Month: September 2017

Categories
High Holidays Sermons

רשע: The Wicked Child Sees Only the Present – Rosh Hashanah 5778, Day 2

How many of us have experienced information whiplash this year? Not just information overload, which I think many of us have managed to live with in the past decade or so, but the sense of having our emotions pulled one way or another by current events, only to be pulled another direction a day or two later? I love coffee, but I had to dramatically reduce my consumption of caffeine this past year to cut down on my anxiety regarding the state of the world. Who would have thought there would be Nazis marching with rifles and helmets in Virginia? Who would have thought that a foreign power would try to manipulate elections?

I think it’s essential that we keep some perspective about the world, and not let events of the present moment throw us too far off the path of forward progress. Yes, the present may be disorienting, but we must try to put everything into proper perspective.

Recap: These four sermons are about our past, present, and future, as seen through the eyes of the famous “Four Children” of Pesah. Yesterday, we spoke about the wise child as being the one who sees past, present, and future.

Today, we’re going to talk about the רשע (rasha), the wicked child. What does the wicked child see? Only the present. It’s all about me, right now.

That cannot be us. Us Jews. We have to think broader than that. And if there is anything that our tradition teaches, it is this: we cannot be the wicked child. We have to see beyond the present moment.

Teaching the Four Sons in the 21st Century | My Jewish ...

Operating system vs. App

I recently heard an appealing image in the podcast, Judaism Unbound (if you don’t know what a podcast is, please ask your grandchildren). Many of us today are carrying smartphones around, and there are two overarching software features to a smartphone: the operating system and the apps. The operating system (OS) is the environment that you see when you turn the system on: the screen where you see all the things you can possibly do. It’s the wizard behind the screen that is making everything function, all the bells and whistles that your smartphone features. You turn it on, and the OS is working. It makes everything go, connects everything together.

The apps (applications) are individual programs that do a specific task. You open one to check and send email. You open a different one to see if it’s going to rain. You open another to see when your next appointment is. Another will help you find a restaurant with vegetarian options for dinner. You get the idea – specific tasks.

The operating system is like your house; it provides space and structure and utilities. The apps are items in the house that do certain things: the blender, the bookcase, the shower.

So the Judaism Unbound hosts have been tossing around the idea of whether Judaism is an operating system or an app. Traditionally speaking, of course, the rabbis who created what we know as Judaism during the Talmudic period (i.e. the 1st through 5th centuries CE), thought of Judaism as the operating system.

Ours is a tradition that has something to say about all facets of our lives: not only how we interact with God or what we eat, but how we speak to each other, how we maintain our physical health, how we learn, how we interact with our relatives and neighbors, how we create a just society, even how we make love. As they taught us to say in Hebrew school (not that we really understood this so well), Judaism is not a religion; it’s a way of life.

And that is the way we have conceived of our tradition for two thousand years.

But we are living in a time, say some, in which fewer of us are thinking about Judaism as an operating system, but rather as an app. That is, when you want it or need it, you open the app. You come to the synagogue. You celebrate a lifecycle event. You speak to a rabbi about a personal issue. And then when you’re done, you’re on to the next app, and you close Judaism until the next time you need it.

That may very well be the case for some of us. Let’s face it – many of us are not even opening the Judaism app at all. Only about half of the Jews in America make an appearance in synagogue on Yom Kippur, but that’s only one measure; most likely far fewer are connecting to the wisdom on the Jewish bookshelf in any substantial way; few are supporting Jewish charities; few find spiritual value in the traditional offerings of Judaism. I would not be totally surprised if, on an average Shabbat morning, there are more American Jews in yoga studios than in synagogues.

Leaving Judaism aside for the moment, the challenge that we are facing as a society is what you might call “application-based thinking.” All the information that is flying at us all the time, all of the constant distraction, is forcing us to compartmentalize our lives in a way that is not only unhealthy for us as individuals, but also as a society. We are moving so fast, trying to accomplish so many things, that we’ve lost sight of the big picture. We are focusing on the moment, on the task at hand without questioning how this particular task fits into the grand scheme.

As an example, I will freely concede that I have become addicted to my own mobile phone. Except for the 25 hours of Shabbat every week, which in my household is a sacred technology-free time, during the rest of the week, like many of you, I compulsively check my text messages, my Facebook notifications, my Twitter and Instagram feeds, my two email accounts, my WhatsApp, and of course the New York Times and the Post-Gazette.

