend whose parents have guns in the house. Or it might be like someone who believes that the law should only allow marriage between a man and a woman peacefully attending the wedding ceremony of their gay or lesbian sibling.
The point is that despite significant and high-stakes differences of opinion, followers of the two schools maintained relationships with one another. It was as if they said to one another, “Even though I think you are wrong, I trust you and I care about you.”
Maintaining an interpersonal, even loving, relationship with those with whom we disagree changes the nature of the disagreement; it somehow elevates it - it brings Heaven in. It assures us that we are not disagreeing merely because we hate one another, not merely for the sake of argument itself, not merely because we like to win.
The mishnah offers a counter example. What is an example of an argument not for the sake of Heaven? We are told, Korach and his followers. Korach appears in the book of Numbers in the Torah. He attempts a rebellion against Moses and Aaron as the Israelites are sojourning in the wilderness. The dispute is resolved, so to speak, when the earth opens up and swallows Korach and his followers. An 18th century Polish rabbi offered these words in his sermon on makhloket l’shem shamayim: “Shammai and Hillel loved one another and respected one another as lovers and friends. This is a sign that their disagreement is for the sake of Heaven. However, “like the makhloket of Korach and his company,” where they were holding onto enmity and hatred and almost stoned Moshe and the like, this is not for the sake of Heaven.”
Maintaining loving relationships despite their disagreement is not the only criteria that characterized Hillel and Shammai’s argument. The Talmud and later commentaries teach that they engaged one another with a tone of humility and respect. They teach that even as they argued for their own positions, they were open to learning something new. These qualities, too, can make a disagreement for the sake of Heaven.
One of the most famous stories about Hillel and Shammai tells that argued for three years about one point of the law, and then a Heavenly voice, a bat kol, called out: “These and these are the words of the living God: elu v’elu divrei elohim chayyim hen” (Talmud Bavli, Eruvin 13b).
This has become a very important idea in Jewish tradition; that our communities contain a multiplicity of voices and perspectives, and not only can we learn to live with those contradictions, but the contradictions and complexity - within communities and even within individuals - can be a source of great creativity.
Disagreement has always been a Jewish value, even as we are in an ongoing process to learn how we can disagree in ways that that uplift, that connect, that are generative and fruitful.
I’ve been reflecting on how this idea might be relevant in our congregation. Over the past several months, I have heard many of you reflect on the limits of your social community and express a desire to come into relationship with more people who are more different from you. This might be about political difference, or it might be about other kinds of difference. Is there a way we could do that as a congregation? What might that look like?
I also know that there is disagreement among members of our community - about politics, about Israel, about immigration, and other issues. I have noticed that we mostly stay away from controversy. I wonder what it would look like to lean towards it a bit more. This may be the opposite of what many rabbis say on the high holy days - let’s make things more controversial! I didn’t ask any more experienced rabbis if it was a bad idea to say this from the bima. But in all seriousness, I want to encourage us not to be afraid of controversy, but to trust that the relationships that are the foundation of our community are strong enough to hold difficult, even painful, conversations. We have Hillel and Shammai’s example to begin with, to teach us some strategies for lifting up the fruitful and even sacred aspects of conflict. Are there difficult conversations you hope we might have together?
I want to acknowledge that in addition to thinking about difference and conflict in society and in our congregation, we each experience it in our interpersonal lives. Maybe you have a relationship in your own life that is stuck in conflict that doesn’t feel like it is l’shem shamayim, for the sake of Heaven. Does the conflict eclipse the relationship? What would you need to do to transform it? What would the other person need to do? Not all conflicts can be l’shem shamayim, and that is important to acknowledge, too, for example if there is a power difference, or if there is violence in a relationship.
We experience disagreement and conflict at all levels in our lives. Our tradition teaches us not to be afraid of conflict, but to embrace it - with care and attention, with humility and respect. In a world so full of conflict that is not for the sake of heaven, conflict that is violent or disrespectful, conflict that is encouraged for the sake of ego and power, it is important that we each practice engaging in makhloket l’shem shamayim, conflict that is constructive. Whether that is working on a personal relationship, initiating a difficult conversation in the congregation by bravely offering your own opinion and inviting others to share theirs, or reaching out to your neighbor whose lawn sign differs from your own, I encourage you to find ways to practice it this year.
I’m looking forward to the process of engaging together, as well as the creativity that we will generate, and I pray that the fruit of our small labors will ripple out beyond our community and contributing to transforming our world.
Rabbi Leora's Yom Kippur Sermon 2017
Makhloket l’Shem Shamayim Part 2
Yesterday evening, I spoke about disagreement as a Jewish value. Today, I want to talk about truth.
For those of you who were not here, yesterday was the first part of what is really a two-part dvar Torah. The theme of our school year is makhloket l’shem shamayim, a Hebrew phrase which means, “disagreement for the sake of Heaven.” In the Talmud, a famous disagreement between Hillel and Shammai, two teachers, serves as an example of a disagreement that is for the sake of Heaven. Hillel and Shammai disagreed with each other about significant and high-stakes legal matters, but nevertheless maintained a loving relationship. Further, their disagreement was characterized by humility, respect, and each being open to learning something new from the other.
Hillel and Shammai’s disagreement is made even more famous by a passage in the Talmud that says after they had disagreed for three years, God’s voice came down and said both of them were right: “These and these are the words of the living God; elu v’elu divrei elohim hayyim hen” ( Babylonian Talmud, Eruvin 13b).
In our tradition, this line became a celebration of pluralism. We value disagreement; we love to wrestle with ideas. Asking questions is what is important; the process is what is important, less so the outcome. What matters is that we engage with each other, and that act itself is generative of new questions, new ideas.
But does it generate truth? Or is this an argument of relativism?
Does this story about Hillel and Shammai suggest that all opinions are equally valid, and we should just argue forever?
No, our tradition does not see it that way.
A 15th century Italian commentator, Rabbi Ovadia Bertinoro, argued that one of the aspects that made Hillel and Shammai’s disagreement l’shem shamayim, for the sake of Heaven, was that they were seeking truth. He wrote, “the purpose and desired outcome of an argument which is for the sake of heaven is to discern the truth, as it was said, “from within the argument, the truth will be clarified.” Hillel and Shammai’s goal, he wrote, was to reach the truth. You’ll remember from yesterday that Korach was offered as an example of someone whose argument was not for the sake of heaven; and Rabbi Ovadiah writes that Korach’s desired outcome was power; he created controversy not in order to seek truth, but because he loved victory.
A sixteenth century Turkish commentator wrote that an argument is for the sake of heaven when the arguers’ intention is that truth should be clarified in a way that could not have happened without the argument.
The conflict is necessary. The conflict enables us to reach the truth. The conflict is in service of truth. It is through making space for multiplicity that we have any hope of arriving at truth.
We live in a cultural and political moment in which truth can feel distant and hard to come by. In this information age, each of us can have a different criteria for what we consider to be true. Any claims at all can be validated on the internet, if you only look. Our lives are characterized by multivocality - we are bombarded by information from all kinds of sources all day long - but it can hard to sort through it all. It can be hard get at truth.
At the same time, across the world, leaders of supposedly democratic countries are behaving like authoritarians: with scathing disregard for fact, science, and a free press, instead fashioning themselves as the ultimate authority, the only one who can speak truth. Timothy Snyder, a professor of European political history, notes the strategies used historically by authoritarian leaders that we see being employed again today: presenting outright lies as if they were facts. Conjuring emotional realities through charismatic performances. Promising to do things that are totally incompatible with each other. Claiming to be the only capable leader. When a leader establishes himself as the source of truth, and when “truth” becomes synonymous with whatever a leader says, evidence becomes irrelevant.
These are dangerous times, and I don’t think you need me to tell you that. But my point is not to be doomsday. Even while Snyder cautions us about the similarities between many of today’s leaders and the fascist regimes of 20th century Europe, he offers suggestions about what we need to do. And one of those is to fiercely defend the truth.
We each bear responsibility for the public’s sense of truth, he writes. “If we are serious about seeking the facts, we can each make a small revolution in the way the internet works. If you are verifying information for yourself, you will not send on fake news to others. If you choose to follow reporters whom you have reason to trust, you can also transmit what they have learned to others. If you retweet only the work of humans who have followed journalistic protocols, you are less likely to debase your brain interacting with bots and trolls.”
It is upon each of us to maintain a commitment to truth even as it is devalued around us, and this includes actively cultivating our moral compass and good judgment. Our tradition teaches that we do this, in part, by actively engaging with many perspectives, listening to voices very different than our own. And our tradition teaches that truth is a spiritual practice and a religious value.
I think modern liberal Jews tend to be squeamish about the relationship between truth and religion. Better to leave truth to the scientists, we think. Our tradition is about what we do, not what we believe; we don’t claim to have the truth, and we are suspicious of any religious people who do. This suspicion comes from our legacy of makhloket, of productive disagreement; our tradition is founded on the idea that incorporating multiple voices and perspectives will lead us to answers we need, that truth is something we strive for in an ongoing process, not something we ever finally arrive at.
But in our current historical moment, we must be bold enough to stand for truth when it matters. We are past the point of entertaining multiple perspectives about the human impact on climate change. And when there are Nazis marching in the streets, there are not two equally valid sides to the story.
This year, let us recommit to the truth:
Let’s do this by deeply and honestly engaging with one another, wrestling with difficult ideas, and learning from our differences.
Let’s do this by supporting independent journalism and using the internet responsibly.
Let’s do this by taking responsibility for what, and how, we communicate.
Let’s do this by continuing to be learners.
There is a midrash, a story, told about Creation. In it, the angels are arguing with God about whether or not to create human beings. The angel representing kindness argues for it - humans will bring such beautiful kindness into the world! The angel representing peace argues against it - but they will bring so much strife and violence. The angel representing righteousness argues for it - humans will be able to do righteous deeds, and this will bring so much honor into the world. And the angel representing truth argues against it - humans will lie and be dishonest and make a total mess of truth. Wouldn’t it be better to just not create them at all, and not bring all of that falsehood and dishonesty into the world?
In response to this makhloket, this disagreement, God takes truth and hurls it to the ground, and commences with creating humanity.
In this wonderful and provocative story, the rabbis who wrote it express their knowledge that humans are a messy bunch of liars and cheaters who also have a tremendous capacity for kindness and righteousness. And they argue that the beauty we bring into the world is worth the trouble we cause. I think I agree with them. This midrash is often called upon to teach that God is so committed to the human project that God was willing to forgo truth in favor of human agency. But God doesn’t abandon truth in the story; God throws truth to the ground, where we are. A line from the psalms says, “and truth will spring up from the ground.” Truth is down here, with us. It is in our hands. Let’s plant it, let’s water it, let’s help it grow.
Yesterday evening, I spoke about disagreement as a Jewish value. Today, I want to talk about truth.
For those of you who were not here, yesterday was the first part of what is really a two-part dvar Torah. The theme of our school year is makhloket l’shem shamayim, a Hebrew phrase which means, “disagreement for the sake of Heaven.” In the Talmud, a famous disagreement between Hillel and Shammai, two teachers, serves as an example of a disagreement that is for the sake of Heaven. Hillel and Shammai disagreed with each other about significant and high-stakes legal matters, but nevertheless maintained a loving relationship. Further, their disagreement was characterized by humility, respect, and each being open to learning something new from the other.
Hillel and Shammai’s disagreement is made even more famous by a passage in the Talmud that says after they had disagreed for three years, God’s voice came down and said both of them were right: “These and these are the words of the living God; elu v’elu divrei elohim hayyim hen” ( Babylonian Talmud, Eruvin 13b).
In our tradition, this line became a celebration of pluralism. We value disagreement; we love to wrestle with ideas. Asking questions is what is important; the process is what is important, less so the outcome. What matters is that we engage with each other, and that act itself is generative of new questions, new ideas.
But does it generate truth? Or is this an argument of relativism?
Does this story about Hillel and Shammai suggest that all opinions are equally valid, and we should just argue forever?
No, our tradition does not see it that way.
A 15th century Italian commentator, Rabbi Ovadia Bertinoro, argued that one of the aspects that made Hillel and Shammai’s disagreement l’shem shamayim, for the sake of Heaven, was that they were seeking truth. He wrote, “the purpose and desired outcome of an argument which is for the sake of heaven is to discern the truth, as it was said, “from within the argument, the truth will be clarified.” Hillel and Shammai’s goal, he wrote, was to reach the truth. You’ll remember from yesterday that Korach was offered as an example of someone whose argument was not for the sake of heaven; and Rabbi Ovadiah writes that Korach’s desired outcome was power; he created controversy not in order to seek truth, but because he loved victory.
A sixteenth century Turkish commentator wrote that an argument is for the sake of heaven when the arguers’ intention is that truth should be clarified in a way that could not have happened without the argument.
The conflict is necessary. The conflict enables us to reach the truth. The conflict is in service of truth. It is through making space for multiplicity that we have any hope of arriving at truth.
We live in a cultural and political moment in which truth can feel distant and hard to come by. In this information age, each of us can have a different criteria for what we consider to be true. Any claims at all can be validated on the internet, if you only look. Our lives are characterized by multivocality - we are bombarded by information from all kinds of sources all day long - but it can hard to sort through it all. It can be hard get at truth.
At the same time, across the world, leaders of supposedly democratic countries are behaving like authoritarians: with scathing disregard for fact, science, and a free press, instead fashioning themselves as the ultimate authority, the only one who can speak truth. Timothy Snyder, a professor of European political history, notes the strategies used historically by authoritarian leaders that we see being employed again today: presenting outright lies as if they were facts. Conjuring emotional realities through charismatic performances. Promising to do things that are totally incompatible with each other. Claiming to be the only capable leader. When a leader establishes himself as the source of truth, and when “truth” becomes synonymous with whatever a leader says, evidence becomes irrelevant.
These are dangerous times, and I don’t think you need me to tell you that. But my point is not to be doomsday. Even while Snyder cautions us about the similarities between many of today’s leaders and the fascist regimes of 20th century Europe, he offers suggestions about what we need to do. And one of those is to fiercely defend the truth.
We each bear responsibility for the public’s sense of truth, he writes. “If we are serious about seeking the facts, we can each make a small revolution in the way the internet works. If you are verifying information for yourself, you will not send on fake news to others. If you choose to follow reporters whom you have reason to trust, you can also transmit what they have learned to others. If you retweet only the work of humans who have followed journalistic protocols, you are less likely to debase your brain interacting with bots and trolls.”
It is upon each of us to maintain a commitment to truth even as it is devalued around us, and this includes actively cultivating our moral compass and good judgment. Our tradition teaches that we do this, in part, by actively engaging with many perspectives, listening to voices very different than our own. And our tradition teaches that truth is a spiritual practice and a religious value.
I think modern liberal Jews tend to be squeamish about the relationship between truth and religion. Better to leave truth to the scientists, we think. Our tradition is about what we do, not what we believe; we don’t claim to have the truth, and we are suspicious of any religious people who do. This suspicion comes from our legacy of makhloket, of productive disagreement; our tradition is founded on the idea that incorporating multiple voices and perspectives will lead us to answers we need, that truth is something we strive for in an ongoing process, not something we ever finally arrive at.
But in our current historical moment, we must be bold enough to stand for truth when it matters. We are past the point of entertaining multiple perspectives about the human impact on climate change. And when there are Nazis marching in the streets, there are not two equally valid sides to the story.
This year, let us recommit to the truth:
Let’s do this by deeply and honestly engaging with one another, wrestling with difficult ideas, and learning from our differences.
Let’s do this by supporting independent journalism and using the internet responsibly.
Let’s do this by taking responsibility for what, and how, we communicate.
Let’s do this by continuing to be learners.
There is a midrash, a story, told about Creation. In it, the angels are arguing with God about whether or not to create human beings. The angel representing kindness argues for it - humans will bring such beautiful kindness into the world! The angel representing peace argues against it - but they will bring so much strife and violence. The angel representing righteousness argues for it - humans will be able to do righteous deeds, and this will bring so much honor into the world. And the angel representing truth argues against it - humans will lie and be dishonest and make a total mess of truth. Wouldn’t it be better to just not create them at all, and not bring all of that falsehood and dishonesty into the world?
In response to this makhloket, this disagreement, God takes truth and hurls it to the ground, and commences with creating humanity.
