Author: rabbiseth

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Festivals Sermons

Living Inside the Box – Sukkot 5776

A few years back, the journalist Jeffrey Goldberg of the Atlantic became the first American journalist to interview Fidel Castro in a long time.  At one point, Goldberg asked El Comandante if his battle with cancer had changed his opinion on the existence of God.  I suppose that Goldberg was thinking of the old maxim, “There are no atheists in foxholes,” and supposing that even a hardened communist might begin to think about greater spiritual things in the context of serious illness. Castro replied, “Sorry, I’m still a dialectical materialist.”

In a radio interview about his talk with Castro, Goldberg assured listeners that if Castro were doing a standup routine for a Marxist audience, that would be simply hysterical.  Frankly, I’m not sure that I get it, as I must admit that I am not up on my communist jargon.

However, the story reminded me of something that I always used to tell the students in my Bar/Bat Mitzvah Workshop (back in Great Neck) when we arrived to the unit on theology: what you believe now may not apply next year, or in ten years, or in 50.  Our understanding of God, our interaction with the Divine changes as we change.  So you always have to stay open to new ideas, new evidence, and new theological approaches.

An ideologue like Castro may never depart his atheistic moorings.  But those of us who occasionally step into a house of worship, however we feel about it, will surely develop in our relationship with the Qadosh Barukh Hu.  And that development can go many different directions, as long as we remain open.

That brings me to Sukkot.  The primary goal of this festival, I am sure, is to challenge our theology, to make us revisit our understanding of and relationship with God, and I am going to give you four pieces of evidence to support this claim, four themes of Sukkot:  Joy, service to God, the well, and the rituals of Sukkot.

1. Joy.  Simhah.  It is the most joyous festival of the year (Deut. 16:15: Vehayita akh sameah – you shall be overwhelmingly joyful), and the only one that will be celebrated after the mashiah comes, at least according to one tradition.

It is at times of great emotion that we are most open to theology, and look for deeper meanings. The cold, rational exterior of the everyday routine keeps us focused on the business of going about life: work, family, shopping, paying bills, and so forth.  During these times, God seldom penetrates our consciousness.

But at times of great joy, like holidays, weddings, benei mitzvah, beritot milah, and so forth, when family gathers to celebrate, we are likely to reflect on what we are thankful for, and the source of good things.  Likewise, at sad times, surrounding illness, death, or other types of loss, we tend to look to God or tradition for answers.

As such, Sukkot seems like a perfect time for spiritual reflection – gratitude for what we have, anticipation for the future, relief for having sought teshuvah / repentance on Yom Kippur.

2. Service to God.  This was the time of the heaviest sacrifice schedule in the Temple.  Far more than any other holiday, there were a total of 98 lambs and 70 bulls offered on the altar over the course of the seven days of the festival.  All of this sacrifice was surely thanksgiving for the harvest, the most joyous time of the year in any agrarian society.  But it also suggests that the spiritual pathways to God are especially open on this festival, that God is most receptive to us, and we to God.

As Jews, we sanctify time; I mentioned this on Yom Kippur.  The spiritual pathways that were open to our ancestors at this time must still be available, because even though we do not sacrifice animals like they did, we still sanctify this festival with prayer and rituals and joyous celebration. This is a week of abundant holiness.

3. The well.  At the end of the first day of Sukkot, the biggest party of the Israelite year was thrown.  It was called Simhat Beit Hashoevah, the celebration of drawing water from a certain well in Jerusalem, and is identified the Mishnah, Tractate Sukkah, where it says (5:1) that anybody who has not witnessed this ceremony has never seen true simhah, true rejoicing in his whole life.

This custom is long gone, of course, perhaps because we do not know where that well is, or what the purpose of the ceremony was.  But learning about it conjures up some kind of magical, mystical image of unabandoned celebration of a holy, essential act.  There are synagogues and other Jewish communities who have revived a form of this party today, generally by hosting musical events.

When I was in rabbinical school at JTS, I had a philosophy class on the newer modes of spirituality, and how they differ from the traditional Western concept of “religion.”  We discussed two major types of seekers today, the mountain climbers and the well-diggers.  Mountain climbers look outside for spiritual nourishment; they climb up to see what they can see.  Well-diggers look inside; they mine themselves for enlightenment.  In our canon, Moshe was a mountain-climber; Avraham was a well-digger. If Shavuot is the festival of mountain climbers, then Sukkot is the holiday for well-diggers.

Perhaps the celebration of the well suggests something particularly deep (ha ha!) about the nature of this festival.  At the same time that we receive great pleasure from the harvest, which is about material success, we are also celebrating having emerged from Yom Kippur cleansed of sin and rejuvenated, and we therefore must remember to also mine our own personal depths for the non-material elements of God’s favor.

The well ceremony is thus a kind of metaphor for our own internal wrangling with God.

4. Rituals.  Sukkot today is laden with curious rituals, some of which seem to be drawn from non-Israelite customs – waving four species around, living in temporary dwellings, beating willow branches against the ground, parading around asking to be saved.

Let’s check out the Torah’s reasoning for living in sukkot during this week (Lev. 23:42-43):

בַּסֻּכֹּת תֵּשְׁבוּ, שִׁבְעַת יָמִים; כָּל-הָאֶזְרָח, בְּיִשְׂרָאֵל, יֵשְׁבוּ, בַּסֻּכֹּת. לְמַעַן, יֵדְעוּ דֹרֹתֵיכֶם, כִּי בַסֻּכּוֹת הוֹשַׁבְתִּי אֶת-בְּנֵי יִשְׂרָאֵל, בְּהוֹצִיאִי אוֹתָם מֵאֶרֶץ מִצְרָיִם

You shall live in sukkot (temporary structures) seven days; all citizens in Israel shall live in sukkot, in order that future generations may know that I made the Israelite people live in sukkot when I brought them out of the land of Egypt.

The commentators suggest that it is incumbent upon all of us to live in the Sukkah as much as possible, and that the Torah specifies “citizens” to make clear that it is for rich and poor alike, that nobody should feel like doing so is beneath them.

We “live” in the Sukkah to bring us back to the wilderness for just a moment.  And, as we all know, the wilderness is the place for visions of God: the burning bush, receiving the Torah on Mt. Sinai, Jacob’s angelic dreams, Ezekiel’s chariot and valley of dry bones, and so on. The Sukkah is a place to be open to communication from God.

IMG_2987

The commentator Rashbam says that this is precisely the time of the year, when the harvest has been gathered and we’re feeling flush, that we should vacate our homes and property to live in a simple hut.  Even though most of us are not farmers, the sukkah still reminds us that it is not through our own hands that we have obtained all of our material goods.

* * *

I have a colleague who posted a story on Ravnet (the email list for Conservative rabbis) about how he was approached after services on Rosh Hashanah by a congregant who told him that the services were not “spiritual.”  The rabbi fretted over this for a while, as I would do, and then discussed the matter with his wife, as I would also do.

The rabbi’s wife said, in essence, relax.  There are no spiritual services, only spiritual people.  A true partnership in congregational Judaism is when the clergy opens the door, and the laity walks through.  We can only meet you halfway; you must seek God as well.

And sometimes you need to shake up your surroundings a bit to, reconsider, rethink, and be inspired, to get our of your material house and into your spiritual hut.  You could call this concept, somewhat ironically, “living inside the box.”

Just about everyone except Fidel Castro has the potential for theological growth.  So leave your comfort zone for Sukkot.  Here is a multi-pronged approach to theological openness for the coming week:

  • Spend some time in a sukkah, and keep yourself open to new inspiration
  • Eat there with your family and friends, or alone – and take a moment to think about the blessing of food and nourishment.  Perhaps discuss what it took for the food to reach your table.
  • Read in the sukkah.  Take your favorite anthology of poetry or a book of Jewish short stories or a siddur.
  • Meditate on the themes of joy, service to God, and the spiritual well.
  • Sit alone in the sukkah and close your eyes and just “be.”

In this season of heightened spiritual energy you might get lucky and discover an open well that you had not noticed before.

Hag sameah!

~

Rabbi Seth Adelson

First Day of Sukkot, 5776

Categories
High Holidays Sermons

Heart and Mind Balance: Changing Our Understanding of the Synagogue – Yom Kippur Day, 5776

There is a wonderful story about the rabbi who is greeting congregants after services on Yom Kippur. He sees Mr. Goldstein, and realizes that he has not seen him for a full year.

“Hayyim,” says the rabbi, “Are you in the army of God?”

“Of course, Rabbi,” says Mr. Goldstein.

“Then how come I only see you once a year?”

Mr. Goldstein leans in close and whispers, “Rabbi, I’m in the secret service!”

****

There is a verse from the Torah that we customarily say every time we enter a synagogue, and many of us are familiar with it (Numbers 24:5):

מַה-טֹּבוּ אֹהָלֶיךָ, יַעֲקֹב; מִשְׁכְּנֹתֶיךָ, יִשְׂרָאֵל.

Mah tovu ohalekha Ya’aqov, mishkenotekha Yisrael

How beautiful are your tents, O Jacob; your dwelling places, O Israel!

The words come from the mouth of the non-Israelite prophet Bil’am, sent by the Moabite king Balaq to curse the Israelites. What comes from his mouth, however, are not curses, but rather blessings. The rabbis of the Talmud (Sanhedrin 105b) interpret this line to speak of the two poles of Jewish life. Bil’am’s blessing says that the Jews will always have batei kenesset (synagogues: places where Jews have traditionally prayed) and batei midrash (traditional study halls, where Jews have learned the ancient words of our tradition). They read ohalekha = your tents = synagogues and mishkenotekha = your dwelling places = batei midrash.

That’s why Mah Tovu is the first thing in the siddur. That’s why we say it when we enter a synagogue, to recall that even as we lost the Temple in Jerusalem and were exiled and faced so many challenges in Diaspora, we could always count on this blessing.

Rabbi Shalom Noah Berezovsky, also known as the Slonimer Rebbe, saw this verse as the key to Jewish survival throughout the centuries. We are drawn near to our tradition by Bil’am’s blessing: The synagogue speaks to the heart and the beit midrash speaks to the mind. These two places are the essential points of qesher / connection in Jewish life. They have kept us Jewish for two thousand years after we should have disappeared, after the Romans destroyed the Second Temple in the year 70 CE. That is why we need both. We need to engage both the heart and mind.

Before we go any further, however, I just have to make sure we all know what I mean by beit midrash. Both the beit kenesset and the beit midrash emerged in antiquity, but they developed separately and are identified in the Talmud as separate places. We all know the synagogue. But most contemporary Jews, and probably the vast majority of Jews throughout history, have not been in a beit midrash.