And yet, I am amazed at the numbers of people I see coming into the synagogue, ostensibly to spend a moment doing something holy, who cannot put their phones down on Shabbat and holidays, even for an hour that they are sitting in the pews, even when we ask them to do so.

smartphones

Ladies and gentlemen, if all we see and consider is what is on the screen for a few moments, that is our inner wicked child taking over. That is living only in the present.

Another example: I’m going to tread very lightly here, but let’s return for a moment to American politics. What is afflicting our system is not necessarily the personalities involved, but rather the imperative to seek short-term political victories over long-lasting policy decisions that benefit us as a society. Sound-bites and insults have become the norm of political discourse, and few politicians, let alone voters, are willing to think too far beyond that.

We have reached a point where few can even entertain, let alone articulate, the position of the other side, and in such a situation, nothing can be accomplished that will further the project of building this country. I fear a future of languishing – of neglect of infrastructure, of failure to confront the devastating consequences of the phenomena that are gnawing at our citizenry: not enough rehab beds for opioid addicts, the outrageous cost of health care, the stagnation of wages for half of America.

True leadership in our body politic requires the long view, of past and future at the same time.

Let’s face it: the present is an illusion. There is no present at all. Dr. Dan Gilbert, a Harvard social psychologist, has said in his TED Talk, The Psychology of Your Future Self, The present is merely a wall, a kind of mehitzah (divider between men and women in some traditional synagogues), if you will, between the past and the future. Who we are at any given moment is just one point of data along a shifting continuum; nobody in this room is finished growing, developing, changing. It does not matter if you are 19 or 90. We’re all still moving forward into the next iteration of ourselves.

And just as politicians and the news media focus only on the “now,” so too are we, the citizens, not taking the long view; we are thinking only about ourselves, in this moment: how will this impact me right now? That is not how a healthy society functions. We’re all in it together.  Ultimately, what affects our neighbors affects us.

The רשע, the wicked child sees only the present, because there is nothing more important in their world than themselves.

When are we the wicked children?

  •     When we see suffering in this world, and we look away.
  •     When we put metaphorical stumbling blocks before the blind – that is, those who are blind to the consequences of their choices.
  •     When we withdraw from the community.
  •     When we put the value of saying yes over doing the right thing.
  •     When we seek financial gain in place of the sanctity of our interpersonal relationships.

I do not have time to give examples of each of these, but I am sure that we can all think of times when we have made the wrong choice, the one that highlights ourselves over the greater good. If we are truly honest with ourselves, we might even see examples of this in our behavior every single day.

So how might we get beyond the present? How might we find our way into the long view?

Ladies and gentlemen, I encountered a wonderful idea in Rabbi Alan Lew’s book about the high holidays, This is Real and You Are Completely Unprepared, generally my go-to source for inspiration at this time of year. (I rarely recommend books in this way, but if you need some high  holiday inspiration, you might want to invest in this book. It’s unlike anything you’ve ever read about Judaism.) Rabbi Lew has a talent for infusing his Jewish commentary with ideas drawn from the Buddhist tradition of meditation.

One of the names of Rosh Hashanah is Yom HaZikkaron, the day of remembrance. Traditionally, we understand this to mean that these days are days on which we remember God, and God remembers us. We ask to be remembered in the Book of Life for a good year. We try to remember the good deeds of the past year, and how we hope that these exceed our transgressions, which, with chagrin, we also remember.

Rabbi Lew reframes the idea of Yom HaZikkaron. Rather than remembrance, he says, we should refer to this day as the day of mindfulness. That on these days, we should be mindful of time, of where we have been and where we are going, and mutual awareness between us and the Qadosh Barukh Hu:

“If God were not aware of us, this whole pageant of teshuvah and forgiveness wouldn’t make much sense. Who would there be to return to? How could we ever be forgiven if there weren’t an awareness out there that knew precisely what we have done and how we feel about it now? And if Rosh Hashanah did not provide us with the perspective of heaven – with the opportunity to see ourselves with perfect clarity as if from the outside – how would we ever achieve this kind of clarity? How would we ever manage to get far enough outside ourselves to see ourselves accurately?” (p. 137)

Mindfulness, which some have translated into Hebrew as “Eranut,” drawn from the word ער, er, awake, is, of course, one of the portals of Derekh. It is an entry point to Judaism, an area in which we at Beth Shalom are now offering innovative activities for you. (E.g. meditation once per month on Shabbat mornings at 9 AM, starting in November.)

