Month: October 2017

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Sermons

The Power of #metoo – Lekh Lekha 5778

I am grateful to be the spiritual leader for a large and growing congregation. I am always honored to be there for people in need, members who are grieving, congregants who need guidance. It is a very special part of my work that few see, but that gives me a great amount of satisfaction with my job.

Frankly, I hope that Harvey Weinstein has gone to his rabbi for counseling.

I concede up front that it is far too easy for me to say from this comfortable position that Mr. Weinstein, and a host of other celebrities who have recently been named in similar incidents, need to do some teshuvah, to seek repentance. Perhaps Mr. Weinstein should have spent more time learning some of the messages of our tradition regarding respect for others.

Harvey Weinstein's A-list accusers come out, Gwyneth Paltrow and Angelina Jolie recount their ...

But what are those messages, exactly? And here we encounter a slight difficulty.

Whenever possible, I try to remind Jews of the essential value of Jewish tradition, the most fundamental aspect of Jewish life and learning: that our ancient wisdom teaches us to elevate the holiness in our relationships with others. That the primary benefit to learning the words of our tradition is that they will improve our marriages, our friendships, our work/life balance, our parenting insight, and our society.

But sometimes, the way that some of the female characters are treated in the Torah does not match our understanding of human relationships today. Times have changed; gender roles have changed. And so, we have to read the Torah with contemporary eyes, sensitive to the way that these stories might be read today.

Most of these tales hit the cutting-room floor in Hebrew school, edited for the sake of decency, or for the complexity of trying to explain them. But to me they speak of two things:

  1. There is no human experience that is not captured in our holy texts.
  2. We have to continue to learn not only from the admirable traits of our ancestors, but also from their failures.

Consider the unnamed wife of Noah, from last week’s parashah, who must have been a saint to have managed 40 days and 40 nights of human and animal chaos, but is barely acknowledged in the story of the tevah / ark. For everything that she did, she gets no credit. (Gen. 6-8)

https://68.media.tumblr.com/c5f62373ac20f9da15070b7ef827df7b/tumblr_mzo9z22Pb91sjkt9jo1_500.jpg

Or the tale of our matriarch Sarah, who has no choice but to be taken into the harem of the Egyptian Pharaoh with the apparent blessing of her husband Avraham so that he can save himself. (Lekh Lekha, Gen. 12:10-20)

Or the story of Lot’s wife, also nameless, who exercises some individual agency in looking back in pain and/or longing at her home town as it is destroyed in fire and brimstone, and is punished for it. (Vayyera, Gen. 19:23-26).

Or the story of Jacob’s only daughter Dinah, taken by force by Shekhem the Canaanite and slurred in the Torah as a yatz’anit, effectively a streetwalker, in what amounts to a classic case of blaming the victim. (Gen. 34)

Or the tale of Tamar, daughter-in-law of Judah, who is denied Judah’s third son after his first two die, in violation of the Torah’s law of the levirate marriage. In desperation, Tamar resorts to dressing as a cultic prostitute to fool Judah into lying with her himself, arguably a foil to Judah’s “male privilege.” (Gen. 38).

And we also should not forsake an obvious case of harassment in the Torah, the tale of Yosef, who is coerced by the wife of his employer Potiphar in Egypt, and imprisoned when he does not fulfill her desire. (Gen. 39).

For most of Jewish history, nobody read these stories as being about “blaming the victim” or “male privilege.” But we are living in different times. One principle, which you have all heard me say by now, is that we have to read the Torah in the context of today, as a text that brings meaning to how we live right now.

A few weeks back, when the accusations against him began to emerge as numerous women came forward, Harvey Weinstein stated, “I came of age in the 60’s and 70’s, when all the rules about behavior and workplaces were different. That was the culture then. I have since learned it’s not an excuse…”

When I read that, I had two thoughts: (a) many decades have passed since the 1970s; did it really take him this long to get the message? And (b) the changing of the times and what is acceptable behavior is something that we, the Jews, are acutely aware of.

Jews have survived for thousands of years precisely because rabbinic Judaism, our belief system as conceived by the rabbis of the Talmud, was conceived to be malleable.  From generation to generation we have been charged with reviewing our tradition and figuring out how to apply them in every new age.

You might even make the case that it is the series of changes that have made us who we are today: the Babylonian Exile in 586 BCE. The destruction of the Second Temple by the Romans in 70 CE. The paradigm shift from Israelite religion and sacrifices to study and prayer of rabbinic Judaism. The expulsion from Spain. The establishment of the State of Israel. Each of these reshaped the contours of the Jewish world dramatically.

And when was the very first such change? In Parashat Lekh Lekha, which we read from today. At the beginning of the parashah, Avraham was given the command to pick up and leave his homeland and his family behind and head from Mesopotamia to Canaan, which would ultimately be known by the name given to his grandson, Israel. But it’s not yet Israel, and Avraham cannot properly be called an Israelite. Instead, he was referred to today (Gen. 14:13) as “Avram ha’Ivri,” Abram the Hebrew. It’s the first time that anybody is given this label.

There are midrashim that suggest etymologies of the Hebrew word for “Hebrew,” that is, “עברי” / “ivri.” It comes from the shoresh / root meaning “to cross over.” Avraham is the first ivri, the first Hebrew, because he crossed over the river Euphrates to get to Canaan, but also because he crossed over from an idolatrous society to a monotheistic one.

We are the people who have metaphorically crossed many rivers to get to where we are today, and every time we do so, things change: language, dress, foods, of course, but also, society changes; what is socially acceptable changes; the understanding of gender continues to change.

What has not changed is that our tradition understands that each of us has a certain spark of the Divine within us; that every person deserves love and respect; that there are good, solid reasons for boundaries in our behavior, boundaries that protect the qedushah / holiness that exists between us in all our relationships.

The Talmud teaches us (BT Sanhedrin 82a):

כל מקום שיש חילול השם אין חולקין כבוד לרב

Wherever the desecration of God’s name [hillul hashem] is involved, one does not show respect to the teacher.

It comes in the context of a discussion of prohibited liaisons. The suggestion is that, no matter the power or rank or knowledge of the transgressor, the subordinate is forbidden to allow inappropriate behavior to continue; rather, the teacher or manager or politician or celebrity must be called to account for his/her actions.