Picture a bunch of Jews seated around tables, heavy books open in front of them, reading, discussing, or indeed arguing, mostly in pairs, around the room. The walls are lined with books – sets of the Talmud, rabbinic commentaries on the Torah, collections of midrash, texts and translations, dictionaries, the tools of textual study. Some are deep in thought. Some sway in concentration. Some schmooze with each other and laugh. That’s a traditional beit midrash.

You may recall that I have spoken over these holidays now for three times about the three qofs: qesher, qehillah, and qedushah, also known as connection, community, and holiness. But today I’d like to add something to it: Mah tovu ohalekha Ya’aqov. Heart and mind.

A synagogue is a place where we make connections with each other and with God, where we build and engage with our community, and where we seek qedushah, holiness and holy moments. However, it is not meant to be only a beit kenesset, a place of gathering for prayer, but it should also serve as a beit midrash, a place of learning. The needs of the contemporary Jewish world require the synagogue to be both.

The synagogue is meant to be a place where we express emotion, of openness, of expressing our vulnerability. I have literally held the hands of fellow Jews as they cried in synagogue, as they grieved for lost loved ones, as they took an inventory of their lives and came up wanting. That’s what this place is for. It’s about love and yearning, as I spoke about last night. It’s about the ritual framework that supports us in our times of need, and helps us achieve exultant highs in our times of joy.

heartWe don’t have too many spaces like this in our society any more. Those of you who heard me speak in August about the future of the Conservative movement might recall that I mentioned the sociologist Robert Putnam, who documents the decline of interconnectedness in our society in his book, Bowling Alone. Putnam points to the disappearance of social societies (the Elks, the Shriners, Hadassah) and bridge clubs and bowling leagues and even couples dining out together to show that we have less and less social capital, that is, connections with each other, than we did in the middle of the 20th century. This is not healthy for a whole bunch of reasons.

But Putnam does point out that houses of worship still offer social capital in spades. You meet people at services, you kibbitz at kiddush, you celebrate together and grieve together and talk and learn and sing in synagogue.

This building makes our world a better place, and it functions by helping us connect to our emotions. The synagogue resides in the heart.

But the beit midrash is all about the mind. It’s about logic and deduction, about puzzling through ancient language and situations that are as resonant today as they were two millennia ago, because we continue to apply them to how we live here and now. It is a place where we connect to each other through the shared joy of the quintessentially Jewish pursuit of textual learning, and we unlock the qedushah found within the words of our ancient scholars. As Rabbi Louis Finkelstein, professor of Talmud and chancellor of the Jewish Theological Seminary, is known to have said, “When I pray, I speak to God. When I study, God speaks to me.”

mindLearning the words of our tradition is, according to the Mishnah (Pe’ah 1:1), the highest mitzvah in Jewish life. Higher than keeping Shabbat and kashrut. Much more important than fasting on Yom Kippur. That is why the beit midrash is so essential to Jewish life. Talmud Torah keneged kulam. The study of Torah, says the Mishnah, weighs more than all of the other mitzvot combined.

And so our tents and our dwelling places, the beit kenesset and the beit midrash, are the places that connect us to each other and to God. These are the places where connection, community, and qedushah are quite literally fashioned.

And today, for us, they have to be the same building. This synagogue must be for the heart and the mind. It must be a beit kenesset and a beit midrash, because the Jewish world needs both.

But it took me a while to figure that out.

***

More than eight years ago, when I graduated from the Jewish Theological Seminary as a newly-minted rabbi, I was under the impression that the most important thing for a rabbi to exercise was the mind. In the seven years that I spent there, I put a sizeable spike on my knowledge curve in the area of Torah, halakhah, Jewish history, ritual, critical approaches to the Tanakh, etc. All very heady stuff, gleaned from old, dusty books.

It took me several years thereafter to understand that while it is impressive to appeal to the mind, the appeal to the heart is much more valuable, much more welcome, and much more likely to inspire people (i.e. you). I can give the most sophisticated, deep, self-impressed reading of Torah verses, and it might be greeted with a shrug at kiddush. But I have found that when I demonstrate that the Torah can be interpreted to help us live better lives as Jews and as people, I find that the message is far more likely to be heard, understood, and appreciated.

So, for example, it seems that when thinking about Yom Kippur, we usually consider its mechanical aspects: fasting for no less than 25 hours, not bathing, repenting by reciting the standard language in the mahzor with the traditional melodies, confessing our sins, striking our hearts, blowing the shofar at 7:58 PM, and so forth.

But we should also consider that this is a time to acknowledge that we are broken, and that we are yearning for wholeness. Nobody here among us is perfect; we all come to Yom Kippur with something in our hearts that needs to be cleansed. As I said last night, we yearn for closeness with God, for mending our relationships, for spiritual purity. These are ideas which flow from the heart.

Consider this for a moment: the public confessional prayers, the Viddui, are recited 12 times over the course of this day. Six times in the silent Amidah, wherein we confess our sins to ourselves, and six times out loud, in public, led by the sheliah tzibbur / the congregational emissary who leads us in prayer. And every single time it is in first person plural: we have transgressed, we have cheated, we have stolen; for the sins we have sinned against You by qalut rosh / superficiality, or by qashyut oref / being stiff-necked, and so forth.

Think about that: we are standing in public, confessing to a whole litany of deplorable behaviors. Doesn’t matter if we have done them or not. We are all stating, to ourselves AND out loud, that we are broken. How powerful is it that Jewish tradition asks us to do so! How therapeutic!

(There is a nice custom to go with this, by the way: we all know that we strike our chests. But something else you can do during the confessional is lean over a bit; hang your head in shame. We should not be proud of having transgressed. We should not be standing upright. We should be a little hunched over.)

That picture of Yom Kippur, going beyond the mechanics of the day to connect our tradition with how we live now, is an appeal to the heart. And that is far more attractive to all of us then the most well-executed midrashic analysis that is delivered entirely divorced from the realities of our lives. The Torah is meant to teach us lessons about how to live better, not to be analyzed dispassionately in slices arrayed on sterile glass slides.

And yet, it seems to me that what works best in the Jewish world is when the heart and mind are in balance. In parallel, just like in the verse: Mah tovu ohalekha Ya’aqov, mishkenotekha Yisrael.

To uncover the love in Judaism, you have to dig deep into Jewish text. You have to go back to the mind.

When we study Torah, we acknowledge that there are shiv’im panim latorah, seventy faces to the Torah, that is, seventy ways (at least) of understanding every passage, every word, every story, every mitzvah, and so forth. (OK, so maybe not seventy, but that’s just rabbinic-speak for “a whole bunch.”)

There are many ways of understanding our foundational text, and the way we approach this text, referred to rabbinically as “Talmud Torah,” we must take as axiomatic the idea that no single approach is the lone correct understanding. Talmud Torah includes the seventy faces. And among those faces are those of the heart and those of the mind.

When we study Torah, we should not merely ask, “What does this mean?” but we should also ask, “What does this mean to us?” And this takes a whole lot more work. The standard commentators on the Torah that some of us know (Rashi, Ramban, ibn Ezra, etc.) usually try to resolve issues within the text by working through the challenging language. Midrash, stories written to fill in the gaps of the Torah, seeks to humanize the text by completing it. And Hasidic tales tend to go even further by seeking the personal angle – how might we learn from this to emulate the acts of piety and selflessness of which Hasidic lore often speaks.

There are many ways to find answers to the question of “What does this mean to us?” Talmud Torah for the modern audience has to hit us where we live: to answer questions like this:

  • What do I want my children to learn about life?
  • How do I make a difference in this world?
  • How do I balance my commitment to my family with my work obligations?
  • How do I improve myself?
  • Why is this world so much more complex than it used to be, and how do I navigate the complexity?

And so forth.

These are all essential questions that we might often overlook if they are not staring us in the face. And that’s why the highest mitzvah in Jewish life is Talmud Torah. You can light all the Hanukkah candles you want; you can daven with passion while fasting on Yom Kippur; you can gorge yourself on matzah and sit in the Sukkah and make sure your boys are circumcized and your doorposts have mezuzot and on and on, but until you commit to learning the precious words of the Jewish bookshelf, you cannot fully appreciate the richness and value of our tradition. When I pray, I speak to God. When I study, God speaks to me.

In an ideal synagogue, the one that we are building here at 5915 Beacon St., we will strike the proper balance between heart and mind. We will not only pray, ask for forgiveness, seek teshuvah / repentance, rejoice and mourn, but we will also learn the words of our tradition and what they mean to us. We will be both a beit kenesset and a beit midrash.

I have taken that journey from the mind to the heart and back again. And you can too. But it requires entering the Jewish study hall, that part of the synagogue devoted to lifelong Jewish learning. We will all have to dig deeper. You need both the heart and the mind to sustain that qesher, that connection with our tradition.

So – I know you’re waiting for this now – what’s the action item, Rabbi?

I would like you to seriously consider one simple question, a question that I hope will help you re-envision your entire understanding of Judaism and of the role of the synagogue. This is a kind of a self-test:

“How has your relationship with Judaism changed in the last ten years?” Judaism – the set of rituals and texts and customs that make up our tradition. Not the cultural trappings: the foods, the institutions, the cool Jewish sites you saw on vacation in Spain.

If you search very deeply and your answer is, “It hasn’t,” then we have some work to do, to engage your heart and mind. Give me a call, shoot me an email, message me on Facebook; I would love to meet up and talk about it.

If you can come up with a whole litany of things you have learned and practices you have adopted and books you have read and holy moments you have experienced, and ways you have applied values from our tradition to your life, then we still have some work to do, because Judaism is a lifetime of learning.

Talmud Torah keneged kulam. Keep learning, and asking “What does this mean to us?” It is high on my agenda here at Beth Shalom to move this congregation forward, and that will require a little more beit kenesset and beit midrash. Unlike Hayyim, who is in the “secret service,” I hope you will join me as we focus on both the heart and the mind, and we continue our collective journey in search of connection, community, and qedushah, holiness.

Mah tovu ohalekha Ya’aqov, mishkenotekha Yisrael.

~

Rabbi Seth Adelson

(Originally delivered at Congregation Beth Shalom, Yom Kippur, 9/23/15.)

Categories
High Holidays Sermons

A Night of Yearning – Kol Nidrei 5776

Goldie Cohen, an elderly Jewish woman from New York, goes to her travel agent. “I vont to go to India.”

“Mrs. Cohen, why India? It’s much hotter than New York, and crowded, and not for the faint of heart.”

“I vont to go to India.”

“But it’s a long journey, how will you manage? What will you eat? The food is too hot and spicy for you. You can’t drink the water or eat fresh fruit and vegetables. You’ll get sick.  And can you imagine the hospital, no Jewish doctors?”

“I vont to go to India.”

The necessary arrangements are made, and off she goes. She arrives in India and, undeterred by the noise and crowds, makes her way to an ashram. There she joins the long line of people waiting for an audience with the guru. She is told that it will take at least three days of standing in line to see the guru.