In this wonderful and provocative story, the rabbis who wrote it express their knowledge that humans are a messy bunch of liars and cheaters who also have a tremendous capacity for kindness and righteousness. And they argue that the beauty we bring into the world is worth the trouble we cause. I think I agree with them. This midrash is often called upon to teach that God is so committed to the human project that God was willing to forgo truth in favor of human agency. But God doesn’t abandon truth in the story; God throws truth to the ground, where we are. A line from the psalms says, “and truth will spring up from the ground.” Truth is down here, with us. It is in our hands. Let’s plant it, let’s water it, let’s help it grow.
Rav Leora's Erev Rosh Hashanah Sermon 2016
This past year, I've become enchanted by the radio show The Moth. I imagine many of you are familiar with it. How many people here listened to the Moth or been to a live story slam? If you aren't familiar with the Moth, it's a radio show and podcast in which real people tell true stories, live.
It’s a very simple premise: People telling true stories as they remember them, in real-time, in front of a live audience. It’s not highly produced, there are no gimmicks, and while some of the story-tellers have prepared their stories ahead of time, it’s not scripted. It’s people speaking truth. Not arguments, statements, or claims. Nothing you can agree or disagree with; just people’s own thoughts on something that happened to them. The stories run the gamut from hilarious to serious.
Some of the stories describe one moment in time: a couple deciding whether or not to bid for an antique desk on eBay, or a high school prom. Others describe an extended period – a whole family’s long-term love of the Mets, or an author’s relationship with her grandmother as it unfolded over her whole life.
Some of the stories are great because they are told so well, like the graduate student in applied math who hacked an online dating website to maximize the number of “matches” he would get, and then went on three dates a day for weeks. Just the right mix of self-deprecating, naïve, and brave, that one had me laughing out loud. Other stories are great because the content is so powerful, like the former army colonel describing how long it took him to admit that he had PTSD and then get treatment.
The stories often contain some kind of confession, which can be uncomfortable or cathartic; sometimes both. A grown adult says they hate an abusive parent; a new mother admits to being depressed after giving birth; a parent describes her fear when her child came out as trans. Some of the stories are powerful because they contain surprising – and often hilarious – moments of resilience within stories of excruciating pain.
Though each story is intensely personal, they all offer bigger truths about being human and living on this planet. Forgiveness is possible. Regret is real. Hope keeps us alive.
They sound like clichés – they are clichés – until they are embedded in a story of real life. Sometimes the truth is excruciating: a five-year-old girl teaches a chaplain how to say goodbye when she insists on visiting her cousin’s body after he dies. Sometimes the truths are simple: whether or not he wins a prestigious prize, a chef continues to make delicious meals for his customers.
Always, the truth arrives through vulnerability. When a top editor for Vogue magazine describes living in a haunted apartment, the truth emerges that we all, even people who appear highly successful and satisfied, have moments in our lives that make us feel completely crazy. A daughter’s fear of coming out as gay to her father reminds us how difficult it is to share ourselves honestly, even with those we love; and his surprisingly loving response reminds us that it is sometimes worth it to take the risk.
On Rosh ha Shana, we also listen to stories. Isaac is born to Sarah and Abraham in their old age, and Sarah asks Abraham to banish his other family – Hagar and their son Ishmael. Hannah longs for a child, endures hardship, prays, and conceives and gives birth.
Like the stories on the Moth, these stories contain conflict, shame, competition, hope, disappointment, intimacy.
The classical reason why we read these stories is because both are about the birth of child, which is one way we humans participate in the creation of the world, which we celebrate today. But I’m certain that it’s also because these are stories of human vulnerability. Stories of our exalted ancestors who were, we learn through these stories, as flawed and human as we are. They, too, did things that make us say, “what were they thinking?” In the Torah reading we’ll read tomorrow, Abraham sends Hagar and Ishmael into the desert with one skin of water, and no destination. What was he thinking?
In the Haftorah we’ll read tomorrow, Peninah laughs at Hannah’s barrenness. It’s so painful, because it is so familiar. How could she say such a thing? And yet we know, because we too have said hurtful things to people we love.
We need to hear these stories of our ancestors, because they remind us that we are not alone in our flaws. They remind us how difficult it is to be human!
And that brings me to the other thing I love about The Moth: the listeners. The shows are told live, and you get to hear the emotional journey of the audience as they listen. Laughter, thoughtful hmms, gasps of surprise or outrage. Sometimes you can tell that a storyteller has friends in the audience cheering them on. But most of the time you get the sense that the audience is full of strangers, who are encountering the person for the first time through their story.
It becomes a sacred space, where the listeners offer the storyteller a chance to speak some truth about themselves, and in doing so, become themselves. The truth is always complex; the people in the stories can be petty, fearful, mean, judgmental, wounded. But because the storyteller is always in a different place than they were when the story happened to them, the telling of the story inevitably serves as testimony to the persons’ change. By telling it to other people, the storytellers discover how they have changed.
The theologian Nelle Morton has a phrase she uses to describe early feminist gatherings when women told their stories to one another for the first time. The women, she writes, “heard one another into speech.” The quality of their listening allowed women to speak their story for the first time, and in doing so, to become more of themselves. It is profoundly healing, and it is an act of teshuvah, to tell a story and be heard, be witnessed.
It’s also a sacred act for the listener, who is honored by the trust and courage of the storyteller. Two years ago, when I was studying in Israel, I had the chance to travel in the West Bank and hear stories from Palestinians who live there. Beautiful, heartbreaking, cynical, hopeful, the stories changed me. And one of the Palestinians who told his story said to us, “Now that we have told you our stories, you have become responsible for them.” I don’t fully know what that means yet. I wonder, of the stories we are told in a lifetime, which ones are we responsible for? And I wonder, what does it mean to be responsible for them? I do know that just as the act of storytelling allows the teller to discover their changes, it is impossible to listen to the Moth without being changed by the stories. In both senses, stories are at the root of teshuvah.
So I invite you: what story do you want to tell? What story can help you become more of who you are in this moment of your life? What story would be healing for you to tell? Think of a story. Find someone to tell it to. Tell it to me.
In fact, the curriculum for our Religious School for the year we’ve just begun is The Stories of Our People. We’ll be studying Torah, midrash, folktales, family stories. I hope that it will offer many opportunities for our students to tell their stories to each other, and also for all of us to tell stories to one another.
May we have a year together rich with stories, funny, absurd, heartbreaking, and real. May we witness one another’s changes through our stories, and support each other to keep changing. May we all find ways to become more of ourselves through the act of storytelling.
The Moth radio hour always ends the same way, with the host saying “We hope you have a story-worthy week.” May we have a story-worthy year.
It’s a very simple premise: People telling true stories as they remember them, in real-time, in front of a live audience. It’s not highly produced, there are no gimmicks, and while some of the story-tellers have prepared their stories ahead of time, it’s not scripted. It’s people speaking truth. Not arguments, statements, or claims. Nothing you can agree or disagree with; just people’s own thoughts on something that happened to them. The stories run the gamut from hilarious to serious.
Some of the stories describe one moment in time: a couple deciding whether or not to bid for an antique desk on eBay, or a high school prom. Others describe an extended period – a whole family’s long-term love of the Mets, or an author’s relationship with her grandmother as it unfolded over her whole life.
Some of the stories are great because they are told so well, like the graduate student in applied math who hacked an online dating website to maximize the number of “matches” he would get, and then went on three dates a day for weeks. Just the right mix of self-deprecating, naïve, and brave, that one had me laughing out loud. Other stories are great because the content is so powerful, like the former army colonel describing how long it took him to admit that he had PTSD and then get treatment.
The stories often contain some kind of confession, which can be uncomfortable or cathartic; sometimes both. A grown adult says they hate an abusive parent; a new mother admits to being depressed after giving birth; a parent describes her fear when her child came out as trans. Some of the stories are powerful because they contain surprising – and often hilarious – moments of resilience within stories of excruciating pain.
Though each story is intensely personal, they all offer bigger truths about being human and living on this planet. Forgiveness is possible. Regret is real. Hope keeps us alive.
They sound like clichés – they are clichés – until they are embedded in a story of real life. Sometimes the truth is excruciating: a five-year-old girl teaches a chaplain how to say goodbye when she insists on visiting her cousin’s body after he dies. Sometimes the truths are simple: whether or not he wins a prestigious prize, a chef continues to make delicious meals for his customers.
Always, the truth arrives through vulnerability. When a top editor for Vogue magazine describes living in a haunted apartment, the truth emerges that we all, even people who appear highly successful and satisfied, have moments in our lives that make us feel completely crazy. A daughter’s fear of coming out as gay to her father reminds us how difficult it is to share ourselves honestly, even with those we love; and his surprisingly loving response reminds us that it is sometimes worth it to take the risk.
On Rosh ha Shana, we also listen to stories. Isaac is born to Sarah and Abraham in their old age, and Sarah asks Abraham to banish his other family – Hagar and their son Ishmael. Hannah longs for a child, endures hardship, prays, and conceives and gives birth.
Like the stories on the Moth, these stories contain conflict, shame, competition, hope, disappointment, intimacy.
The classical reason why we read these stories is because both are about the birth of child, which is one way we humans participate in the creation of the world, which we celebrate today. But I’m certain that it’s also because these are stories of human vulnerability. Stories of our exalted ancestors who were, we learn through these stories, as flawed and human as we are. They, too, did things that make us say, “what were they thinking?” In the Torah reading we’ll read tomorrow, Abraham sends Hagar and Ishmael into the desert with one skin of water, and no destination. What was he thinking?
In the Haftorah we’ll read tomorrow, Peninah laughs at Hannah’s barrenness. It’s so painful, because it is so familiar. How could she say such a thing? And yet we know, because we too have said hurtful things to people we love.
We need to hear these stories of our ancestors, because they remind us that we are not alone in our flaws. They remind us how difficult it is to be human!
And that brings me to the other thing I love about The Moth: the listeners. The shows are told live, and you get to hear the emotional journey of the audience as they listen. Laughter, thoughtful hmms, gasps of surprise or outrage. Sometimes you can tell that a storyteller has friends in the audience cheering them on. But most of the time you get the sense that the audience is full of strangers, who are encountering the person for the first time through their story.
It becomes a sacred space, where the listeners offer the storyteller a chance to speak some truth about themselves, and in doing so, become themselves. The truth is always complex; the people in the stories can be petty, fearful, mean, judgmental, wounded. But because the storyteller is always in a different place than they were when the story happened to them, the telling of the story inevitably serves as testimony to the persons’ change. By telling it to other people, the storytellers discover how they have changed.
The theologian Nelle Morton has a phrase she uses to describe early feminist gatherings when women told their stories to one another for the first time. The women, she writes, “heard one another into speech.” The quality of their listening allowed women to speak their story for the first time, and in doing so, to become more of themselves. It is profoundly healing, and it is an act of teshuvah, to tell a story and be heard, be witnessed.
It’s also a sacred act for the listener, who is honored by the trust and courage of the storyteller. Two years ago, when I was studying in Israel, I had the chance to travel in the West Bank and hear stories from Palestinians who live there. Beautiful, heartbreaking, cynical, hopeful, the stories changed me. And one of the Palestinians who told his story said to us, “Now that we have told you our stories, you have become responsible for them.” I don’t fully know what that means yet. I wonder, of the stories we are told in a lifetime, which ones are we responsible for? And I wonder, what does it mean to be responsible for them? I do know that just as the act of storytelling allows the teller to discover their changes, it is impossible to listen to the Moth without being changed by the stories. In both senses, stories are at the root of teshuvah.
So I invite you: what story do you want to tell? What story can help you become more of who you are in this moment of your life? What story would be healing for you to tell? Think of a story. Find someone to tell it to. Tell it to me.
In fact, the curriculum for our Religious School for the year we’ve just begun is The Stories of Our People. We’ll be studying Torah, midrash, folktales, family stories. I hope that it will offer many opportunities for our students to tell their stories to each other, and also for all of us to tell stories to one another.
May we have a year together rich with stories, funny, absurd, heartbreaking, and real. May we witness one another’s changes through our stories, and support each other to keep changing. May we all find ways to become more of ourselves through the act of storytelling.
The Moth radio hour always ends the same way, with the host saying “We hope you have a story-worthy week.” May we have a story-worthy year.
Rav Leora's First Day of Rosh Hashanah Sermon 2016
This past summer, I traveled to Hungary and Poland with six women, all rabbinical students or Jewish community leaders. As it happened, we were in Warsaw the same weekend as President Obama, who was there for the NATO summit. It was also the weekend after Alton Sterling was killed by a police officer in Baton Rouge, and Philandro Castile was killed in St. Paul. It was the weekend after five police officers were killed in Dallas. That Friday morning, my group had the opportunity to meet the Chief Rabbi of Poland, Michael Shudrick. As we shared grief and consternation over what was happening in the United States, Rabbi Shudrick said something that struck me: he wondered how President Obama must have been feeling, being so far away, knowing he should be home with his people. In Rabbi Shudrick’s voice, I heard deep empathy for President Obama.
I heard the rabbi identifying with the president, knowing that his people were suffering and needed not only his leadership, but his presence. The rabbi was suggesting that even presidents of secular countries have some obligation towards the spiritual well-being of their citizens.
Throughout this presidential election season, I have been troubled to see the opposite. Leadership that does not support our well-being, but instead exacerbates anxiety, alarm, and short-sightedness. Not comfort, vision, or moral clarity, but fear and fear-mongering. I think fear is something many of us are feeling these days, and for good reason: our country has seen many tragedies this year, from mass shootings to terrible floods. Our world is facing a massive refugee crisis, and, in so many places, a seemingly total disregard for human rights and dignity. We are in desperate need of vision, nuance, and complexity.
Instead, leaders manipulate our fear to build their own power.
Jews know why this is so dangerous, know what fear-mongering from a leader can lead humans to do to one another. We have been made into the feared Other, with unspeakably tragic consequences.
Jews are also familiar with examples of fear-mongering leadership in our sacred sources. Pharaoh is the classic model. The book of Exodus opens with Pharaoh describing how large the population of Israelites has grown in Egypt. He exaggerates the damage this people could potentially cause in order to justify killing and enslaving them.
Another model we have of a fear-mongering authority figure is God. Just last Shabbat, we read verse after verse describing the horrifying curses with which Moses threatens the Israelites should they fail to follow God's law. And maybe you know the midrash about Mount Sinai, that says when the people of Israel stood at the mountain to receive Torah from God, they were literally underneath the mountain, which God was hanging over their heads by a thread, threatening to crush the people if they did not accept the Torah.
These examples in which God compels us to be God's people through coercion fit with an image of God as a scary, threatening authoritarian. And so much of the liturgy of these High Holy Days reinforces that image, one of a king sitting on a throne, before whom we quake and tremble. Our fear of this harsh and demanding God is supposed to motivate moral and courageous behavior.
Judith Plaskow, in her pioneering work of Jewish feminist theology, taught that the way we think about God both reflects and shapes the way our society works. Primarily masculine images of God mirror a patriarchal society, but they also reinforce the idea that men should and do have all the power. And images of a God who demands terrible sacrifices, who threatens and coerces, reinforce a worldview in which fear drives our choices and characterizes the way we interact with the world.
Plaskow challenges us to find metaphors for God that reflect our actual lived experience and that inspire the kind of society we want to live in.
To be honest, that’s why I wanted to become a rabbi. Because I think our spiritual communities are one of the places where we get to figure out how we do want power and authority to work in the world. Where we get to think about what it means to live within a system of law and be constantly wrestling with how to live its values into practice.
Where we get to ask – what do we consider worthy of worship, worthy of our awe?
The rabbis of the Talmud, our sages who invented the religion we practice today, were actually uncomfortable with fear of punishment as a motivation for behavior. Fear of punishment might – sometimes – prevent sin, but fear isn’t a valid basis for religious life. The Hebrew word for fear, yirah, the rabbis also interpreted as “awe.” This distinction opened the way for generations of Jewish thinkers to develop new ideas about the kind of posture we might want to take towards our idea of God. Fear? Awe? Love?
I believe that it is incumbent upon us to keep wrestling with that question, to keep searching for metaphors for God that reflect our real lives and that also inspire the kind of society we want to live in. One metaphor that works for me is a deep well, the source of life.
