Month: November 2020

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The Constant Gift of Life – Hayyei Sarah 5781

One of the ways in which I have coped with our pandemic separation is by cooking. This week I did something I had not done in a long time – at least a year. I made a butternut squash soup. It’s a great recipe that I discovered a few years back (of course, I use kosher vegetable stock instead of chicken stock): lots of butter, which makes it so rich, but also with fennel, which rounds out the flavor. It is, however, an extensive kitchen project, with lots of time peeling and chopping and sauteeing and simmering and pureeing. We ate it with Shabbat dinner last night. (Yes, in our house, Shabbat meals are often dairy.)

But, as we learn in Pirqei Avot, Im ein qemah, ein Torah; im ein Torah, ein qemah. If there’s no bread, there’s no Torah; if there’s no Torah, there’s no bread. You have to eat to learn, but you also have to learn to eat. Food and Torah are intimately tied together in our tradition.

In other news, you might say that I “hit for the cycle” this week. (Yes, I’m using a baseball metaphor, even though I think the season is over. Right?) I hit almost every lifecycle event this week.

Last Sunday, on the most beautiful November day of my lifetime, I officiated at the wedding of Abigail Blatt and Eric Yoffee. Eric is the son of our members Carol Beth and Mike Yoffee. It was held in the Yoffees’ back yard, with about minyan of attendees. 

Wednesday, longtime Beth Shalom Cantor Moshe Taube passed away, and we have been preparing for a memorial service for him, which will be held on Thursday evening (11/19).

Cantor Moshe Taube

Thursday, I made a new Jew! We brought Casey Weiss’s husband Doug Frisbee to the miqveh to complete his journey to Judaism. Casey is, of course, the daughter of our members Amy and Lou Weiss.

Friday, we welcomed Carson Weiss, the son of our members Emily and Aaron Weiss (no relation to the previous Weisses), into our people’s covenant with God through the ceremony of berit milah, ritual circumcision. Emily and Aaron were with me last January on the Honeymoon Israel trip, and we now see the fruits of our having welcomed them into this community.

Today, of course, we are celebrating Maddie Zabusky-Stockton’s stepping forward into direct relationship with the mitzvot of Jewish life, as we called her to the Torah as a bat mitzvah.

And also this week I spoke with potential new members, people observing yahrzeits, people recovering from COVID-19, other conversion students, and so forth. Plus I virtually attended the United Synagogue’s first conference about Jews and racism.

And all of this was with the pandemic in the background. All socially-distanced. All masked. All a little more anxious than it would have been under “normal” circumstances. 

And this is how our lives are right now.

A good news item this week was that at least one company that is working on a vaccine published results of a successful trial, indicating that their vaccine was 90% successful in preventing new infections of the coronavirus. Maybe the end of our current predicament is in sight. Let’s hope.

But even so, things are not looking so good, in a more immediate sense. Rates of infection are taking off, here in Allegheny County and all over the world. Hospital beds are filling up again. Ventilators and PPE may soon be in short supply. We may soon be back where we were in April.

Meanwhile, we have to do everything that we can to prevent the spread of this virus. We have to continue to be very careful about being masked when around others, and about maintaining our distance, and about minimizing our exposure. We must continue to be vigilant, particularly as Thanksgiving comes and then the December holidays, because the opportunities to spread the virus will certainly increase if people gather, even in small groups. Please remember the essential message of piqquah nefesh / the mitzvah of saving a life – preventing the spread will save lives, and that is one of our most essential mitzvot / holy opportunities as Jews.

Taking a step back to the Jewish bookshelf, right up front in Parashat Hayyei Sarah, Sarah dies. In the first two verses of Hayyei Sarah, the Torah takes note of the fact that her life, “Hayyei Sarah,” spans 127 years; then she dies, and Avraham mourns her and cries for her. The last word of that second verse, Bereshit / Genesis 23:2, is velivkotah, meaning, “and to cry for her.” In Torah scrolls and in some humashim, including Etz Hayyim, which some of us have, the “kaf” in that word is smaller than the other letters. It is a longstanding scribal tradition that dates back many centuries, maybe more than a thousand years.