“Dats OK,” Goldie says.

Eventually she reaches the guru’s entryway. There she is told firmly that she can only say three words.

“Fine,” she says.

She is ushered into the inner sanctum where the guru is seated.  As she approaches him, she is reminded: “Remember, just three words.”

Unlike the other devotees, she does not prostrate at his feet. She stands directly in front of him, folds her arms on her chest, fixes her gaze on his, and says: “Shmuel, come home.”

***

There is a great tradition of Jews who have sought spiritual fulfillment in other traditions, particularly those of the East. We are a people who yearn for connection, and our rich, ancient tradition is often perceived to be insufficient, or perhaps merely impenetrable to satisfy some of us. Author Rodger Kamenetz wrote about these people, whom some call “JuBus,” Jewish Buddhists, in his book about the Jewish delegation that went to see the Dalai Lama in 1990, The Jew in the Lotus. (I think the Shmuel of the story actually appears in the book, perhaps under a different name.)

And yet, we have in our tradition, which is vast and deep and thoughtful and complex, all of the spiritual tools to provide that nourishment, that sense of qedushah*.

The irony, it seems, is that many of us do not appreciate the range of offerings our tradition has. Many of us have confined Judaism to a box that contains Hanukkah candles, bagels, Yiddish-accented humor, and a whole lot of mumbling in a language that nobody can understand (and takes hours).  Hence the need to seek elsewhere for spiritual satisfaction.

A synagogue is not just a place to daven / pray. It is not merely a place where you can interact with God. You can talk to God, or listen for God’s voice anywhere.

Rather, a synagogue is a beit kenesset, a place of gathering. It’s our communal home. It’s a place that is designed for Jews to come together, whether for ritual, social, educational, spiritual, or organizational reasons. The English word “synagogue” is a direct translation of the Hebrew beit kenesset: “syn” = together, “gog” = place. Each of us should think of this place as an annex of our home, a third place (home, work, synagogue) whose doors are always open. We’re here for you. Not just me and the staff, but your community. We’re here. Gather with us.

This is a place of the three qofs: qesher, qehillah, qedushah*. Connection, community, and holiness.

The real reason that you are here tonight is because of the three qofs. You need to be counted as part of the qehillah, to be with your people, to connect with others who are here, to reach out and grab just a wee bit of qedushah, holiness. It’s not about Kol Nidrei, per se. This is a night of yearning. Yearning for these three things, which most of us are not even aware that we need.

Judaism does not really have intrinsically holy places or objects. Qedushah is a little more elusive than that. I know that runs counter to what many of us have been taught. The beit kenesset / synagogue?  We make it holy with our presence. The Sefer Torah? “Holy” books? We endow them with holiness when we use them. The Kotel? Har HaBayit / the Temple Mount? While there is a tremendous sentimental value to those ancient rocks, the prevailing opinion is that when the Temple was destroyed by the Romans, the Shekhinah, God’s presence, departed. Like a beit kenesset, we make those items and locations holy when pray, celebrate, weep, and yearn with them or at them.

It’s not the tangible things in Judaism that are holy. It’s time. We sanctify time. Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel famously described Shabbat as “a palace in time.” We mark holy moments. We resonate together at Kol Nidrei, at Ne’ilah, at joyous and mournful lifecycle events. The high points within Judaism are moments in time, moments marked by qedushah / holiness. It’s not the stained-glass windows; it’s the moment.

That is why the Jewish calendar is so much more complicated than the Gregorian calendar** – because we care very deeply about the sanctification of time. Time is much more valuable than any physical thing.

And the older I get, the more I appreciate the value of time, and the more I understand that I have to try to fill as much of my time with as much qedushah / holiness as possible.

We all want a little holiness in our lives. But we do not always know how to find it.

I have good news for you. The real action is right here, right now. Tonight is the night to get a little taste of holiness, when the gates of heaven are truly open. It’s the most powerful night of the Jewish year, this night of yearning.

All it takes to make it happen is for you to open up, to allow that yearning to surface.

الموضوع: أشواقنــا ؟

But that’s not so easy.

I spoke on Rosh Hashanah about how the shofar opens us up, breaks through our tough exterior to reveal our internal radiance. But Yom Kippur works a little differently.

It is a unique day for many reasons:

  • It is described in the Torah as Shabbat Shabbaton – the Sabbath of Sabbaths – the only day in the Jewish calendar more holy than Shabbat
  • This is the only evening of the year when we wear a tallit
  • We never actually conclude any service until the very end; it’s as if we are in prayer all day, the full 25 hours
  • We are supposed to “afflict our souls” on this day. Not necessarily the body, but the soul. (Don’t confuse the two!)
  • We wear white (as I suggested on Rosh Hashanah) to suggest the purity for which we yearn
  • This day is both weighty and joyous: historically, a happy day on which young women went out into the fields looking for husbands (Mishnah Ta’anit 4:4)

The very singularity of this day, its uniqueness, point to one thing: that we are all united today. That Benei Yisrael, all of the descendants of Jacob and Leah and Rachel and Bilhah and Zilpah, stand together on Yom Kippur.

One commentator to address the nature of Yom Kippur was Rabbi Yehudah Aryeh Leib Alter, the late 19th-century head of the Ger Hasidic court, often known by the name of his major work, the Sefat Emet (or Sefas Emes, depending on your perspective). The Sefat Emet took note of the rabbinic explanation that Yom Kippur is the day when Moshe brought down the second set of tablets from Mt. Sinai. This is, of course, after the first set was broken because the Israelites had built an idol, a calf made from melting down their jewelry.

The molten calf (although we often refer to it as the “golden calf,” “molten” is the translation of the Hebrew, “egel masekhah,” the term the Torah uses to describe it in Exodus 32) is the closest thing that Judaism has to the Christian concept of “original sin.” (We do not see people as fundamentally sinful – everybody is born with a clean slate, and every Yom Kippur we have the ability to wipe that slate clean again.)

Ancient interpreters understood the molten calf as having inspired a cascading effect that compelled the Israelites to perform a wide range of bad things, from sexual indiscretion to murder to sin’at hinnam, causeless hatred.

And so, when Moshe returns on Yom Kippur with the second set of tablets, the Israelites had many transgressions for which to atone. Yes, avodah zarah / idol worship was high on the list. But also the relationships between the people had been broken through these sins. They were in need of interpersonal repair; they needed to stand together, to achieve wholeness once again as a qehillah, a community.

And so too today. The Sefat Emet tells us that on Yom Kippur, we seek to recover wholeness as a community – mercy for one another, acts of hesed, the sense of ve-ahavta lereiakha kamokha / love your neighbor as yourself. When we seek those things, we recapture the qedushah / holiness of the moment when Moshe comes down with the second set of tablets. Then we can re-activate the Torah within us; we regain that clean slate; we start fresh on a new path for the new year.

That is why we are here tonight: to restore a sense of who we are as a community – what connects us to each other, what values unite us, how we live the words of our tradition from day to day.

And for the entire day, from Kol Nidrei until the final teqi’ah gedolah, we yearn for that unity, that wholeness. We yearn to be restored as a qehillah.

****

I have been overwhelmed with many emotions since meeting you all for the first time back in February. This is a congregation with tremendous history. We are very nearly 100 years old. A whole century. There are not too many congregations in America that can claim that sort of lifespan.

And over the arc of the last century, the fortunes of this congregation have risen and fallen. But you know what? The reason that Judy let me apply here (in our house, the rebbetzin wears the pants!) is that we saw readily that this congregation has wonderful potential; it has all the features that we were looking for in a qehillah:

  • Many, many volunteers. The level of personal involvement here is very impressive. There are a lot of you who care very strongly about Beth Shalom, and are willing to put in personal time and energy to help make it better
  • Very knowledgeable active core of members
  • Not just a number of young families, but a bunch of actively-involved young families. This core will inevitably attract more.
  • Day school nearby that is integral to the community.
  • Unique and vibrant JJEP religious school
  • Tight-knit, urban setting
  • Healthy daily minyan
  • Enthusiasm. Judy and I have been overwhelmed with how excited people are about Pittsburgh, about Beth Shalom, about our joining this community.
  • It is part of a wider community that is a shining beacon of Jewish pluralism and togetherness (very different from the New York area, BTW) Jewish Pittsburgh is indeed a unique community.

All of the ingredients are here for a shining future. We – you and me – are going to make it happen. We are going to make this congregation not what it was, but what it can be.

There is so much here to be proud of; so much to celebrate, so much to be inspired by and to be hopeful for.

And, given that the Sefat Emet tells us that this is a night of unity, Yom Kippur 5776 should be a powerful reminder of the task before us. We must see ourselves as united to move forward, and willing to do the following:

  • Be more open: open to outsiders; open to people from across the religious and social spectrum; open to new ideas and new methods of engagement; open to all the variations on the contemporary Jewish family
  • To have a sense of togetherness, that we are all on the same side
  • To have a sense of purpose – that we have a shared mission upheld by Jewish values writ large and Conservative Jewish values in particular.

Those are all attitudinal points. In terms of what we offer, I think we should have:

  • More engaging services.
  • More music, both vocal and instrumental.
  • More provocative speakers.
  • More social action activities.

And all of these have to be reinforced by what I think is the most valuable thing that Jewish communities should be doing today: More small-group experiences.

While the Judaism of our parents and grandparents was buoyed by the dramatic feeling of classically beautiful services in huge, ornate rooms and featuring fiery rabbinic oratory, most Jews are not looking for these experiences today. What most of us are looking for in this isolated, impersonal world is more intimate, more personally meaningful interactions with other people like us. We are looking to sanctify those holy moments in ways that are familiar and amiable.

I am going to pause from all this envisioning for a moment to suggest that on this eve of Yom Kippur, on this holiest of holy moments, we ask ourselves a crucial question. It seems that there is something for which we must, as a united community, request forgiveness, something for which we must seek teshuvah / repentance.

I am told that there are many people who left this congregation or are still angry because members of this community spoke to them in a way that was inappropriate (or mean, or nasty). So it is extremely important that we ask ourselves if we are indeed repentant. Have we changed the way we speak to each other?

Have we spoken ill of any of our fellow congregants, whether in private or in public? Have we gossiped?  Have we exchanged harsh words or spoken with a lack of respect within or without these walls?  We cannot truly heal ourselves as a qehillah qedoshah / holy community, we cannot move forward if we do not resolve to treat and speak to each other with only the highest respect.

And so, looping back to Shmuel, or anybody else who has not yet found their entree into a fulfilling Jewish life, I hope that together we will find ways to present our very rich heritage of learning, values and culture by reaching out through affinity groups, by capitalizing on our own internal social networks. We will thereby draw more of us into the center from the periphery.

In the mean time, let our yearning this evening translate to action. Let our desire for the future of Beth Shalom, un-clouded by the uncertainties of the past, drive us to fashion a new type of congregation, where more of us are involved on a more regular basis through a new set of entry points.