One traditional understanding in Judaism that may be help us to not be the wicked child, to see beyond the present, is the idea of the yetzer hatov and yetzer hara, which are usually translated as “the good inclination” and “the evil inclination.” But a more accurate traditional understanding of the yetzer hatov is, “the inclination to selflessness,” and the yetzer hara as “the inclination to selfishness.”

When we live only in the present moment, we are governed by our yetzer hara, the inclination to selfishness. On the other hand, when we successfully think about past and future, about lessons learned and potential consequences, about ancient and modern wisdom, we are being governed by our yetzer hatov, the inclination to selflessness. When we realize how our lives are intertwined with our community, how our fate is bound up with that of our fellow citizens, that is the yetzer hatov acting. That is when we see beyond the present moment, when we see the past and the future, and the betterment of others around us.

Hands Reaching Out Related Keywords & Suggestions - Hands ...

I am inclined to think that our knowledge and awareness of God on these days is reflected in a more practical way in our awareness of the individuals and society around us.

Now, that’s not an easy thing to do. But Judaism provides direction.

One of those things that help to bring out the yetzer hatov is tefillah / Jewish prayer. Prayer is a kind of mental training, similar to meditation or yoga. It is entering a mode of focus, of reciting an ancient formula that connects our hearts and minds to our hands and mouths. I love the meditative aspects of tefillah; that is one reason that I ask you to engage in some moments of silence and create some internal space to strive to hear the still, small voice of the Divine during the Amidah prayer – we want to give everybody in this room the opportunity to find that meditative focal point. If you feel unable to connect with the words on the written page, listen to that inner voice as your guide.

After prayer, the second thing of primary value in our tradition is Jewish text learning. “When I pray, I speak to God,” said Rabbi Louis Finkelstein, professor of Talmud and chancellor of the Jewish Theological Seminary, “When I study, God speaks to me.”

Think, for example, about the internal struggle reflected in the words of Hillel found in Pirkei Avot: “If I am not for myself, who will be for me? And If I am only for myself, what am I?” Those words from the Mishnah are more than 1800 years old. And yet they continue to echo in the challenge that we each face as we continue the daily struggle between the yetzer hatov and the yetzer hara, the inclinations to selflessness vs. selfishness.

To get to the best gems of rabbinic literature, you have to be open to reading and discussing the words of our tradition.

Even if you are ambivalent about traditional theology, or the idea of “organized religion” (You call this “organized”?!), the words of our tradition will speak to you, because they are not about God, per se. They are about humanity, about intellectual stimulation, about making this world a better place, about self-improvement. These words are about you, and about us.

In 2007 when I was completing rabbinical school and applying for jobs, I had an interview with a team from a large west coast congregation. Toward the end of the interview, they asked me the following:

“A congregant comes to you and says, ‘Rabbi, I feel as though I really need some spiritual engagement, but I work like a dog and I just can’t make it to synagogue on Shabbat. I need to go to the beach.’ What do you say to that person, Rabbi?”

3 Must See Beaches in Asia - Moonlight MileMoonlight Mile

I explained that, after trying unsuccessfully to get this theoretical Shabbat beach-goer to a Talmud class or a discussion on theology, I concluded that the only solution is to say, “Well, you should know that God is also at the beach.”

 

I did not get the job.

But I think the answer is not to answer Mr. Beach Guy at all. When he comes to me to ask the question, I have to grab him at that moment, sit him down with Pirkei Avot or the beginning of Massekhet Berakhot, the first tractate of the Talmud, and start learning right then and there. That is, to give him the perspective on the depth and richness of our ancient collected wisdom, something that many of us somehow missed in Hebrew school.

I think that we have no choice but to force ourselves to see beyond the present; to recall the past and prepare for the future. We have to let the words of our tradition infuse our lives, to let them draw us out of the app and into the operating system.

While it may be obvious that none of us wants to be the רשע, the wicked child, it is sometimes a lot harder for us to see beyond the present. But that is exactly what we need to do.