The small kaf is a reminder that grief can make us feel small. In the Post-Gazette’s obituary for Cantor Taube, he was quoted as being so wrought with grief when the Nazis invaded Poland, that, in his words:

I could not sing between 1939 and 1945. I couldn’t sing because of the atrocities that happened. Singing is an expression of fulfillment, happiness, of worship. I did worship, but not with singing.

Although he survived the war, being number 22 on Schindler’s List, he carried that sense of having been made small by the Shoah for the rest of his life, and you could hear that in his music, in his voice. Indeed, the numbers of our people were made significantly smaller by the Nazis, and so too was our spirit as a people brought low.

We also lost this week Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks, the former Chief Rabbi of the United Kingdom, a universally-admired interpreter of Torah for our times. (BTW, there aren’t too many rabbis who get THAT title.)

Of course, there are also times when life makes us feel larger, like the bigger letters in the Torah: joy over happy lifecycle events – weddings and new baby rituals and benei mitzvah – these things can make us feel a little bigger.

But the vast majority of letters in the Torah are the same size. They have the same proportions. They do not stand out from one another.

And that is how our lives go. Sometimes the big letters; sometimes the small letters. But most of the Torah that we live is of average size. Thank God.

Yes, we suffer devastating losses; we grieve and mourn; sometimes we cannot sing. And yet we also find moments in which to celebrate and to mark the passage of time and the milestones in our lives in great happiness. We should never diminish the power of loss or of joy.

And yet we must go on about our lives. We must continue to get married and have children and celebrate benei mitzvah. Although we may feel small, we have to look not only for the big letters of Torah, but also all of those regular letters, the ones we usually hardly notice. With the recent string of births, I hope that we are seeing evidence of a COVID baby boom, which would certainly be a silver lining.

In reflecting on life, Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks wrote: 

“It is difficult to feel depressed when you remember fairly constantly that life is a gift. ”

Yes, life is a gift in the sense that we occasionally experience joy to counter our grief. But life is also a gift when you consider his use of the word “constantly” – while we walk this Earth, while we breathe, we experience the constant miracle of being alive. That is why, three times a day, every day, in the Amidah, on Yom Kippur and on Purim, whether we are in mourning or celebrating, we say words of gratitude, in the paragraph thematically dedicated to thanks:

נֽוֹדֶה לְּךָ וּנְסַפֵּר תְּהִלָּתֶֽךָ עַל־חַיֵּֽינוּ הַמְּ֒סוּרִים בְּיָדֶֽךָ וְעַל נִשְׁמוֹתֵֽינוּ הַפְּ֒קוּדוֹת לָךְ וְעַל נִסֶּֽיךָ שֶׁבְּכָל יוֹם עִמָּֽנוּ וְעַל נִפְלְ֒אוֹתֶֽיךָ וְטוֹבוֹתֶֽיךָ שֶׁבְּ֒כָל עֵת עֶֽרֶב וָבֹֽקֶר וְצָהֳרָֽיִם

We will give thanks to You and recount Your praise, for our lives which are committed into Your hand, and for our souls which are entrusted to You, and for Your miracles of every day with us, and for Your wonders and benefactions at all times— evening, morning and noon.

I am grateful to have met Cantor Moshe Taube and heard him sing and been inspired by his music; I am grateful to continue to learn from Rabbi Sacks, and we mourn for them. And I am also grateful to be here today for Maddie’s bat mitzvah, and to have celebrated this week a wedding and a berit milah and bringing on a new member of the tribe. But I am also grateful to have made (and ate) a tasty yet humble (okay… its hard to call it a humble soup when you use a full stick of butter…) squash soup.