Here is the action item: Find some way to participate. Volunteer to help out. Come to our adult ed offerings. Learn something new so you can participate in parts of services. Brainstorm new programs or ways to engage others. Donate your time or your funds (or both). Come to the parlor meetings that we will be hosting through the coming year to discuss all of these things.

We are going to build. And for that we need you. We need you to seek connection, community, and qedushah here, among your people.

Tonight we yearn for that rosy future; on this night next year, we will be well on the way to building it. Let’s stand together to bring Shmuel, and all the other Shmuels, back home.

* Apologies if the “q” seems strange. One way of representing the Hebrew letter ק (qof) in English transliteration is q, because (as you can readily see if you look at them right next to each other) the Latin q is actually related to the Hebrew ק. (The Latin “k” comes from the Hebrew כ (kaf).) By transliterating this way, it helps English speakers learn or remember the Hebrew spelling of the transliterated word.

** How much more complicated? I can’t even begin to explain. Just trust me on this.

~

Rabbi Seth Adelson

(Originally delivered at Congregation Beth Shalom, Leil Yom HaKippurim, 9/22/15.)

Categories
High Holidays Sermons

Optimism, or, Building Yerushalayim Shel Ma’alah – Day 2 Rosh Hashanah 5776

There’s an ancient rabbinic story (now quite dated) that goes something like this:

How can you tell the difference between an optimist and a pessimist in Israel?

The optimist is learning Arabic. The pessimist is learning Russian. (This worked better back in the good ol’ days of the Cold War.)

I am not going to give the Israel sermon that some of you might be expecting. I’m not going to talk about the return of anti-Semitism after 70 years of retreat. I’m not going to talk about Europe or college campuses, or, for that matter, settlements and peace processes. I’m not even going to talk about Iran. I am instead going to talk about what very few commentators are willing to engage in: optimism. Hope for the future. Because really, it’s all we have.

I have been an ohev tziyyon, a lover of Zion, for all of my life. I have lived in Israel. I have a son that lives there whom I visit regularly. I am tremendously proud of everything that our people have accomplished in the modern return of Jews to Israel, from the revival of Hebrew as a spoken language, to the many scientific advances that Israel has given to the world, to the easy availability of excellent coffee and, more importantly, free wifi everywhere in the Jewish state.

I have a qesher / connection with the land of Israel, a qesher that is also (as we discussed yesterday) seasoned with a sense of qehillah (community) and qedushah (holiness). In fact, it would not be unreasonable to say that my Jewish identity, my qesher with Judaism, would be incomplete without Israel. When I met Judy for the first time, we discovered that we both had this love of Israel; hers was nurtured in a secular Zionist upbringing, while mine was more closely tied to my relationship with Judaism and Jewish life. We have since confessed to each other over and over that this Israeli qesher is a cornerstone of our relationship.

Given the current state of affairs, I am sorry to say that 5775 was not a good year for optimists. Public opinion on Israel in almost every place in the world except the United States has shifted away from Israel. Israel has come under fire in every quarter, from academic boycotts to an attempt to exclude Israel from international soccer tournaments to the performing arts.

Perhaps you heard about the American Jewish reggae artist Matisyahu, who was initially forced out of a Spanish reggae festival because he would not repudiate his support of Israel. After an international outcry, the organizers relented and allowed him to perform, and he gave them a little dig by singing one of his particularly pro-Israel tunes, a paean to Jerusalem, with exultant pride:

Jerusalem, if I forget you

Fire not gonna come from me tongue

Jerusalem, if I forget you

Let my right hand forget what it’s supposed to do

(The song references Psalm 137:5-6:

אִם-אֶשְׁכָּחֵךְ יְרוּשָׁלִָם תִּשְׁכַּח יְמִינִי. תִּדְבַּק לְשׁוֹנִי לְחִכִּי אִם-לֹא אֶזְכְּרֵכִי

If I forget you, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget; let my tongue stick to the roof of my mouth, if I do not remember you.)

In the midst of the last war with Hamas, in the summer of 2014, while there was much carnage and loss of life and Israelis going in and out of bomb shelters something truly unfortunate happened in Jerusalem. (This was really only a footnote to everything else that happened that summer.) The Jerusalem light rail system, the Rakevet HaQalah, was attacked. Well, not the entire system – only the three stations in the Arab neighborhoods of the united city of Jerusalem: Es-Sahl, Shuafat, and Beit Hanina. I have considered the ramifications of this quite a bit in the context of what I personally know about Jerusalem.

I lived there for about seven months in the year 2000, just before the second Intifada erupted, when I was a cantorial student at Machon Schechter, the Israeli teaching institution of the Masorti (Conservative) movement. At that time, there was no light rail system, and there was (at least until that summer) a certain amount of optimism in the air. Peace was on the way. The Oslo accords were not yet dead. There was hope for a future of cooperation, of an economic dividend on both sides of the Green Line – the Palestinians had even built a casino in Jericho with the intent of attracting Israeli tourists. Ramallah was becoming a fashionable place to visit.

Living in Jerusalem is something like living in Gan Eden / Paradise. Well, that is, for the first few weeks. Then one starts to be aware of the traffic (which is particularly vicious), the high cost of living, the heavy tax burden, the tensions between the various demographic groups, the political snake-pit that is the Knesset, the thornier parts of the Israeli character, and so forth.

Back to the Light Rail: In an effort to help curb the traffic problem, in the early 2000s the city began to build its light-rail system. For a few years it actually made traffic in the Holy City even worse, as Rehov Yafo / Jaffa St., the main drag in central Jerusalem, was torn up to build the rails. It opened in 2010, and I first rode it on a visit in 2011. It’s beautiful – stylish, efficient, well-designed. (It runs on the honors system, which is, I suppose, appropriate for the Holy City – you buy your tickets outside and self-validate on the train. Inspectors do come through and check from time to time, although I have never seen one.)

And, call me crazy, but as an engineer, I appreciate things like this: it has electronic crawling signs telling you of the upcoming stops and warning you about suspicious packages. But here’s the cool part: it’s in three languages, Hebrew, Arabic, and English. So, if you can picture this for a moment, there is a kind of linguistic compromise in play on the sign. First it crawls from left-to-right for the Semitic languages, and then it reverses direction for the English. Once the English is done, it crawls back the other way again. I think that’s really cool.

But the most powerful, symbolic feature of the light rail system is that it was designed to serve both Jews and Arabs, in what is largely a segregated city, still segmented by imaginary lines. People could board the train in Shuafat and get off in the center of the city. (Although I suppose that many people here have been to Jerusalem, I would hazard a guess that very few of us have been to Shuafat. I have never been there, and I have walked many, many streets in Jerusalem.)

The fact that some Arab neighborhoods were to be served by the Rakevet HaQalah / the Light Rail was heralded as something that would be a boon to the economy. Roughly one-third of united Jerusalem’s population is Arab, and the perception is that many of these neighborhoods are under-served by city services.

Against the backdrop of the war with Hamas in Gaza last summer, the three stations in Arab neighborhoods were attacked by Arab youths and heavily damaged. For several months, the trains stopped running north of the Giv’at HaMivtar stop in French Hill. Those neighborhoods were cut off.

Some time last spring there was a captivating article in the New York Times magazine about the “psychology” of cities, and in particular how breaking transportation connections, like bridges or rail service, serves to weaken the morale of people on both sides of the breakage. Indeed, internal breakage in cities causes depression: economic and social. It drags the local population down. Neighborhoods feed off of each other for energy when people and goods flow freely. When areas are cut off from each other, says research psychiatrist Mindy Thompson Fullilove, the vitality drains away.

Now, we might be inclined to think of those who attacked the stations in the Arab neighborhoods as savage enemies of Israel and the Jews. And they probably see themselves as Israel’s enemies. But I think a more accurate understanding is that they are in fact enemies of the future. They don’t want cooperation. They don’t want any acknowledgment of or participation with the State of Israel or with us, the Jews, or even anybody on the Palestinian side who cooperates with the Jews. And they certainly don’t want united Jerusalem to feel united.

I think that we can all agree that the light rail is a good thing for Jerusalem, for everybody who lives there. Connections are good. Flow is good.

Understanding this, Israel restored the stations, and they were functioning again about three months later. But the wound in the heart of Jerusalem is still undeniably there. And all the more so: the trains are running, but the dialogue is not.

In the Jewish mind there are two Jerusalems: Yerushalayim shel ma’alah, the heavenly Jerusalem, and Yerushalayim shel matah, the earthly Jerusalem. Yerushalayim shel mata has been ravaged for centuries by war and dysfunction: destruction of two Temples and two millennia of subsequent conquerors. By contrast, Yerushalayim shel ma’alah has always been under God’s sovereignty; it is the ideal to which the earthly Jerusalem aspires, the Jerusalem of our tiqvah / hope and our tefillah / prayer. We must admit that although we, the Jews, now control Yerushalayim shel matah, and safeguard the freedom to worship for the three major religions who revere her, Jerusalem is still a far cry from the heavenly ideal.

***

Israel is a very complicated place. When you visit Israel as a tourist, you see what some dismiss as “Disneyland Israel”: the Kotel, the Old City, the wonderful museums, the fantastic food, the sense of peoplehood and sovereignty twisted together in a magical bow that resonates deeply with those of us who make our home in Diaspora but (to paraphrase Yehuda HaLevi) whose hearts are in the East . There is something tremendously gratifying about quenching our yearning of 2,000 years by hiking in the desert, weeping at the Wall, and partying on the beach in Tel Aviv.

But Israelis have a much more nuanced understanding of their own country. It is small, crowded, and relatively poor: salaries are low and cost of living is high. Army service and the constant threat of war are ever-present. Never mind the breakdown between Arabs and Jews – the rifts just among the Jews seem insurmountable: religious vs. secular, Ashkenazi vs. Eastern / Mizrahi, right vs. left. It’s very hard for Israelis to be optimistic about the future.

Those of you who know and love Israeli pop music are probably familiar with the first Israeli supergroup, Kavveret, who were sent to the Eurovision song festival in 1974 to perform their hit, Natatti Lah Hayyay – “I gave her my life”:

נתתי לה חיי

ירדתי על ברכי

יאמינו לי כולם

למדתי מה זה סתם ונעלבתי.

I gave her my life

I got down on my knees

All will believe me

I learned the meaning of nothingness, and I was insulted.

The lyrics are cryptic, but most Israelis understand this song to be a critique of their own state: you give everything to her and she knocks you down. And I have lived there long enough to assure you that every Israeli feels this way at some point.

In truth, it is really a part of the Jewish psyche, both in Israel and the Diaspora, to see ourselves as constantly under threat of disappearance. In his essay from 1948 entitled “Israel: The Ever-Dying People,” philosopher Simon Rawidowicz posited that this innate pessimism dates all the way back to Moses, and is a constant in Jewish thought and culture right up to the present day. And we see it on display in its full glory throughout the Jewish world.