The phrase “m’kor chayyim,” source of life, comes from Psalms: Nahal adanecha tashkem, ki imcha mkor chayyim. You nourish us from the river of your delight, for with you is the Source of Life.
The image of a sustaining well shows up throughout the Torah. When Abraham banishes Hagar and her son Ishmael and she thinks they will die of thirst in the wilderness, God opens her eyes to the well that was always there. The Israelites as they wander in the desert are sustained by a well that appears whenever they need it. And at the end of the story, just before they cross into the land where they will begin to establish their own society, when Moses is teaching Torah to the Israelites for the first time, the word used for “explain” is the same as the word for “well.” Moses offers them the Torah as a well.
We experience this well in different ways. The poet Max Ritvo experiences it through his imagination. He says, “My interactions with my imagination are the closest I’ve ever gotten to the wellspring of life itself. The imagination is a very sacred place for me.”
Judith Plaskow experienced it at Iguassu, one of the largest series of waterfalls in the world, in the Amazon. There, she was struck by the energy, potency, and beauty of the rushing water, which had the potential to “nourish and vivify” or “overwhelm and destroy.” It’s potential to destroy didn’t make her feel fear, but it did make her feel awe.
I experienced the well in the Negev desert, a desolate place, with nothing but dust and rock, wind and mountain. But as you walk through that desert, every now and then you come across a wadi, a dry riverbed, and along the wadi is life. Tenacious desert plants, even flowers grow. Sometimes you can see the water. Usually you can’t. But you know there is enough to sustain life, because you can always see evidence of the nourishment it provides.
The imagery of an unseen source, a hidden well that nourishes me when I most need it, is a source of strength. It reminds me that I want to approach the world with the assumption that the nourishment we all need is available, if we can figure out how to share it. That God is as universal as water, and every human being is inherently worthy of access. The image of a magnificent waterfall, carving its way through rock, reminds me to be in awe of human history – to remember what has come before, and to learn from it.
I need this imagery both to live with my real fears about the world, and to resist the fear-mongering of our political climate. I hope this congregation can be a place where we get to find and create images of God that sustain us, where we get to discover and articulate together what it is we find worthy of awe. I hope we can share these ideas with one another. I hope we can reach out to other spiritual communities and share with and learn from them. In that way, we will offer spiritual leadership to each other. Building strong spiritual communities with vision, grounded in our values, can give us hope in scary times. I pray that this community can strengthen us to face our own fears, and I hope it can also strengthen us to work towards a world where we don’t have to be afraid.
I heard the rabbi identifying with the president, knowing that his people were suffering and needed not only his leadership, but his presence. The rabbi was suggesting that even presidents of secular countries have some obligation towards the spiritual well-being of their citizens.
Throughout this presidential election season, I have been troubled to see the opposite. Leadership that does not support our well-being, but instead exacerbates anxiety, alarm, and short-sightedness. Not comfort, vision, or moral clarity, but fear and fear-mongering. I think fear is something many of us are feeling these days, and for good reason: our country has seen many tragedies this year, from mass shootings to terrible floods. Our world is facing a massive refugee crisis, and, in so many places, a seemingly total disregard for human rights and dignity. We are in desperate need of vision, nuance, and complexity.
Instead, leaders manipulate our fear to build their own power.
Jews know why this is so dangerous, know what fear-mongering from a leader can lead humans to do to one another. We have been made into the feared Other, with unspeakably tragic consequences.
Jews are also familiar with examples of fear-mongering leadership in our sacred sources. Pharaoh is the classic model. The book of Exodus opens with Pharaoh describing how large the population of Israelites has grown in Egypt. He exaggerates the damage this people could potentially cause in order to justify killing and enslaving them.
Another model we have of a fear-mongering authority figure is God. Just last Shabbat, we read verse after verse describing the horrifying curses with which Moses threatens the Israelites should they fail to follow God's law. And maybe you know the midrash about Mount Sinai, that says when the people of Israel stood at the mountain to receive Torah from God, they were literally underneath the mountain, which God was hanging over their heads by a thread, threatening to crush the people if they did not accept the Torah.
These examples in which God compels us to be God's people through coercion fit with an image of God as a scary, threatening authoritarian. And so much of the liturgy of these High Holy Days reinforces that image, one of a king sitting on a throne, before whom we quake and tremble. Our fear of this harsh and demanding God is supposed to motivate moral and courageous behavior.
Judith Plaskow, in her pioneering work of Jewish feminist theology, taught that the way we think about God both reflects and shapes the way our society works. Primarily masculine images of God mirror a patriarchal society, but they also reinforce the idea that men should and do have all the power. And images of a God who demands terrible sacrifices, who threatens and coerces, reinforce a worldview in which fear drives our choices and characterizes the way we interact with the world.
Plaskow challenges us to find metaphors for God that reflect our actual lived experience and that inspire the kind of society we want to live in.
To be honest, that’s why I wanted to become a rabbi. Because I think our spiritual communities are one of the places where we get to figure out how we do want power and authority to work in the world. Where we get to think about what it means to live within a system of law and be constantly wrestling with how to live its values into practice.
Where we get to ask – what do we consider worthy of worship, worthy of our awe?
The rabbis of the Talmud, our sages who invented the religion we practice today, were actually uncomfortable with fear of punishment as a motivation for behavior. Fear of punishment might – sometimes – prevent sin, but fear isn’t a valid basis for religious life. The Hebrew word for fear, yirah, the rabbis also interpreted as “awe.” This distinction opened the way for generations of Jewish thinkers to develop new ideas about the kind of posture we might want to take towards our idea of God. Fear? Awe? Love?
I believe that it is incumbent upon us to keep wrestling with that question, to keep searching for metaphors for God that reflect our real lives and that also inspire the kind of society we want to live in. One metaphor that works for me is a deep well, the source of life.
The phrase “m’kor chayyim,” source of life, comes from Psalms: Nahal adanecha tashkem, ki imcha mkor chayyim. You nourish us from the river of your delight, for with you is the Source of Life.
The image of a sustaining well shows up throughout the Torah. When Abraham banishes Hagar and her son Ishmael and she thinks they will die of thirst in the wilderness, God opens her eyes to the well that was always there. The Israelites as they wander in the desert are sustained by a well that appears whenever they need it. And at the end of the story, just before they cross into the land where they will begin to establish their own society, when Moses is teaching Torah to the Israelites for the first time, the word used for “explain” is the same as the word for “well.” Moses offers them the Torah as a well.
We experience this well in different ways. The poet Max Ritvo experiences it through his imagination. He says, “My interactions with my imagination are the closest I’ve ever gotten to the wellspring of life itself. The imagination is a very sacred place for me.”
Judith Plaskow experienced it at Iguassu, one of the largest series of waterfalls in the world, in the Amazon. There, she was struck by the energy, potency, and beauty of the rushing water, which had the potential to “nourish and vivify” or “overwhelm and destroy.” It’s potential to destroy didn’t make her feel fear, but it did make her feel awe.
I experienced the well in the Negev desert, a desolate place, with nothing but dust and rock, wind and mountain. But as you walk through that desert, every now and then you come across a wadi, a dry riverbed, and along the wadi is life. Tenacious desert plants, even flowers grow. Sometimes you can see the water. Usually you can’t. But you know there is enough to sustain life, because you can always see evidence of the nourishment it provides.
The imagery of an unseen source, a hidden well that nourishes me when I most need it, is a source of strength. It reminds me that I want to approach the world with the assumption that the nourishment we all need is available, if we can figure out how to share it. That God is as universal as water, and every human being is inherently worthy of access. The image of a magnificent waterfall, carving its way through rock, reminds me to be in awe of human history – to remember what has come before, and to learn from it.
I need this imagery both to live with my real fears about the world, and to resist the fear-mongering of our political climate. I hope this congregation can be a place where we get to find and create images of God that sustain us, where we get to discover and articulate together what it is we find worthy of awe. I hope we can share these ideas with one another. I hope we can reach out to other spiritual communities and share with and learn from them. In that way, we will offer spiritual leadership to each other. Building strong spiritual communities with vision, grounded in our values, can give us hope in scary times. I pray that this community can strengthen us to face our own fears, and I hope it can also strengthen us to work towards a world where we don’t have to be afraid.
Rav Leora's Kol Nidre Sermon 2016
The Speed of Life
I recently read a description of an amazing pre-Yom Kippur ritual that women in Eastern Europe used to practice. It was described by Aviva Richman, a teacher at Mechon Hadar, an egalitarian yeshiva in New York City. Women used to make their own yarzheit candles to light in memory of their dead relatives at Yom Kippur. They made big candles, which they took to the synagogue to light before Kol Nidre, and the candles burned through Neilah, through the end of the fast. To make the candles, the women would go to the cemetery and measure the circumference of their loved ones’ graves with a string. Then they would cut that string into wicks, and dip it over and over again into hot wax. While they dipped, they murmured prayers. Richman quoted a memoir written by Bella Chagall, the wife of the artist Marc Chagall. Bella describes her mother making one candle for the living; as she dips it, she names her living loved ones and prays for health, strength, and success for them. She makes a second candle for the dead, in which she invokes the names of her loved ones who have died, and asks that they, too, pray for her and her living family. The hot wax mixes with her tears as she lovingly pulls the wick through again and again. For Richman, what is striking about this ritual is the way it transcends the boundary between life and death – the living pray for and remember the dead, while asking the dead to pray, in turn, for the living.
For Richman, this teaches that tshuvah, that for which we pray on Yom Kippur, is also about transcending boundaries: that it isn’t just about her own personal work, but about the work we do together as a community. That it is about relationships. That these relationships need to extend beyond our normative boundaries of community.
I also found this approach to remembering the dead to be moving and powerful. But what was most striking to me about the ritual was something much simpler: the idea of the women making their own candles at all, let alone the intention that went into their project. Maybe it’s not so surprising to you; the women no doubt hand made a lot of what they used back then; household and ritual objects alike. They certainly didn’t pop over to Shaws to pick up a couple of yarzheit candles before the holiday!
Our relationship to time is so different than it was for those women. They had time in abundance, and a scarcity of material resources, so they used their time to thriftily create and save the materials they needed. We, in contrast, have an abundance of material resources, and a scarcity of time, so we are constantly acquiring new things in order to help us save time.
The journalist and author Pico Iyer describes it this way: “A lot of us have this sense that we’re living at the speed of light, at a pace determined by machines, and we’ve lost the ability to live at the speed of life. … We have more and more time-saving devices and less and less time, it seems, to us.”
What we lose when we live at the pace of machines, he says, is the experience of reflecting on, or processing, our lives. The only way we can “extract meaning” from our lives is by getting away from them. Iyer says, “We are living so close to our lives we can’t make sense of them, and that’s why people go on retreat, meditate, do yoga, go for runs – each person now has to take a conscious measure to separate herself from experience just to be able to do justice to experience and to process and understand what is going on in her life, and direct herself.”
That’s exactly what I understand those women to have been doing when they lovingly, painstakingly, dipped string into wax again and again, making candles to remember their dead. They were processing their lives, their loves, their losses in order to understand them, and in order to learn how to keep living.
That is a primary function of many spiritual and religious practices, of course. To prevent us from sleepwalking through our lives; to interrupt our mundane routines with reflection and intention. Jewish prayer practices ask us to begin the day with gratitude and to end the day with forgiveness. To interrupt something as normal, as everyday, as eating, and call attention to its sacred aspect.
Jewish practice doesn’t only do this on a personal, daily cycle. It also does it on a communal, weekly and yearly cycle, precisely by the way it asks us to pay attention to time.
Shabbat is our weekly interruption, inviting us to step away from our mundane lives and re-focus on the Divine. In our machine-dependent world, finding a comfortable Shabbat practice can be difficult. For me, the important thing is not what we don’t do on Shabbat, but what we do.
Spend time with loved ones face-to-face, instead of communicating through machines? Exercise, instead of sitting still most of the day? Enjoy the natural world? Appreciate what we have, instead of acquiring more things? Over the coming year, I hope to spend some time learning with one another about how Shabbat can help us slow down to the speed of life.
Our year calendar is also full of interruptions. Almost every month of the Jewish year contains a holiday. Tishrei is the most full, of course, with Rosh Hashana, Yom Kippur, Sukkot, and Simchat Torah. Cheshvan, the Jewish month following Tishrei, is known as marcheshvan, meaning “the bitter Cheshvan,” because it contains no holidays or observances. (The joke, of course, is that rabbis love Cheshvan!) We are almost always preparing for or recovering from a holiday. The holidays ground us in agricultural cycles, historical cycles, and spiritual cycles, and in doing so, add rich layers to the passage of the year.
In addition to the holiday calendar, what we call the “year cycle,” Jewish lives are enriched by a lifecycle calendar, by the attention we give to milestones in our lives, placing them in the context of community and tradition. Rabbi Arthur Green offers an interesting take on the High Holidays. They fit, of course, as part of the yearly holiday cycle. But they are also, he claims, a lifecycle event. We need a time every year to pinch ourselves and say “Thank God I’m still alive.” That’s a life milestone that we need to mark every year.
The ritual of making a yarzheit candle fits right at this intersection of the lifecycle calendar and the year cycle calendar. It brings our annual synagogue confrontation with mortality into the home, into a family’s personal cycle of grieving for loved ones who have died. In this way it brings honor and significance to the grieving cycle.
At the same time, the grieving cycle teaches us something about the religious ritual of the high holidays. Grief is not a linear process. Mourning for lost loved ones is not something we finish. Rather, it is something that becomes part of our lives, something that changes with time, but not always in a consistent pattern. It doesn’t always “get better” – rather, it ebbs and flows. So, too, is the process of tshuvah. It’s not linear. We don’t mess up, repair, ask forgiveness, and then be done. For small transgressions, maybe. But for most things we confess on Yom Kippur, the process is more complex than that. Sometimes it’s because humans are habitual creatures, and habits are so hard to break. Wanting to stop smoking, exercise more, use resources differently – these are really difficult changes to make, and it takes more than one try to get it right. It can take years, a whole lifetime. Other times, tshuvah takes more than one try because the harm is big. Whether we have been hurt or hurt someone else, damaged relationships take time and work to heal. Like grief, relationships ebb and flow. Healing them can be like dipping a wick in hot wax over, and over, and over again. It can take years, it can take a life time.
There is a strange midrash that teaches that tshuvah was created before the world was made. What could that possibly mean? I think it means that tshuvah is outside of regular time. It doesn’t abide by the regular rules of time. In our lightspeed world, it can be really hard to give grief and tshuvah the time they require. We have become so habituated to speed that when things are slow, it’s hard for us.
Maybe the image of making a yarzheit candle can help us learn to slow down. Those candles were so full of meaning, and no doubt the light they cast was so tender and bright, because so much time and intention went into making them.
The 23rd psalm, which we say at funerals and memorial services, ends with these words:
ach tov va’hesed yird’funi kol y’may chayai
v’shavti b’veit haShem l’orech yamim
May only goodness and love pursue me all the days of my life,
and I will dwell in the house of the Eternal forever.
I learned a teaching once about that phrase, “may only goodness and love pursue me.” Most of us are running after goodness and love. We are constantly seeking the next thing. But in truth, goodness and love are pursuing us; if we would just slow down a moment, they will catch up with us. May our community be a place for all of us to slow down in the coming year, and may only goodness and love catch up with us.
I recently read a description of an amazing pre-Yom Kippur ritual that women in Eastern Europe used to practice. It was described by Aviva Richman, a teacher at Mechon Hadar, an egalitarian yeshiva in New York City. Women used to make their own yarzheit candles to light in memory of their dead relatives at Yom Kippur. They made big candles, which they took to the synagogue to light before Kol Nidre, and the candles burned through Neilah, through the end of the fast. To make the candles, the women would go to the cemetery and measure the circumference of their loved ones’ graves with a string. Then they would cut that string into wicks, and dip it over and over again into hot wax. While they dipped, they murmured prayers. Richman quoted a memoir written by Bella Chagall, the wife of the artist Marc Chagall. Bella describes her mother making one candle for the living; as she dips it, she names her living loved ones and prays for health, strength, and success for them. She makes a second candle for the dead, in which she invokes the names of her loved ones who have died, and asks that they, too, pray for her and her living family. The hot wax mixes with her tears as she lovingly pulls the wick through again and again. For Richman, what is striking about this ritual is the way it transcends the boundary between life and death – the living pray for and remember the dead, while asking the dead to pray, in turn, for the living.