Life, this miraculous gift, goes on. Be vigilant. Wear a mask. But look to the moments of ordinary-ness, of constancy, when all the letters are the same size, and we will make it through this together.

~

Rabbi Seth Adelson

(Originally delivered at Congregation Beth Shalom, Pittsburgh, PA, Shabbat morning, 11/14/2020.)

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Healing Through Welcoming – Vayyera 5781

Late Tuesday afternoon, when the polls were still open and anxiety hung in the air like a mixture of stale cigar smoke and vinegar, I was invited to appear on an Israeli TV news program where they were discussing the American elections. I was actually quite impressed with the way that Israeli commentators, some embedded here, were pontificating on aspects of the electoral college system and the issues on the table at our present moment. 

And frankly, as I watched and waited for the host to call on me, I was terrified! While my modern, spoken Hebrew is decent, I cannot think and talk in the rapid-fire mode that is typical of these kinds of programs, even in English. But I had my pre-translated talking points ready.

They wanted from me not only some reminiscences on the two-year anniversary of the Tree of Life massacre, but also a perspective on the election, considering our unfortunately unique position here in Pittsburgh. 

Now, as the rabbi of a congregation that includes people of a whole range of political perspectives, I do my best to try not to favor one political party over another. While you know that I surely occasionally speak about issues which some may think are political in nature, my primary goal is actually to try to discuss things that we are all thinking about from the perspective of Jewish tradition and Jewish text. 

So while the host might have wanted me to pick one presidential candidate over another, I declined to do that, but rather focused on the way that we relate to one another. And I must say that the most important thing that we should be doing right now is to try to speak to each other and think about each other in a healthier way. As a society, we need a whole lot of healing right now, because if we cannot talk to one another, we cannot face the big challenges that we need to address. The great division in our society – over politics, over culture, over race and sexuality and public health and even religion – is actually killing us.

Some of you may know that Parashat Vayyera contains one of my favorite scenes in the entire Torah, one which I have learned with many of you in parlor meetings and in other contexts, and in fact I like it so much that I mentioned it last week, while we were still reading Lekh Lekha. 

It is the story of the three strangers who come to Avraham, who rushes to bring them water and find them a place to rest and to feed them. He welcomes them in with an overwhelming show of desert hospitality.

And the kicker is that, at the end of Parashat Lekh Lekha, Avraham had just circumcised himself, at age 99! So he’s in pain. And a midrash reminds us not only of this, but also tells us that God had made the sun especially strong that day, had “taken the sun out of its sheath,” in the poetic language of the midrash. So Avraham is sitting by his tent, in pain, in the most vicious heat of the day, when he sees these strangers (whom we later discover are malakhim, heavenly messengers), and he leaps into action to make them feel welcome.

So what is the message that the Torah wants us to glean from this? It is that hakhnasat orhim, the welcoming of guests, is a Jewish value of utmost importance. 

You have probably heard me say that before. But here is a new thought:

Perhaps Avraham needed those angelic guests precisely BECAUSE he was in pain. Perhaps the very act of hakhnasat orhim, into which he leapt with such zeal, enabled him to heal more quickly.

And maybe the healing that we need right now, soothing the pain caused by the great political divide I mentioned earlier, is something we can achieve through haknasat orhim – by reaching out to others and welcoming them in.

“Oh, rabbi,” you’re thinking, “you’re so naive. The people on the other side do not want healing. They want division. They are being cynically manipulated by their self-serving and dangerous leaders and media outlets. They thrive on that.”

Well, perhaps. 

But let’s face it, folks: you hired me to be naive. To teach Torah as some kind of theoretical, possibly unreachable ideal. You want me to stand up here and teach you about mitzvot, about halakhah, about the stories of our tradition and the values therein. You want me to challenge you, to encourage you to reach higher, to be a better person. To some extent, it is my job to be naive, to put before you simple truths from the Jewish bookshelf that are uncluttered by the complexity of contemporary life.