Pessimism aside, Rawidowicz concludes his essay by pointing out that, “a people who have been dying for thousands of years means a living people.” We are still here, and where are the Canaanites? The Babylonians? The Assyrians? The Romans? The modern states of Greece and Egypt are barely shadows of what they were in ancient times. And yet we’re still here, and we even have a Jewish state. The ever-dying people is still alive. Thriving, even. Am Yisrael Hai.

One might even say that Zionism, the political movement that began in the late 19th century advocating Jewish national self-determination, is the most optimistic venture that we have ever undertaken as a people. Given the status of most of our people at that time, it was a bold vision indeed to think that we could establish our own state in the land renamed Palestine by the Romans eighteen centuries earlier.

True, it was borne of pessimism: In France, the first country in the Old World to grant Jews full rights as citizens, the young Hungarian journalist, Theodor Herzl, was covering the Dreyfus affair in Paris in 1895. It occurred to him that if an angry mob of citizens of the most enlightened society in the world at the time could march through the streets chanting, “Mort aux Juifs,” (“Death to the Jews”) then there was no future for Jews in the Diaspora. It was this pessimistic outlook which inspired him to convene the First Zionist Congress in Basel two years later. The rest, of course, is history.

Im tirtzu, ein zo agadah. If you will it, said Herzl, it is no dream. That is an undeniably optimistic statement.

And you know? We can still follow Herzl’s lead. We can return to the tremendous optimism that yielded Medinat Yisrael, the State of Israel, the greatest Jewish miracle of our time. And who brought about that miracle? We did.

Close your eyes for a moment. Imagine the Israel that you want your great-grandchildren to visit, to know, to love. Is it a peaceful place? Is it well-developed? Economically stable? Vital? Not bathed in fear? Living in harmony with her neighbors? A vibrant, Jewish democracy? Imagine that for a moment.

We will disagree about the various political wranglings that must take place to build that Israel. As the old joke goes, two Jews, three opinions.  And it is OK to disagree, as long as we do so respectfully. But everybody around the table has to keep talking to each other.

(An aside: Regarding respectful disagreement, I’m afraid that on the domestic front we Jews and ohavei tsiyyon / lovers of Israel on both sides of the recent debate over the Iranian nuclear deal have been guilty of not merely being uncivil, but downright appalling public rhetoric, so much so that the Anti-Defamation League had to speak up to condemn it forcefully, calling it “hateful,” “vicious,” and “dehumanizing.” I certainly hope that such horrible discourse will never be heard again.)

While a pessimist is never disappointed, optimists live happier lives.

These Aseret Yemei Teshuvah, these ten days of repentance that include Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, are among the most forward-looking days of the year.

We gather to pray and sing, and of course to eat, and maybe hear a few bons mots from the rabbi. But we also gather to yearn for closeness with God, to ask for forgiveness, to seek reconciliation, to hope for a good year, to carry the sweetness of these apple-and-honey soaked days into 5776. In short, we should be filled with optimism on these days; we acknowledge that we have the power to change our lives, to change God’s decree. That is an incredible thing!

If we can do that for ourselves, we can also do it for Israel. Let’s keep looking to the future, and keep talking, and counting on the measure of Divine goodness that enabled Israel to come into being a mere 51 years after the First Zionist Congress. And we must keep building and rebuilding those literal and figurative rail lines.

So what’s the action item, rabbi?

It’s not so easy. Yesterday, I suggested the action item of wearing white on Yom Kippur. That’s simple.

Today, the action item is to follow the lead of Theodor Herzl, and turn pessimism into optimism. Think positive. Be hopeful. Not in a Pollyannish, naive kind of way.  But rather in knowing that doing so is part of our heritage, our tradition.  It is what God wants of us on these days, and beyond them for our lives.  I know as little as you do about the future, but I am pretty certain that hoping for and working toward a good outcome has a better chance of success than defeatism.

Consider optimism. Come on over to the sunny side of Jaffa Street as we inch toward Yerushalayim shel ma’alah, the heavenly Jerusalem.

Shanah Tovah!

~

Rabbi Seth Adelson

(Originally delivered at Congregation Beth Shalom, 2nd day of Rosh Hashanah, 9/15/2015.)

Categories
High Holidays Sermons

One Jewish Boy’s Story and Three Qofs – Day 1 Rosh Hashanah 5776

Shanah tovah! It’s truly a pleasure and an honor to stand before you here today. I am truly feeling at this moment the spirit of “Hayom Harat Olam.” Today the world is born. It’s a new world for me and Judy and the kids. We are overjoyed to be here in Pittsburgh.

I am going to start off in a sort of unorthodox way (which is completely OK, ‘cause I’m not an Orthodox rabbi…). We all need to get to know each other, and there is only one of me and whole lot of you, so I am hoping that you are willing to cut me some slack, at least for the first few years.

So in pursuit of getting to know each other, I’m going to tell you a story. A true story. But first, I have to lay something out for you that you might find a little unpleasant, an important fact about me that I have hidden from you up until right now:

I know next to nothing about sports. More to the point, I know virtually nothing about the Pittsburgh teams. What I do know, I know about baseball, and most of that is from the late 1970s, when I was collecting baseball cards. (The good news is that 1979 was my first summer at a sleepaway camp, and I remember the Pirates of that year, the summer of “We Are Family,” the gay ‘90s caps. But other than that and a vague notion of who Roberto Clemente was, I’ve got nothin’.)

Prior to consulting with Rabbi Google two weeks ago, I couldn’t name a single Steelers quarterback. And the Penguins? As they say in Brooklyn, fagettaboutit.

So we’re all going to have work a little harder to get to know each other. I’ll try to become familiar with the current teams, but I must admit that I have a pretty long to-do list right now, so I’m not optimistic. Meanwhile, we’re going to have to work with other material. So now that that is out of the way, let me tell you a story.  The story of a boy and 3 qofs*.

Once upon a time there was a Jewish boy, who lived in a small town in the Berkshires, in Western Massachusetts. He and his family were very committed to their Conservative synagogue, which was 20 miles away from their home. They spent a lot of time on the road, driving back and forth to synagogue for Hebrew school, for Shabbat morning services, for special events and speakers and classes and semahot and so forth.

This boy loved his synagogue community. He felt very much an integral part of it, and after his bar mitzvah continued in Hebrew High School, read Torah regularly, led services regularly, helped build and decorate the sukkah, led Junior congregation, was a music teacher in the Hebrew school, and so forth. He went to Israel during the summer before his senior year in high school, and felt even more strongly connected to his people.

And then something happened. He left to go to university to study engineering. And he did not have the same qesher*, the same connection with the other Jewish students he met there. He drifted away from them, and away from his qehillah*, his Jewish community, and away from Jewish life. (Ironically, in this time, he also became a vegetarian, mostly because he could not get kosher meat.)

But then something stranger happened: he went even further away from home to go to graduate school, also in engineering, at a huge university in a far-away place, where  there were only a handful of Jewish people like him. And he discovered that he needed qehillah, community, and that he needed qesher, personal connection. And so he re-entered Jewish life.

Eventually, this 20-something engineer had to find a job. So he did. And meanwhile, he maintained his connection / qesher, and joined a community / qehillah or two. He taught Hebrew school again, led a Jewish youth group, sang in a synagogue choir, read more Torah, and even learned to lead parts of High Holiday services. And went to work, where he helped build things. Big things: chemical plants, refineries, and parts thereof. But something was missing.

One Sukkot, our young Jewish man, now almost finished with his 20s, was sitting in his cantor’s sukkah. And the cantor said something like this: “Look, I know you don’t love your work as an engineer. And I know you love Judaism and love to sing. Why don’t you consider going to cantorial school?”

The young man had never thought about that. But after lots of reflection, he began to think that it might address the problem of “something missing.” So, taking stock of his life, he took the next appropriate step: he moved to Israel, to the desert town of Arad, to clear his head, to learn Hebrew, and to reflect, just as the Israelite prophets always did in the Judean hills.

After some contemplation, some hiking in the desert, and a whole lot of falafel, he realized that what was missing was qedushah, holiness, and so he decided to make qedushah a career. And he enrolled in cantorial school.

After 4 years of study he became a hazzan.  But he was reveling in the qedushah so much he decided to remain a few more at the Jewish Theological Seminary to become a rabbi as well.

And that is the story of how I came to stand before you today, this day on which the world was born. I am proud to say that I have built my rabbinate around these three qofs, these three ideas: qesher / connection, qehillah / community, and qedushah / holiness.  My greatest desire is to help others to find their paths into these three things, and with all the excitement and anticipation that comes with starting a new position, I hope to take these principles to a whole new level.

CCQ

Together, ladies and gentlemen, we are going to be partners. We are going to build that qehillah that brings qesher and qedushah to all who enter. And all the more so, we are going to reach out beyond these walls to bring all three of those things to those who don’t yet know they need them.

This won’t be easy. It will require love. Love of everybody. Love of all humanity.

It will also require resources, energy, and people.

And that’s where you come in. The first step is to build qesher between all of us. And we have to start with the fundamentals: the sharing of stories. I have just told you one of my stories, and I have many more to share .And each of you has many stories as well, stories that define who you are, that have the potential to connect you to everybody else here.

What makes a community function well, ladies and gentlemen, is that we feel interconnected. And one of my primary goals during my first year here is to build connections. Many of you are already connected to each other, I know. Even for three and four generations. But that’s not enough. We have to reach higher. If we are going to make this truly a qehillah qedoshah, a community bound together in holiness, a community that is so inspiring that others will want to join or participate in more fully, we have to be even more interconnected. We have to raise our qesher quotient, our QQ, if you will.

I have already begun this process. I have met with a few small groups already to get the ball rolling in raising that qesher quotient. Throughout this year, every single person in this room will be invited to a parlor meeting where you will meet me, I will meet you, and we’ll share some of ourselves as a group to further the goal of building qesher, of raising ourselves up in the context of community.

Some of the ideas that have surfaced at these meetings we are already putting into place. Many of you attended the instrumental service that I led here with several musical partners a few Friday evenings ago. More than 200 of us learned some new melodies, sang joyously, and considered the Jewish value of compassion; it was really quite moving. We will be doing that again on October 23rd, and ideally every fourth Friday night of the month thereafter. We will be having more Shabbat dinners as well, paired with upbeat, Carlebach-style Kabbalat Shabbat services. We will step up our social action activities. And there will be more.

Another new vehicle for building qesher is the New Members’ Welcoming Ceremony, which we will be hosting in coming months for those that have recently joined our congregation. On that day we will incorporate our newest members by giving each of them the opportunity to hold a sefer Torah, visibly demonstrating how we can all take hold of our tradition. Judaism is not something that the rabbi does for you; it’s yours to take hold of, and we will be finding ways to lower the bar to participation.