To read the next in the series, The Simple Child Sees Only the Past, click here.

Shanah tovah!

 

~

Rabbi Seth Adelson

(Originally delivered at Congregation Beth Shalom, second day of Rosh Hashanah 5778, 9/22/2017.)

Categories
High Holidays Sermons

חכם: The Wise Child Sees Past, Present, and Future – Rosh Hashanah 5778, Day 1

Shanah tovah! Welcome to 5778, and of course welcome to Beth Shalom as we continue to celebrate our 100th year.

You may recall that, two years ago, when I first stood before you at this moment, the first day of Rosh Hashanah 5776, I made a heartfelt confession as a way of introducing myself. I confessed that I know next to nothing about sports, and that I would not be able even to make cocktail-party-level conversation about what’s going on with the local teams.

So I now have some very good news. No, I have not been following the Pirates this summer (although I was there at the stadium for Jewish Heritage Night in August). But the good news is that since I have been in Pittsburgh, the Penguins have won the Stanley Cup two years running! Coincidence? I don’t think so.

One hundred years ago, long before there were Penguins in Pittsburgh, there was no rabbi to give a high holiday sermon in Squirrel Hill; there were only a handful of optimistic Jews who needed a place to daven (to pray), and set up over a store on Forbes. A century later, it is clear that we, that you have built something truly awesome. We will be celebrating by throwing the party of the century on November 11th, and I hope you will join us then – gala chairs Marlene Silverman and Bernice Meyers and the rest of the centennial team are cooking up something wonderful for that night.

So 5778 is a truly special year for this congregation. As such, I am framing this series of High Holiday sermons on past, present, and future. At the current moment, we are at one end of a lengthy time line. But there are thousands of years before us, and (we hope) thousands after us as well. 100 years, though it may seem like a lot to us, is really only a very small slice of the Jewish path through history.

Relive the Journey of Our First 100 Years!

So that’s a weighty thought. Here we are in 2017, the beginning of 5778. We are looking backward one century, and looking forward into the next. But really, we are at the nexus of a paradigm shift as to how we relate to Judaism. We have received thousands of years of tradition, and now it is our job to carry it forward, to make it our own and make sure that our children and grandchildren carry it as well. This is, in my mind, the primary reason we are gathered here today. This is the reason we have a synagogue. This is why we need Beth Shalom.

But the framework here is not only about past, present, and future. For the four sermons over these holidays, I am also going to borrow from another holiday, one that is a reflection of the High Holidays directly across the cycle of the year: Pesah / Passover, and specifically, the Arba’ah Banim, the Four Children. (I know the tradition is sons; I prefer the more egalitarian, non-gender specific “children.”) To refresh your memory, the Four Children are:

  • The Wise Child – חכם (hakham)
  • The Wicked Child – רשע (rasha)
  • The Simple Child – תם (tam)
  • The Child Who Does Not Know How to Ask – שאינו יודע לשאול (she-eino yode’a lish’ol)
From Arthur Szyk’s illustrated haggadah, 1939

How is it, you may ask, that I can just borrow a theme from a totally different part of the Jewish year? Simple: we do this all the time!

For example, there is a custom that some have of saving their lulav and etrog after Sukkot, allowing them to dry out, and using them to help burn the hametz on the day before Pesah. On Simhat Torah, there is the custom of using melodies from the entire Jewish year in the hatzi qaddish before Musaf (it’s called, in Yiddish, the “yareskadish,” the qaddish of the whole year. There is the custom that some have of wearing a kittel, the white robe that is traditionally worn on the High Holidays to suggest purity, at the Pesah seder. And so forth.

Our customs connect us across the Jewish year. Melding past, present, and future with the Four Children, we arrive at the following:

Today, I will speak about the wise child, the one who sees past, present, and future.

Tomorrow, I will speak about the wicked child, who sees only the present.

On the evening of Kol Nidrei, I will discuss the simple child, who sees only the past, and does not know how to connect it with the future.

And, on the day of Yom Kippur, I will focus on the child who does not know how to ask; that child is our future. And we have to show them the way in.

***

Today we consider the חכם, the wise child.