And yes, our tradition is demanding. Yes, we fail to meet its expectations time and time again. That is why we all keep coming back for Yom Kippur, to beat our chests and say we’ll be better next year.

So this, too, will be hard. Healing through welcoming is difficult. I do not think we even know how to do it.

How might we heal ourselves, our society? By relating to one another with compassion, with understanding. By seeking out the stranger in our moment of pain and discomfort. By welcoming them in. And we are obligated to do that, even if those folks do not want to be welcomed.

Think of the many people in pain right now. As we were all obsessing over absentee ballots, we set an eye-popping record of 121,000 new positive coronavirus cases in America on Thursday. Now over 236,000 fellow citizens have died. And the wave of new infections will surely bring another spike of death in a few weeks. Think of all those who have lost parents to this virus, who are grieving for the people they loved most, whose loss might not have occurred had more people been willing to engage in mitigation measures.

And let’s not forget the economic devastation it has caused. Yes, the economy has come back somewhat since last spring, but there are still many, many people out of work. It may be hard to quantify this, but I’m almost certain that I am seeing more folks on the street asking for money. 

And even before the virus shut us all down, many of us were aware of the statistics indicating that younger people today will likely not exceed their parents in earnings and wealth.

And don’t think the opioid crisis has gone away, just because Purdue Pharma and the Sackler family settled with the Justice Department for billions of dollars over the aggressive marketing of OxyContin.

And did you know that this hurricane season has featured a record-setting 28 named storms?

And did you also know that the US officially left the Paris Climate Accord this past Wednesday, the only nation of the original 200 signatories to have done so?

And we cannot forget the ongoing challenges of providing a decent education for the young people of America, and good-quality, affordable health care for all of us, as any nation should do.

We have so many sources of pain, and the only means to alleviate this pain is to reach out to the people with whom we vehemently disagree. If there is any single lesson to be learned from last week’s election, it is that we are not only heavily divided as a nation, but also that regardless of on which side you stand, there are a whole lot of people on the other side. Nobody will be able to accomplish anything without bringing a few folks from across the aisle with them.

And yes, some of those folks have opted out of living in the world of facts. I think that has something to do with the unfortunate reality that the truths of this world are just so painful. As I have indicated many times in this space, we are going to have to address the misinformation / disinformation problem that we have as a nation. We the Jews know how important the truth is; it is the falsehoods that have been told about us by others that have caused us so much pain and suffering for our people, including, of course, the deaths of the 11 holy souls whose yahrzeit we observed on Thursday.

A few days ago, a colorful graphic of unknown origin floated across my screen. It said, “After the election, if you win, don’t gloat. If you lose, don’t despair.”

Indeed. The way for us to move forward as a society is not for the winners to mock the losers or for the losers to give up and opt out. It is not to scream at each other or, God forbid, drum up violence in our streets.

Rather, the way for us to undo the damage wrought by the unhealthy division in our society is to take a deep breath, to roll up our sleeves, and 

(א) to acknowledge that the vast majority of American citizens are good people who just want to make a living and be treated justly, 

(ב) to condemn the outright anti-Semites and the racists and the other haters in our society, including those whose brains have been invaded by ridiculous and offensive conspiracy theories, and 

(ג) to reach out across the aisle and try to move forward together.

We are in pain. But we can bring healing by waiting by the metaphorical door to our tent, and when strangers come by, rushing to greet them and to welcome them in. Hakhnasat orhim will heal us.

~

Rabbi Seth Adelson

(Originally delivered at Congregation Beth Shalom, Pittsburgh, PA, Shabbat morning, 11/7/2020.)

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What Does a Jewish Person Look Like? – Lekh Lekha 5781

וַיֹּ֤אמֶר ה’ אֶל־אַבְרָ֔ם לֶךְ־לְךָ֛ מֵאַרְצְךָ֥ וּמִמּֽוֹלַדְתְּךָ֖ וּמִבֵּ֣ית אָבִ֑יךָ אֶל־הָאָ֖רֶץ אֲשֶׁ֥ר אַרְאֶֽךָּ׃

God said to Avram, “Go forth from your land, your native land, and from your father’s house to the land that I will show you.” (Bereshit / Genesis 12:1)

One person. 