And we are launching yet another new, engaging way to connect. We don’t even have a name for it yet, but we will be reaching out beyond the synagogue walls to host a series of discussions in people’s homes, led by a group of ideally ten members with whom I will be personally working. So it goes like this: I meet with my ten scholar/facilitators, discuss a Jewish topic with them, and then they go off to discussions hosted by some of you in your living room to discuss the same material. The goal is to engage far more people, some of whom may not even be members of Beth Shalom, in making Jewish values and text relevant to who we are today. (If you have an idea for what to call this, or if you want to lead or host, please let me know!)

The true holiness to be found in synagogues, in being here today, is not in the celebration of an ancient ritual, of the welcoming of 5776, of the opening of the Book of Life. Those things are all important, but they are not the essential reasons that we are gathered here today.

The most important reason that we are together today is community. We are here to be with each other, to be a part of something big, to connect with our heritage. To grasp our tradition.

Because let’s face it, people. We need this. Not Rosh Hashanah. Not “shul,” per se. Not the wonderful lunch that you’re going to have in an hour or so. But each other. Together, we make part of a whole, a connection with our past, our ancestors, our tradition, our Torah. And you can’t find that on your smartphone. You can’t buy it on Amazon. You can’t get it with vanilla syrup and steamed milk at Starbucks.

The holiness to be found in connection and community can only be acquired right here, with your fellow Jews.

As we celebrate the start of 5776, as we begin this 10-day journey of cleansing, of spiritual inventory-taking and ultimately atonement, we should take note of each other. We are all here together at this moment, but that does not mean that when we leave this room that we are no longer inter-connected. On the contrary – we will share these bonds when we leave the building as well. And even if many of us do not see each other for a whole year, until we gather again for the beginning of the year 5777 (whoa…), we will continue to be connected to each other, and ideally to draw more of us into our qehillah circle.

I am very much looking forward to hearing your stories: what it means for you to be Jewish, what powerful Jewish experiences you have had, how you see yourself connected to Beth Shalom or the Pittsburgh Jewish community or the entire Jewish world, and, most importantly, what action items might inspire you to help us build an even more engaged, more vibrant community.

At our Selihot evening discussion last week, we spoke about understanding Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur as being about spiritual yearning, about the closeness of God at this time and our desire for a revelatory encounter with God.

Just after we heard the shofar this morning, we chanted the line (Ps. 89:16):

אַשְׁרֵי הָעָם, יֹדְעֵי תְרוּעָה; ה’, בְּאוֹר-פָּנֶיךָ יְהַלֵּכוּן

Ashrei ha’am yode’ei teru’ah, Adonai be’or panekha yehalekhun.

Joyous are the people who know the calling of the shofar; Adonai, they walk by the light of Your presence.

Why are we joyous for having swooned to the sound of the shofar? The Hasidic Rabbi Moshe Hayyim Efraim of Sudilkov, a grandson of the Ba’al Shem Tov who lived in the latter half of the 18th century, saw this line as being essential to the entire enterprise of Rosh Hashanah.

He taught (in his work Degel Mahaneh Efraim), that the sound of the shofar breaks open our awareness on these days, opening us up to our penimiut, our true spiritual inwardness. And inside these depths, buried within our mundane reality, we find the radiance of God’s holy name, glowing within us.

We are the yode’ei teru’ah, those who intimately know the shofar’s call. And this deep familiarity inspires us to seek that encounter, that breaking of the external to get to the light hidden within, to reach the Divine spark found within each of us. That is what happens when we hear the sound of the shofar.

But you can’t do that at home, alone; you can only do it with your community. The shofar unites us on this day to uncover that internal radiance. This verse describes us all in both plural and singular:

Ashrei ha’am = Happy is the nation (singular, i.e. one people)

Yode’ei teru’ah = Those who know the shofar’s call (plural, i.e. individuals)

American culture highlights the power of “one,” of the individual; our tradition speaks to the power of “us.” What makes the shofar moment work is that we are all together, that we stand together, joined as one nation, one “am,” to listen for that sound that opens us up. We share this together as individuals, personally connected to one another, and also as a community. This is the qedushah found in that moment of shofar.

It’s a new year. It’s 5776. And we are all going to get to know each other. We are going to seek those holy moments together. We are going to open up together. We are going to pray together, to sing together, to weep together, to dance, to celebrate, to learn, to share stories, to eat, and on and on. We are going to break open those tough, exterior shells to get to the inner radiance that we share. That is how we will build qesher / personal connection and qehillah / community; the qedushah / holiness will follow in spades.

And, to that end, I am going to suggest a small “action item,” one that I hope will help us in the building of qesher and qehillah on Yom Kippur: Wear a white outfit. I know that some of you  already do this, and I will obviously be wearing white. But the tradition of wearing white on YK is not just for the rabbi and cantor. It’s for everybody! It’s a symbol of purity: the purity of the soul that we seek as individuals and as a community during these ten days of teshuvah, of repentance. Yes, I know that the custom is to dress in nice clothes for synagogue. But don’t worry about that so much! YK is not about your nicest, cleanest suit! It’s about your nicest, cleanest soul. It does not have to be a kittel or a robe – anything white will do. I hope that some of you will join me in participating in this symbolic gesture next Wednesday, and that it will connect more of us to each other and our tradition as we raise the bar of community and qedushah.

Shanah tovah!

* Apologies if the “q” seems strange. One way of representing the Hebrew letter ק (qof) in English transliteration is q, because (as you can readily see if you look at them right next to each other) the Latin q is actually related to the Hebrew ק. (The Latin “k” comes from the Hebrew כ (kaf).) By transliterating this way, it helps English speakers learn or remember the Hebrew spelling of the transliterated word.

~

Rabbi Seth Adelson

(Originally delivered at Congregation Beth Shalom, first day of Rosh Hashanah, 9/14/2015.)

Categories
Kavvanot

Spiritual Inventory: A Self-Test for the End of Elul

For the purposes of introspection, here is a list of ten questions worthy of consideration in the final days before Rosh Hashanah:

In the past year, have I…

… taken care of the people around me enough?

… sought reconciliation with loved ones with whom I have struggled?

… improved my connections with others?

… tried to focus on personal behaviors that I would like to change?

… sought humility?

… evaluated how my actions affect others?

… volunteered my time for the betterment of society or the environment?

… mistreated anybody, deliberately or not?

… not fulfilled promises?

… considered ways to improve this world, and taken appropriate action?

… avoided words that may hurt others, both in public and private?

… apologized where necessary?

Plenty to think about here, but if you have a good question to add, please leave it in the comments below.

Shanah tovah! Have a good and introspective 5776.

~

Rabbi Seth Adelson

Categories
Sermons

United We Stand (Against the Yetser Hara) – Ki Tetse 5775

I was asked a very important question last week at kiddush. So important, in fact, that it became the basis of today’s derashah.

I’ll come back to the question itself, but first, let me give you the context. Those of you who were here last week may recall that I spoke about the future, about building this community, about tradition and change (and particularly the “change” part of that equation). I suggested three basic principles for moving forward:

  • to ask good questions about why we do what we do, and not to accept “Because we’ve always done it that way!” as an answer;
  • to be open, that is, open to new people coming in and joining us, and even to seeking them out to invite them in; and
  • to think in terms of the relationships that we build here as a community, rather than merely programmatically.

Many of you responded favorably to the ideas that I presented, and I am happy about that. (If you were not here, please note that you can read the sermon on my blog: themodernrabbi.com, but please note that it’s always better live!)

At kiddush afterwards, a couple of members pulled me aside and asked (I’m paraphrasing here), “Rabbi what are you going to do to heal the rifts between members of the congregation?” To unpack this question a bit, I will have to assume that it was precipitated by the sermon – that is, “OK, it’s nice to talk about change and building community. But in order to do so, we must first be able to get along with each other. What are you going to do about that?”

One of the foundations of the very idea of a kehillah, a congregation, is that we have some commonalities. We must at the very least get along with each other, but we should also have some principles to which we all agree. In our case here at Beth Shalom, some of those principles are the guiding values of Conservative Judaism: a positive, historical approach to halakhah and Jewish life; an acceptance of contemporary authority in our Jewish choices; a commitment to egalitarianism, the idea that women and men are understood to be equal with respect to Jewish law and ritual; a willingness to engage with modernity and not isolate ourselves, to make choices and changes that are respectful of tradition and yet sensitive to where we are and who we are today.

But let’s face it: even if we agree on these values, that does not mean that we all agree about everything. In fact, as one of my teachers at the Jewish Theological Seminary, Rabbi Bill Lebeau, taught us, the synagogue in which everybody agrees about everything and there are no political divisions is a dying shul.

There is a classic story that I am sure some of you know and love, the one about the congregation where they can’t agree whether to stand or sit during the Shema. Half stand, half sit, and they are arguing with each other in a particularly non-decorous manner. They resolve to go to find the oldest living member of the congregation, Mr. Goldberg, to find out what the original custom was. He is in an assisted living facility, lying in bed, and a group of congregants descends on him.

“Mr. Goldberg,” says a stander, “It was always the tradition to stand during Shema, right?”

Goldberg says nothing, seems to stare off into space.

“Mr. Goldberg,” says a sitter, “We always sat for Shema, correct?”

Goldberg still does not react.

The synagogue president comes forward. “Mr. Goldberg, you have to help us. Right now, half are standing, half are sitting, and all are yelling at each other.”

Goldberg’s face lights up. He raises his hand with a flourish. “That’s the tradition!” he says.

Disagreement has been the Jewish tradition for at least two millennia; it is the basis of most discussions in the Talmud. In fact, you might make the case that it is exactly Judaism’s tradition of diversity of opinion which has enabled us to survive for these thousands of years, since the Romans destroyed the second Temple in Jerusalem in 70 CE. Had we not moved from a tradition of hierarchical, regimented, centralized sacrificial worship during Temple times to the more democratic mode of teaching, learning, and personal fulfillment of ritual, we may have simply disappeared when the center was destroyed. But we are still here, and where are the Romans?

We may argue, or not see eye-to eye, or we may not even like each other. But it is essential, for the good of this congregation, the wider Jewish community, and the world at large that we treat each other respectfully, even as we disagree. In fact, it is an imperative of rabbinic Judaism to do so.

We learn in the Talmud (Shabbat 127a)

אלו דברים שאדם עושה אותם ואוכל פירותיהן בעולם הזה והקרן קיימת לו לעולם הבא, ואלו הן: כיבוד אב ואם וגמילות חסדים והבאת שלום שבין אדם לחברו ותלמוד תורה כנגד כולם

These are the deeds that yield immediate fruit and continue to yield fruit in the world to come: honoring parents; doing deeds of lovingkindness; and bringing peace between people; but the study of Torah outweighs them all.

