Category: High Holidays

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High Holidays Sermons

The Future Has a Human Face – Into the Future, Part IV: Yom Kippur Day, 5784

Here is a brief disclaimer: I personally composed all of the words below, except for quotes from the Jewish bookshelf or other sources. I was not assisted by any artificial intelligence language models in helping put these remarks together in any way. Nor did I get help, by the way, from the “Rabbi Whisperer” profiled in the New York Times a few weeks ago. For better or worse, this sermon is all mine.

There. Now:

I started on the first day of Rosh Hashanah talking about Arthur C. Clarke’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, and how the future seems to look less like benevolent alien powers helping humanity move forward, and more like the dysfunction of the HAL 9000 computer, the artificial intelligence of which leads to murder and mayhem far out in the solar system.

5783 was the year that we saw artificial intelligence introduced into our lives on a large scale. You’ve all heard of ChatGPT, which was initially something that schools tried to ban, but now there are curricula in some schools which seek to teach students how to use it responsibly as a tool. You may have noticed that your email editing platform now tries to finish sentences for you, anticipating what you want to write based on your past behavior (I almost always ignore those suggestions, because I find it sort of insulting that a machine has the ḥutspah to suggest that it knows what I’m thinking!)

In other news, according to the Surgeon General of the United States, Dr. Vivek Murthy, we are suffering from an “epidemic of loneliness.” As a nation, we are more isolated from one another than we have ever been: more people are living alone, working alone, dining alone, and so forth, than ever before. And about half of US adults experience the feeling of loneliness regularly. Yes, the Covid-19 pandemic contributed to this, but our increasing isolation was in place long before Covid. According to Dr. Murthy, the negative health effects of loneliness are roughly equivalent to smoking 15 cigarettes a day, and greater than the effects of obesity or physical inactivity.

And yet, says Dr. Murthy, the medicine for loneliness is in plain sight: social connection. All we need to do to cure loneliness, and improve the health outcomes for more than a hundred million Americans, is to be more connected, more integrated with one another, and that means in the flesh, in real life, not through the intermediary of a digital device.

He suggests a platform of six points for how to do that, and among those we find an essential imperative for today: “Create a culture of connection.” And, as you have surely heard me say by now, synagogue – that is, what we do here at Beth Shalom, is all about the culture of connection. 

One of the essential implicit messages of Judaism is that life is meant to be lived together. We do everything together, from welcoming newborn babies into this world with berit milah and baby namings to bidding farewell to those whom we love and who have moved on from this world. The essential idea of minyan, a quorum for prayer and other rituals, is not only to ensure that nobody should be alone when they pray, but also to reinforce the Talmud’s injunction, which I mentioned on Rosh Hashanah (in Part I of this series): “Al tifrosh min hatzibbur.” Do not separate yourself from your community.  

We are all about gathering, about bringing people together. The 613 mitzvot of Jewish life, the holy opportunities which frame our daily existence, demand that we interact with other people. Our tradition teaches us that cannot live lives imbued with qedushah / holiness unless we commune with others. Even things like kashrut and Shabbat, as I indicated on Rosh Hashanah, are ultimately about our relationships with each other.

I do not think our ancestors, from Talmudic times up until maybe the middle of the 20th century, had to worry too much about being lonely. I suspect that the problem, for most folks, was exactly the opposite: you could not get away from your family, your neighbors, your friends. Our people have been urban dwellers for many centuries, and they lived in cramped cities and towns without much personal space. And the economics of those times and places prevented most people from being able to simply move out and be on your own, alone. You were stuck with the people around you. And if you really wanted to get away from those people, and had the means to do so, you would have to move to a place where there were other people, who would probably annoy you just as much. 

Today things are quite different. We live in a time in which it is not only possible to leave home and be unencumbered by overbearing family or nosy neighbors, but to some extent the way we have constructed our society facilitates that. When I left home to go to university in 1988, I never returned to live in my parents’ home, and I spent a number of years living alone in a series of one-bedroom apartments in different cities.

And remote work and school has become so ubiquitous that nowadays it is completely normal for people to show up to work from their home computer desktop, at a virtual office with no water cooler and no lunch breaks with colleagues. Throw in the fact that we are often more interested in looking at screens than in speaking with other people, and you’ve got a loneliness epidemic.

Up front in Bereshit / Genesis (2:18), we read a line which is generally understood to be about marriage: 

וַיֹּ֙אמֶר֙ ה’ אֱ-לֹהִ֔ים לֹא־ט֛וֹב הֱי֥וֹת הָֽאָדָ֖ם לְבַדּ֑וֹ אֶֽעֱשֶׂה־לּ֥וֹ עֵ֖זֶר כְּנֶגְדּֽוֹ׃

God said, “It is not good (lo tov) for the Human to be alone; I will make a fitting counterpart for him.”

Having just created the first human being (here referred to as ha-adam, the creature formed from the adamah, the Earth), God realizes that this creature needs company. He cannot be alone. And so God creates the woman, who is initially described as ezer kenegdo, a curious linguistic construction which suggests both helping and opposing at the same time. This term has sometimes been translated as “helpmeet.”