Lekh lekha. Pick yourself up and go, says God. It’s a singular imperative. Avraham is chosen to launch monotheism, and hence Judaism, into the world.

And then there are two monotheists. And then a family. And then Yitzhaq, Ya’aqov, Rivqah, Rahel, Leah, and then 12 tribes and then two million former slaves are standing at Mt. Sinai to receive the Torah.

And what color was their skin? Did they “look Jewish?” Does the Torah tell us?

No, it does not. The only thing we know about the Imahot and the Avot, the Matriarchs and Patriarchs is that they are all descendants of the first humans, who are created “betzelem Elohim,” in the image of God. And usually, when we use that term, we are speaking more about our spiritual construction than our physical appearance. Rashi, by the way, disagrees; he claims that God created us in God’s physical image as if stamping us out like coins.

And if we are following Rashi, then, every single human face reflects God’s image, and God’s holiness.

**** 

Perhaps you are familiar with the following rabbinic anecdote:

A man is riding a train from Pinsk to Minsk. He is reading a book, minding his own business, and he becomes aware of a woman seated across from him, who is staring at him intently. He tries to avoid her gaze, but then she speaks:

“Excuse me, sir, are you Jewish?”

“No,” he replies politely.

Some time passes and she continues to stare. “Are you sure you’re not Jewish?”

“Yes, I’m sure. I’m not Jewish.” Now he’s annoyed. 

More time passes. “Are you absolutely sure you’re not Jewish?”

“Alright, alright. You got me, lady. I’m Jewish. Now will you leave me alone?!”

“Funny,” she says, “you don’t look Jewish!”

Many of us are burdened with a stereotype for what Jews look like. I am blessed with an ample, yet otherwise well-designed nose, for example, and throughout my life have been told that it is a “Jewish” nose. And yet, I know plenty of Jews, even Eastern European Ashkenazi Jews that have more petite, yet fully functional noses.

My wife, however, has blonde hair and blue eyes, and gets very resentful whenever she hears anybody talking about how somebody “looks Jewish.” She grew up in New York, a secular Zionist born to two Hungarian Holocaust survivors. When revealing her Jewishness, it was always a toss-up as to whether the response would be, “Funny, you don’t look Jewish,” or “Yeah, I figured.” When she went to Israel as a teenager, she was struck by the wide palette of Jewish looks there, and she realized that there is no single Jewish appearance.

I want to suggest something. No, I want to mandate something. (I know, I cannot really do that, but bear with me here.)

We have to try to strike that idea from our heads, that there is a particular Jewish look. Why? Because it actually causes many Jews very real pain, and very likely has led some people to leave the synagogue and never come back. And yes, even here at Beth Shalom.

Let me explain:

You may have read an opinion piece in last week’s Jewish Chronicle written by a Beth Shalom member, high school senior Naomi Kitchen. I know that Naomi is well-known to many members of our community; she is a CDS alumna, and in fact the first time that I met her was during my first year here on a visit to CDS, Naomi spoke to me as a Student Ambassador.

Naomi’s father is half-Korean, and her mother is of Israeli Ashkesfardi extraction, and in her article, titled “A Message to my Squirrel Hill community, from a Jew with a touch of color,” she documents how she has often been confronted with comments that are related to “Funny, you don’t look Jewish,” although many of them were very unpleasant to endure. In a related article that appeared in eJewishPhilanthropy, which Naomi co-wrote with Makeda Zabot-Hall, who is a Black Jew, the two describe being interrogated, to see if they are “really Jewish.” 

Once in this very building in which I stand, ladies and gentlemen, Naomi became so frustrated at people’s assumption that she is not Jewish that a few years ago she swore to herself that she would never enter this institution again.