For Richman, this teaches that tshuvah, that for which we pray on Yom Kippur, is also about transcending boundaries: that it isn’t just about her own personal work, but about the work we do together as a community. That it is about relationships. That these relationships need to extend beyond our normative boundaries of community.
I also found this approach to remembering the dead to be moving and powerful. But what was most striking to me about the ritual was something much simpler: the idea of the women making their own candles at all, let alone the intention that went into their project. Maybe it’s not so surprising to you; the women no doubt hand made a lot of what they used back then; household and ritual objects alike. They certainly didn’t pop over to Shaws to pick up a couple of yarzheit candles before the holiday!
Our relationship to time is so different than it was for those women. They had time in abundance, and a scarcity of material resources, so they used their time to thriftily create and save the materials they needed. We, in contrast, have an abundance of material resources, and a scarcity of time, so we are constantly acquiring new things in order to help us save time.
The journalist and author Pico Iyer describes it this way: “A lot of us have this sense that we’re living at the speed of light, at a pace determined by machines, and we’ve lost the ability to live at the speed of life. … We have more and more time-saving devices and less and less time, it seems, to us.”
What we lose when we live at the pace of machines, he says, is the experience of reflecting on, or processing, our lives. The only way we can “extract meaning” from our lives is by getting away from them. Iyer says, “We are living so close to our lives we can’t make sense of them, and that’s why people go on retreat, meditate, do yoga, go for runs – each person now has to take a conscious measure to separate herself from experience just to be able to do justice to experience and to process and understand what is going on in her life, and direct herself.”
That’s exactly what I understand those women to have been doing when they lovingly, painstakingly, dipped string into wax again and again, making candles to remember their dead. They were processing their lives, their loves, their losses in order to understand them, and in order to learn how to keep living.
That is a primary function of many spiritual and religious practices, of course. To prevent us from sleepwalking through our lives; to interrupt our mundane routines with reflection and intention. Jewish prayer practices ask us to begin the day with gratitude and to end the day with forgiveness. To interrupt something as normal, as everyday, as eating, and call attention to its sacred aspect.
Jewish practice doesn’t only do this on a personal, daily cycle. It also does it on a communal, weekly and yearly cycle, precisely by the way it asks us to pay attention to time.
Shabbat is our weekly interruption, inviting us to step away from our mundane lives and re-focus on the Divine. In our machine-dependent world, finding a comfortable Shabbat practice can be difficult. For me, the important thing is not what we don’t do on Shabbat, but what we do.
Spend time with loved ones face-to-face, instead of communicating through machines? Exercise, instead of sitting still most of the day? Enjoy the natural world? Appreciate what we have, instead of acquiring more things? Over the coming year, I hope to spend some time learning with one another about how Shabbat can help us slow down to the speed of life.
Our year calendar is also full of interruptions. Almost every month of the Jewish year contains a holiday. Tishrei is the most full, of course, with Rosh Hashana, Yom Kippur, Sukkot, and Simchat Torah. Cheshvan, the Jewish month following Tishrei, is known as marcheshvan, meaning “the bitter Cheshvan,” because it contains no holidays or observances. (The joke, of course, is that rabbis love Cheshvan!) We are almost always preparing for or recovering from a holiday. The holidays ground us in agricultural cycles, historical cycles, and spiritual cycles, and in doing so, add rich layers to the passage of the year.
In addition to the holiday calendar, what we call the “year cycle,” Jewish lives are enriched by a lifecycle calendar, by the attention we give to milestones in our lives, placing them in the context of community and tradition. Rabbi Arthur Green offers an interesting take on the High Holidays. They fit, of course, as part of the yearly holiday cycle. But they are also, he claims, a lifecycle event. We need a time every year to pinch ourselves and say “Thank God I’m still alive.” That’s a life milestone that we need to mark every year.
The ritual of making a yarzheit candle fits right at this intersection of the lifecycle calendar and the year cycle calendar. It brings our annual synagogue confrontation with mortality into the home, into a family’s personal cycle of grieving for loved ones who have died. In this way it brings honor and significance to the grieving cycle.
At the same time, the grieving cycle teaches us something about the religious ritual of the high holidays. Grief is not a linear process. Mourning for lost loved ones is not something we finish. Rather, it is something that becomes part of our lives, something that changes with time, but not always in a consistent pattern. It doesn’t always “get better” – rather, it ebbs and flows. So, too, is the process of tshuvah. It’s not linear. We don’t mess up, repair, ask forgiveness, and then be done. For small transgressions, maybe. But for most things we confess on Yom Kippur, the process is more complex than that. Sometimes it’s because humans are habitual creatures, and habits are so hard to break. Wanting to stop smoking, exercise more, use resources differently – these are really difficult changes to make, and it takes more than one try to get it right. It can take years, a whole lifetime. Other times, tshuvah takes more than one try because the harm is big. Whether we have been hurt or hurt someone else, damaged relationships take time and work to heal. Like grief, relationships ebb and flow. Healing them can be like dipping a wick in hot wax over, and over, and over again. It can take years, it can take a life time.
There is a strange midrash that teaches that tshuvah was created before the world was made. What could that possibly mean? I think it means that tshuvah is outside of regular time. It doesn’t abide by the regular rules of time. In our lightspeed world, it can be really hard to give grief and tshuvah the time they require. We have become so habituated to speed that when things are slow, it’s hard for us.
Maybe the image of making a yarzheit candle can help us learn to slow down. Those candles were so full of meaning, and no doubt the light they cast was so tender and bright, because so much time and intention went into making them.
The 23rd psalm, which we say at funerals and memorial services, ends with these words:
ach tov va’hesed yird’funi kol y’may chayai
v’shavti b’veit haShem l’orech yamim
May only goodness and love pursue me all the days of my life,
and I will dwell in the house of the Eternal forever.
I learned a teaching once about that phrase, “may only goodness and love pursue me.” Most of us are running after goodness and love. We are constantly seeking the next thing. But in truth, goodness and love are pursuing us; if we would just slow down a moment, they will catch up with us. May our community be a place for all of us to slow down in the coming year, and may only goodness and love catch up with us.
Rav Leora's Yom Yippur Sermon 2016
As you know, I’m new to this community. I’ve been feeling really grateful that the High Holidays fell at the beginning of my first year here, because even though it is an exhausting time, it’s such a rich time to be together. I’ve had a steep learning curve, where I’ve learned a lot about how things work in the synagogue, and I’ve had the opportunity to work closely with the lay leadership, and the office staff, to prepare for the holidays. It has been a great chance to get to know some of you, and to get to know the community better.
The High Holidays are a bonding time, partly because we just spend so much time together, but more so because we come together in a vulnerable way. Prayer in general invites us to be vulnerable; singing, expressing our longing, or sorrow, or gratitude, even sitting still together – all of these things expose parts of ourselves that are often not considered socially acceptable to share. But prayer on the High Holidays is especially vulnerable. We are invited to engage with it more deeply than at any other time of year. And the prayer asks more of us – this morning, our prayer ranges from extravagant praise of God, to hearing Torah to remembering our loved ones who have died, to honoring people who died because they were Jewish, to praying for peace, wholeness, and redemption for the entire world. That’s a huge agenda for one morning! These services really ask a lot of us.
But the most vulnerable aspect of our services, in my experience, is the confession: the ritual recitation of wrongs we have committed in the past year. Admitting that we have done wrong takes so much courage. Exposing ourselves to judgment, whether from ourselves, God, or fellow human beings, is a risk and, for most of us, goes against deep instincts. Admitting what we have done takes intellectual work – to remember and evaluate our actions – and spiritual work – to tune into the widening circle of ripples that our actions may have caused. This is the work of teshuvah, work we have to do outside of the synagogue. In preparation for Yom Kippur, we have to identify those wrongs we want to atone for, think about how to repair the damage, ask for forgiveness, and figure out what we need to do so that we won’t commit the same wrong again. The recitation on Yom Kippur is ideally the culmination of this process: the last step where we name the behavior we want to change one last time and, God-willing, leave it behind.
Because the work of teshuvah is so deep, so risky, so personal, I have always found it surprising that we then recite the actual confession in the plural. Ashamnu, we say. We have sinned. Al chet she’chatanu lifanecha – for the mark that we missed in your presence. Even when we recite the confessions quietly during the personal Amidah, we use the “we” form. Why?
I want to offer three ideas.
First, reciting our confession in the plural makes it a public ritual. Again, the real work of teshuvah happens outside of the synagogue. Reciting ashamnu in the plural together – words that were chosen generations ago, and have been recited by many of our ancestors – connects us to a long chain of people who have made mistakes and then tried to change. Paradoxically, announcing our wrongdoings offers us a foundation of hope, by affirming our belief in the possibility of change and in a society built on care and compassion, rather than punishment or vengeance. Making our confession public is a way of honoring it as sacred work, and making it communal is a way of saying that we all have work to do. It makes it admirable, worthy of praise, rather than disgraceful, worthy of shame.
Second, we recite the confession communally because the purpose is not actually to incriminate ourselves. Yesterday evening, I read words from my teacher Rabbi Sharon Cohen Anisfeld, that confession is not allowed in a Jewish court of law – one is not allowed to incriminate oneself. “While confession has no place in our legal system,” she writes, “It has an important place in our spiritual system. We confess in order that we may face ourselves. That we may forgive ourselves. That we may allow ourselves to be forgiven. You cannot incriminate yourself by confessing. You can only cleanse yourself.” There is great power in a public confession, but the purpose is not to bring each person’s individual wrongdoings to the surface. We confess not for judgment, but for catharsis, for release.
For this to be effective, only we need to know what we are truly confessing; our neighbor need not know. Again, this only works if we do the work of repair and forgiveness outside of the synagogue; sometimes we’ll have done this in preparation for the ritual, and sometimes the ritual will inspire the work. Either way, both the ritual and the work are necessary. But by naming all of the transgressions, together, we enable each of us to say our own personal transgressions aloud, before God and our community, without fear of our neighbor’s judgment. Paradoxically, making the confession public and communal enables it to be more personal.
This may raise a question of accountability for you: how do we know our neighbors are doing their own personal work? We don’t. We only know about the relationships we are in that need teshuvah. We don’t know about any body else’s. But the act of doing the confession together is an act of tremendous generosity: through it, we say implicitly to one another: I believe in you. I believe that you can and are doing the work of forgiveness and repair that you need to do in order to make this ritual real.
So we do a public, communal confession to honor teshuvah as holy work, to enable and affirm one another in that work, and to share in an experience of release.
But there is another reason. We confess together because so often we make mistakes together. So often we enable one another to do wrong. So often we fail to hold one another accountable. The communal confession is a chance to acknowledge that we commit wrongs in relationship, that there is almost always a “we” when we fail. And this last reason leads to a critical question that must come out of our worship on Yom Kippur: what can we do to support one another to do better in the coming year?
This is a question we can ask interpersonally: parents can ask children, spouses, friends, colleagues can ask one another. Are there ways I have enabled you to miss the mark this year? How can I change, to help you change? This is also a question we can, and must, ask communally. How can our congregation support you to do better this year? And finally, it’s a conversation we have to ask as a society. What do we need to change as a society to help each individual do better? In what ways do our systems set us up to fail? I hope we can explore this question as a congregation this year. Two of the issues I hope we can address are racism and climate change. Where is the “we” in these transgressions? If we confess to racism as a community, what kinds of communal-wide change might that inspire? If we acknowledge that we all contribute to climate change, how might that motivate us to change our practices as a community?
I believe in asking these critical questions. I think naming our wrongs is essential in the process of becoming better people, better congregations, better society. But I think there is another essential act in this process that the Yom Kippur liturgy leaves out. Just as we need to publically acknowledge our failings, we need to publically acknowledge our successes. We need to affirm that which we have done well this year. We need to affirm our community’s values through positive statements, not just negative ones, highlighting what we want to celebrate,
not only what we want to let go of.
So to close these words about public confession, I invite you to join me in a public affirmation. Like the Ashamnu, this is an alphabetical list, only it is called Ahavnu, we have loved. You don’t have the words in front of you, so I’m going to ask you repeat after me. And just as during Ashmanu we do this motion, either beating our chests or gently knocking on our hearts, I invite you to find a physical motion of affirmation. Maybe a little pat on the back, or a thumbs up. Whatever works for you.
Please rise in body or in spirit for Ahavnu.
Ahavnu, we have loved.
We have given good advice.
We have blessed.
We have celebrated creativity.
We have danced with joy.
We have practiced empathy.
We have forgiven.
We have grown.
We have cared for our own health and the health of others.
We have interpreted torah.
We have pursued justice.
We have kindled friendship.
We have learned.
We have made music.
We have been good neighbors.
We have opened our hearts to others.
We have been patient.
We have asked good questions.
We have given and earned respect.
We have spoken truth.
We have given thanks.
We have tried to understand.
We have valued the natural world.
We have worked to be whole.
We have examined ourselves.
We have yearned.
We have zealously given tzedakah.
You may be seated.
The High Holidays are a bonding time, partly because we just spend so much time together, but more so because we come together in a vulnerable way. Prayer in general invites us to be vulnerable; singing, expressing our longing, or sorrow, or gratitude, even sitting still together – all of these things expose parts of ourselves that are often not considered socially acceptable to share. But prayer on the High Holidays is especially vulnerable. We are invited to engage with it more deeply than at any other time of year. And the prayer asks more of us – this morning, our prayer ranges from extravagant praise of God, to hearing Torah to remembering our loved ones who have died, to honoring people who died because they were Jewish, to praying for peace, wholeness, and redemption for the entire world. That’s a huge agenda for one morning! These services really ask a lot of us.
But the most vulnerable aspect of our services, in my experience, is the confession: the ritual recitation of wrongs we have committed in the past year. Admitting that we have done wrong takes so much courage. Exposing ourselves to judgment, whether from ourselves, God, or fellow human beings, is a risk and, for most of us, goes against deep instincts. Admitting what we have done takes intellectual work – to remember and evaluate our actions – and spiritual work – to tune into the widening circle of ripples that our actions may have caused. This is the work of teshuvah, work we have to do outside of the synagogue. In preparation for Yom Kippur, we have to identify those wrongs we want to atone for, think about how to repair the damage, ask for forgiveness, and figure out what we need to do so that we won’t commit the same wrong again. The recitation on Yom Kippur is ideally the culmination of this process: the last step where we name the behavior we want to change one last time and, God-willing, leave it behind.
Because the work of teshuvah is so deep, so risky, so personal, I have always found it surprising that we then recite the actual confession in the plural. Ashamnu, we say. We have sinned. Al chet she’chatanu lifanecha – for the mark that we missed in your presence. Even when we recite the confessions quietly during the personal Amidah, we use the “we” form. Why?
I want to offer three ideas.
First, reciting our confession in the plural makes it a public ritual. Again, the real work of teshuvah happens outside of the synagogue. Reciting ashamnu in the plural together – words that were chosen generations ago, and have been recited by many of our ancestors – connects us to a long chain of people who have made mistakes and then tried to change. Paradoxically, announcing our wrongdoings offers us a foundation of hope, by affirming our belief in the possibility of change and in a society built on care and compassion, rather than punishment or vengeance. Making our confession public is a way of honoring it as sacred work, and making it communal is a way of saying that we all have work to do. It makes it admirable, worthy of praise, rather than disgraceful, worthy of shame.
Second, we recite the confession communally because the purpose is not actually to incriminate ourselves. Yesterday evening, I read words from my teacher Rabbi Sharon Cohen Anisfeld, that confession is not allowed in a Jewish court of law – one is not allowed to incriminate oneself. “While confession has no place in our legal system,” she writes, “It has an important place in our spiritual system. We confess in order that we may face ourselves. That we may forgive ourselves. That we may allow ourselves to be forgiven. You cannot incriminate yourself by confessing. You can only cleanse yourself.” There is great power in a public confession, but the purpose is not to bring each person’s individual wrongdoings to the surface. We confess not for judgment, but for catharsis, for release.