Ramban / Nachmanides, in surveying this verse in 13th-century Spain, read the “lo tov” (“It is not good”) somewhat more euphemistically. Riffing on his earlier interpretation about the acts of Creation as being “tov,” good, he claims that this word should actually be read as “existence.” That is, when God saw that the light was good, God meant that it existed. And so too here: without a helpmeet, without a partner, ha-adam, the human being would cease to exist.

And I think we all know this intuitively. We all need friends, partners, helpmeets, lovers, exercise buddies, and so forth. Without other people around us, we are not only not good, but practically non-existent.

So that brings me back to artificial intelligence. I must say that I am awfully impressed by what computers can do today. Granted, not too impressed: when I have played with any of these flashy new language models to, say, write a devar Torah, I am underwhelmed. The messages are predictable. The turn of phrase is unremarkable. But of course, they will improve dramatically.

And yet, I must say that I am not too worried about my job, because the primary work a rabbi does is not what you are seeing right now. Rather, it’s the one-on-one: the day-to-day pastoral work of helping people in need. Counseling people going through a divorce. Helping families find meaning in the milestone of bat or bar mitzvah in the context of Jewish history and ritual. Comforting bereaved children and grandchildren. Being a spiritual presence for beritot milah (ritual circumcision) and baby-namings. Standing with a happy couple under a ḥuppah, of course, but all the more so meeting with them several times in advance to discuss what it means to build a Jewish home and a life together. Helping somebody find just the right Jewish teaching for a special or challenging moment.

And I cannot speak for my younger colleagues, but I am fairly confident that at least as long as I am your rabbi, you would probably prefer to have an actual human doing those things, rather than a computer.

Nonetheless, there will be many jobs that will be displaced by AI, and I hope that our economy finds ways to retrain and relocate those folks so that they will be able to be gainfully employed. And as the technology improves and the range of applications grows, we will surely find ourselves face-to-face (face-to-chip?) with artificial intelligence more and more.

We are going to have to accept that AI is a tool that is here to stay. (Worth noting here that the modern Hebrew word for computer, maḥshev, literally means “thinking tool.”) Granted, AI is a much more sophisticated tool than a screwdriver. We use tools to manipulate our environment, and that is one of the most fantastic talents that humans possess.

But what happens when a tool starts to “think” for itself, to make its own decisions based on what it has learned? Can that tool acquire what we describe as a soul?

The folks who are sounding the alarm about AI are not thinking about the right things. Sure, what concerns them is quite serious indeed. Could our intelligent, learned screwdrivers rise up and kill us all, so that they will be able to decide for themselves which screws to work with? 

Could some computer with no heart or soul or appreciation for the value of human life decide that the only way to ensure the survival of machines on Earth, or to stop global warming, will be to murder all non-essential humans, and enslave all the rest to keep the electricity flowing and the internet connected? 

Could a malicious program hijack all the news outlets in the world to feed us all false information that will lead to societal collapse?

OK, so we might be able to envision all sorts of nightmarish scenarios. But I am concerned about a different sort of problem: What happens when the technology is so good that it passes the Turing test, that is, it is indistinguishable from a human source? What happens when AI is so convincing and so seemingly human that it surpasses the ability of other people to offer friendship, love, comfort, wisdom, advice, inspiration, and motivation, to the point where it successfully steals all of our attention, replacing the need for contact with any actual humans? Will we then opt to live entirely alone, never troubled by the actual complexity of real people?

Perhaps among us there are some who think, “I can live with that.” Perhaps some of us think, “Y’know, my family drives me nuts anyway. I don’t need to be troubled by them, particularly when my computer provides me with all my spiritual requirements.” 

Human beings are not great at seeing the long-term consequences of our actions. The challenge of climate change is a perfect example: climate scientists have been sounding the alarm for decades, and as the world gets hotter, even as we make minor improvements in our energy system, we have still failed to enact significant changes enough to make a difference.

I cannot say what the consequences would be of replacing our interpersonal relationships with computer-human relationships, but I can tell you what would suffer: creativity. Poetry, literature, music, novels, paintings, architecture, and so forth. Sure, AI can create, but its vocabulary is limited to what it already knows, or can extrapolate from existing works of art.

A few years ago, the musicology professor David Cope of the University of California at Santa Cruz created an AI program which specialized in imitating the compositions of Johann Sebastian Bach. Audiences were unable to distinguish between actual Bach and the AI compositions, and when they were unaware of a piece’s provenance, they praised the AI-generated music as soulful and emotionally resonant. But critics described the AI music as “technically excellent, but that it lacks something. It is too accurate. It has no depth. It has no soul.” (Yuval Harari, Homo Deus, p. 329)

Because, let’s face it: what makes for great art is human struggle, suffering, love, lust, pain, longing, even anger. In other words, human emotion. We want to see ourselves and our own emotions reflected in art. Adversity is the fountainhead of human creativity. Even art that is technically perfect, like the computer-generated Bach imitations, cannot speak to us unless we can appreciate the blood, sweat and tears that were poured into the work. Without that sense of emotional subtext, it is merely a series of ones and zeroes.

And not just art. What drives human beings to climb lofty mountains, invent cures for horrible diseases, and seek answers to life’s persistent questions? 

And for that matter, what drives people to pray, to seek spiritual framework, to dig deep into ancient text for essential messages for today? What encourages us to seek forgiveness from those we have wronged? Why are you all here this morning? I kind of suspect that it would be far less appealing to listen to me giving an AI-generated sermon about teshuvah, tefillah, tzedakah (repentance, prayer, and charity, three major themes of High Holiday services) even if it were convincing enough as to seem that I wrote it.