Stephen Hawking, in his work, A Brief History of Time, cites a familiar story about theories about the world:

A well-known scientist (some say it was Bertrand Russell) once gave a public lecture on astronomy. He described how the earth orbits around the sun and how the sun, in turn, orbits around the center of a vast collection of stars called our galaxy.

At the end of the lecture, a little old lady at the back of the room got up and said: “What you have told us is rubbish. The world is really a flat plate supported on the back of a giant tortoise.”

The scientist gave a superior smile before replying, “What is the tortoise standing on?” “You’re very clever, young man, very clever,” said the old lady. “But it’s turtles all the way down!”

Perched up here in 5778 / 2017, looking down at all the turtles supporting us, or better, at the giants of our history upon whose shoulders we stand, we have the benefit of hindsight. We have a sense about where we have been. And, like wise children, we will take the lessons of the past, apply them in the present, and thereby shape the future.

What has brought us to this day is the past. But as we stand here in the present, we must look toward the future. The future is in innovation – the kind of innovation that will help lead us onward while strengthening the roots that connect us to our tradition.

And the cynical among us might ask, “Why should we care about our tradition?” Because we need it. And I am going to make the case over these holidays for how we will move forward – standing on the shoulders of giants, as it were, creating the innovation of the future, and helping you to find your way in.

The Past

What makes Judaism so special is that we continue to acknowledge the depth and breadth of our past. You may be familiar with the popular, witty summary of every Jewish holiday: “They tried to kill us; we survived; let’s eat.” Cute, yes. Accurate? Well, not really.

Jewish history, our national story, continues to inform us; we continue to learn how to be better people, how to improve ourselves and our relationships from the lessons of history.

My family has recently become obsessed with the soundtrack for the Broadway musical Hamilton; its success has as much to do with Lin-Manuel Miranda’s hip-hop grooves as it does with the eternally-valid lessons of history.

How did we get here? To paraphrase (badly) the opening lines of Hamilton (if you’re reading this on the blog, please imagine a tall, skinny, white rabbi trying to rap):

How did a worn-out, ragtag bunch of former slaves

emerge from the desert a new nation,

to give to the world the most meaningful,

the most magical,

the most awe-inspiring long-lasting story ever written?

How did we outlast the Romans, the Babylonians, the Assyrian Empire, the Crusaders?

Was it because of ritual?

Was it because of commitment to Torah?

Was it because of bagels? Or a prodigious talent for comedy?

(OK, so I’m not much of a rapper.)

The answer is, of course, is not simple; there is no particular moment or item that we can point to and say, “Aha! There it is. That’s the reason we are still here.”

At the very least, there are three dates in Jewish history that you should memorize. And I’m going to pretend that the wall behind me is our time line. (Did I mention how much I love time lines?):

  • 586 BCE, the destruction of the first Temple by the Babylonians;
  • 70 CE destruction of the second Temple by the Romans; and
  • 1948, establishment of the State of Israel.
  • 1492, the Expulsion from Spain, is a bonus.

And of these four dates, one is a wee bit more special than the others. One particular moment in history, one cataclysm that spawned a paradigm shift that forced innovative thinking, enabling us to survive until today. That change was the destruction of the Second Temple by the Romans in 70 CE.

What happened in the Temple was NOT what we think of as Judaism today; our ancestors practiced, until about 2,000 years ago, an ancient form of animal sacrifice, coordinated by a priestly class, the Kohanim and Leviim. The way you expressed your gratitude to God or sought atonement for your transgressions was by bringing animals or grain to be sacrificed by the priests on the altar. There were no synagogues and few rituals that could be performed without a kohen. Everything in Jewish life was centrally controlled in Jerusalem and rigidly hierarchical.

The Second Temple in Jerusalem, detail from the model at the Israel Museum

So what did the Romans do? By destroying the Temple, by putting an end to the sacrifices performed there by our ancestors, they caused us to rethink who we are and what we do. They created a situation in which everything that the Jews had known up to that time about God and the Torah became suddenly irrelevant.

But while the Romans thought that they had crushed the Jews and Judaism, the joke’s on them, because we’re still here, and where are they?

The Jews had no choice but to create a new framework. That is the framework that ultimately was written down in volumes you find on the Jewish bookshelf:  in the Talmud, the midrash, the Torah commentaries, the medieval halakhic codes of Jewish law, and so forth. The Romans are long gone. But by burning Jerusalem and ultimately banning Jews from living there, they caused us to re-invent ourselves, and make it such that our tradition was no longer top-down, no longer specific to one particular mountain in the Middle East, no longer in the hands of a privileged few.