For this to be effective, only we need to know what we are truly confessing; our neighbor need not know. Again, this only works if we do the work of repair and forgiveness outside of the synagogue; sometimes we’ll have done this in preparation for the ritual, and sometimes the ritual will inspire the work. Either way, both the ritual and the work are necessary. But by naming all of the transgressions, together, we enable each of us to say our own personal transgressions aloud, before God and our community, without fear of our neighbor’s judgment. Paradoxically, making the confession public and communal enables it to be more personal.
This may raise a question of accountability for you: how do we know our neighbors are doing their own personal work? We don’t. We only know about the relationships we are in that need teshuvah. We don’t know about any body else’s. But the act of doing the confession together is an act of tremendous generosity: through it, we say implicitly to one another: I believe in you. I believe that you can and are doing the work of forgiveness and repair that you need to do in order to make this ritual real.
So we do a public, communal confession to honor teshuvah as holy work, to enable and affirm one another in that work, and to share in an experience of release.
But there is another reason. We confess together because so often we make mistakes together. So often we enable one another to do wrong. So often we fail to hold one another accountable. The communal confession is a chance to acknowledge that we commit wrongs in relationship, that there is almost always a “we” when we fail. And this last reason leads to a critical question that must come out of our worship on Yom Kippur: what can we do to support one another to do better in the coming year?
This is a question we can ask interpersonally: parents can ask children, spouses, friends, colleagues can ask one another. Are there ways I have enabled you to miss the mark this year? How can I change, to help you change? This is also a question we can, and must, ask communally. How can our congregation support you to do better this year? And finally, it’s a conversation we have to ask as a society. What do we need to change as a society to help each individual do better? In what ways do our systems set us up to fail? I hope we can explore this question as a congregation this year. Two of the issues I hope we can address are racism and climate change. Where is the “we” in these transgressions? If we confess to racism as a community, what kinds of communal-wide change might that inspire? If we acknowledge that we all contribute to climate change, how might that motivate us to change our practices as a community?
I believe in asking these critical questions. I think naming our wrongs is essential in the process of becoming better people, better congregations, better society. But I think there is another essential act in this process that the Yom Kippur liturgy leaves out. Just as we need to publically acknowledge our failings, we need to publically acknowledge our successes. We need to affirm that which we have done well this year. We need to affirm our community’s values through positive statements, not just negative ones, highlighting what we want to celebrate,
not only what we want to let go of.
So to close these words about public confession, I invite you to join me in a public affirmation. Like the Ashamnu, this is an alphabetical list, only it is called Ahavnu, we have loved. You don’t have the words in front of you, so I’m going to ask you repeat after me. And just as during Ashmanu we do this motion, either beating our chests or gently knocking on our hearts, I invite you to find a physical motion of affirmation. Maybe a little pat on the back, or a thumbs up. Whatever works for you.
Please rise in body or in spirit for Ahavnu.
Ahavnu, we have loved.
We have given good advice.
We have blessed.
We have celebrated creativity.
We have danced with joy.
We have practiced empathy.
We have forgiven.
We have grown.
We have cared for our own health and the health of others.
We have interpreted torah.
We have pursued justice.
We have kindled friendship.
We have learned.
We have made music.
We have been good neighbors.
We have opened our hearts to others.
We have been patient.
We have asked good questions.
We have given and earned respect.
We have spoken truth.
We have given thanks.
We have tried to understand.
We have valued the natural world.
We have worked to be whole.
We have examined ourselves.
We have yearned.
We have zealously given tzedakah.
You may be seated.
Rabbi Diamond's Erev Rosh Hashanah Sermon 2015
I want to speak tonight about a characteristic or practice that can help us during the long services that will follow on the two days of Rosh Hashanah and on Yom Kippur. And that is, receptivity. It’s a long word, five syllables, that doesn’t get a lot of use, but I keep it in mind because of an old cassette tape I used to have of Lucie Blue Tremblay, a French Canadian singer, who came to the US to sing, and sang in French, and on this live tape she said in a French accent, “Thank you for your receptivity to my culture.”
I heard recently that a foreign accent is a sign of courage, courage to step out of one’s comfort zone, or be forced from it, and to travel to another land, to experience another culture, not knowing if we will be accepted or find a home. Some of us may feel we have done this - travelled to a foreign land - when we step into the synagogue.
I thought of this a few months ago when I picked up the book Amazing Grace by Kathleen Norris. Norris is one of my favorite authors, a poet who studied at Bennington College and lived in New York City and then moved home, to where her grandparents had lived, in North Dakota, to write and to live. And when she arrived, she went back to church, after a 20 year absence from religious community, and she started to work on what it meant to her to live a religious life, and she wrote what is probably my favorite book in the world, called Dakota: A Spiritual Geography. In Dakota, Norris tries to come to terms with her new/old home and with what it means to live in a small town, outside the American mainstream, with all its blessings and challenges.
Amazing Grace is a different kind of book - in it, Norris tries to come to terms with what happens to her when she steps into church, and confronts religious language - in many ways a foreign language - which she finds uncomfortable, and even scary. I started nodding the minute I picked it up and read how she felt. In the book, she goes word by word through the language of her tradition - wades through concepts like sin and salvation, writing her own response to each word, what it evokes in her - stories, meditations, questions, challenges.
This is an exercise each one of us may need to do, and may need to do more than once. This is what I love about Norris - who has prayed and written extensively about Psalms - that she doesn’t try to change the words of tradition but to come to terms with them, to make them her own, even when necessary, in struggle. I love this because she is honest - how many times have you looked at a prayer in the siddur or machzor or a piece of Torah and thought - how can this belong to me? It doesn’t speak to me. I find it uncomfortable, or scary, or completely foreign. In a recent hevruta, I sat with a companion and discovered that both he and I feel that way during most of the Torah reading that goes on in synagogue!
So I ask myself, what would it mean to be receptive in those moments - to be open to hearing fully. Because if I want prayer to move me, I have to be receptive. I have carried for years a teaching from Lord Immanuel Jakobovits, former chief rabbi of England, who said that Jewish prayer is primarily impressive, not expressive. But how can prayer create an impression on me, in me, if I am not open to it?
One helpful message about this I learn from Karen Armstrong, another amazing spiritual writer. This quote is about theology and poetry, but it could as easily be about prayer:
“Theology is-- or should be-- a species of poetry,which read quickly or encountered in a hubbub of noise makes no sense. You have to open yourself to a poem with a quiet, receptive mind, in the same way you might listen to a difficult piece of music... If you seize upon a poem and try to extort its meaning before you are ready, it remains opaque. If you bring your own personal agenda to bear upon it, the poem will close upon itself like a clam, because you have denied its unique and separate identity, its inviolate holiness.”
― Karen Armstrong, The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness
I have to open myself to prayer with a quiet, receptive mind - have to somehow let go of my own agenda and desires to be able to hear what the prayers might be teaching me.
This approach may be similar to the Psalmist in Psalm 131 - a Psalm that I love, but which also challenges me immensely.
A Song of Ascents of David
O Lord my heart is not proud nor my look haughty
I have not gone for greatness or what is too wondrous for me;
but I have stayed still and quieted my soul
like a weaned child with its mother
like a weaned child is my soul to me
O Israel wait for the Lord
Now and forever
The image of the weaned child appears clearer to me these days - the child who can sit on his or her mother’s lap not searching for anything. This is the place from which we can wait for G-d’s message - a place of openness in which we are not seeking something.
The end of this Psalm, - Israel wait for the Lord - in Hebrew Yahel Yisrael el Hashem is a theme of these high holidays and the Psalms associated with them. We read Psalm 27 every day at this season and it ends with the line, “Hope in Hashem, be strong and of good courage, Hope in Hashem.” Psalm 130 is read between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur and includes both these verbs for waiting and hoping: I hope in Hashem, my soul hopes, I wait for G-d’s word….O Israel, wait for Hashem for with G-d is steadfast love and great power to redeem. He will redeem Israel from all their iniquities.
Some of this language is uncomfortable but underneath it is a teaching and a promise - the teaching is that we have to wait at this season. Were we to come to Teshuva certain of G-d’s forgiveness, certain that all would be all right, then we would not be human and the process would not be real. There must be a some sense of fear and trembling, some sense that we stand before something wholly other and more powerful than us, for these days to make sense. Waiting and hoping must be part of this season. At the same there is a promise in these words - a promise that there is that there is something to hear for each of us to hear and receive in these days of prayer, a word of the spirit, of the divine, that we must listen for at this season. A still small voice or a loud blast, a different message probably for each one of us who is here. A unique call in the Shofar’s sound for each one of us to hear. We may hear it if we are quiet, if we are receptive.
I heard recently that a foreign accent is a sign of courage, courage to step out of one’s comfort zone, or be forced from it, and to travel to another land, to experience another culture, not knowing if we will be accepted or find a home. Some of us may feel we have done this - travelled to a foreign land - when we step into the synagogue.
I thought of this a few months ago when I picked up the book Amazing Grace by Kathleen Norris. Norris is one of my favorite authors, a poet who studied at Bennington College and lived in New York City and then moved home, to where her grandparents had lived, in North Dakota, to write and to live. And when she arrived, she went back to church, after a 20 year absence from religious community, and she started to work on what it meant to her to live a religious life, and she wrote what is probably my favorite book in the world, called Dakota: A Spiritual Geography. In Dakota, Norris tries to come to terms with her new/old home and with what it means to live in a small town, outside the American mainstream, with all its blessings and challenges.
Amazing Grace is a different kind of book - in it, Norris tries to come to terms with what happens to her when she steps into church, and confronts religious language - in many ways a foreign language - which she finds uncomfortable, and even scary. I started nodding the minute I picked it up and read how she felt. In the book, she goes word by word through the language of her tradition - wades through concepts like sin and salvation, writing her own response to each word, what it evokes in her - stories, meditations, questions, challenges.
This is an exercise each one of us may need to do, and may need to do more than once. This is what I love about Norris - who has prayed and written extensively about Psalms - that she doesn’t try to change the words of tradition but to come to terms with them, to make them her own, even when necessary, in struggle. I love this because she is honest - how many times have you looked at a prayer in the siddur or machzor or a piece of Torah and thought - how can this belong to me? It doesn’t speak to me. I find it uncomfortable, or scary, or completely foreign. In a recent hevruta, I sat with a companion and discovered that both he and I feel that way during most of the Torah reading that goes on in synagogue!
So I ask myself, what would it mean to be receptive in those moments - to be open to hearing fully. Because if I want prayer to move me, I have to be receptive. I have carried for years a teaching from Lord Immanuel Jakobovits, former chief rabbi of England, who said that Jewish prayer is primarily impressive, not expressive. But how can prayer create an impression on me, in me, if I am not open to it?
One helpful message about this I learn from Karen Armstrong, another amazing spiritual writer. This quote is about theology and poetry, but it could as easily be about prayer:
“Theology is-- or should be-- a species of poetry,which read quickly or encountered in a hubbub of noise makes no sense. You have to open yourself to a poem with a quiet, receptive mind, in the same way you might listen to a difficult piece of music... If you seize upon a poem and try to extort its meaning before you are ready, it remains opaque. If you bring your own personal agenda to bear upon it, the poem will close upon itself like a clam, because you have denied its unique and separate identity, its inviolate holiness.”
― Karen Armstrong, The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness
I have to open myself to prayer with a quiet, receptive mind - have to somehow let go of my own agenda and desires to be able to hear what the prayers might be teaching me.
This approach may be similar to the Psalmist in Psalm 131 - a Psalm that I love, but which also challenges me immensely.
A Song of Ascents of David
O Lord my heart is not proud nor my look haughty
I have not gone for greatness or what is too wondrous for me;
but I have stayed still and quieted my soul
like a weaned child with its mother
like a weaned child is my soul to me
O Israel wait for the Lord
Now and forever
The image of the weaned child appears clearer to me these days - the child who can sit on his or her mother’s lap not searching for anything. This is the place from which we can wait for G-d’s message - a place of openness in which we are not seeking something.
The end of this Psalm, - Israel wait for the Lord - in Hebrew Yahel Yisrael el Hashem is a theme of these high holidays and the Psalms associated with them. We read Psalm 27 every day at this season and it ends with the line, “Hope in Hashem, be strong and of good courage, Hope in Hashem.” Psalm 130 is read between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur and includes both these verbs for waiting and hoping: I hope in Hashem, my soul hopes, I wait for G-d’s word….O Israel, wait for Hashem for with G-d is steadfast love and great power to redeem. He will redeem Israel from all their iniquities.
Some of this language is uncomfortable but underneath it is a teaching and a promise - the teaching is that we have to wait at this season. Were we to come to Teshuva certain of G-d’s forgiveness, certain that all would be all right, then we would not be human and the process would not be real. There must be a some sense of fear and trembling, some sense that we stand before something wholly other and more powerful than us, for these days to make sense. Waiting and hoping must be part of this season. At the same there is a promise in these words - a promise that there is that there is something to hear for each of us to hear and receive in these days of prayer, a word of the spirit, of the divine, that we must listen for at this season. A still small voice or a loud blast, a different message probably for each one of us who is here. A unique call in the Shofar’s sound for each one of us to hear. We may hear it if we are quiet, if we are receptive.
Rabbi Diamond's First Day of Rosh Hashanah Sermon 2015
The Congregation has chosen Jewish Identity as our theme for this High Holiday season, and I want to share some thoughts on that subject by responding to an article that was recently published in the Forward entitled Why My Son Won't Be Having a Bar Mitzvah
Written by Neal Pollack, a writer, and journalist, it starts out this way:
My son, who’s turning 13 on Halloween, won’t be having a bar mitzvah. This is what’s happening, or not happening. The entry in the Book of Life has been written, the invitations not sent out, the food truck and DJ not ordered. I feel shame and guilt and other emotions that I can’t identify, for reasons that I don’t quite understand.
Pollack goes on to describe the efforts he and his wife made to make their home and lives Jewish:
It’s not as though we didn’t try. Even though my wife isn’t Jewish, we have a mezuzah on our doorpost and a menorah in the china cabinet. At Passover, we serve the soup and make the Hillel sandwiches and sing Dayenu.
When Elijah was getting ready to start third grade, we joined a temple and enrolled him in Sunday school and Hebrew school. For the first couple of years, he seemed to enjoy himself. He made friends and talked with vague interest about stuff he’d learned. We did flashcards with the Hebrew alphabet at home. My wife and I went to Sunday potlucks. Even though I felt less actual community at those events than I do at yoga class or trivia night or on Twitter or in the airport security line or pretty much anywhere else, there were plenty of other guys just sitting on their laptops while the potluck swirled around them. My son ran around with his Jewish friends, he had fun. We were on the track.
But as time goes on Pollack’s son, Elijah, stops enjoying Hebrew school, in fact he hates it. And one day he tells his father.
“I’m not going anymore.”
“What are you talking about?” I said.
“I don’t feel Jewish,” he said.
“That’s not the point. You are going to do this.”
“But why? I’m not Jewish. I’m not going to do it.”
I took him to Rosh Hashanah services anyway. They lasted three and a half hours. He slid down in his seat, looking pale, withdrawn, almost deathly ill. I don’t know if any of you have ever looked into your children’s eyes and seen a vast spiritual emptiness, but it was there, and it terrified me. More distressingly, I felt it, too.
The father has his own fears about the cost and the logistics of organizing the event, but he tries to keep them to himself and keeps encouraging his son. And as he pushes his son, the son continues to ask the question:
“Why do I have to go [to Hebrew school]? I don’t feel Jewish.”
That was the key statement. I’d raised my son to be aware of his Jewish identity, but I’d also raised him to think independently and critically. I wasn’t about to tell him that his thoughts and feelings were invalid.
My wife and I decided that Elijah needed to talk to the rabbi. Elijah talked to the rabbi for an hour. On the drive home, I said, “So how’d it go?”
“OK,” Elijah said.
“More details, please.”
“Well, I told him I didn’t believe in God. He said it was normal to be skeptical or not believe, but that you can still have a bar mitzvah. Being Jewish is about more than memorizing prayers and believing in God.”
“That’s true,” I said.
“But I’m still not going to do it. Because I don’t feel Jewish.”
That was when I knew: My son’s bar mitzvah was dead. Moses had descended from Mount Sinai with less certainty.
My parents weren’t pleased that their first-born grandchild wouldn’t be bar mitzvahed. They hadn’t prepared for this nightmare. They have a simple and understandable point of view. My grandparents, on my father’s side, escaped the Nazis in the 1930s, and denying a Bar Mitzvah means denying that heritage.