God help us if “the casting couch” at which Mr. Weinstein hinted in his statement was at one time considered acceptable in Hollywood or anywhere else. The very idea is revolting. Such behavior can only be described with the rabbinic term, “hillul hashem,” a desecration of God’s name.

But if we are to truly prevent people from the kinds of abuse that have been splashed across headlines in recent weeks, we have to make sure that the abusers know that those whom they abuse will not be silent. We have to ensure that the power dynamics that enabled Mr. Weinstein and others to do what they have done to so many is eclipsed by the strength of #metoo, by the strength of knowing that if all of us speak up, then the power of the abuser is broken. That those of us who have been abused can take the control away from the abusers.

We cannot be rendered anonymous and silent, like Noah’s wife, or powerless like Sarah; we cannot allow people to be shamed, like Dinah, or forced into desperate situations like Tamar, or harassed like Joseph.

Instead, we have to stand up and raise our voices. To say, “Me too.” “Gam ani.” To make sure the abusers of this world are cast out of the shadows and into the light. To make sure that the young women (and young men) who are called to the Torah this year are not victims in the next.

And whatever happens with Harvey Weinstein, I just hope that he has an opportunity to reflect on the words of our tradition, about changing times, and about how his actions have caused such damage to so many.

If you have been a victim or know somebody who has, speak up, even if it is just a phone call to the right person. I or my assistant Audrey can put you in touch with somebody who can help. Change does not happen overnight, but Ani veAtah neshaneh et ha’olam – you and I will change the world.

 

~

Rabbi Seth Adelson

(Originally delivered at Congregation Beth Shalom, Shabbat morning, 10/28/2017.)

Categories
Sermons

The Divinity of Vulnerability – Bereshit 5778

The holidays are over; we have concluded three weeks of introspection, of asking for forgiveness from God and each other, of celebrating and building and dancing and eating and praying and so forth.

You might be inclined to think that the High Holiday season ended yesterday, when we paraded the Torah and danced and sang with abandon. A better case could be made that they actually ended on Wednesday morning, on Hoshanah Rabbah, when we marched seven times around the chapel with our lulavim and etrogim, and then beat willow branches on the floor until the leaves came off, chanting three times, “Qol mevasser, mevasser ve-omer,” “A voice proclaims, proclaims and says.”

‫הושענא רבה - נוסח חבאן (בי"כ מפעי, מושב ברקת, תשס"א ...

Says what? A curious statement, indeed. The piyyut, the liturgical poem that features these lines in the siddur / prayerbook is incomplete; there is no direct object to the two verbs, mevasser (proclaims) and omer (says).

The line seems to reference a passage in Isaiah (52:7) heralding redemption.* But why did the author of this poem in the siddur, El’azar ben Qillir, the 6th-7th century CE Palestinian payyetan, leave off what it is that the voice is announcing?**

Well, I’m going to propose an answer: that the mysterious voice is God’s (OK, not such a stretch), the still, small voice (I Kings 19:12) that will guide us as we move forward into the new year, and yet reminds us of the vulnerability that we emphasize on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. It is this vulnerability, after all, in which you may find the Divine spark that makes us at once profoundly human and yet Godly. And the origin of this vulnerability is to be found in Parashat Bereshit, which we read today.

The fourth most-viewed TED Talk of all time (videos of short, inspirational lectures, usually by people who are not celebrities) features the “researcher-storyteller” Dr. Brené Brown, and is titled, “The Power of Vulnerability.” Has anybody here seen it? Dr. Brown is a professor in the social work school at the University of Houston. Some of her research has been devoted to recording and analyzing people’s stories of shame and vulnerability.

She speaks of her own fear of being vulnerable, and how, while she is trying to manage this fear, her research reveals that it is, in fact, embracing being open and vulnerable that makes us feel worthy, that makes us live, as she says, “wholeheartedly.”

Among the wisdom revealed by her research, we find the following gems:

  • Our essential goal is connection. The ability to feel connected is what gives us purpose and meaning in our lives.
  • Shame is the fear of disconnection.
  • People who have a strong sense of love and belonging feel that they are worthy of love and belonging, and the way to achieve this is to expose your vulnerability, to embrace it, to allow your true self to be seen.

Dr. Brown’s point is that we as a society tend to misunderstand the importance of vulnerability. None of us is perfect; that we leave for God. But it is, in fact, our vulnerability that makes us strong; it is our vulnerability that makes us attractive to others, the willingness to pursue love, careers, parenting, and other types of human relationships despite our fears of failure and rejection.

And that is one of the primary messages of Bereshit – that we are not perfect. We are not immortal. Rather, we are human. We are fundamentally flawed.*** When we lose Eden, we learn the extent of our vulnerability. What does God say to Adam as he and Eve are being shooed out of the Garden? We read this a little while ago:

אֲרוּרָה הָאֲדָמָה, בַּעֲבוּרֶךָ, בְּעִצָּבוֹן תֹּאכְלֶנָּה, כֹּל יְמֵי חַיֶּיךָ

Cursed be the ground because of you;

By toil shall you eat of it

All the days of your life…

By the sweat of your brow

Shall you get bread to eat,

Until you return to the ground —

For from it you were taken. (Gen. 3:17-19)

Henceforward, says God, human life will be difficult. Nothing will be provided for us; we must work hard to eat, to live, to love. And we will try and fail, try and fail again. We will try to plant wheat, and thorns and thistles will grow instead. We will reach out to others for love and be rejected. We will work hard at making senior partner, only to be passed over.

This is, of course, from the second Creation story, the more human of the two, Gen. 2:4b ff. The first story (Gen. 1:1 – 2:4a) is about order: six days of God admiring God’s own perfect work, and then resting. Shabbat is today that aftertaste of perfection, a little hint of the Garden of Eden here in Pittsburgh and everywhere else for 25 hours every week.

But the other six days are days of toil and suffering. And that is what makes us human. We are subject to the elements, to the economy, to the vagaries of human relationships, to political forces, and so on. We are vulnerable.

But wait a minute. Didn’t God make us this way? Is not our tendency to feel shame also Divine?