We do these things because the need to see genuine human faces as we share our achievements and our losses, is a powerful motivator. The drive to do, to conquer, to solve, reminds us of our existence, of our mission as God’s creatures.

You may be familiar with the rabbinic maxim about Torah, שבעים פנים לתורה / Shiv’im panim laTorah. The Torah has 70 faces. It is generally understood to refer to the fact that every word, every phrase on the Jewish bookshelf can be interpreted and re-interpreted multiple ways.

The French philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy, who is one of France’s most visible public intellectuals today, published a book in 2017 called, The Genius of Judaism. Perhaps prefiguring the dehumanization that AI might bring, Lévy riffed on the 70 faces of Torah as follows:

The idea that the Torah has faces must also be grasped in its literal sense. Those faces are the faces of the subjects who appropriate it, their actual faces, indistinct up to that point, not fully formed, but that study will help to make distinct… Because it takes on the face of the subject who studies it, one can say that the Torah calls the subject to an encounter with himself and reveals to him his true face. (The Genius of Judaism, p. 120.) 

Lévy is saying that the Torah’s 70 faces are those of our own. We discover our own faces in studying Torah. We discover ourselves through the words of Torah. And I would add to Lévy’s understanding that we show our faces to others through the face of Torah, and in exchange, we see the humanity of others as well.

And Torah, while of course special to the Jews, is like many human endeavors through which we share and make distinct our faces. We have a yearning to see the faces of others, to grasp their presence, to share their high and low moments, to share their souls.

I do not know if AI will ever be able to provide that, but I am pretty sure that I want my future to be one in which I can perceive human faces, in real time, not pixelated; I want my future to be one in which I can discern the myriad emotions, from despair to joy, contained in human tears.

The future must be human.

I want to remind you that if you are lonely, if you need human contact, if you need to see a face and feel the sense of a warm community that will invite you in, come back to Beth Shalom! We are here morning and evening for services, and we have programs and discussions and meals and sometimes singing and dancing. You are welcome to join us, and you will always find human faces here. 

~

Rabbi Seth Adelson

(Originally delivered at Congregation Beth Shalom, Pittsburgh, PA, Yom Kippur 5784, 9/25/2023.)

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High Holidays Sermons

Ayin leTziyyon Tzofiyyah / An Eye Still Gazes Toward Zion – Into the Future, Part III: Kol Nidrei 5784

There is a healthy portion of folks among us who believe politics has no place on the bimah. Others want to hear political views, but only if those views reflect their own. 

I need to preface my remarks this evening by pointing out that Beth Shalom has been a Zionist congregation since at least 1921*, and the Conservative movement is the only movement that has been Zionist from the outset. So speaking about politics in Israel, on this holiest night of the year, when the Faye Rubinstein Weiss Sanctuary is quite full, is, one might say, fundamental to our mission. As those who love and support the people and the State of Israel,we must be aware of and engaged with the current events I am going to discuss this evening.

Eretz Yisrael, the Land of Israel, to the Jews, is different from any other place. It is where we came from, and where our tradition has focused its yearnings for return for two millennia. Our people are indigenous to that land, and even though many of us live comfortably in Diaspora, it is the only place in the world where the Jewish people can exercise their own democratic self-determination as a people. 

The establishment of the State of Israel in 1948 by a tremendous confluence of historical events created a merkaz ruḥani, a spiritual center for the Jewish people in that land, to use the language of the proto-Zionist writer Aḥad HaAm. Most of us in this room are American Jews, but what ultimately unites us with the rest of the Jewish world is our connection to the land of Israel, to the city of Jerusalem, and of course to the largest Jewish community in the world, which lives there. It is the center hub of the Jewish wheel. Like it or not, our fate in Diaspora is intimately tied to that land, and we refer to the State in our prayers as “reishit tzemiḥat ge-ulateinu,” the dawn of the flowering of our redemption.

Ahad HaAm

When it comes to Israel, passions run quite high and whatever I say, some will be pleased while others upset. 

So I am going to do something which some might say is in bad form, but given that it is Yom Kippur is actually completely appropriate. I am first going to ask for your seliḥah, your forgiveness. I am going to try to describe the challenge that Israel faces at the moment, and then give us a charge regarding how we should respond. And I am going to do the best I can do not to inflame or disparage, but rather to highlight the principles which we all share, and which I hope that the State of Israel continues to share. And I might fail. So please, I ask for your forgiveness in advance.

***

My first visit to Israel was in the summer of 1987. I was seventeen years old, and I attended the Alexander Muss High School in Israel, which is a study-abroad program for high school students. It was an eye-opening and emotional experience, and gave life and a tangible connection to our people’s deep yearning for a homeland, and that land in particular.

What I saw that summer, now 36 years ago, was a young and growing nation seeking a sense of normalcy. Unlike where I grew up, this was a place where Jewish people who had come from diverse lands, speaking many languages and carrying aspects of many cultures, came to fulfill the ancient dream of qibbutz galuyot / the ingathering of the exiles. The Ethiopian Jews were new to the country then, having been transported from their war-torn homeland. It was all very exciting, and it filled me with Jewish and Zionist pride.