Judaism became open to the Jews. The regular folks. And, in some sense, the rest of the world as well. The events of 70 CE enabled us to create a system in which we were bound not to an ancient sacrificial altar, but contained within the “arba amot shel halakhah,” the four cubits / six feet of personal space in which we each carry out our tradition as individuals. That system is what we know as Judaism today; it is what we refer to as “rabbinic Judaism” – the Judaism that was created and led by rabbis, not kohanim. Rabbis are decidedly NOT priests; they are teachers.

So the last two millennia of Jewish life, of rabbinic Judaism, have been dedicated to the ongoing project linking our hearts and minds; of learning and interpreting our texts and creating personal and communal rituals. This 2,000-year project of fashioning Judaism after the Temple has been about finding a way to connect the Torah with how and where we live, how we treat ourselves, others, and the world, day after day.

The most wonderful secret of the pages of the Talmud is that the lessons to be found therein crackle today with vibrancy. Jewish texts provide a framework for life that has worked for these two millennia. Our tradition is rich with advice on how to live and improve our lives and our relationships, ideas that still apply today.

Just a small taste, straight out of the Mishnah, Avot 4:1:

.איזה הוא מכובד? המכבד את הברייות

Eizehu mekhubad? Hamekhabed et haberiyot.

Who is honored? The one who honors all of God’s creatures.

Imagine what a spectacular world we would live in if all of us went through life remembering that every other person, every other living thing, and even the earth itself deserved honor and respect? Imagine what this world could be like if we took to heart the kedushah, the holiness all around us?

This is only one tiny but resonant example. We are all inheritors of a wonderful, rich, inspiring tradition. It’s all there if you reach out. The past is part of our present. The novelist William Faulkner said, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” And he was not even Jewish.

Our past is not past; it is our future.

The Future

The Jewish future in America depends on two things: our willingness to open those ancient books, and our willingness to accept change. Because as much as many of us are committed to this – this building, this mode of worship, this siddur – the Jewish future will require us to recommit to the most essential mitzvah of Jewish life: Talmud Torah: learning the words of our tradition.

The events of 70 CE were a paradigm shift in Jewish life. And we are on the verge of another shift. The Information Age may not change the value of our ancient texts, but it has certainly already made their dissemination easier. And we all have the potential to benefit in ways that our parents and grandparents could not.

To be wise children, we have to take the past and make it the future. We have to think about what comes next.

As you may recall from just about anything you might have heard me say over the last two years, the time is now for us to be rethinking what we do as Jews. Gone are the days when people would simply join a synagogue because, well, that’s what you did. Today, we have to continually make the case for what involvement in Jewish life will give you. We have to show the world that being a part of a synagogue community, learning the words of Jewish tradition, and engaging with our customs and rituals will enrich your life, will strengthen your relationships, will bring you a greater sense of appreciation and satisfaction and will better our world.

So what will it take to be innovative? Well, we have already begun. As you may know, we have just begun to build, in conjunction with our Centennial fundraising campaign, the new set of programming offerings known as Derekh, meaning literally, “the way.”

We have hired Rabbi Jeremy Markiz, who is also our director of Youth Tefillah, to get this program off the ground, to fashion the entry points into our tradition. The whole idea, of course, is to make the synagogue essential to your life, to help you find your way into our tradition, to help you discover the various ways that Judaism can benefit you individually and communally.

Derekh is our engine of innovation; it is the means by which we will be wise children, seeing past, present, and future. We will be using the new technologies at our disposal to reach out better. We will be thinking creatively about new ways to reach you, and to engage the people who are not in this room. We will be offering new means to connect to Jewish text, to Jewish culture, to social action, to Israel, and to the mindfulness that our tradition teaches.

derekh logo - high quality

Today’s Beth Shalom is firmly rooted in our 100-year history, and the 2,000-or-so year history of rabbinic Judaism. But tomorrow’s Beth Shalom will rely on your willingness to embrace innovation, to consider new paths in Jewish life, and to invest yourself in building this community.