When Adam and Eve eat fruit from the tree of knowledge of good and evil, they suddenly realize that they are not wearing clothes. And what happens? They feel ashamed. They feel vulnerable. Recognizing this new emotion in the creatures God has created, the Qadosh Barukh Hu asks them (Gen. 3:11), “Mi higid lekha ki eirom atah?” “Who told you that you were naked?”

Rashi glosses this verse as follows: “Me-ayin lekha lada’at mah boshet yesh be-omed arom? Ha-min ha-etz?!” “From where did you learn what shame there is in standing naked? From the tree?!”

That’s when they start pointing fingers, blaming each other and the serpent to alleviate their shame. (Dr. Brown: “blame” is defined in the relevant academic literature as, “a way to discharge pain and discomfort.”)

Of course it was not from the tree. Shame was also created by God in those first six days of ostensibly “perfect” Creation.

So when Adam and Eve lose paradise, and are told that they are on their own, that fundamental vulnerability comes from God. It is Divine. It is the essential piece of humanity, the finishing flourish, if you will, of Creation.

So what is the voice proclaiming at the end of the holiday season? Embrace that God-given vulnerability. That is what the Yamim Nora’im, the High Holidays, are all about: we are frail, we need help. And carry that sense of frailty into the rest of the year. Live with it, because it will make you more wholehearted.

Dr. Brené Brown concludes her talk by pointing out that the way that we deal with our vulnerability is by trying to numb it through addictive behaviors. “We are the most in-debt, obese, addicted, and medicated adult cohort in US history,” she says.

But the problem with this is that you cannot selectively numb particular emotions, and so we have also numbed our ability to experience joy, gratitude, and happiness, and this has led to a whole host of other social ills. We are increasingly isolated, increasingly certain and inflexible in our beliefs, increasingly willing to assign blame rather than accept who we are.

She offers that what we need to be teaching our children is, it’s OK to be imperfect. It’s OK to be flawed and wired for struggle, but you are worthy of love and belonging. I would append to this the idea that God created us that way, way back in Bereshit / Genesis.

During Sukkot, we “invite” key figures in Jewish folklore to come and sit with us in our sukkah, in a ceremony known as Ushpizin. We call on Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, Moses, Aaron, David, Sarah, Rebecca, Leah, Rachel, Miriam, Deborah, and Ruth to honor us with their presence. But we often forget that these characters were human, and hence imperfect. Abraham twice identified his wife Sarah as his sister, because he was afraid of being killed. Sarah laughed when promised a son late in life. Moses was ashamed of what may have been a stutter. Aaron made the Molten Calf, for crying out loud! And David, the great King David, slept with his neighbor’s wife and then had her husband killed in battle, because he was ashamed. These were flawed people!

Love and I love on Pinterest

But they lived with their vulnerabilities. They are on display for all to see in the stories of the Tanakh. And we too must embrace our own insecurities, and raise our children to accept their shortcomings. Nobody’s perfect, my friends. Qol mevasser, mevasser ve-omer. Remember the still, small voice, calling out from the New Year. The imperfection within us is Divine; now get out there and be proudly vulnerable.

~

Rabbi Seth Adelson

(Delivered at Congregation Beth Shalom, Shabbat morning, 10/14/2017.)

* Isaiah 52:7, a verse that we read over the summer in the Fourth Haftarah of Consolation:

מַה-נָּאווּ עַל-הֶהָרִים רַגְלֵי מְבַשֵּׂר, מַשְׁמִיעַ שָׁלוֹם מְבַשֵּׂר טוֹב–מַשְׁמִיעַ יְשׁוּעָה; אֹמֵר לְצִיּוֹן, מָלַךְ אֱ-לֹהָיִךְ

How welcome on the mountain

Are the footsteps of the herald

Announcing happiness,

Heralding good fortune,

Announcing victory,

Telling Zion, “Your God is King!”

** Yes, if you study the words of the piyyut / liturgical poem carefully, you will find that it speaks of “various prophetic descriptions of apocalyptic events in the end of days,” (Reuven Hammer, Or Hadash: A Commentary on Siddur Sim Shalom for Shabbat and Festivals, p. 211). But the repeated lines at the beginning and the end are incomplete, and we repeat them five times.

*** Please note that while some Christian denominations point to this episode as the source of “original sin,” Judaism reads the first few chapters of Bereshit / Genesis differently. God did not create humans to be immortal, and the first humans were not perfect. In other words, the expulsion from the Garden was inevitable, like the classic arc of tragedy.

Categories
Festivals Sermons

Ani Ma’amin / I Believe – Shemini Atzeret 5778

We are in difficult times. Wildfires. Hurricanes. A horrific mass shooting. A president who thrives on insults and can’t distinguish between Nazis and “fine people.”

I’m going to talk today about faith, about commitment to our spiritual tradition, in the context of challenging times. Ani Ma’amin. I believe.

Belief is a funny thing. My sense is that we don’t believe in too much today, do we? We like our distance, our cool, reserved, “let’s wait and see” stance.

How many of us believe so strongly in something that we can actually put ourselves into it bodily? How many of us fully invest ourselves in a cause, for example, that we’re actually out in the streets, marching? How many of us feel so strongly about our tradition that we commit to the actions of the tradition, rather than merely checking the “High Holiday” or “Yizkor” box?

There is really no greater figure on the Jewish bookshelf than Rabbi Moshe ben Maimon, aka Maimonides, aka Rambam. He lived in the 12th century, primarily in Egypt, and wrote two major works: the Mishneh Torah, and the Moreh Nevukhim, the Guide for the Perplexed. These two works come at Judaism from two different perspectives. The Moreh Nevukhim is written for the skeptic, the one who has not yet bought into the idea of Judaism. It’s written to try to initiate the uninitiated; it presents the meaning of our rituals and customs and texts with an eye to inspiring connection. It is written in Judeo-Arabic, the language of the Jews of Egypt of the 12th century.

Spain - Cordoba - statue of the Jewish scholar Maimonides ...
Statue of Maimonides in Cordoba, Spain

The Mishneh Torah, on the other hand, is a halakhic guide. Its title means, literally, the second Torah, boldly titled to almost suggest that if you read this book, you would not need to read the original Torah. It’s for the already-convinced, the committed Jew who wants to know how to do Judaism properly. It’s for the one who throws his or her whole body and heart and mind into it. It’s written in beautiful, crisp medieval Hebrew, easily understandable to those who have studied our essential tongue.