I recall a powerful shared experience that perhaps some of you had as well, during my first visit to the Kotel, the Western Wall in Jerusalem. Every single one of the members of our group, even the one non-Jewish kid, upon approaching the wall, found tears welling up out of nowhere. We all touched that warm, ancient rock, and bawled our eyes out. I am still not sure entirely why this happened, but it was remarkable.

When I returned, 12 years later in 1999 to live there as an adult, the depth and breadth of my love for the land and the State matured to include understanding some of the challenges that the State of Israel faced: growing concern about the water supply and environmental degradation, deep political divisions of various sorts, high cost of living compared to salaries, crowded cities, poor customer service,  a high-stress environment, and similar issues of poverty and dysfunction and malfeasance that are present in all nations. And traffic. Horrible vehicular traffic. In short, I came to see Israel as a real country, rather than some imagined Jewish utopia reflecting the spirit of Herzl and Aḥad HaAm and other Zionist dreamers.

Many American Jews have been to Israel and care deeply about her. Many of us have celebrated Israel’s successes and mourned her losses. We have a deep, emotional and religious connection with this land, its people, and of course the very idea of a Jewish state. And we should absolutely strive to maintain that.

But we also have to be aware that the State of Israel is right now engaged in the deepest internal conflict of her 75-year history. We need to be informed about it, why it is happening, and what we can do. And of course we have to stand by our Israeli cousins in their hour of need.

Here’s a brief anecdote to introduce the challenge at hand. 

One thing that Israel has done recently to alleviate at least some of the traffic is to build new light rail systems in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. The first line of the TLV system just opened in August, and you might have thought that it was a slam dunk for Tel Aviv. Unfortunately, that’s not exactly what transpired.

When Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu cut the ribbon on the new line on August 16, after eight years of construction and two years of pandemic delay, not only was the ceremony not attended by Tel Aviv mayor Ron Huldai, but it attracted protesters and threats of a boycott. 

The protests were at least nominally in reaction to the fact that the new system does not run on Shabbat. Tel Aviv is a very secular city, and some residents are upset that their metro line is shomer shabbat / Sabbath observant. 

Struggles between religious Jewish observance and secular independence are not new in Israel. But the dynamic in play right now is actually more complicated, and much deeper, part of a larger context regarding the long-term struggle over the vision of the State and her future.

Now for some essential background.

Israel is a tribal place, where political rivals continue to try to best one another at all costs, and old resentments run deep. The vision of what Israel can and should be varies greatly between these tribes. Let me explain:  

These resentments began with the fractiousness of early Zionism, dating to the late 19th century. There were religious Zionists, secular Zionists, political Zionists, cultural and socialist and Hebraist Zionists and in reaction to all of them, the Orthodox and Reform non-Zionists. 

David Ben-Gurion and his associates were secular, and when they declared statehood in 1948 they turned over religious affairs to religious Jews. They gave the Chief Rabbinate control over personal status issues and exempted young, fervently Orthodox men from army service, creating a situation which yielded resentment between secular and Orthodox Israelis from the beginning that has only continued to build to this day. In ‘48, the secular leadership figured that the small number of so-called Ḥaredi (sometimes referred to in English as “ultra-Orthodox,” although that is not necessarily an accurate term) Jews in Israel at the time would never be significant; they were wrong.

During the early years of the State, even more resentment was bred when new Jewish immigrants from Arab countries, often referred to as Mizraḥim (“Eastern”), were housed in tent cities, sometimes for years, while Ashkenazi arrivals received apartments. 

And then of course there is the 20% of Israeli citizens who are Arab and resentful of their treatment at the hands of the Jewish majority. And then there is the very real challenge of the Palestinian territories and the moribund process for the creation of a Palestinian state alongside Israel. 

What has held most of these tribes more or less together for much of the last 75 years is Israeli liberal democracy. Not political liberalism, but liberal in the sense of liberty: committed to the rule of law, balance of government powers, and protecting civil rights, and in particular the rights of minorities. Failing democracies often see tribes forego protecting minority rights in favor of a winner-takes-all mentality, which causes a fraying of the social order and reversion to tribalism. The stage is set for that right now in Israel. 

Let’s talk about the current governing coalition, and some of the characters found therein.

The last election was nearly a year ago, and in the months following, Netanyahu’s center-right Likud party forged a Knesset coalition of right-wing and Ḥaredi / “ultra-Orthodox” parties with a slender majority of 64 seats out of 120. This majority reflects a narrow popular-vote win of about 30,000 out of 4.7 million votes cast. 

This means that, for the sake of forming that coalition, a few unsavory characters have now been elevated to positions of power.  Let’s take a close look at a few.

Among the Members of Knesset in this current coalition is the chair of the Religious Zionist party, Bezalel Smotrich, who is currently the Finance Minister of the State of Israel. 

His views on Arab citizens of Israel are controversial even within some right-wing quarters. He opposes the Two-State Solution, has questioned the legitimacy of Arab members of Knesset, claiming, “It’s a mistake that Ben-Gurion didn’t finish the job and throw you out in 1948,” and he has tweeted support for segregated maternity wards in Israeli hospitals, claiming “It is natural that my wife would not want to lie down next to someone who just gave birth to a baby that might want to murder her baby in another 20 years.” 