But from my son’s point of view, he’s not denying anything. He’s aware of the history, but this isn’t about history to him. We can’t make Elijah study or read his Torah portion, and I won’t drag him in front of the ark and force him to bow his head to a God in which he doesn’t believe. No matter where his paternal great-grandparents were born, my son doesn’t identify as Jewish. I have to respect his decision.
When I first read this piece my response was, Jewish is not a feeling. I thought immediately of something I learned from Fraidel Segal, now Fraidel Zucker, the education director here at Agudas Achim when I first came in 1993. Fraidel told me a story of someone who said, “I feel Jewish in my heart.” And the answer Fraidel explained was that you can’t practice Judaism in your heart, because Judaism is about action. You can think all you want about lighting Shabbat candles and how nice it would be, but that’s not the point. The point is to actually light the candles. (I fight this battle with myself almost every Shabbat - finding myself often feeling too busy to get the candlesticks off the shelf, and who will be home to watch them, etc. etc.)
But I thought of another story indicating that maybe Jewish is a feeling, but a very deep one that has to be taught from a young age. Ceil Weiner of blessed memory knew and transmitted this to kindergartners at Agudas Achim for many years.
This story is told in the book called Number Our Days in which anthropologist Barbara Myerhoff writes about the lives of elderly Jews in Venice California. The chapter is called “Jewish comes up in you from the roots” and a phrase used by Rachel as she talks about her childhood. When she was a girl, she hated drying the dishes, because of the towel that was scratchy but she had a small, much loved grandmother, and that grandmother got her to dry the dishes by saying, “Rachel, such a beautiful name you have Rachele, the name of Rachel Imenu, Rachel our mother, such a proud woman, the mother of Joseph and Benjamin. You carry the name of this matriarch - all the deeds you do bring honor to your name, and your family and your people.” And that’s how Rachel came to continue drying dishes, and to believe that Jewish comes up in you from the roots.
But not all of us have our roots in Judaism, some of us come to it later in life, and your own roots aren’t always something you can pass on to your children - Neal Pollack’s grandparents’ experience didn’t have the same meaning for his son Elijah as it did for him. And Neal knew that, so he took his son to the synagogue, to Hebrew school. From what I read of Neal’s words, he missed is this simple truth - you can’t bring your kid to synagogue and expect them to get something out of it unless you bring yourself to synagogue and try to get something out of it for yourself.
Here’s the secret - the best place to do that isn’t in Hebrew school or at a potluck - it’s in adult Jewish learning. Adult Jewish learning is the heart of Jewish life, which is why I have spent the past 14 years solely devoting myself to it. In any synagogue, adult learning is the key to building Jewish lives. It’s where we seek to find out what this ancient tradition is all about anyway, and it’s where we try to figure out how to apply ancient teachings to our lives today. Learning makes prayer, and all Jewish activities, more meaningful. It can be hard for parents of small children to find the time for it - but if you are coming to synagogue and not taking part in some kind of Torah learning, you are missing a key piece. You are missing a chance to wrestle with the tradition and get it to speak to you, you are missing a chance to add your voice to the conversation, and you are missing a chance to learn from the people around you. Judaism is a religion of study - learning Torah is a commandment - we say ‘Baruch Ata Hashem Elokenu Melech HaOlam Asher Kidshanu BeMitzvotav veTzivanyu La’Asok BeDivrei Torah - Blessed are you G-d who has sanctified us with your commandments and commanded us to occupy ourselves with the words of Torah.’ We pray that words of Torah will be sweet to us and to our children - they have to be sweet to us before they will be so to our children - we have to try to figure out for ourselves what we are doing here - what our it all means to us before we can seek to pass that on.
And we can only do that in community. אין התורה נקנית אלא בידי חבורה - Torah is not acquired except in community. And that’s the other piece of where I think Neal Pollack missed the boat - his understanding of community. He wrote:
My wife and I went to Sunday potlucks. Even though I felt less actual community at those events than I do at yoga class or trivia night or on Twitter or in the airport security line or pretty much anywhere else...
In my experience of Jewish and other communities, community isn’t something one “feels” instantly. Community is built. And like Jewish life, it’s built on actions. I learned this clearly at Agudas Achim from Paul Pepi Policow of blessed memory (and many others). Pepi was here at shul several times a week - setting up for Bingo, making sandwiches, and as I found out only after he died, buying the toilet paper and other items the synagogue needed to function. When I feel disconnected in one of the two synagogues I attend, I use Pepi as my example. If I don’t feel I can talk to anyone at Kiddush, I take a garbage bag and start cleaning up. There’s an old saying about this in Alcoholics Anonymous where the ABCs - the basics of becoming part of the community - were taught - A -ashtrays, B-brooms and C-chairs. If you aren’t feeling at home in synagogue, try setting up or stacking chairs, sweeping the floor, and if that doesn’t do it, washing the floor - care for it like a home and see how differently you will feel.
Community is about what we put into it. I learned this from Alen, my partner, who spent five years serving as president of our Reform congregation. They were hard years for the synagogue financially and in other ways. There were days I felt the congregation took much more from us than we had to give, there were arguments and times when I begged her to quit. Then I was hospitalized and 18 people came to visit me over 4 days. Her father died and 50 people came to our home for the one night of shiva that she had in Israel. Someone took our son after school and brought him home at bedtime bathed and fed. And when our daughter, yes, a rabbi’s daughter, who goes to synagogue every week, resisted having a bat mitzvah, we were able to say to her - this is our family’s community. They were with us in a time of sorrow and we want to share with them our time of joy. This didn’t happen because we attended a few potlucks and sat on our laptops. There’s a payoff in community, but it requires an investment.
There is a huge place for children in synagogue communities, but not, G-d forbid, in making them sit through three hour services!! Children belong in children’s activities, and in my opinion, they belong running around the hallways and outside, even into the teen years. They belong in youth groups. And it is up to adults of all ages to fund these programs and make sure that all children and teens have these opportunities. I spent a chunk of my childhood running the halls of the Hebrew Institute of Pittsburgh. My nine year old has spent precious few minutes actually sitting in synagogue - yet seems to have learned the songs by osmosis, and he feels like he belongs because he is known, and welcomed. He knows that when he’s an adult, there will be something there for him, because the adults in his life make it a point to find something there for themselves.
As for Elijah Pollack who isn’t having a Bar Mitzvah - Jewish may come up in him through the roots - he carries the name of a great prophet who was zealous for God. I am sure his family will continue to challenge him and he to challenge them. I would like to talk more to Neal, his father. I’d like to invite him to study some Torah with us, to find out more about his grandparents, to hear the stories he has to tell and to hear how he makes meaning of the Torah we learn together. And then I’ll give him a broom and welcome him to the community.
Written by Neal Pollack, a writer, and journalist, it starts out this way:
My son, who’s turning 13 on Halloween, won’t be having a bar mitzvah. This is what’s happening, or not happening. The entry in the Book of Life has been written, the invitations not sent out, the food truck and DJ not ordered. I feel shame and guilt and other emotions that I can’t identify, for reasons that I don’t quite understand.
Pollack goes on to describe the efforts he and his wife made to make their home and lives Jewish:
It’s not as though we didn’t try. Even though my wife isn’t Jewish, we have a mezuzah on our doorpost and a menorah in the china cabinet. At Passover, we serve the soup and make the Hillel sandwiches and sing Dayenu.
When Elijah was getting ready to start third grade, we joined a temple and enrolled him in Sunday school and Hebrew school. For the first couple of years, he seemed to enjoy himself. He made friends and talked with vague interest about stuff he’d learned. We did flashcards with the Hebrew alphabet at home. My wife and I went to Sunday potlucks. Even though I felt less actual community at those events than I do at yoga class or trivia night or on Twitter or in the airport security line or pretty much anywhere else, there were plenty of other guys just sitting on their laptops while the potluck swirled around them. My son ran around with his Jewish friends, he had fun. We were on the track.
But as time goes on Pollack’s son, Elijah, stops enjoying Hebrew school, in fact he hates it. And one day he tells his father.
“I’m not going anymore.”
“What are you talking about?” I said.
“I don’t feel Jewish,” he said.
“That’s not the point. You are going to do this.”
“But why? I’m not Jewish. I’m not going to do it.”
I took him to Rosh Hashanah services anyway. They lasted three and a half hours. He slid down in his seat, looking pale, withdrawn, almost deathly ill. I don’t know if any of you have ever looked into your children’s eyes and seen a vast spiritual emptiness, but it was there, and it terrified me. More distressingly, I felt it, too.
The father has his own fears about the cost and the logistics of organizing the event, but he tries to keep them to himself and keeps encouraging his son. And as he pushes his son, the son continues to ask the question:
“Why do I have to go [to Hebrew school]? I don’t feel Jewish.”
That was the key statement. I’d raised my son to be aware of his Jewish identity, but I’d also raised him to think independently and critically. I wasn’t about to tell him that his thoughts and feelings were invalid.
My wife and I decided that Elijah needed to talk to the rabbi. Elijah talked to the rabbi for an hour. On the drive home, I said, “So how’d it go?”
“OK,” Elijah said.
“More details, please.”
“Well, I told him I didn’t believe in God. He said it was normal to be skeptical or not believe, but that you can still have a bar mitzvah. Being Jewish is about more than memorizing prayers and believing in God.”
“That’s true,” I said.
“But I’m still not going to do it. Because I don’t feel Jewish.”
That was when I knew: My son’s bar mitzvah was dead. Moses had descended from Mount Sinai with less certainty.
My parents weren’t pleased that their first-born grandchild wouldn’t be bar mitzvahed. They hadn’t prepared for this nightmare. They have a simple and understandable point of view. My grandparents, on my father’s side, escaped the Nazis in the 1930s, and denying a Bar Mitzvah means denying that heritage.
But from my son’s point of view, he’s not denying anything. He’s aware of the history, but this isn’t about history to him. We can’t make Elijah study or read his Torah portion, and I won’t drag him in front of the ark and force him to bow his head to a God in which he doesn’t believe. No matter where his paternal great-grandparents were born, my son doesn’t identify as Jewish. I have to respect his decision.
When I first read this piece my response was, Jewish is not a feeling. I thought immediately of something I learned from Fraidel Segal, now Fraidel Zucker, the education director here at Agudas Achim when I first came in 1993. Fraidel told me a story of someone who said, “I feel Jewish in my heart.” And the answer Fraidel explained was that you can’t practice Judaism in your heart, because Judaism is about action. You can think all you want about lighting Shabbat candles and how nice it would be, but that’s not the point. The point is to actually light the candles. (I fight this battle with myself almost every Shabbat - finding myself often feeling too busy to get the candlesticks off the shelf, and who will be home to watch them, etc. etc.)
But I thought of another story indicating that maybe Jewish is a feeling, but a very deep one that has to be taught from a young age. Ceil Weiner of blessed memory knew and transmitted this to kindergartners at Agudas Achim for many years.
This story is told in the book called Number Our Days in which anthropologist Barbara Myerhoff writes about the lives of elderly Jews in Venice California. The chapter is called “Jewish comes up in you from the roots” and a phrase used by Rachel as she talks about her childhood. When she was a girl, she hated drying the dishes, because of the towel that was scratchy but she had a small, much loved grandmother, and that grandmother got her to dry the dishes by saying, “Rachel, such a beautiful name you have Rachele, the name of Rachel Imenu, Rachel our mother, such a proud woman, the mother of Joseph and Benjamin. You carry the name of this matriarch - all the deeds you do bring honor to your name, and your family and your people.” And that’s how Rachel came to continue drying dishes, and to believe that Jewish comes up in you from the roots.
But not all of us have our roots in Judaism, some of us come to it later in life, and your own roots aren’t always something you can pass on to your children - Neal Pollack’s grandparents’ experience didn’t have the same meaning for his son Elijah as it did for him. And Neal knew that, so he took his son to the synagogue, to Hebrew school. From what I read of Neal’s words, he missed is this simple truth - you can’t bring your kid to synagogue and expect them to get something out of it unless you bring yourself to synagogue and try to get something out of it for yourself.
Here’s the secret - the best place to do that isn’t in Hebrew school or at a potluck - it’s in adult Jewish learning. Adult Jewish learning is the heart of Jewish life, which is why I have spent the past 14 years solely devoting myself to it. In any synagogue, adult learning is the key to building Jewish lives. It’s where we seek to find out what this ancient tradition is all about anyway, and it’s where we try to figure out how to apply ancient teachings to our lives today. Learning makes prayer, and all Jewish activities, more meaningful. It can be hard for parents of small children to find the time for it - but if you are coming to synagogue and not taking part in some kind of Torah learning, you are missing a key piece. You are missing a chance to wrestle with the tradition and get it to speak to you, you are missing a chance to add your voice to the conversation, and you are missing a chance to learn from the people around you. Judaism is a religion of study - learning Torah is a commandment - we say ‘Baruch Ata Hashem Elokenu Melech HaOlam Asher Kidshanu BeMitzvotav veTzivanyu La’Asok BeDivrei Torah - Blessed are you G-d who has sanctified us with your commandments and commanded us to occupy ourselves with the words of Torah.’ We pray that words of Torah will be sweet to us and to our children - they have to be sweet to us before they will be so to our children - we have to try to figure out for ourselves what we are doing here - what our it all means to us before we can seek to pass that on.
And we can only do that in community. אין התורה נקנית אלא בידי חבורה - Torah is not acquired except in community. And that’s the other piece of where I think Neal Pollack missed the boat - his understanding of community. He wrote:
My wife and I went to Sunday potlucks. Even though I felt less actual community at those events than I do at yoga class or trivia night or on Twitter or in the airport security line or pretty much anywhere else...
In my experience of Jewish and other communities, community isn’t something one “feels” instantly. Community is built. And like Jewish life, it’s built on actions. I learned this clearly at Agudas Achim from Paul Pepi Policow of blessed memory (and many others). Pepi was here at shul several times a week - setting up for Bingo, making sandwiches, and as I found out only after he died, buying the toilet paper and other items the synagogue needed to function. When I feel disconnected in one of the two synagogues I attend, I use Pepi as my example. If I don’t feel I can talk to anyone at Kiddush, I take a garbage bag and start cleaning up. There’s an old saying about this in Alcoholics Anonymous where the ABCs - the basics of becoming part of the community - were taught - A -ashtrays, B-brooms and C-chairs. If you aren’t feeling at home in synagogue, try setting up or stacking chairs, sweeping the floor, and if that doesn’t do it, washing the floor - care for it like a home and see how differently you will feel.
Community is about what we put into it. I learned this from Alen, my partner, who spent five years serving as president of our Reform congregation. They were hard years for the synagogue financially and in other ways. There were days I felt the congregation took much more from us than we had to give, there were arguments and times when I begged her to quit. Then I was hospitalized and 18 people came to visit me over 4 days. Her father died and 50 people came to our home for the one night of shiva that she had in Israel. Someone took our son after school and brought him home at bedtime bathed and fed. And when our daughter, yes, a rabbi’s daughter, who goes to synagogue every week, resisted having a bat mitzvah, we were able to say to her - this is our family’s community. They were with us in a time of sorrow and we want to share with them our time of joy. This didn’t happen because we attended a few potlucks and sat on our laptops. There’s a payoff in community, but it requires an investment.
There is a huge place for children in synagogue communities, but not, G-d forbid, in making them sit through three hour services!! Children belong in children’s activities, and in my opinion, they belong running around the hallways and outside, even into the teen years. They belong in youth groups. And it is up to adults of all ages to fund these programs and make sure that all children and teens have these opportunities. I spent a chunk of my childhood running the halls of the Hebrew Institute of Pittsburgh. My nine year old has spent precious few minutes actually sitting in synagogue - yet seems to have learned the songs by osmosis, and he feels like he belongs because he is known, and welcomed. He knows that when he’s an adult, there will be something there for him, because the adults in his life make it a point to find something there for themselves.
As for Elijah Pollack who isn’t having a Bar Mitzvah - Jewish may come up in him through the roots - he carries the name of a great prophet who was zealous for God. I am sure his family will continue to challenge him and he to challenge them. I would like to talk more to Neal, his father. I’d like to invite him to study some Torah with us, to find out more about his grandparents, to hear the stories he has to tell and to hear how he makes meaning of the Torah we learn together. And then I’ll give him a broom and welcome him to the community.