Among the holiest tasks we can perform is to create peace bein adam lehavero, between each other. And that is something that we must all pursue.

Even greater than that, Parashat Ki Tetse speaks to the power of togetherness. The 20th-century Slonimer Rebbe, Rabbi Shalom Noah Berezovsky, observed that there is one place in Ki Tetse where the text refers to the Israelites as going out to war as a troop (Heb: mahaneh; Deut. 23:10):

כִּי-תֵצֵא מַחֲנֶה, עַל-אֹיְבֶיךָ,  וְנִשְׁמַרְתָּ מִכֹּל דָּבָר רָע

When you go out as a troop against your enemies, be on guard against anything untoward.

While it seems that the Torah is speaking about actual war, the kind fought over territory, Rabbi Berezovsky reads it not as a war between peoples, but the individual war that we all fight against the yetser hara, the evil inclination. So this becomes not an unholy battle with dangerous weapons and blood and death, but a holy battle for control of our souls. It is this battle that we are heading into as we round the halfway point of Elul in our ascent to the Aseret Yemei Teshuvah, the ten days of repentance bracketed by Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur.

In this battle for the soul, says the Slonimer Rebbe, we must go out together, united as a troop. We join for the purposes of restoring kedushah, holiness, to our lives. “By losing some of our own identity by subjecting it to the needs of the collective,” he writes, “we are given the hedge against the yetser hara.” He points out that the Talmud (Sanhedrin 39a) suggests that the power of minyan, of a quorum of ten Jews for some ritual purposes, lies in the understanding that when ten of us gather together, the Shekhinah, God’s presence, is there too.

In other words, the Torah is teaching us that united we stand (against the yetser hara), and divided we fall. This is a huge lesson for today, when we live in dramatically independent times.

united-we-stand-divided-we-fall-variation.jpg

It is this togetherness that enables us to be a kehillah kedoshah, a holy community. We are a communal people; we need a minyan to attain a particular level of kedushah. How much more so do we need togetherness to achieve kedushah as a community for all our endeavors, for all the things that synagogues do, from running a nursery school to tending to our cemetery to hosting cultural events to having individual conversations with each other in the parking lot. We have to maintain the level of kedushah in all of our activities.

To that end, I have introduced an overarching theme for the upcoming High Holidays: Connection, Community, and Kedushah, which we are representing graphically by the letters CCק. Yes, the holidays are a time to gather with family for meals (and fasting), to seek teshuvah / repentance, to hear some fabulous sermons, etc. But they are also about maintaining our personal connections with each other, gathering as a community, and seeking kedushah / holiness. And these are things that can only take place when we think of ourselves as a united troop, one in which we are connected to each other, giving up (as the Slonimer suggests) a little piece of our own personal independence for the sake of the greater good, the collective.

Now I know, some of you are thinking, “Oh, you naive rabbi. That all sounds so pat. But you really want me to be nice to so-and-so, that lousy (insert epithet here)?”

And the answer is, yes. Yes, you can. Actually, you have to, for the benefit of this congregation.

We are going to build. I am happy to report that I have heard from a number of people in the past two weeks that will be joining Beth Shalom as new members and re-joining veteran members, and that is wonderful. (Is anybody here right now that has just joined or is about to?) And so we will incorporate all of them into our kehillah kedoshah, and know that those of us who are new may not agree with those of us who have been here for a long time. And that’s OK, just as long as we treat each other with respect, in public and in private. We would not want to give the yetser hara a foothold.

Really, we’re not going to agree. And you don’t have to like everybody. But we all have to be civil and respectful to each other. Not doing so is NOT OK. Everybody here is welcome.

Remember that it is diversity of opinion that has enabled us to survive, along with our willingness to stick together. Let’s increase our diversity, and work together to continue to build.

Shabbat shalom!

~

Rabbi Seth Adelson

(Originally delivered at Congregation Beth Shalom, Shabbat morning, 8/29/2015.)

Categories
Sermons

Looking Forward: Tradition, Change and the Future – Shofetim 5775

A few years back, my previous congregation, Temple Israel of Great Neck, celebrated the 50th anniversary of the publishing of Rabbi Mordecai Waxman’s seminal work, Tradition and Change. Rabbi Waxman had been the rabbi at TIGN for an astonishing 55 years, from 1947 until he retired in 2002. The book’s title (apparently coined by his wife Ruth) became the de facto slogan of the Conservative movement.

Since the book was published in 1958, the world has changed dramatically. Consider just one thing: technology. The ubiquity of small computers for personal use has changed our lives in ways that are so profound that many of us cannot even imagine a world without them.

And of course, the Jewish landscape has changed as well. Jews have many more options today for their Jewish involvement, including, of course, the option of opting out entirely.

When Tradition and Change was published, the Conservative movement accounted for half of American Jewry. Today, demographic studies suggest that about one-third of affiliated American Jews are members of Conservative synagogues. And the number of Conservative synagogues is going down as smaller congregations merge or close.

In Rabbi Waxman’s original introduction, he indicated the following as essential features of our movement:

  1. A commitment to Kelal Yisrael. Rabbi Waxman uses Rabbi Solomon Schechter’s term, “Catholic Israel,” the idea that all Jews are one people, united by common texts, rituals, and values, a common language and shared history.
  1. Positive-Historical Judaism: This is a concept that originated in the 19th-century German-Jewish sphere, that our approach to Judaism is at once aware of the historical changes within Jewish law, halakhah, and custom, minhag, and that we emphasize our connection with history as we look to the future.
  1. Acceptance of modern thought: Our approach to Torah demands that we open our minds to the changing currents of science, philosophy, archaeology, Biblical criticism, and so forth, and not ignore them or obfuscate when they challenge accepted tradition.
  1. Authority and interpretation: We are bound by Jewish legal tradition, and our reading of halakhah depends on the classical methods of interpretation that Jewish scholars have used for millennia in different lands. And yet we are able to make serious changes in halakhic practice based on our engagement with modern thought and values.

I believe firmly in this formula. Growing up attending a Conservative synagogue,  I knew that although driving a car to synagogue on Shabbat would violate several traditional Shabbat prohibitions, nonetheless the Conservative movement had decided that it was more in the spirit of Shabbat to drive there than not to go to synagogue at all.

No matter the numbers of the Conservative movement, we are still here. And we still stand for the principles of Tradition and Change – of the approach to halakhah / Jewish law, as halakhic decisors have guided it for centuries.

The Conservative movement has changed in the last half-century. In particular, in the 1950s, the extent of egalitarianism in American Judaism was mixed seating. I think we have also witnessed a change in Conservative clergy. The Rabbi Waxman model was rabbi-as-academic-scholar. Today’s Conservative rabbis and cantors are scholarly, yes, but are also expected to make personal connections and work harder at community-building initiatives, to focus on pastoral care and engaging contemporary Jews in new ways.

And, of course, the Conservative laity has changed dramatically. While the bulk of Jews in the Conservative pews in 1958 were immigrants and children of immigrants, today’s membership is in a different place. We are largely not naturalized Americans. We are simply Americans. The State of Israel is a given, and its influence both in the Jewish world and out is far greater than its size. Attendance at synagogue services is way down. Sermonic pyrotechnics and cantorial recitatives that moved congregations of the last century are rarely heard, let alone appreciated, by Jews under the age of 60.

And American society has changed dramatically as well. Formality is out; digital interconnectedness is in, even while our actual, physical interconnectedness (that which sociologist Robert Putnam calls “social capital”) is down. Personal choice is our highest ideal. Membership in organizations of all kinds, including religious institutions, is declining. Intermarriage of all kinds is commonplace; homosexuality has moved into the mainstream.

And for all these reasons, the need for synagogues like Congregation Beth Shalom is as prominent as ever. Ladies and gentlemen, Judaism needs the American middle. Let me tell you why:

While most Jews will never commit to the halakhic expectations of Orthodoxy,  most still want some kind of Jewish experience, and many of those, when they come for their Judaism fix, they want it to be traditional, and yet open to contemporary thought and sensibility.

Consider the recent Conservative publication, The Observant Life. Meant as a successor to the classic halakhic work by Rabbi Isaac Klein, A Guide to Jewish Religious Practice (1979), The Observant Life contains all you need to know not only to practice the ritual aspects of Judaism (kashrut, Shabbat and holidays, daily tefillah / prayer, mourning practices and so forth), but also includes chapters on such non-ritual topics as business ethics, civic morality, sexuality, intellectual property, caring for the needy, and so forth.

American Judaism needs the middle. And that means that we in the middle are going to have to work harder to maintain ourselves. We need to take a longer, harder look at the “Change” part of Rabbi Waxman’s slogan, and consider ways to make the middle more viable. To that end, I am going to suggest three important areas that we need to address here at Beth Shalom, in the spirit of Tradition and Change:

  1. To ask ourselves serious questions about why we do what we do. You will hear me frequently quote Dr. Ron Wolfson, professor of education at the American Jewish University. Dr. Wolfson has observed that although most synagogues have “Da lifnei mi atah omed” / “Know before whom you stand” written over the bimah, most of us think that what it says is, “Because that’s the way we’ve always done it!” In re-examining ourselves – our services, our programs, our schools – the question, “Why are we doing this” can never be answered with, “Because that’s the way we’ve always done it!” This is not an acceptable answer.On the contrary: rabbinic tradition requires us to ask questions, and the Jewish way is to come up with good answers. Sometimes, “Because it says so in the Torah,” is sufficient. But that is never really the answer. Why do we say the Shema twice a day, evening and morning? Because it says so in the Shema itself. But the real reason is because it keeps us focused on the big picture: loving God, teaching our children, and keeping the words of Torah around us at all times.
  2. To be as open as possible. It is worth pointing out (although I know that there are safety reasons for this) that there are many entrances into this building, almost all of which are always locked. The metaphor for entry into Beth Shalom is unfortunate: it’s not so easy for outsiders to get in.Every single one of us should be leaping over each other to pull others into our circle. That means the following:
    1. We are all ambassadors for Congregation Beth Shalom, and that means that we should all be promoting this congregation, what we do, why we do it, and the benefits of belonging. We should all be reaching out in particular to those who have left to welcome them back, but also to unaffiliated members of the community to make the case for belonging.
    2. For people to join, this has to be a place that they would want to join. And that means that at every opportunity we need to welcome people in. We need a group of greeters – people who are skilled at making others feel welcome, and to do so not just at services, but at all events in the building.On a related note, I am aware that on some seats in the Faye Rubinstein Weiss Sanctuary, there are names. However, there are no names here or in the Helfant Chapel or in the Homestead Hebrew Chapel. What that means is that no seat belongs to anybody. So if a guest is sitting in what you think is “your” seat, please greet that person kindly, and sit somewhere else. There is nothing more awkward and humiliating than coming into an unfamiliar synagogue and immediately being told to move.
    3. We have to be open to all the types of people who come in here. Gay, straight, transgender, Jewish, not yet Jewish, in-married, inter-married, black, white, Asian, Hispanic, single parents, and so on, and so on. The changing face of America is not just in New York and California, it’s here too. We are not in a position to make any judgments. We must welcome all who come here with open arms.
  3. To think relationally. This again courtesy of Dr. Wolfson’s most recent book, Relational Judaism. We live in a very impersonal world – anybody who has ever had to call a customer service number knows that. But the synagogue must be a place that builds relationships; the Greek etymology of the word “synagogue” is “place of coming together,” and is a direct translation of the Hebrew, beit kenesset.What makes a group of Jews a beit kenesset? Personal relationships. This is a place where relationships are forged. We have to work harder to build stronger relationships among ourselves, and to create them with others. And that means thinking relationally. The true measure of the success of a program, says Ron Wolfson, is not how many people there were or whether or not they liked it, but rather how did it build relationships between people?