That was us. That was you and me. And that hurts.

And of course Naomi is not alone. We have a number of members of this congregation who do not present as stereotypical Eastern European Jews. And frankly, that’s a good thing, and not only because stereotypes are bad. 

It is a sign that we have made it in America. In the five and a half years that I have now been in Pittsburgh, I have helped make more than 50 new Jews through conversion. A decent fraction of them would stand out in a crowd of Eastern Europeans. 

But as you may know, a Jew is a Jew is a Jew, and we are forbidden by halakhah / Jewish law to remind somebody that they were not born Jewish, or question anybody about their background or demean them for what they know or do not know.

We have a member of this congregation who is of Chinese and Japanese extraction whom I have heard reciting Birkat Hamazon / the grace after meals better than the vast majority of members of this congregation, and yet it happened once that when entering Beth Shalom on the High Holidays, she was not handed a siddur, even though the people in front of her and behind her received them.

And of course conversion is only part of the story. There are adoptees. And those born to non-white Jewish father and a Jewish mother. And do not forget that there are many Black Jews in this world, from native populations from Ethiopia and from Uganda. 

Judaism has no requirement for skin color; like Sarah and Avraham, we are only colored with the Divine image.

We all make snap judgments based on the way people look – clothing, hair style, posture, glasses, etc. People are simply wired that way. And we all have biases to which we can either succumb, or try to overlook. And the Jews, at least historically, have a distinctive mistrust of non-Jews, which we have inherited from our ancestors. When we were confined to shtetlakh and subject to blood libel accusations and pogroms and laws applied to dhimmi in Muslim lands, it was hard for Jews to trust strangers. This is a part of the historical burden that has filtered down to us.

But look at us today: we have, the events of two years ago in Pittsburgh notwithstanding, been welcomed into the wider American society with open arms. We have lost many of our number in America to assimilation. That is how successfully the great Jewish-American project has proceeded.

So we should be grateful (א) for those of us who are grandchildren and great-grandchildren of immigrants who are still willing to come into a synagogue, and (ב) for anybody else who wants to join us. And when a young woman tells me that she was so turned off by people’s assuming that she is not Jewish, because of their preconceived notion of what a Jew looks like, that she decided to leave this building and not come back, I am ashamed. I am embarrassed for all of us. And you should be too.

Shomer yisrael, shemor she-erit yisrael. Guardian of Israel, protect the remnant of Israel. That is what we say in tahanun, the brief moment of supplication recited on most weekday mornings. We are but a remnant, a she-erit. And we have to do everything we can to make sure that we cast a wide net, that we share our values and the framework of our tradition with as many as we can. If somebody wants to be a part of us, we have to reach out and embrace them. 

You know, I usually speak about issues of welcoming when we reach Parashat Vayyera, which we will read next week, in which Avraham Avinu rushes to invite three strangers into his home. I know many of you have studied this passage (Genesis 18:1-8) with me.

But how does Avraham become so welcoming? Returning to Lekh Lekha: The Sefat Emet, a 19th-century Chasidic rabbi, suggests that Avraham’s leaving home for Canaan is at least part of it. Avraham travels from the familiar, his home in Haran, to the open-ended, the unfamiliar land of Canaan. The final word in the first verse is “areka,” which is usually read as “I will show you,” that is, God is telling Avraham that he should pack up and leave, and when he gets to the right place, God will tell him when to stop. 

But the Sefat Emet is telling us that we might read this instead as, in leaving your homeland and traveling to this unfamiliar land, I will cause you to see more. I will enlarge your vision. 

We all need to enlarge our vision, to take a step back from our natural biases, and widen our sense of what a Jew looks like. Because none of us really “look Jewish” unless everybody else sees God’s image in your face, and in your words. 

~

Rabbi Seth Adelson

(Originally delivered at Congregation Beth Shalom, Pittsburgh, PA, Shabbat morning, 10/31/2020.)