Sitting next to each other on the shelf, what might this suggest about the Jews that Rambam knew in 12th-century Cairo? Certainly, the Mishneh Torah suggests that there were some Jews who were committed to halakhah and wanted to know more, wanted to know from a master interpreter of our tradition what exactly makes a sukkah kosher, or what Psalms to recite for Hallel. But the Moreh Nevukhim, The Guide for the Perplexed, suggests that there were many that were not yet ready to believe, not yet ready to commit.

Having just completed the odyssey of the Yamim Nora’im, the High Holidays, I must say that I find it extraordinarily ironic that one of the best-known piyyutim (liturgical poems) of those days is “Vekhol Ma’aminim.” It includes a litany of statements about God that “all [of us] believe.” And yet, I know that in the sanctuary on those days, there are many who do not believe – do not buy into fundamental traditional understandings of our tradition, of Jewish theology, of the halakhic system, of mitzvot, and so forth. Many of us do not believe, even some of us who are singing along.

Whenever we say the word “amen,” we are saying, I am in a state of faith with you. I believe.

But tefillah, prayer, is not a portrait of what is; it is a vision of what could be. So it’s certainly possible to be in a state of faith that tefillah helps us along the path to building that vision. And that’s certainly where I am.

I believe in the power of Judaism to change your life. I believe in the richness of wisdom that is found in our ancient texts. I believe in the holy spark that may be found in all people, and in all of God’s creation. I believe in the power of that force that flows around and through us that we refer to as the Qadosh Barukh Hu, the Holy Blessed One, to change us and to change the world.

Maybe that makes me an outlier. But it puts me in good company.

A few years back, Elie Wiesel was featured at a performance at the 92nd St. Y in New York. He told a story about how his mother, who came from a well-known family of Vizhnitzer Hasidim, brought him on one Shabbat in 1943 to the court of the Vizhnitzer Rebbe. Elie was 15, and although rumors had reached his home town, Sighet, Romania, about what the Nazis were doing to Jews in Poland, nobody knew for certain.

Elie Wiesel: 1928-2016

Also there on that Shabbat was a nephew of the Vizhnitzer Rebbe, a young man who had been in Nazi-occupied Poland, but managed to find his way back Vizhnitz, in the Ukraine. The Hasidim there that Shabbat pressed him for information, but he would not say a thing. He simply could not tell them what he had likely seen: the ghettos, the Einsatzgruppen, SS mobile killing squads, rail transports to death camps in cattle cars, and so on. On all these things, the young man was silent. Instead, he only sang. He sang the words of Ani Ma’amin, Maimonides’ fundamental statement of faith in the coming of the mashiah. But embedded in the words, and in the melody, was the message that they needed to maintain faith despite the coming cataclysm:

(You can hear the recording of Elie Wiesel singing this song by clicking here.)

אני מאמין
באמונה שלמה
בביאת המשיח
ואף על פי שיתמהמה
עם כל זה אחכה לו
בכל יום שיבוא

Ani ma-amin
Be-emunah shelemah
Bevi-at hamashiah
Ve-af al pi sheyitmahmeah
Im kol zeh ahakeh lo
Bekhol yom sheyavo

I believe
With perfect faith
In the coming of the mashiah (the anointed one)
And although he tarries
Nonetheless, I wait for him
Every day, that he may come

What did the Jews of Vizhnitz and Elie Wiesel learn that Shabbat? That whatever unspeakable horrors lay in front of them, they would survive. That whatever fate was awaiting them at the hands of their oppressors, that some of them would make it to the other side. That there would be Jews at some future time, Jews who would be on this Earth to greet the arriving mashiah. That even though there are dark times ahead, that they would eventually pass.

There is always hope for the future. Our tradition teaches us to be patient, and to look past the current darkness to the better days ahead. Ani ma’amin. I believe.

To be sure, Elie Wiesel lost his faith; he chronicles that moment in his first book, Night, his account of the Shoah, when he arrives at Auschwitz and is hustled out of the cattle car, and an SS officer points to the flames coming from the crematorium and screams, “Do you see that chimney over there? See it? Do you see those flames? (Yes, we did see the flames.) Over there-that’s where you’re going to be taken. That’s your grave, over there.” And in that moment, reports Wiesel, he loses his faith. A God that could have allowed such a thing did not deserve his reverence. His faith, he says, was consumed in those flames.

At some point, later in life, he found Judaism again. But anybody who survived the camps had to struggle with belief. I had a congregant back on Long Island who, late in life, authored an account of her own Shoah story. It was particularly striking to me that, in the book, she conceded that, while she raised a family in Jewish tradition, and her children and grandchildren were believers, she could not find the same belief within herself.

And yet, it is that belief that enabled some to survive. It is that sense of “Ani ma-amin,” I believe, that has given our people hope for millennia, through destruction and exile and Crusades and Inquisition and expulsion and genocide.

I believe that we are here today because of our belief.

Because we will be here forever, if we all just reach a little deeper, if we all just put a little more of ourselves into learning our tradition, into acting on our tradition, in keeping the holy opportunities, the mitzvot of our tradition in front of us. If we let go of some of that cool reserve, if we put ourselves bodily into our rituals and customs bodily, if we pray with fervor, if we reach higher to keep the mitzvot, if we yearn to reach past the perplexity to seek answers, to act on that belief, we will survive whatever challenges we face.

Ani ma-amin. I believe. And I’ll wait, and continue to daven every day, until we get to the other side.

 

~

Rabbi Seth Adelson

(Originally delivered at Congregation Beth Shalom, morning of Shemini Atzeret, Thursday, 10/12/2017.)

Categories
High Holidays Sermons

שאינו יודע לשאול: The Child Who Does Not Know How to Ask is the Future – Yom Kippur Day, 5778

Before reading this sermon, you might want to check out the first three in the series:

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

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

Kol Nidrei 5778: The Simple Child Sees Only the Past

arba'ah banim

***

Today, we take a look at the שאינו יודע לשאול / she’eino yodea lish’ol, the Child Who Does Not Know How to Ask. That child is our future.