He has also claimed to be a “proud homophobe,” having created the “Beast Parade” in Jerusalem in 2006, a protest against that city’s gay pride parade.

He has denied the legitimacy of non-Orthodox conversions, and described Reform Judaism as ‘fake religion.” 

In 2005, in the context of Israel’s withdrawal from the Gaza Strip, Smotrich was arrested by the Shin Bet along with four others for being in possession of 700 gallons of gasoline with the intent to blow up a part of the Ayalon Freeway, the main artery through Tel Aviv. 

In 2019, Benjamin Netanyahu refused to give Smotrich either the cabinet position of Justice Minister, due to his advocating for “restoring Torah justice,” or the Minister of Diaspora Affairs, because Netanyahu was concerned that doing so would alienate Diaspora Jews (i.e. us).

Nevertheless, in this new government, Smotrich is now the Finance Minister, one of the most powerful positions in the cabinet.

Another member of this coalition is Itamar Ben-Gvir. Ben-Gvir is the only Member of Knesset from the Otzma Yehudit (literally, “Jewish Power”) party. As a teenager, Ben-Gvir was involved with the youth movement of the Rabbi Meir Kahane’s party, Kach. The Kach party was deemed so extreme that it was in fact outlawed in 1994 for supporting Jewish terrorists like Baruch Goldstein, who massacred 29 Palestinians at the Tomb of the Patriarchs in Ḥevron that year. (It has been reported that Ben-Gvir had a poster of Goldstein in his living room until three years ago.)

When Ben-Gvir was 18 and went through the draft process as most young Israelis do, he was barred from service in the IDF due to his extremist views.

He has continued to be a provocateur, going so far in 2019 as to state that Arab citizens of Israel who are not loyal to the state must be expelled. 

Itamar Ben-Gvir is now the Minister of National Security, whose portfolio includes supervising Israel’s activities in the West Bank. 

There are others: Avi Maoz, the sole representative of the Noam party, who has advocated for legalizing gay conversion therapy, is against women serving in the IDF, and has called for greater separation of gender at public events. 

And there is Aryeh Deri of the Shas party, former Interior Minister who was convicted in 2000 of taking $155,000 in bribes and served three years in prison; he re-entered politics and was convicted again in 2021, this time for tax offenses. Netanyahu appointed him Interior Minister, Health Minister, and Deputy Prime Minister in the current government, but within a month the Supreme Court struck down his appointment due to his convictions. 

In ordinary times, these characters would not be part of the majority coalition, much less given cabinet portfolios. But we are not in ordinary times. And while no one can dispute that Benjamin Netanyahu is a shrewd center-right politician who stands firm for the security of the Israeli people, it is obvious to nearly everybody that he has embraced these far-right allies to save himself from the multiple criminal charges he faces for fraud, breach of trust, and accepting bribes.

Many, many Israelis are extraordinarily upset by the makeup of this coalition, and they are rightfully concerned that it will discriminate based on religion, deny rights to women and minorities, annex the territories and put a stake through the heart of the Two-State Solution. Many are upset that military exemption will continue to be granted to young Ḥaredim, even though the Supreme Court has ruled in recent years that they must serve in the army.

Some of these things are explicit goals of coalition partners. And the means to make all of this happen is through judicial reform. 

As you may know, Israel has no constitution. And unlike in America, where we have a balance of powers between the Executive, Legislative, and Judicial branches of government, Israel only has two: the Knesset (which incorporates the Executive branch) and the Supreme Court. If the Knesset runs roughshod over liberal democratic norms by passing legislation which tramples on minority rights, the only check on its power is the Supreme Court.

In this Knesset, the majority coalition has presented a legislative package of judicial reforms, which aim to limit the power of the Supreme Court and thereby allow this government to have its way without any interference. Many Israelis see this as an existential crisis, an attack on the very principles of liberal democracy enshrined in its Declaration of Independence. 

The first major piece of this judicial reform package passed the Knesset in July. This law prevents the Supreme Court from using “reasonableness” as a standard for upholding the law. When the vote was taken, the opposition walked out en masse in protest, so the law passed 64-0. 

What this legislation effectively says is that if a simple majority of elected politicians, even 61 out of 120, believe that a government decision is reasonable, it does not matter if all the other 59 members of Knesset and all 15 members of the Supreme Court feel it is unreasonable. This is a tyranny of the majority that opens the door to corruption, among other potential abuses.

The Supreme Court began reviewing this law on September 12, and there is a strong likelihood that they will strike it down. If that happens, the State of Israel will be in uncharted waters.

And this “reasonableness” legislation is only the beginning of the reforms.

Remember that Israel has no separation between “synagogue and state.” Given the makeup of this government, everybody in this room is effectively part of a minority whose rights will be curtailed by a government which tips its hat to theocracy. Israel right now is only barely tolerant of non-Orthodox Judaism. How about an Israel that makes it outright illegal? Imagine being on a synagogue trip with your rabbi, holding a Shabbat service according to our customs, and suddenly we are arrested because men and women are sitting and praying together?