Rabbi Diamond's Second Day of Rosh Hashanah Sermon 2015
On the second day of Rosh Hashanah, we studied one of the most famous prayers of this time of year, the Unetaneh Tokef prayer. In it we proclaim the awesome power of this day, and proclaim it to be true that G-d is the judge who records and seals, counts and measures, remembering all that has been forgotten. According to the prayer, when G-d opens the book of remembrance, the seal of each person is upon it.
We talked about the image of the book, which dates further back than the prayer itself, to the time of the Talmud, around 300 -400 of our era. Whatever we believe about G-d and about this image, the notion that each person's seal is upon the book reminds us that we are ultimately responsible for our deeds. It is our actions that we have come to examine and consider on this day of atonement.
The prayer also tells how fates are sealed on this day – on Rosh Hashanah it is written, on Yom Kippur it is sealed – who shall live and who shall die, who in the fullness of days and who before their time, who by fire and who by water, etc. etc. These words have been put to a haunting English melody by Leonard Cohen, a prayer so harsh as he sings it I have always found it hard to listen to.
According to the prayer, the evil decree, or the evil of the decree, can be averted by three actions on our part – teshuva, return; tefillah, prayer; and tzedakah, acts of giving, of justice and charity. The implication of the prayer is that we can change our fate.
In the world we live in, the world we see around us, changing just our own fate, however, would be a selfish task. If we are here only to atone so that we can escape death or some other punishment, I think we have missed the point. Of the three acts we are encouraged to do – teshuva, tefilla and tzedakah, tzedakah has a greater power than changing our lives – it is the act that can change the lives of others.
The rabbi's knew this when they said, "Tzedaka saves from death." I don't think they just meant I can avert my own death. Tzedaka saves others from death – my giving to help those in need can literally save a life. That's why Tzedakah is so important.
We live in an age where information is overwhelming. We can know the plight and fate of refugees from Syria, Somalia, and South Sudan. We can see photos and read gripping accounts of tragedies around the world. We can connect with others and in the best of all possible worlds, we can help others. But the same technology that connects us can lead to a confusion about what action is and what action is needed from us. It can lead to a confusion between speech and action and to a confusion about who we are and what we are called to do in the realm of tzedakah.
Speaking is not the same as doing. Awareness is not the same as action. While we may have responsibilities to speak out and interrupt negative behavior, while awareness of issues can help motivate us to act, sometimes it actually works in reverse. I shared something on facebook and I thought I did something. I looked up more information, sat in my chair and learned more about a situation, and became even more discouraged and paralyzed. I thought I was doing something to improve the world, but I was actually just sitting on my computer and if I was lucky, perhaps making myself feel more virtuous.
Here's what I really needed to do – I needed to make a credit card donation or write a check. I needed to find someone in my neighborhood who needed food, or appliances, or clothing or shelter and help them receive it. I needed to reach out to a person running a food drive, a blood drive or a tzedakah drive and ask how I can help. I needed to open my wallet and I needed to open my heart. And usually, but not always, I needed to get up from my computer to do these things.
Another pitfall with tzedakah is when I start wondering, who should I give to? and wind up giving to no one. I can get bogged down in wondering – is that organization really doing good, is that person on the street asking for money going to use it for food or for drugs, will my funds really get to the people in need? There is a need for due diligence in philanthropy, but there is also a need to give with trust and to keep up the practice of simply giving regularly. I was once told that a person begging on the street has always been reduced by circumstances to a place of humiliation – were that not true, they would not be asking. There are also stories of great rabbis who kept two wallets – so that they would always have a place from which to give tzedakah.
I want to tell you a story today about a person who is making a difference where most of us no doubt felt we could not, a Jewish person who took seriously the need to act and help others. Steve Maman is a Jewish businessman from Montreal who decided he needed to do something to help Christian and Yezidi girls who have been kidnapped and enslaved by the so-called Islamic State fighters in Syria and Iraq. When he learned of the horrible brutality taking place, this father of six decided to act. He has so far raised over half a million dollars and ransomed over 120 captive girls and women. What follows was written about him in the Canadian Jewish news this week:
So how does a guy from Montreal rescue young captives in a conflict thousands of miles away? For 20 years Maman, a native of Morocco, has been in the vintage car business, dealing directly with buyers in the Middle East. “I know the culture,” he said.
He also knows powerful players in the region. A couple of years ago, he made some key connections while trying to acquire cars once owned by Saddam Hussein.
He convinced his Iraqi contacts to get involved with his efforts to free Yazidi slaves. They, too, both Sunnis and Shiites, are “appalled by ISIS,” he said.
Leveraging his ties in the region, Maman set up a team of people, headed by an Iraqi who once worked for the U.S. army.
“They don’t go in and get the children themselves. They work with contacts in Mosul [considered the ISIS capital], who work with the same purpose we do, to get the girls out and stop the pain.”
The team negotiates the freedom of Yazidi girls – some of them as young as nine when they were sold in the Mosul market.
His organization is called the Liberation of Christian and Yazidi Children of Iraq [CYCI], and he has a Facebook page and supporters around the world.
Speaking at the Toronto rally, Maman explained his rationale for creating the organization. He cited Rabbi Nachman of Breslov, a famous rabbi who died in the early 1800s, who said prayers said in seclusion are the most powerful.
Jews uttered these prayers of pain and abandonment in Auschwitz, and he imagined Yazidis are saying similar ones today.
“I wanted to help these innocents because these prayers in seclusion, these prayers of distress, came once again 70 years later. This time, it came from Mosul. This time, it came from women and children. Being held in cages. Being underfed and beaten. Being repeatedly raped. Being resold numerous times. Being treated like cattle. Basically, being killed every single day, without their soul leaving their body!”
Maman said people have two options: acting or being spectators. He chooses to act.
We can each do something now to avert the evil decree and alleviate the suffering of these captives and of Syrian refugees around the world. I have placed in the hall information about Steve Maman's organization and other Jewish organizations working to support Syrian refugees.
As I was thinking of this talk on Tzedakah, I thought that what I need is a checklist of questions I can ask myself at different intervals. So here's a suggested list of how to keep ourselves on track with tzedakah and acts of kindness, hesed, over the coming year:
Each day, to ask myself, how have I helped another person today?
Each week, to ask myself, have I given tzedakah this week? (and if I have regular monthly amounts being deducted from my pay or credit card, to review them each month).
Each month, to speak with my spouse and children about where we have given tzedakah and where we would like to give.
Each month, to be in touch with at least one person in my community who is raising funds and ask how I can help.
Each holiday (Jewish or secular), to give extra tzedakah to help a family in need celebrate the holiday.
Each year, to review with my loved ones our charitable giving for the year and our plans for the coming year, including charitable bequests in my will. If I can follow this action plan, I can maintain a significant ongoing connection with tzedakah giving. I can be part of a flow of life – sharing my blessings with those in need. I can ensure that I avert the evil of the decree – not only for myself and my family – but for others. I can live a life of deeds that will help others to be sealed in the book of life, no matter how long I live. Gmar Hatimah Tovah.
We talked about the image of the book, which dates further back than the prayer itself, to the time of the Talmud, around 300 -400 of our era. Whatever we believe about G-d and about this image, the notion that each person's seal is upon the book reminds us that we are ultimately responsible for our deeds. It is our actions that we have come to examine and consider on this day of atonement.
The prayer also tells how fates are sealed on this day – on Rosh Hashanah it is written, on Yom Kippur it is sealed – who shall live and who shall die, who in the fullness of days and who before their time, who by fire and who by water, etc. etc. These words have been put to a haunting English melody by Leonard Cohen, a prayer so harsh as he sings it I have always found it hard to listen to.
According to the prayer, the evil decree, or the evil of the decree, can be averted by three actions on our part – teshuva, return; tefillah, prayer; and tzedakah, acts of giving, of justice and charity. The implication of the prayer is that we can change our fate.
In the world we live in, the world we see around us, changing just our own fate, however, would be a selfish task. If we are here only to atone so that we can escape death or some other punishment, I think we have missed the point. Of the three acts we are encouraged to do – teshuva, tefilla and tzedakah, tzedakah has a greater power than changing our lives – it is the act that can change the lives of others.
The rabbi's knew this when they said, "Tzedaka saves from death." I don't think they just meant I can avert my own death. Tzedaka saves others from death – my giving to help those in need can literally save a life. That's why Tzedakah is so important.
We live in an age where information is overwhelming. We can know the plight and fate of refugees from Syria, Somalia, and South Sudan. We can see photos and read gripping accounts of tragedies around the world. We can connect with others and in the best of all possible worlds, we can help others. But the same technology that connects us can lead to a confusion about what action is and what action is needed from us. It can lead to a confusion between speech and action and to a confusion about who we are and what we are called to do in the realm of tzedakah.
Speaking is not the same as doing. Awareness is not the same as action. While we may have responsibilities to speak out and interrupt negative behavior, while awareness of issues can help motivate us to act, sometimes it actually works in reverse. I shared something on facebook and I thought I did something. I looked up more information, sat in my chair and learned more about a situation, and became even more discouraged and paralyzed. I thought I was doing something to improve the world, but I was actually just sitting on my computer and if I was lucky, perhaps making myself feel more virtuous.
Here's what I really needed to do – I needed to make a credit card donation or write a check. I needed to find someone in my neighborhood who needed food, or appliances, or clothing or shelter and help them receive it. I needed to reach out to a person running a food drive, a blood drive or a tzedakah drive and ask how I can help. I needed to open my wallet and I needed to open my heart. And usually, but not always, I needed to get up from my computer to do these things.
Another pitfall with tzedakah is when I start wondering, who should I give to? and wind up giving to no one. I can get bogged down in wondering – is that organization really doing good, is that person on the street asking for money going to use it for food or for drugs, will my funds really get to the people in need? There is a need for due diligence in philanthropy, but there is also a need to give with trust and to keep up the practice of simply giving regularly. I was once told that a person begging on the street has always been reduced by circumstances to a place of humiliation – were that not true, they would not be asking. There are also stories of great rabbis who kept two wallets – so that they would always have a place from which to give tzedakah.
I want to tell you a story today about a person who is making a difference where most of us no doubt felt we could not, a Jewish person who took seriously the need to act and help others. Steve Maman is a Jewish businessman from Montreal who decided he needed to do something to help Christian and Yezidi girls who have been kidnapped and enslaved by the so-called Islamic State fighters in Syria and Iraq. When he learned of the horrible brutality taking place, this father of six decided to act. He has so far raised over half a million dollars and ransomed over 120 captive girls and women. What follows was written about him in the Canadian Jewish news this week:
So how does a guy from Montreal rescue young captives in a conflict thousands of miles away? For 20 years Maman, a native of Morocco, has been in the vintage car business, dealing directly with buyers in the Middle East. “I know the culture,” he said.
He also knows powerful players in the region. A couple of years ago, he made some key connections while trying to acquire cars once owned by Saddam Hussein.
He convinced his Iraqi contacts to get involved with his efforts to free Yazidi slaves. They, too, both Sunnis and Shiites, are “appalled by ISIS,” he said.
Leveraging his ties in the region, Maman set up a team of people, headed by an Iraqi who once worked for the U.S. army.
“They don’t go in and get the children themselves. They work with contacts in Mosul [considered the ISIS capital], who work with the same purpose we do, to get the girls out and stop the pain.”
The team negotiates the freedom of Yazidi girls – some of them as young as nine when they were sold in the Mosul market.
His organization is called the Liberation of Christian and Yazidi Children of Iraq [CYCI], and he has a Facebook page and supporters around the world.
Speaking at the Toronto rally, Maman explained his rationale for creating the organization. He cited Rabbi Nachman of Breslov, a famous rabbi who died in the early 1800s, who said prayers said in seclusion are the most powerful.
Jews uttered these prayers of pain and abandonment in Auschwitz, and he imagined Yazidis are saying similar ones today.
“I wanted to help these innocents because these prayers in seclusion, these prayers of distress, came once again 70 years later. This time, it came from Mosul. This time, it came from women and children. Being held in cages. Being underfed and beaten. Being repeatedly raped. Being resold numerous times. Being treated like cattle. Basically, being killed every single day, without their soul leaving their body!”
Maman said people have two options: acting or being spectators. He chooses to act.
We can each do something now to avert the evil decree and alleviate the suffering of these captives and of Syrian refugees around the world. I have placed in the hall information about Steve Maman's organization and other Jewish organizations working to support Syrian refugees.
As I was thinking of this talk on Tzedakah, I thought that what I need is a checklist of questions I can ask myself at different intervals. So here's a suggested list of how to keep ourselves on track with tzedakah and acts of kindness, hesed, over the coming year:
Each day, to ask myself, how have I helped another person today?
Each week, to ask myself, have I given tzedakah this week? (and if I have regular monthly amounts being deducted from my pay or credit card, to review them each month).
Each month, to speak with my spouse and children about where we have given tzedakah and where we would like to give.
Each month, to be in touch with at least one person in my community who is raising funds and ask how I can help.
Each holiday (Jewish or secular), to give extra tzedakah to help a family in need celebrate the holiday.
Each year, to review with my loved ones our charitable giving for the year and our plans for the coming year, including charitable bequests in my will. If I can follow this action plan, I can maintain a significant ongoing connection with tzedakah giving. I can be part of a flow of life – sharing my blessings with those in need. I can ensure that I avert the evil of the decree – not only for myself and my family – but for others. I can live a life of deeds that will help others to be sealed in the book of life, no matter how long I live. Gmar Hatimah Tovah.
Rabbi Diamond's Kol Nidre Sermon 2015
In the Torah portion tomorrow we will read about Teshuvah, returning to G-d at this time of year. In the Torah portion, returning to G-d is linked with the people returning to the land. According to the Torah portion, once we return to G-d in the lands where we have been dispersed, G-d wll gather us and return us to the land. We studied this passage from Deuteronomy on the Shabbat before Rosh Hashanah.
This Torah portion no doubt brought comfort to Jews who lived in exile in much more difficult conditions that Jews do today in America. For nearly two thousand years, Jews prayed for the restoration of a Jewish homeland and to return there. Only in the 20th century did this become a reality for many Jews. Longing for return was part of Jewish spirituality. Now that the state exists, longing for return has been replaced with other longings. Longing for the past but also for a better future has always been part of Jewish tradition - as we say, “Hadesh yamenu kekedem - renew our days, as in days of old.”
My father in law passed away in Trinidad last November. The last time I saw him was in December 2012, and when I visited him in his home I was touched to see on his bookshelf an Israeli novel in translation. The book is Homesick by Eshkol Nevo and the story takes place in a small town about 25 minutes from where I live. I was touched to see that my father in law, living thousands of miles away from us in Trinidad, was seeking to understand our lives better and to stay connected with us by reading this novel.
Though the book is called Homesick in English, in Hebrew it is called Four Houses and Longing, or Missing or Nostalgia. You can see why they couldn’t translate it literally - it’s too hard to translate - but the original title tells what the book is about - four different houses right next to each other, each opening a different window onto an inner world. I’d like to speak today about those four homes and aspects of Israeli society they reflect. Though the story is set in 1995, the aspects of Israeli society reflected in it are very much alive today.
In one home lives a married couple with a pre-school child. Like 55% of Jews in Israel, this family comes from a middle Eastern Jewish background, what we often call “sephardi” but which represents not Spanish Jewry but a range of middle eastern backgrounds - moroccan, tunisian, iraqi, kurdish, persian, algerian, egyptian, yemenite and others. The couple is not particularly observant, but like many Jews of similar backgrounds, they keep kosher, light candles, eat Shabbat dinner, and observe the holidays. When the time comes to send their son to pre-school, they choose a religious pre-school and thus begins a saga of challenge for them as a couple. The husband thinks they should return to the traditional religion of their grandparents, the wife is less sure, and ongoing conflict develops.