I hosted my first Pesah seder when I was a sophomore in college. I wasn’t able to go home for sedarim that year, so I figured I would do it myself in my co-operative house at Cornell, where I lived. So, figuring I had to make it somewhat traditional, I got from my mother instructions on how to make certain Jewish foods. Tzimmes. Matzah-ball soup. And, although I was effectively vegetarian at that point, I learned how to cook a chicken for my friends.

The next time I hosted my own seder, I did it my way: fully vegetarian. No tzimmes. No matzah-ball soup. (Maybe there was gefilte fish.) I roasted a beet instead of a shank bone to put on the seder plate. My mother was shocked.

The Passover Seder Plate and New Traditions | The Kitchn

Our expression of Judaism has never ceased to change. Customs come and go. Musical tastes and styles change. What they consider traditional Jewish foods among the Persian Jews, for example, is quite different from what they ate in Poland on Rosh Hashanah, and that has everything to do with geographical separation of these communities, and the changes that took place within each.

And, as I have emphasized over these holidays, we are living in a time of great change here in the New World. So great, in fact, that many of us who are intimately tied to traditional Jewish institutions have not even figured out that it’s going on.

Perhaps the greatest challenge in the Jewish world is reaching the growing number of Jews who are not connected to Jewish life or institutions. We all want to do this – Orthodox, Reform, Reconstructionist, Conservative, Federations – but nobody really knows how. Chabad does it by bringing some Jewish rituals into the public square. We in the non-Orthodox world tend to reach out by putting together great programs and hoping that people show up. (We at Beth Shalom are trying to change this model with Derekh, our new programming area with five entry portals.) But we all want the disaffected Jews to find their way in.

Consider also that Jewish North America is quite different than it used to be.

  • Roughly 60% of Jews who have married in the last two decades have married somebody who is not Jewish;
  • We are no longer exclusively white and Ashkenazi (although of course calling Jews “white” is problematic);
  • We no longer have the expectation that a Jewish household consists of one woman, one man, and a couple of children;

Furthermore, Judaism is attracting new members – not those who wish to convert for marriage, but people also genuinely motivated by the appeal of our rich, ancient tradition. And not only that, but many of those of us who grew up with two Jewish parents and had a Jewish education are uncomfortable in traditional Jewish environments because we don’t know Hebrew, we haven’t learned Talmud, we can’t speed through the Amidah like the old-timers seem to do, or we simply find Jewish rituals baffling.

In short, we have many Jews and people married to Jews who are part of the community, but have not found their way in.

I heard about a new program recently, called Honeymoon Israel, which has come up with a new way of reaching out. The program was founded by Mike Wise, who was at one time the head of the Jewish Federation of Buffalo. He was in Pittsburgh back in the spring to discuss launching a cohort of Honeymoon Israel here. Let me explain how it works:

Basically, it’s a week-long trip to Israel at a heavily subsidized price (I think it’s $1800 per couple) for couples aged 25-40 that are within their first five years of marriage (or commitment – marriage is not actually required). At least one partner must be Jewish, and at least one partner must not have been on an organized trip to Israel (e.g. Birthright). Among the organizers’ stated goals are the following (from their website):

  • We particularly welcome participants of diverse backgrounds, including interfaith couples and LGBTQ couples.
  • One of our goals is to create a fulfilling, welcoming experience for people without strong Jewish connections. There are no rules about how “Jewish” you need to be to participate.

Most importantly, each of the trips builds a cohort from a particular metropolitan area. Thus, if you are from Denver, you will be traveling to Israel with 19 other couples from Denver. Same for New York, Atlanta, DC, and, as of next spring, Pittsburgh. That is an essential part of the experience, because when these couples return to their home cities, they have an instant cohort of other Jews with whom to gather for Shabbat dinner or a Passover seder. They have an entree into community.

You see, the goal of the trip is not necessarily connection to Israel, per se, but rather connection to Jews and Jewish life. Israel may be the destination, but this is more about the journey – the Jewish journey after their return. In fact, each couple is screened (there is a waiting list, particularly in the larger cities) and the ones with WEAKER Jewish connections are actually more likely to be selected for the trip. That pretty much guarantees a greater bang for the investors’ buck – reaching deeper into the ranks of disconnected young Jews and giving them a better chance to connect them.

So here is the fascinating part: the demographics of the 2000 or so who have participated include about 70% interfaith couples, and among the remaining 30% about half include a partner who converted to Judaism. About 9% are same-sex couples. As you may imagine, the participants run the gamut of ethnic, racial, and religious backgrounds. This is an honest portrait of Jewish America. As such, the trip organizers work very hard to make sure that the language is inclusive, that there is no apparent agenda in terms of conversion or other religious pressure.

Now, there are some among you who are clearly thinking right now, “But rabbi, how can this possibly be a Jewish trip if (א) they are not requiring participants to put on tefillin every day and (ב) a third or more of the participants are not even Jewish?”

The early 20th-century German Jewish philosopher Franz Rosenzweig, raised a secular Jew, was on the verge of becoming Christian to further his academic career, but gave traditional Judaism a final shot before taking the plunge. He quickly discovered the richness of our tradition, and went on to write one of the best-known works of contemporary Jewish philosophy, The Star of Redemption, and to establish the Lehrhaus, the contemporary House of Jewish Learning, in Frankfurt. When asked later in life if he was putting on tefillin every day, his answer was, “Not yet.”

Franz Rosenzweig - Wikipedia
Franz Rosenzweig

Let me tell you this, ladies and gentlemen. Yes, we in the Conservative movement accept the traditional idea that halakhah / Jewish law applies to us, that Shabbat and kashrut/dietary laws and daily tefillah / prayer are an essential part of what we do as Jews.

But the approach to take when welcoming marginally-connected folks into the fold should be, “Not yet.” Don’t hit them over the head with dietary restrictions, with shutting down for Shabbat, with diving into Rashi and Rambam.

Rather, we should welcome them by building a network of other Jewish people with whom they can dip their toes in the water. But we need to warmly invite them in rather than push them away by setting the bar too high. We cannot make them feel inadequate for not knowing Hebrew or what Shemini Atzeret is. (Heck, I don’t really know what Shemini Atzeret is!)

Our goal, as contemporary Jews and people who appreciate the value of our tradition, is to open the doors. Just throw ‘em wide open and say, “Come on in! We value you. We want you as a part of our community. We don’t judge you for your sexuality or if your partner is not Jewish. Bring them along!”