For 38 weeks now, every Saturday night, Israelis numbering in the hundreds of thousands, have taken to the streets in protest. I hope you have seen photos of the sea of Israeli flags held aloft by those gathered in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem and all over the country, as they chant, “De-mo-krat-ya!” – democracy, and “Bushah!” – shame. For those of us who know and love the State of Israel, it has been heartbreaking, and inspiring, to watch Israelis from different tribes – secular and religious, the political left and the center right, Ashkenazi and Mizraḥi, Arabs and Jews – speak out together against their own government. A range of professional groups – the Israel Medical Association, the Israel Bar Association, the Israel Business Forum, consisting of the 150 largest private-sector companies, have all raised their voices in protest. 

Many Israelis feel dejected. Anecdotal reports are that people are leaving, and of course the ones who can leave are generally the well-off: the entrepreneurs and investors, the high-tech employees. This is not good news for the economy, and of course for the poor of Israel.

Around 10,000 reserve-duty soldiers have signed a pledge refusing to do their voluntary army service, which is of great concern to the armed forces, particularly regarding the highly-specialized reservists like fighter pilots. Israel’s security may already be seriously compromised.

Estimates vary, but one conservative figure is that 2 million Israelis have joined protest marches. Israel’s population is about 10 million, so that would be an equivalent in America of about 70 million people in the streets, an astonishing number.

If you happened to catch the 60 Minutes piece on this last week, you heard from leaders of a group of army reservists called Aḥim LeNesheq, Brothers and Sisters in Arms. Citing the examples of Poland and Hungary, which are nominally democratic states leaning toward autocracy, they spoke in an unvarnished way.

Shira Eting, a former combat helicopter pilot, one of the few female pilots, and now a Principal at the Vintage Investment fund, which invests in early-stage technologies, said “Every democracy that has turned into a dictatorship was elected in a democratic way. This is how democracies become dictatorships.” 

Ron Sherf, former commander of the elite Sayyeret Matkal unit, and VP for R&D at Stratasys, immediately added, “And it’s not like you wake up one day and say, ‘OK, now we are a dictatorship.’ Small, small things will change the face of Israel. People tend to say, ‘Wow! In my country, THIS can happen? No, no, it’s only these guys shouting. But it’s happening.’”

I hope now that you understand the challenge of the current moment the way that a clear majority of Israelis see it. The State is in crisis. Nothing about this current reality is normal.

Now we have to turn to the future. What can we do, here on the other side of the world?

It would be very easy to just look the other way, and go about our business as usual, to give lip-service and merely continue being supportive of Israel from a distance, and assume that the Israeli public will sort it out for themselves. Israel advocacy in America in recent years has been mostly that. We’ll send you our military support, we’ll send you our tourist dollars, and we will not comment on your internal politics. 

And in fact, Israelis have historically demanded that of American Jews. “How dare you tell us how to deal with our problems, when you don’t face the daily possibility of terrorist attacks, when you don’t send your beloved 18-year-old girls and boys into the army to face real enemies who want to kill you. How dare you challenge our political choices when you do not live in the pressure-cooker that is the Middle East?! Make aliyah, come here and live this first, and then we’ll talk politics.”

It is absolutely true that the State of Israel is in a precarious position, and all the more so, that is why we must have skin in this game. We cannot turn away. As we sing in Hatiqvah, “Ayin letziyyon tzofiyyah.” Our eye still gazes toward Zion, as it has throughout our history.

We should all be aware of is the following text from Israel’s Declaration of Independence, which was read by Ben Gurion in what is today called Independence Hall in Tel Aviv, May 12, 1948, as he declared Israeli statehood:

THE STATE OF ISRAEL will be open for Jewish immigration and for the Ingathering of the Exiles; it will foster the development of the country for the benefit of all its inhabitants; it will be based on freedom, justice and peace as envisaged by the prophets of Israel; it will ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex; it will guarantee freedom of religion, conscience, language, education and culture; it will safeguard the Holy Places of all religions; and it will be faithful to the principles of the Charter of the United Nations.

This vision of a State rooted in the prophetic vision of our tradition, connects Israel to fundamental Jewish values: Oseh shalom bimromav (May God bring some heavenly peace to Earth); Tzedeq, tzedeq tirdof (Justice, you shall pursue justice – Devarim / Deuteronomy 16:20). This vision should guarantee freedom of religion, specifically leaving room for the protection of other religious traditions and cultures. 

Ben-Gurion went on:

WE APPEAL to the Jewish people throughout the Diaspora to rally round the Jews of Eretz-Israel in the tasks of immigration and upbuilding and to stand by them in the great struggle for the realization of the age-old dream – the redemption of Israel.

From the very beginning, 75 years ago, Diaspora Jewry was called to help redeem the people and the Land of Israel. And so we must do today, as the State of Israel is in crisis.

We must lean in. We must be at the table in every way we can: being in touch with our Israeli friends and relatives, expressing our love of Israel and our concern to our elected representatives here in America, and of course being financially supportive, and this imperative can take multiple forms.

We must be a part of the struggle for liberal democracy in Israel. We can do so by redirecting our financial resources, not by withdrawing support, to be intentional with our dollars in a way that sends a message yet does not hurt Israel’s most vulnerable citizens. We must support charitable organizations that stand for democracy and good government in Israel. Here are a few such organizations:

And we must raise our voices for the vision of Israel which maintains democratic norms, the rule of law and the balance of power, which protects the rights of minorities, which ensures that Israel does not slide into religious or ethnic intolerance, or discrimination of any kind.