This couple’s story reflects Israel today. While so-called secular Judaism used to be the norm, many Israelis, especially of Middle Eastern backgrounds, have turned back to religion and are known as “hozrim bateshuva” - those who have returned in penitence The phenomenon is visible everywhere. There are also many others in Israel for whom it is more accurate to say, “the synagogue they don’t go to must be orthodox.” Orthodoxy is considered by them to be the only real Judaism, as it is considered by the majority of Jews in South Africa, Australia, Europe and England. Reform and Conservative Judaism, which have the majority of affiliated Jews in North and South America, struggle to maintain a foothold in Israel. This is not only because of prejudice, but also because those attracted to more liberal forms of Judaism are simply not as committed. There are many people in my town who want a Reform synagogue to be there when their children reach Bar Mitzvah, but they aren’t willing to put up resources or commit to it at other times. Bat Mitzvah is a whole other challenge - for most non-Orthodox and even many orthodox girls, it is simply a party, with little or no religious content. For a girl or woman to be called to the Torah is considered at best weird and at worst absolutely forbidden - our daughter was one of only two girls out of 59 in her sixth grade class to be called to the Torah for her bat mitzvah. Conservative and Reform Judaism are growing, but we face continuous challenges.
Of course I have found this tremendously challenging. I retain my connections to the Judaism I was raised with, while also trying to give my children a secure foundation of religious life and connection. This has meant bringing them, each Shabbat, to the Reform congregation, which usually has services only on Friday night, and most Shabbat mornings, to a modern Orthodox congregation. Though I was not raised to sit separated by a mechitza from the prayer leaders and the Torah reading, I have somehow managed to find what is good in that community and continue to hope that my children will gain from their exposure to Orthodox Judaism. Alen and I have made other choices too, such as the decision to send our children to secular schools, which have consequences I am not sure about. I find myself constantly making trade offs, and sometimes cynically wondering if my kids might have gotten a better Jewish education at the community day school in Rhode Island. It would surely have been closer to my comfort zone, but of course they would have missed what we came to Israel for - to be part of a Jewish state, with all its challenges.
The second home in the story holds a family struggling to come to terms with the death of their son while serving in Lebanon in the army. His death has fractured their family and left the parents with little to offer their surviving teenage son, who also gropes for meaning in the face of his brother’s death. “Bereaved families” are a feature of the Israeli landscape. The society focuses on them one day each year, on memorial day, Yom HaZikaron, but the families struggle every single day. The spectre of war hangs over Israel constantly, and while war and conflict affect the psyches of all though they affect some families more directly. Alen and I moved to Israel during the second intifada - the first year we lived in Jerusalem, 200 people were killed in terror attacks, with many bus bombings including on bus lines we regularly used to go to work.. As that period ended, we left it behind and the daily fear became much less. But in the summer of 2014 I happened to be attending a shiva and sat next to a woman who had lost two children in one of the bus bombings. Though more than twelve years had passed, she was still suffering as greatly as she ever had. For her the intifada had not ended.
It is hard to put into words the effect of ongoing violence, war and threat of war on Israelis in general and my family in particular. My children already speak about army service, already know what to do when they hear a siren and how to behave in a sealed room. Denial and resiliency are two major features of the culture. On days when things are quiet, I try to enjoy them. And I pray every day not to act based on fear. Sometimes I actively try to avoid learning about what is going on in Syria, Iraq and other nearby countries. Other times I try to learn more.The horrific area-wide situation also causes me to want to focus on the here and now, on doing my small part to make the world better, and on seeking to maintain balance and joy.
In the third house in the story, a young couple lives together, trying to advance in their education and careers and to figure out whether to marry. Israeli young people go to the army first, at age 18 or 19, and after 2 or 3 or more years of army service, many go to work to save money for a trip around the world (or to part of it). Some places are so popular for Israeli young travellers that there are new programs for Israelis to volunteer in places around the world and give back to the communities. When the earthquake hit in Nepal last year, hundreds of Israelis were there, as well as Israeli organizations that had been bringing young volunteers for years to help the local communities. After such world travels, young people settle down to university studies, often at age 23 or 24, and there’s also a good deal of pressure to marry and start families. Economically, this can be a big challenge, as the costs of housing in Israel have soared while salaries remain low. Nonetheless, childbearing is a huge value in Israeli culture, with most families having three or more children, and religious families having more. A colleague told me some years ago that “four is the new three”, and with two children, our family is noticeably small in our community.
The focus on family and extended family has been a huge positive upside of living in Israel. Israel was recently voted one of the best places to raise children in a survey of expatriates. There are no arguments about Free Range kids going on in our town - my 9 year old has been riding his bike to school every day and enjoys the kind of freedoms kids used to have. I feel very grateful to be raising my children there and for the feeling that we are part of a culture that supports families in general and our non-traditional family in particular.
The fourth house in the story is being built by Arab workers who come in from the West Bank. As the story progresses, it gets harder for these workers to cross the green line to the area where they are working. But that area is actually the area their families lived - and left in 1948. The area is called the Castel, named for a fort or castle on a hill overlooking the road to Jerusalem. The Castel is the site of a national park today, which tells the story of the fierce battles for this hillside and the area around it. Tens of small Arab towns in this corridor were conquered and depopulated during the 1948 war, in the spring. It took longer for Jewish forces to get to the less strategic area I live, in the hills to the south, where the Arab towns were conquered in October, 1948. Tzur Hadassah, where I live, sits on the lands of the village Ras Abu Amar, which according to the website Palestine Remembered had 106 houses and 719 residents in 1948. 50 years later these descendants of these residents were thought to number 4400. According to my neighbor who took us on a hike and showed us the village, the Arab residents of our area went to the Dehaishe refugee camp in the Bethlehem area, which took in refugees from 45 towns in the Jerusalem and Hebron areas and currently has about 15,000 residents in an area of one square kilometer.
I have not found a way to understand and address this challenge of living where I live. Since the second intifada, Israeli society has become even more segregated. Arabs and Jews are separated by language but also in almost all aspects of the culture. The one notable exception is the field of medicine. I am most likely to meet an Arab man or woman in a hospital, pharmacy or other medical setting, either as a fellow patient or often as a nurse, doctor, or pharmacist. But outside the medical world, Jews and Arabs remain in separate worlds, even if we share roads, trains, buses, supermarkets, malls and other spaces. Prejudice among Jews against Arabs is rampant, and I feel I must work hard to educate my children not to take on the attitudes of their school mates. I am grateful to have friends and family who are working on co-existence - Alen recently designed a training for eco-tourism guides that is also being used in the Palestinian territories. I continue to feel that I have a lot more to do for my part in creating change and promoting peace and dialogue.
These four houses provide a window, but just a small one, on the diversity of Israel and the longings of the people who live there. In the story, it’s easy to see the longing of the bereaved family for their lost son and the wholeness their family once had, and the longing of the Palestinians for the home they once knew. But the married couple is also longing for wholeness - for a family life that makes sense and for a way to be true to the traditions of their ancestors and to the modern world. And the young couple is longing as well - to find their place in the world, to commit to each other, and to make the next generation.
I am longing for my father in law, whose caring brought him to try to understand the world I live in. I am longing for more of you to come and visit my home, as he did in 2007. I am longing for North American Jews to remain connected to Israel, and for Jews around the world to maintain, across our distances, a commitment to caring about and learning about each other. Most importantly, I am longing for Israel to live up to its promise of being a place where justice reigns, where all can live equally and in peace.
This Torah portion no doubt brought comfort to Jews who lived in exile in much more difficult conditions that Jews do today in America. For nearly two thousand years, Jews prayed for the restoration of a Jewish homeland and to return there. Only in the 20th century did this become a reality for many Jews. Longing for return was part of Jewish spirituality. Now that the state exists, longing for return has been replaced with other longings. Longing for the past but also for a better future has always been part of Jewish tradition - as we say, “Hadesh yamenu kekedem - renew our days, as in days of old.”
My father in law passed away in Trinidad last November. The last time I saw him was in December 2012, and when I visited him in his home I was touched to see on his bookshelf an Israeli novel in translation. The book is Homesick by Eshkol Nevo and the story takes place in a small town about 25 minutes from where I live. I was touched to see that my father in law, living thousands of miles away from us in Trinidad, was seeking to understand our lives better and to stay connected with us by reading this novel.
Though the book is called Homesick in English, in Hebrew it is called Four Houses and Longing, or Missing or Nostalgia. You can see why they couldn’t translate it literally - it’s too hard to translate - but the original title tells what the book is about - four different houses right next to each other, each opening a different window onto an inner world. I’d like to speak today about those four homes and aspects of Israeli society they reflect. Though the story is set in 1995, the aspects of Israeli society reflected in it are very much alive today.
In one home lives a married couple with a pre-school child. Like 55% of Jews in Israel, this family comes from a middle Eastern Jewish background, what we often call “sephardi” but which represents not Spanish Jewry but a range of middle eastern backgrounds - moroccan, tunisian, iraqi, kurdish, persian, algerian, egyptian, yemenite and others. The couple is not particularly observant, but like many Jews of similar backgrounds, they keep kosher, light candles, eat Shabbat dinner, and observe the holidays. When the time comes to send their son to pre-school, they choose a religious pre-school and thus begins a saga of challenge for them as a couple. The husband thinks they should return to the traditional religion of their grandparents, the wife is less sure, and ongoing conflict develops.
This couple’s story reflects Israel today. While so-called secular Judaism used to be the norm, many Israelis, especially of Middle Eastern backgrounds, have turned back to religion and are known as “hozrim bateshuva” - those who have returned in penitence The phenomenon is visible everywhere. There are also many others in Israel for whom it is more accurate to say, “the synagogue they don’t go to must be orthodox.” Orthodoxy is considered by them to be the only real Judaism, as it is considered by the majority of Jews in South Africa, Australia, Europe and England. Reform and Conservative Judaism, which have the majority of affiliated Jews in North and South America, struggle to maintain a foothold in Israel. This is not only because of prejudice, but also because those attracted to more liberal forms of Judaism are simply not as committed. There are many people in my town who want a Reform synagogue to be there when their children reach Bar Mitzvah, but they aren’t willing to put up resources or commit to it at other times. Bat Mitzvah is a whole other challenge - for most non-Orthodox and even many orthodox girls, it is simply a party, with little or no religious content. For a girl or woman to be called to the Torah is considered at best weird and at worst absolutely forbidden - our daughter was one of only two girls out of 59 in her sixth grade class to be called to the Torah for her bat mitzvah. Conservative and Reform Judaism are growing, but we face continuous challenges.
Of course I have found this tremendously challenging. I retain my connections to the Judaism I was raised with, while also trying to give my children a secure foundation of religious life and connection. This has meant bringing them, each Shabbat, to the Reform congregation, which usually has services only on Friday night, and most Shabbat mornings, to a modern Orthodox congregation. Though I was not raised to sit separated by a mechitza from the prayer leaders and the Torah reading, I have somehow managed to find what is good in that community and continue to hope that my children will gain from their exposure to Orthodox Judaism. Alen and I have made other choices too, such as the decision to send our children to secular schools, which have consequences I am not sure about. I find myself constantly making trade offs, and sometimes cynically wondering if my kids might have gotten a better Jewish education at the community day school in Rhode Island. It would surely have been closer to my comfort zone, but of course they would have missed what we came to Israel for - to be part of a Jewish state, with all its challenges.
The second home in the story holds a family struggling to come to terms with the death of their son while serving in Lebanon in the army. His death has fractured their family and left the parents with little to offer their surviving teenage son, who also gropes for meaning in the face of his brother’s death. “Bereaved families” are a feature of the Israeli landscape. The society focuses on them one day each year, on memorial day, Yom HaZikaron, but the families struggle every single day. The spectre of war hangs over Israel constantly, and while war and conflict affect the psyches of all though they affect some families more directly. Alen and I moved to Israel during the second intifada - the first year we lived in Jerusalem, 200 people were killed in terror attacks, with many bus bombings including on bus lines we regularly used to go to work.. As that period ended, we left it behind and the daily fear became much less. But in the summer of 2014 I happened to be attending a shiva and sat next to a woman who had lost two children in one of the bus bombings. Though more than twelve years had passed, she was still suffering as greatly as she ever had. For her the intifada had not ended.
It is hard to put into words the effect of ongoing violence, war and threat of war on Israelis in general and my family in particular. My children already speak about army service, already know what to do when they hear a siren and how to behave in a sealed room. Denial and resiliency are two major features of the culture. On days when things are quiet, I try to enjoy them. And I pray every day not to act based on fear. Sometimes I actively try to avoid learning about what is going on in Syria, Iraq and other nearby countries. Other times I try to learn more.The horrific area-wide situation also causes me to want to focus on the here and now, on doing my small part to make the world better, and on seeking to maintain balance and joy.
In the third house in the story, a young couple lives together, trying to advance in their education and careers and to figure out whether to marry. Israeli young people go to the army first, at age 18 or 19, and after 2 or 3 or more years of army service, many go to work to save money for a trip around the world (or to part of it). Some places are so popular for Israeli young travellers that there are new programs for Israelis to volunteer in places around the world and give back to the communities. When the earthquake hit in Nepal last year, hundreds of Israelis were there, as well as Israeli organizations that had been bringing young volunteers for years to help the local communities. After such world travels, young people settle down to university studies, often at age 23 or 24, and there’s also a good deal of pressure to marry and start families. Economically, this can be a big challenge, as the costs of housing in Israel have soared while salaries remain low. Nonetheless, childbearing is a huge value in Israeli culture, with most families having three or more children, and religious families having more. A colleague told me some years ago that “four is the new three”, and with two children, our family is noticeably small in our community.
The focus on family and extended family has been a huge positive upside of living in Israel. Israel was recently voted one of the best places to raise children in a survey of expatriates. There are no arguments about Free Range kids going on in our town - my 9 year old has been riding his bike to school every day and enjoys the kind of freedoms kids used to have. I feel very grateful to be raising my children there and for the feeling that we are part of a culture that supports families in general and our non-traditional family in particular.
The fourth house in the story is being built by Arab workers who come in from the West Bank. As the story progresses, it gets harder for these workers to cross the green line to the area where they are working. But that area is actually the area their families lived - and left in 1948. The area is called the Castel, named for a fort or castle on a hill overlooking the road to Jerusalem. The Castel is the site of a national park today, which tells the story of the fierce battles for this hillside and the area around it. Tens of small Arab towns in this corridor were conquered and depopulated during the 1948 war, in the spring. It took longer for Jewish forces to get to the less strategic area I live, in the hills to the south, where the Arab towns were conquered in October, 1948. Tzur Hadassah, where I live, sits on the lands of the village Ras Abu Amar, which according to the website Palestine Remembered had 106 houses and 719 residents in 1948. 50 years later these descendants of these residents were thought to number 4400. According to my neighbor who took us on a hike and showed us the village, the Arab residents of our area went to the Dehaishe refugee camp in the Bethlehem area, which took in refugees from 45 towns in the Jerusalem and Hebron areas and currently has about 15,000 residents in an area of one square kilometer.
I have not found a way to understand and address this challenge of living where I live. Since the second intifada, Israeli society has become even more segregated. Arabs and Jews are separated by language but also in almost all aspects of the culture. The one notable exception is the field of medicine. I am most likely to meet an Arab man or woman in a hospital, pharmacy or other medical setting, either as a fellow patient or often as a nurse, doctor, or pharmacist. But outside the medical world, Jews and Arabs remain in separate worlds, even if we share roads, trains, buses, supermarkets, malls and other spaces. Prejudice among Jews against Arabs is rampant, and I feel I must work hard to educate my children not to take on the attitudes of their school mates. I am grateful to have friends and family who are working on co-existence - Alen recently designed a training for eco-tourism guides that is also being used in the Palestinian territories. I continue to feel that I have a lot more to do for my part in creating change and promoting peace and dialogue.
These four houses provide a window, but just a small one, on the diversity of Israel and the longings of the people who live there. In the story, it’s easy to see the longing of the bereaved family for their lost son and the wholeness their family once had, and the longing of the Palestinians for the home they once knew. But the married couple is also longing for wholeness - for a family life that makes sense and for a way to be true to the traditions of their ancestors and to the modern world. And the young couple is longing as well - to find their place in the world, to commit to each other, and to make the next generation.
I am longing for my father in law, whose caring brought him to try to understand the world I live in. I am longing for more of you to come and visit my home, as he did in 2007. I am longing for North American Jews to remain connected to Israel, and for Jews around the world to maintain, across our distances, a commitment to caring about and learning about each other. Most importantly, I am longing for Israel to live up to its promise of being a place where justice reigns, where all can live equally and in peace.