Unfortunately, ladies and gentlemen, here is an area where we need to do a little bit of teshuvah. We have been judgmental. I am aware of a number of instances where people who do not match the expectations of others have been told unfriendly things. The tough ones are those who stuck around despite the judginess. The not-so-tough ones probably never came back.

Ladies and gentlemen, we cannot afford to turn our backs on anyone who walks into a synagogue, who seeks to connect with Jewish tradition. Yes, we still have an obligation to halakhah, to Jewish law. But nobody will learn this if they are turned away at the door or made to feel unwelcome.

One thing that Mike Wise mentioned is that in their interviews with potential couples for Honeymoon Israel, there were a lot of tears; many stories of rejection.

But the outcomes have been positive. Honeymoon Israel continues to track their participants afterwards, and have found overall greater levels of engagement with Jewish life, and a greater sense of shared involvement in Jewish life, even when one partner is not Jewish.

We are a synagogue – beit kenesset. A place of gathering. And we should strive to make sure that all are welcome here.

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And for those of you who may be wondering, “But Rabbi, doesn’t the future of Judaism depend on making sure that our children only marry Jews?” I would respond by saying, “Actually, the future of Judaism depends on making sure that all who enter into our synagogues understand the richness of our tradition. The future of Judaism depends on sharing our wisdom and values with the world. The future of Judaism depends on offering a deep sense of connection and spirituality. The future of Judaism depends on supporting each other as a community. Perhaps most importantly, the future of Judaism depends on imparting all of this to our Jewish children and grandchildren. And if some non-Jewish partners get swept up in our enthusiasm for these things, then that is simply wonderful.”

Now of course we are still bound by halakhah, Jewish law in the Conservative movement, but I’ll tell you this: in 5777 I welcomed 15 new Jews into our berit, our covenant. Six of them were women married to Jewish men and their children. That is what we stand to gain by being open.

We need to look for those who do not know how to ask, and help them, gently, assuredly, to find their way in.

And certainly, I understand why many of us are concerned about opening up the tent. We are, as the philosopher Simon Rawidowicz declared in the title of his 1948 essay, “The Ever-Dying People,” on how Jews have always been anxious about their nascent disappearance.

Rabbi David Hartman addresses this issue in his book, A Heart of Many Rooms (Jewish Lights, 1999). He says the following:

“If we can rid ourselves of the obsession with certainty and finality – if we can internalize the spirit of the covenantal idea – then the uncertainties of the modern world will not deter us from renewing the vital interpretive processes that define our religious heritage.”

OK, so I know Rabbi Hartman’s prose is slightly impenetrable, but his point is that embedded in our berit, our covenant, is God’s keeping God’s word to us regardless of the uncertainty that modernity has brought us. It’s going to be OK. But if we want Judaism to continue, we have to be less focused on merely practicing Judaism and more interested in the meaning behind what we do, and making sure that we continue to interpret and redefine for today. Judaism did not stop moving forward in the shtetl of Eastern Europe. Ever since the destruction of the 2nd Temple in 70 CE (remember from the first day of Rosh Hashanah?), Judaism has never ceased to grow and change; that is the source of its resilience. And we have to continue to let it move forward today, given the realities of where Jews are.

And where might we find the meaning that our tradition teaches? How might we engage those vital interpretive processes to which Rabbi Hartman refers? You could throw a dart onto just about any page on the Jewish bookshelf and hit something powerful.

The bottom line of Judaism, drawn from our historical texts, is treating each other well. About society. About the providing for the needy among us; about treating the refugee among us respectfully, about ensuring that the orphan, the widow, the homeless in our neighborhood are taken care of. All of that comes from the same books that speak about kashrut and Shabbat. We read in the haftarah today, the words of Isaiah (58:5-7), speaking of the fast day of Yom Kippur:

“Is such the fast I desire, a day for people to starve their bodies?…

No, this is the fast I desire: to unlock fetters of wickedness, and untie the cords of the yoke

To let the oppressed go free; …

It is to share your bread with the hungry, and to take the wretched poor into your home;

When you see the naked, to clothe them, and do not ignore your own flesh.”

That is the Judaism we must teach to the she-eino yodea lish’ol, the child who does not know how to ask. That is the future we must create.

I spent a good deal of this sermon speaking about the mysterious “they” who are unconnected to Jewish life. Ladies and gentlemen, we are all the ones who do not know how to ask, because we have been conditioned not to ask. We have been intimidated by the apparently high bar of knowledge it seems you must have to enter and learn from Jewish text.

That’s gotta stop. The Jewish future depends on your willingness to invest your mind and heart in our rich tradition, in the words that have enabled us to survive the last 2000 years, through persecution and oppression and genocide.

The challenge, moving forward, is to find your way in. And not just you who are here today, but the many more who are not. And we’re going to help you with that.

Over these holidays, we have built a bridge across the Jewish year, uniting the framework of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur with the Pesah theme of the Four Children. When we complete this High Holiday cycle this evening with Ne’ilah, you do not have to wait until Hanukkah or Pesah to reconnect; this thread of Jewish connection, of the Jewish operating system, is there for you all year long. Come back to Beth Shalom regularly; stay connected; watch for the Derekh programming coming your way. Make a little more room in your heart and mind for what we are doing now – what you put into this community will be paid back to you doubly in the satisfaction of creating a better you, and a better world.

 

~

Rabbi Seth Adelson

(Originally delivered at Congregation Beth Shalom, Yom Kippur day, 9/30/17.)

Categories
High Holidays Sermons

תם: The Simple Child Sees Only the Past – Kol Nidrei 5778

Before reading this sermon, you might want to check out the first two in the series:

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

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

hashmal arba'ah banim

***

Throughout my life, there have always been two flags on either side of the bimah, or the Jewish  stage: the American flag and the Israeli flag. This is not an arrangement that derives from divided loyalties, but rather a double measure of pride: On the one side the pride of being a citizen of the nation that provided a safe haven for my family members who fled persecution in Czarist Russia and enabled them to thrive in an open, tolerant land, and on the other side the nation that continues to symbolize the dawn of our Jewish redemption, a beacon of hope and democracy in the Middle East and an eternal symbol of our tradition.