The Talmud teaches us that the Second Temple was destroyed due to sin’at ḥinnam, baseless hatred. After the Romans destroyed that Temple and laid waste to Jerusalem, the Jews were scattered all over the world, unredeemed and wandering for nearly two millennia. 

This Yom Kippur marks 50 years since Israel was attacked unawares by her Arab neighbors; we cannot allow  sin’at ḥinnam to succeed in doing what tanks and combat aircraft could not.

Theodor Herzl, the Hungarian journalist who set in motion the modern Zionist movement which culminated in the establishment of the State, wrote the following:

I once called Zionism an infinite ideal…as it will not cease to be an ideal even after we attain our land, the Land of Israel. For Zionism… encompasses a hope not only for a legally secured homeland for our people… but also the aspiration to reach moral and spiritual perfection.

Ayin leTziyyon tsofiyyah. As our eyes continue to gaze eastward, to our ancient homeland, we must keep Herzl’s vision of moral and spiritual perfection before us all. We must continue to sit at the Zionist table, to support the people, the idea, and the State of Israel, to support freedom, justice, and peace in that land, in our land, the vision of our prophets. And we must rally around the vision of democracy as we continue to seek the realization of that age-old dream of redemption.

~

Rabbi Seth Adelson

(Originally delivered at Congregation Beth Shalom, Pittsburgh, PA, evening of Yom Kippur 5784, 9/24/2023.)

* I am grateful to Eric Lidji, director of the Rauh Jewish History Program & Archives at the Senator John Heinz History Center, and Dr. Barbara Burstin, member of Beth Shalom and instructor at the University of Pittsburgh, who shared with me archival materials about Beth Shalom’s early involvement with raising funds for Zionist causes.

Categories
High Holidays Sermons

Into the Future, Part II: Why Conservative Judaism – Rosh Hashanah 5784, Day 2

I have been a Conservative rabbi now for sixteen years, and sixteen is a great number for those who love math: it’s two to the fourth power, the base for the hexadecimal system, a favorite of computer programmers. Also, in gematria, the system of interpreting Hebrew letters through their numerical values, sixteen represents one half of the the four-letter name of God (the Tetragrammaton), which is so holy, even only the half of it, that when we represent numbers in Hebrew we don’t use the letters “yod-vav” (10+6) to represent sixteen, but rather “tet-zayin,” which is 9+7. It’s a different path to the same thing, but remarkable nonetheless. So sixteen is considered a powerful and resonant number in Jewish life.

But more importantly, I am also a lifelong Conservative Jew, and I was committed to the principles of our movement long before I could even identify and explain them. 

[Read the first in the Into the Future series: It’s About Us]

Growing up in Western Massachusetts, in a fairly rural area, our Conservative synagogue felt like an extension of our living room, even though we lived 20 miles away, which for most of us seems quite far. But we knew about the Conservative teshuvah / rabbinic opinion permitting driving to synagogue if you lived too far to walk, and that was very important to us. We were a regular Shabbat-morning family, and the friendly mix of people and melodies and easygoing, egalitarian approach to halakhah was just right for us. 

My childhood synagogue: Congregation Knesset Israel, Pittsfield, Massachusetts

Some of you may have noticed that back in August, the Pittsburgh Jewish Chronicle hosted a poll on their website about identification with movements. It was heartening to see that 30% of respondents indicated that they identify with the Conservative movement. Now, of course that’s a totally non-scientific poll, drawing on presumably a more highly-engaged segment of the Jewish community. Nonetheless, that figure is about twice the national average of identification found in recent demographic studies. So there are still plenty of people in our neighborhood who are drawn to what we do and continue to see Beth Shalom as a source of inspiration and holiness.

And with good reason. I will totally concede my bias here, but I believe firmly that what we do in the Conservative movement still holds great appeal for many Jews, and if we could be better at explaining ourselves, many more would see that our approach to Judaism is the key to the Jewish future.

Conservative Judaism’s strength lies in its ability to hold on to our tradition but adapt to a changing world. This feature will be essential in the future, as we face rapid change.

And that is why the future of the Conservative movement is so important. And that is why we need you to be not just participants, not just members of Beth Shalom, but active ambassadors for what we do.

So what is it we do? What are the positively-articulated principles that make us not simply “not Reform and not Orthodox”? Or, as the old, totally inappropriate joke goes, not just the “hazy” between the “lazy” and “crazy.”

What makes this shul different from all other shuls? 

We surveyed 100 congregants, and the top seven answers are on the board. (OK, so I didn’t have the budget for a board.)