I want you to reach higher. I want you to come around for something you do not usually do. Come join me for a lunch and learn discussion on a Jewish philosopher that you should know. Have coffee with me or with Rabbi Jeremy to discuss building community. Take advantage of all the monthly beit midrash programs, in which you’ll learn about the ancient wisdom which continues to guide us. Come learn with scholars from the whole community in JJEP’s adult learning programs. Come to the new early Shabbat morning program (on non-benei mitzvah days) at 9 AM, in which we will offer a rotating offering of meditation, niggun singing, and text study. Watch for an upcoming film series. Check out a weekend retreat. Check out the range of short videos we are putting out through the Beth Shalom Facebook page. We’ll be putting together a trip to Israel as we begin our next 100 years.

We have so much new stuff going on, and I promise you that it will be informative, connective, and worth your time. Join us.

So even as we recall all the turtles supporting us, even as we invoke and cherish what our ancestors have given us, even as we celebrate 100 years, we have to reach higher. We have to be the חכם, the wise child.

I am, in some sense, throwing down the gauntlet. Here is a challenge to you: let’s make this community sparkle with all the illumination that our ancient texts still shed. Come find your way in.

To read the next in the series, The Wicked Child Sees Only the Present, click here.

Shanah tovah!

 

~

(Originally delivered at Congregation Beth Shalom, first day of Rosh Hashanah 5778, 9/21/2017.)

Categories
Sermons

No Justice, No Peace – Ki Tetse 5777

Last Monday, Rabbi Jeremy and I were fortunate to be able to attend a local interfaith commemoration of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s Aug 28 1963 March on Washington. Faith leaders from all over the region gathered at the JCC to learn together and share sermons about the need for justice in our society today, a need that is as great as it was 54 years ago when Dr. King gave his most famous speech. Dr. King’s dream is still alive; it is, of course, unfulfilled. 169 local priests, ministers, rabbis, and imams signed a joint declaration, which we read at the ceremony, re-affirming our obligations as clergy to fight hatred and to stand together for compassion and inclusion.

... Who Refused to Celebrate the 50th Anniversary of March on Washington

This section of Devarim / Deuteromony is all about justice. It begins with the statement in last week’s parashah, “Tzedeq, tzedeq tirdof,” “Justice: you shall pursue justice,” (that’s my translation), and the Torah’s requirement to appoint impartial judges and law enforcement officers. The thread of justice continued this week with an assortment of other commandments that maintain the holiness in human relationships. For example, the obligation to pay a day laborer promptly and not take advantage of him (Deut. 24:14), or the commandment not to despise the foreigner among you, because we know what it’s like to be foreigners (23:8). We have to allow needy people to pick up produce that has fallen to the ground, and otherwise glean from our fields (24:19, e.g.), but they are not allowed to take more than their share (23:25).

We have an obligation to make sure that our society is a just one. And, as Maimonides explains at the end of the Moreh Nevukhim, the Guide for the Perplexed, the mitzvot (holy opportunities derived from the Torah) are there not only for us to fulfill, but also for us to extrapolate moral behavior according to the spirit of the law. This principle is known in Hebrew as “lifnim mishurat hadin,” that we should behave within the line of the law. So yes, having a just society means setting up legitimate courts, honest weights and measures, and making sure that some of your  produce is set aside for the poor; these are all explicit in the Torah. But extending that line, creating a just society also means that we have an obligation to step forward in the event that your leadership does not. It means that we each have a personal responsibility to make sure that our society is just, and we might fulfill that by supporting organizations that protect the right of everybody to vote, for example, or by making sure that our laws do not discriminate against individuals on the basis of race, gender, religion, and so forth, or by working to ensure that our public schools offer a worthy education to all who enter.

There has been much recent concern over public statues that feature people who stood for abhorrent things, like slavery. This was, of course, part of the back-story for the events that took place in Charlottesville, VA a few weeks back. I think that there are certainly good arguments for taking down statues to Confederate leaders.

But there is also another way. What do we do with the symbols of an unseemly past? We teach. We talk about them. We study.