So let’s talk about the tam, the simple child: In the Pesah haggadah, what is the answer given to the simple child’s question of “Mah zot?” What is this?

בְּחֹזֶק יָד הוֹצִיאָנוּ ה’ מִמִּצְרַיִם, מִבֵּית עֲבָדִים

It was with a mighty arm that God took us out of Egypt, out of the house of slavery. (Exodus 13:14)

The answer given to the simple child dwells only on the past. No complexity: we were slaves, and then we were free. Only history; no present or future.

Although our past is essential to who we are today, we cannot be content to be the simple child, to dwell only on the past. That cannot be us. Let me explain.

What does the past look like? Well, I think it’s different depending on how many years you have been on this earth.

If you are over a certain age, you might see our history of persecution drawn in relief; you might remember the Shoah and its aftermath; you might recall that Jewish identity in the middle of the 20th century went hand-in-hand with remembering the Holocaust, and how the sympathy of the world in the late ‘40s contributed to the creation of the State of Israel (Pew Study 2013: 73% of Jews said that “Remembering the Holocaust” is essential to what it means to be Jewish, more than any other feature of Jewish life). You may also be aware of the arc of upward mobility of American Jews, and in particular the pattern of those who remained culturally Jewish but increasingly looked to religious leaders to be their proxy in spiritual matters.

Those of you who are younger than I am (I am grateful to have walked this earth for 47 very complicated years) might have a different perspective on the past. You grew up in America with no barriers to entering wider society. Anti-Semitism has not seemed particularly relevant, at least until the last year, with the rise of the alt-right. You have never lived in a world without a strong, resilient State of Israel. You may even be increasingly disappointed that Israel may not be the or lagoyim / the light unto the nations that we expect her to be. Your relationship to Judaism is far less connected to institutions, and more do-it-yourself.

So how do we move forward together from this point, as one people who are drawn to two flags?

We cannot be the simple child, only replaying and living in the past. Rather, we have to acknowledge the past and embrace the future. That is, we must embrace the unknown.

 

100 Years of Balfour

Let’s consider Israel.

This is a fascinating year with respect to Israeli history, because we are commemorating two anniversaries this year. On November 2, 1917, the same year that Beth Shalom was established, the British government issued the Balfour Declaration, which stated the following:

“His Majesty’s Government views with favour the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine.”

It was a major victory for the political Zionists who had been working with the Brits to secure a Jewish state, with the goal of fulfilling hatiqvah bat shenot alpayim, the hope of 2,000 years.

Remember on Rosh Hashanah, when we spoke about the Romans destroying the Second Temple in 70 CE?  From that point on, that region was controlled by one empire or another.

Successive waves of immigration, starting in the 1860s, had brought tens of thousands of pioneers to the land, so that by 1917 there were already a good number of Jewish pioneers living in Palestine and building the new home for the Jews. But they had not yet received any assurance from any major player that a new Jewish state was even remotely possible. They were working the fields, growing Jaffa oranges, and meditating on the words of Theodor Herzl: Im tirtzu, ein zo agadah. If you desire it, it is not a fantasy.

With the fall of the Turkish Ottoman Empire during World War I, the land that the Romans had labeled Palestine now lay in British hands. Dr. Chaim Weizmann, then president of the British Zionist Federation, worked quickly with British politicians, including Foreign Secretary Lord Arthur Balfour (the one who wrote the famous Declaration), to set the foundation for a new political entity in the region. (Dr. Weizmann went on not only to found the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, but also to become the State of Israel’s first president.)

TIME Magazine Cover: Lord Arthur Balfour - Apr. 13, 1925 ...

The Balfour Declaration paved the way for the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948. Herzl’s desire became a reality; the Jewish dream of being am hofshi be’artzeinu, a free people in our land, had taken a substantial leap forward. (BTW, the British government reinforced its support for the Balfour Declaration in April of this year.)

Fast forward 50 years after Balfour, to June of 1967. The State of Israel, 19 years old and only tenuously holding on to her tiny piece of land,  She pre-emptively attacked her Arab neighbors, who were busy amassing troops to attack. In what came to be known as the Six Day War, Israel captured not only the Old City of Jerusalem, reuniting the city that had been divided for 19 years, but all the remaining territory of the historical Palestine, plus the Sinai peninsula and the Golan Heights, effectively tripling its area. The world, including Diaspora Jewry, woke up to the fact that Israel was here to stay.

But the heady victory of the Six Day War not only secured Israel’s future and guaranteed her ongoing stability, it also set up fifty years of political complexity on the ground. Not only was she still technically at war with the entire Arab world, but now also in control of an additional 1 million Arabs, who had been building a national identity in resistance to Egyptian and Jordanian control, and who were certainly not grateful to their new landlords. It was only five years later that the Palestinian Black September terrorist operation killed 11 Israelis in Munich, opened up Israelis to ongoing terror at home and abroad.

Herzl and Weizmann and Balfour and Ben Gurion did not anticipate that we would be in the place that we are today: a world in which the intractable challenges of creating safety, security, and peace in the Middle East have cost the region nearly 100,000 lives and, by one estimate, $13 trillion dollars.

So while we continue to celebrate the past, to revel in nearly 70 years of the state of Israel, we also have to be realistic about the future. Many of you know that I am an incurable optimist, and optimists are especially rare right now.

I am also a proud Zionist, one who is committed to an Israel that continues to be strong and democratic. And I am also the father of an Israeli 11th-grader, a kibbutznik who is facing his bagruyot (the high school matriculation exams) with greater anxiety.

But I also believe in talking, in bringing the relevant parties back to the negotiating table. I wish I had the answers.  I don’t know how to bring about peace and security for Israel. But I do know that the status quo is not sustainable, that the arsenals of Hezbullah and Hamas continue to grow, that the next time rockets fly from Gaza they will reach my son’s kibbutz, and that the only way things will change is by looking to the future rather than the past.

We cannot simply look back and admire the string of successes of the last 100 years. Even if we leave aside the question of a Palestinian state or the threat of a nuclear-armed Iran: Israel has serious challenges within, among them many citizens living in poverty, the always growing divide between secular and religious Jews, the politically fractious nature of Israeli politics, and of course the current government’s willingness to throw non-Orthodox Diaspora Jewry under a bus for political purposes.