All of this will require that we work for change, that we stretch ourselves a bit, perhaps beyond what is comfortable for us. But from my vantage point of having just arrived, I can see no other way forward.

****

Today in Parashat Shofetim, we read about the commandment to the (at this point theoretical) Israelite king that he must keep a copy of the Torah next to his throne. Nobody is above the words of the Torah, the words of God. But a flesh-and-blood king deals with real problems; he must be engaged with society in real time. The Torah is not to keep him in the past, but rather to help him confront the present.

When Rambam was asked why he rejected astrology, when the rabbis of the Talmud clearly believed in it, he answered by saying that our eyes are in front of us, so that we look to the future, and not to the past.

We will continue in the spirit of Tradition and Change, and change we must if we are continue to provide a home for the much-needed Jewish middle ground.

One final note: the United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism is holding its biennial convention in Chicago, Nov. 15-17, where members and professionals from synagogues from all over will gather to learn tools for communal change. Our president Dave Horvitz and I will be there, and Rabbi Waxman will be there in spirit. Please let me know if you will be coming.

Join us as we look to the future, and consider how to move forward. Shabbat shalom!

~

Rabbi Seth Adelson

(Originally delivered at Congregation Beth Shalom, Shabbat morning, 8/22/2015.)

Categories
Sermons

Halakhah and The Big Picture – Re’eh 5775

I am particularly fortunate to have started this week in Pittsburgh for Parashat Re’eh. It’s one of my favorites. OK, so it’s true that I have a lot of favorite parashiyyot, but this is an especially good one. I do enjoy the passages of the Torah that include numerous mitzvot / commandments, not only because they give us insight into how our ancestors lived and the values they held, but also because they continue to shape our lives today.

But let’s face it: there is quite a bit of obscure and/or curious stuff in the Torah – commandments that don’t apply to anybody today, like those related to sacrifices, or obligations for agricultural behaviors or activities that are irrelevant to contemporary non-farmers, or things that are just downright strange.

For example, in today’s parashah we encounter the obligation not only to not worship like the Canaanites do, but indeed to destroy their altars. (Has anybody met any Canaanites lately?) Also, there are commandments to tithe from our produce, to eat only certain kinds of animals, and to be particular about not eating their blood with the meat. There is the commandment to take care of the needy people around you, and the strange law about piercing the ear of the slave who opts to stay with his master rather than go free. And then there is a whole range of holiday practices.

For us today, we immediately understand the relevance of kashrut and holiday observances – most of us have been doing some of these things for our entire lives. But to an outsider looking in, this parashah might look like a jumble of eccentric behaviors that make no particular sense.

And I might argue that, if we were to look at these things objectively, devoid of context, we might also think that it is odd, for example, to avoid eating leavened things for a week, or to build and live in a temporary hut outside your home for a different week.

But I think that sometimes it is a good idea to pull back the camera to try to see the greater picture.

I recently heard a TED talk about ants, featuring the ecologist Deborah Gordon, who studies ant colonies for a living. What is striking about ants, she says, is that ants function as a collective unit without speaking, without memory, and without a visible leader. And for sure they don’t have the Internet or smartphones. And yet, they have a highly complex society that functions quite well even though not a single one of them can actually see the larger picture. No ant understands how it fits into the colony, and nobody is telling it what to do, but somehow it all works together like some magnificent symphony.

Aluminum cast of a fire ant colony.
Aluminum cast of an ant colony

One principle that makes an ant colony function is that it has rules. Some ants forage, other ants are soldiers, the queen lays eggs, and so forth. Those rules are governed by what is encoded in the ants’ DNA.

From the human perspective, we don’t see how the ants function as individuals. We only see the final product: that the ants build extensive homes underground, and forage for food, sometimes in your pantry, and somehow manage to survive the winter to build a new colony next year. And all of this depends on the series of rules for how the ants work.

But humans are not like ants. We think; we communicate; we argue; we create; we destroy; we doubt; we cooperate; we sabotage; and so forth. Each of us as individuals has the potential to help or wound, to be selfish or to participate with others.

And that is why we need a framework. That is why human societies have always had guidelines. Laws. Courts.

And the Torah is our framework, including its obscure laws and its odd commandments. The mitzvot are our rules, and as a people, we have spent the better part of the last two millennia trying to figure out exactly how to carry out these rules. We call that system of rules, “halakhah,” which the Hebrew scholars among you will know is from the verb lalekhet, to go. Halakhah is how we walk through life.

And, just like the ants, it is difficult, and some might even say impossible, for us to see the true bigger picture. Yes, our intellect allows for us to understand more than the ants. But the larger spiritual picture is blurred; all we know is that we have a fundamental drive to reach higher, to seek holiness, to seek purity, to seek the Divine.

Our greatest sages have spent two millennia analyzing and interpreting the meaning, the reasons for, and how to carry out the mitzvot, and we continue to do so ledor vador, in each generation in its context.

You see, when it comes down to it, we don’t really know why the Torah asks us not to mark our bodies permanently, or burn animals on an altar. Even the obvious things, those mitzvot which we are naturally inclined to keep: we don’t even really know why the Torah instructs us not to murder others, or honor your parents, or abstain from sexual indiscretion. We will never really be clear on the big picture. But that is what makes Judaism interesting, and has allowed for an ongoing discourse across the ages over the meaning of what we read in the Torah. An absolute, definite answer would be boring; our tradition allows for continual renewal.

All we can really say for certain is that this template for holy living is what makes our world function. It affects the greater good. It works down here and on high. It is tried and true for 5775 years.

Now I can hear the skeptics among us who might be thinking, “OK, Rabbi, that sounds just peachy. But come on – does it really matter if I pray, or put on tefillin, or avoid shellfish?”

And the answer is yes. 100%. Why? Because you know as well as I that the America of today is one of limitless choice. We are so bombarded with “freedom” that simply choosing a toothpaste or a salad dressing from the hundreds on offer takes up far too much of our time, taking bandwidth away from things that are far more important. And the message that we continually reinforce to our children is, “What do you want?”

We need boundaries. We need framework. Some choices are acceptable, and some are not. All of us who are parents know that, but it applies to adults and children equally. What does infinite choice yield? Indecision. Paralysis. Disunity. Dissatisfaction. The feeling that even though you chose this product, or this school, or this spouse, there might be a better one behind door number 2.

Jewish life gives us a frame through which our lives are endowed with stability and purpose. And we need that more than ever.

Now, that does not mean that the boundaries do not change. Of course they have, and they will continue to change. It is a good thing for the Jews, and Maimonides says so outright in the Mishneh Torah, that prayer replaced sacrifice. It is a good thing that the slavery described in the Torah is no longer permitted. It is wonderful that we at Beth Shalom treat men and women as absolute equals under Jewish law. It is a good thing that we view halakhah through the lens of modernity; Jewish law changes with us, slowly but always for the better.

So, while the Torah includes a number of imperatives that are no longer applicable, we continue to read it and respond to it with change. The history behind the evolution of halakhah is an essential piece of this holy framework.

It’s up to us to find ways to interpret the Torah for today. That is the principle upon which I have built my rabbinate. We have to read the Torah in today’s context; not in the context from which it emerged; not in the context of 12th-century Egypt (Maimonides) or 16th-century Tzefat (Rabbi Yosef Karo, who authored the Shulhan Arukh). We welcome all of those guys to the table, but we have to seek our own meaning. We have to set the boundaries as a community, and the way we do that is the same way that our ancestors have done so for two thousand years: we open the book, and we dig into the text. (The berakhah for Torah study is “La’asoq bedivrei Torah” – to get busy with the words of Torah.)

As I move forward from this starting point here in Pittsburgh, I hope to continue doing exactly that. You will hear me say this over and over: the highest mitzvah in Jewish life is not keeping Shabbat or kashrut or daily tefillah / prayer or even honoring your parents. The highest mitzvah (Mishnah Pe’ah 1:1) is talmud Torah, interactive study of our ancient texts.

And that is how the whole system functions. We may not see the big picture, but within that microcosm, the arba amot shel halakhah, the four cubit radius of our own personal spheres of Jewish existence, we have a holy framework for living that is guided by our personal and communal understanding of Torah. And by following that framework, we each contribute individually to the overall picture.

Shabbat shalom!

~

Rabbi Seth Adelson

(Originally delivered at Congregation Beth Shalom, Shabbat morning, 8/15/2015.)

Categories
Kavvanot

Urban Nature Walks 101

Sitting in my office for the first day at Congregation Beth Shalom, I caught sight of our ELC teaching staff being escorted outside the building by one of my personal rebbes, Dr. Gabe Goldman, nature educator par excellence and Pittsburgh-area resident. He took them on a walk around the building to seek out teachable locations for helping young children to explore the natural environment within our otherwise urban setting. Gabe coordinated instruction for the Jewish Environmental and Nature Education (JENE) fellowship program when I was a JENE fellow at Camp Ramah in New England back in the summers of 2004 and 2005, and he taught me volumes about Judaism and the environment, which continue to infuse my work as a rabbi.

view from office window
Gratitude: the view from my new office window

One of the items he shared with us back in the day was a phrase that I continue to use when I take groups out into nature, meant to be shouted out upon finding something special: “Mah rabu ma’asekha!” “How numerous are Your works!” It’s from Psalm 104:24, the Psalm that retells Creation by highlighting all of its elements, and we recite this verse as a part of the daily morning service. It speaks not only of what Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel called “radical amazement,” our awe in response to the Infinite, but also of our gratitude for everything around us, for the air we breathe and the water that sustains us and the lush green of the trees and grasses and bushes and so forth.

As this new chapter in my life opens, I am grateful not only for God’s numerous works, but for all that my teachers have given me and all that I have learned merely by taking a closer look at what grows all around us. Go outside, take a deep breath, and enjoy the rest of summer. Mah rabu ma’asekha!

~

Rabbi Seth Adelson