There are many such examples in our siddur (prayerbook). To cite just one, consider the image of resurrection that is featured in the second berakhah of the Amidah, the standing prayer that we recite each day. Yes, you heard that right: resurrection. When we say, “Barukh Attah Adonai, mehayye hameitim,” we are saying, praised are You, God, who brings the dead back to life. It is a paean to the ancient understanding that when the Anointed One, the mashiah (messiah) comes, faithful Jews will be resurrected and get on El Al flights to return to Israel, which will be united again under the kingship of a descendant of King David. In today’s Jewish world, some groups have elevated classical messianism to the point where it is an essential part of their theology, despite the fact that no such idea exists in the Torah.

But messianism has always been an uncomfortable area for contemporary Jews, including your faithful rabbinic correspondent. We don’t treat each other justly for some eschatological reward (something to which we can look forward at the end of times). Rather we treat each other justly because it is the right thing to do in the here and now, that the reward comes from elevating the qedushah / holiness in our relationships.

And so, while the Reform movement replaced “mehayye hameitim” with “mehayye hakol,” restoring life to all, we in the Conservative movement say the original text, while reinterpreting the berakhah to mean that God is the source of all life. It does not have to be about messianic resurrection; it can be about how God works as a force in nature all around us, providing the spirit that nourishes all of us in life and in death. We take our traditional text and reinterpret the words, thereby conserving the tradition and making it work with our contemporary values.

But of course, that requires explanation, and you will find one if you look in the margin of Siddur Lev Shalem on a page with the Amidah (e.g. p. 186). In the Conservative movement, we have a long and glorious history of re-interpretation. So the message for today is, whether we take down statues or not, let’s make sure that we make our interpretation explicit.

Let’s make sure that every child knows that slavery was deeply wrong, that racism is wrong, that anti-Semitism is wrong, that anti-immigrant-ism is wrong. Let’s make sure that our elected officials and judges and law enforcement officers do not unfairly target people with different skin color. Let’s make sure that we acknowledge the divinity in EVERY human being, the Godly spark that motivates us all to do good for each other in this world.

It is a long-standing Jewish tradition to recite a prayer for the secular authorities of the jurisdiction in which we live. (One of the most interesting features of old siddurim is to find the prayer for the emperor of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, or, as referenced in Fiddler on the Roof, a blessing for the czar and/or czarina).

Week after week we pray for our country, that of the United States of America. They are roughly the same words that we have been saying for many years (Lev Shalem, p. 177).

We are living in a time in which many people are in pain. Many in our this great and prosperous nation are suffering from disenfranchisement, from the scourge of readily-available, inexpensive addictive drugs, from the cycles of poverty which afflict us from generation to generation, from the growing gap between rich and poor, from the closing of steel mills and coal mines to the looming threat of unemployment from self-driving cars and trucks and the coming automation of, well, everything. We are frustrated by stagnant wages and the outrageous cost of health care. We are frightened at the prospect of emboldened racists and anti-Semites parading through our streets, and the attendant regression in race relations. We are once again roiled by the fear of immigrants in our midst. We are living in a time of great philosophical divide in our country, and the reluctance to compromise on a range of issues.

As the center of American Judaism, we have what to teach the world about these things. We, particularly as Conservative Jews, understand listening to all sides, left and right. We understand the value of maintaining tradition while reinterpreting and explaining for today to reflect contemporary sensibilities.

In our prayer for the country, we said the following:

Help [the inhabitants of this country] understand the rules of justice You have decreed, so that peace and security, happiness and freedom, will never depart from our land.

If there were ever a time that we needed those words, it would be right now. If there were ever a time in which we needed those ideals, it is the current moment. And so we have to get out there and teach our Torah, our values.

To have peace, happiness, freedom, and security, we need justice. And justice requires thoughtful reflection, to making sure that the choices we make will ultimately support the institutions that we have set in place. We cannot respond out of hatred and fear of the other. We cannot support authority figures who seek only to destroy institutions and prop up the bigotry-mongers. We cannot violate the sacred ideals of democracy and individual protections which immigrants to this great nation have sought for centuries. We have to make sure that our leaders follow not only the rule of law, but also the spirit. Lifnim mishurat hadin.

Image may contain: one or more people, crowd, sky, tree and outdoor

We have the potential to reignite those values. Because, in the words of Pirqei Avot (the 2nd-century collection of ancient rabbinic wisdom), “Im lo akhshav, eimatai?” If not now, when?

 

~

Rabbi Seth Adelson

(Originally delivered at Congregation Beth Shalom, Shabbat morning, 9/2/2017.)