Those of you who heard my Hamilton impression on the first day of Rosh Hashanah may be relieved that I will not be rapping again. Nonetheless, Washington’s advice to Hamilton from the Broadway show comes back to me here: “Winning was easy, young man. Governing is harder.”

Embracing the future means that we have to keep talking, keep facing all of the serious challenges before us, and look forward.

 

American Jewish Experience: Decline of “Ethnicity”

But Israel is only one of the flags of my identity; the other flag paints my Magen David in red, white, and blue.

The landscape of American Judaism has changed dramatically since this congregation formed in 1917 as the first Jewish congregation established in Squirrel Hill. And that has everything to do with what you might call a decline in a distinct Jewish “ethnicity” among American Jews.

It has often been said that the Jews are like everyone else, only more so. And today, that is more true than it has ever been!

The world of our parents and grandparents was one of exclusion from the wider society. Living apart from the Ukrainians, Russians, and Poles was expected in the old country; when our forebears immigrated to this country many of them maintained their distinct dress, language, foods, songs, and of course religious rituals for a generation or so.

But my grandmother, who was 8 years old when she came to Boston in 1921 from the province of Volhynia in the Ukraine, did not want to be a “greenhorn.” She refused to speak Yiddish. She soon learned that she loved to eat lobster and clams, like so many other Bostonians. She wasn’t so interested in Jewish life. And so she, like many other immigrants, began to shed the ethnic attributes of the old world.

Nearly a century later, where are we as modern Jews? We speak the same language, eat the same foods, wear the same clothes, and hold the same jobs as our gentile neighbors. And, perhaps most significantly, they don’t mind socializing with, and even marrying us. So where does that leave our Jewish identity?

Much of what we think of as Judaism is highly connected to Jewish ethnicity. And now that the ethnicity is mostly gone, the practices associated with Judaism seem, for many, irrelevant.

Today, while our Shabbat morning services are full and lively, we occasionally struggle on weekday and even Shabbat evenings to make a minyan of ten people. Only reluctantly can we get members of the congregation, even those who know and love tefillah, to come on a regular basis to help us make a minyan, a quorum of ten. Even more troubling to me is the idea that the weekday service is there only for people to say kaddish, memorial prayers for their deceased loved ones. I am fairly certain that’s not the original idea of daily tefillah / prayer.

Meanwhile, from where I stand, the number of younger people in our orbit who derive meaning in services seems to decline.

We are in a totally different place today from when this congregation began; the Jews have a completely different view of themselves. We do not necessarily need a social club of our own, since we are welcome everywhere. We do not need a place where people can schmooze or kibitz.

We cannot operate a synagogue based on the models of the past. We cannot only look backward with nostalgia. That is what the simple child does.

Instead, we have to take what we have and move forward. And what we have is the richness of accumulated Jewish wisdom. We have the words of the Torah, which tell us to leave a portion of what we reap in life to those in need. We have the words of the Talmud, which speak of the essential obligation of visiting those who are ill, of performing deeds of lovingkindness, of making peace between people. We have the words of philosophy, which teach us to find the meaning in our concrete, scientific world. We have the words of tefillah, of prayer, which bring us humility and compassion as we reach within ourselves and out to the Divine. We have the ongoing inspiration that is the State of Israel and our connection to it. We have all of these things, even if we do not speak Yiddish or eat gefilte fish.

Sea Breeze Fish Market in Plano Offers Classes, House Made ...

All of that has already been uncoupled from the trappings of ethnicity. But we still need a synagogue, because this is the house that keeps all those things alive. This is the place where we teach them, where we live them. It has been observed that while Jews used to come to synagogue because they were Jewish, today they come to BE Jewish.

Ladies and gentlemen, this particular moment, 100 years after the establishment of Congregation Beth Shalom and 100 years since Lord Balfour set in motion the creation of the State of Israel, we are at a critical juncture. We need to continue to be here as a community, as a synagogue, offering guidance and inspiration and community and connection and qedushah / holiness. We need to continue, as our mission statement says, enriching lives through community, lifelong learning, and spiritual growth.

And we need Israel to be there as or lagoyim, that inspirational light unto the nations, a beacon for Diaspora Jews and for the rest of the world.

And so that’s why we have to think to the future. That’s why we cannot be like the simple child. We cannot merely think wistfully about the past, and expect that the 20th century version of Beth Shalom will always be relevant. We have to look forward. We have to think outside the box. We have to find ways to connect with people that are new and powerful.

And that’s why I am counting on all of you.

Many of us in the room know that this is the only night of the year on which one wears a tallit, a prayer shawl. Traditionally, the tallit is worn only during the day.

It is customary to wear a tallit in the evening on Yom Kippur because our prayer never stops; even though we go home and sleep. We don’t eat, and we deny ourselves a range of physical pleasures. It is as though on this day we never stop pleading with God for forgiveness.

In the spirit of the full 25 hours of kavvanah / intention of Yom Kippur, when you go home tonight, take that one step further. Rather than fantasizing about breaking the fast tomorrow evening, take some time to think about what it is that will make you put more time and energy and resources into building our future together.

Do not think that because you cannot read Hebrew at light speed you are not capable of contributing to the future of Judaism. Do not think that if you do not know Maimonides from Mendelsohn you are unworthy of creating the Jewish future. On the contrary: I’d make the argument that this would make you uniquely qualified to participate in the conversation. If being Jewish matters to you but you do not know exactly how or why, then you are perfectly positioned to help us envision our community for the next 100 years.

I hope you, unlike the tam, the simple child, will look to the future. You chose to be here tonight.  Make the decision to be here next week.  Invest in the future of this community with integrity and pride.  And please don’t just come to me with, “Hey Rabbi, here’s an idea that you should do.” Rather, “Hey Rabbi, here’s an idea that I want to do, and I’m willing to help make it happen.” Because our sustainability depends on your willingness to partner with this community in building together.

To read the final installment in the series, The Child Who Does Not Know How to Ask is the Future, please click here.

Shanah tovah!

 

~

Rabbi Seth Adelson

(Originally delivered at Congregation Beth Shalom, evening of Kol Nidrei, 9/29/17.)