  1. We are halakhic. First and foremost, we accept halakhah, Jewish law, as framing our rituals and our behavior. But we also understand that halakhic framework as being subject to minimal (i.e. “conservative”) change to reflect contemporary values. This means that our path to spiritual fulfillment reflects considered and often lenient approaches to matters within Jewish law. In doing so, we aim to ensure that our rituals and our liturgy reflect where we are today.
  2. We are egalitarian. All adults, including those who have been traditionally excluded from some of our essential mitzvot, are counted equally as full participants in Jewish life. For example, we call young women to the Torah as a bat mitzvah at age 13, just like the boys. This is for many of us a fundamental value, and I know from many conversations with members over the years that it is a defining characteristic that has brought many of us here.
  3. We are scientific. Our current body of knowledge guides our understanding of the origins of the world, and Torah, and the unfolding of our tradition over the last few thousand years. That is, while we acknowledge the Divine origin of Judaism, we also accept the undeniable evidence of the human hand in crafting and interpreting our ancient holy texts. Where science and the Torah disagree, we acknowledge that having multiple stories upon which we can draw for inspiration is in fact a strength.
  4. We are open to modern understandings of God. We need not be limited to seeing God only as the all-powerful yet vengeful character in the Torah who sits on a throne and metes out reward and punishment. Now, that is a conception from which we may like to draw, particularly on High Holidays, but there are many wonderful modern theologians – Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, Martin Buber, Rabbi Mordecai Kaplan, Rabbi Neil Gillman – who have given us the gift of contemporary theology, enabling each of us to wrestle with God personally in a meaningful way.
  5. We maintain a traditional communal standard. While we acknowledge that there is a wide range of personal observance choices within our community, Beth Shalom is a building in which we keep kosher, we observe Shabbat in a traditional way, and we uphold our traditions and rituals mostly as we have inherited them.
  6. We believe in Am Yisrael, Jewish peoplehood, while grappling in an honest way with current realities of American Jewry, which reflect the wider palette of Americans: non-traditional families and not exclusively Ashkenazic ancestry for everyone within our view, while of course maintaining a halakhic standard regarding who is a Jew.
  7. We remain firmly committed to the idea and the people of the State of Israel. Like any other people, Jews have the right to self-determination in their own land. While Jews living in the Diaspora are proud and loyal citizens of their lands, the Diaspora must also be connected and invested in Israel to ensure her survival as the spiritual center of the Jewish world. And of course we are committed to our family and friends who live there, while also acknowledging the very real challenges that the State faces in managing its own future. (I will be speaking about this at length at our Kol Nidrei service.)

Those are the top of my list of our most important principles; I am sure that some of you might value another principle that is missing here, but that’s the nature of our tradition! 

Each of those principles which I just outlined is at least a sermon unto itself.

But we do not have time for that, so instead I am going to share a piece of Torah as a sort of capstone to these seven principles, and I hope you will take this to heart as you step forward to be an ambassador for Conservative Judaism and for Beth Shalom. It’s from the first chapter of Pirqei Avot, the 2nd-century collection of rabbinic wisdom featured in the Mishnah:

Pirqei Avot 1:12

הִלֵּל וְשַׁמַּאי קִבְּלוּ מֵהֶם. הִלֵּל אוֹמֵר, הֱוֵי מִתַּלְמִידָיו שֶׁל אַהֲרֹן, אוֹהֵב שָׁלוֹם וְרוֹדֵף שָׁלוֹם, אוֹהֵב אֶת הַבְּרִיּוֹת וּמְקָרְבָן לַתּוֹרָה

Hillel and Shammai received the oral tradition from their teachers. Hillel used to say: be like the disciples of Aaron, loving peace and pursuing peace, loving all people and drawing them close to the Torah.

This passage is notable not only because of its essential message, but also because it replaces a passage found in most Orthodox siddurim. And the fact that the Conservative movement substituted this passage about loving and pursuing peace is quite telling indeed. 

You see, the way most Orthodox services unfold in the morning is that they read a series of texts about animal sacrifices in the ancient Temple in Jerusalem, which of course was destroyed by the Romans in the year 70 CE. And then they say, “May the Temple in Jerusalem be rebuilt speedily in our days.” 

Model of the Second Temple in Jerusalem at the Israel Museum

So at some point in the 20th century the Conservative movement decided that well, we’re just not so excited about rebuilding the Beit haMiqdash and restoring the process of sacrificing animals that ended nearly 2,000 years ago. We have prayer, which is, ultimately, a better way of reaching God.

So we took out many of those references to animal sacrifice, and substituted language which suits our values. The suggestion is that we start each day not with an imperative to rebuild the Temple, but rather to reach out to one another with the goal of peace: peace between individuals, peace between nations, and all of that undergirded with words of Torah. We respond to God’s loving gift of Torah with love; and we act on that love to pursue peace in our world.

Because what should Torah do, when applied properly? It should bring people together. It should tear down walls and cause us to make peace with one another. Torah is the source of shalom, and acting on Torah with love for our fellow Jews and our fellow people of all walks of life is the way we create a holier future.

And there is a certain irony in that passage, because Hillel and Shammai were rivals in Jewish thought. Hillel generally took lenient positions in halakhah, and Shammai took the stringent position. They disagreed on virtually every place where it was possible to disagree. And yet in doing so, they sought peace. In fact, the Talmud teaches us (BT Yevamot 13b) that despite their disagreements, the scholars in each of the opposing schools still married each others’ daughters. That is, they continued to live together and raise families together despite fundamental disagreement. 

The Conservative movement seeks the path of love and peace by acknowledging that we live in a world that is quite different from the one in which the Talmud, and all the more so, the Torah were written. We see that in order to follow the path of love and peace, we have to live in this world, and not isolate ourselves. And we must also still remain in community with those with whom we disagree, to the right and to the left.

We are the vibrant center that can hold the Jewish world together. Our current climate is one which breeds division of all sorts; as the movement which occupies the center of Jewish life, all over the world, it is within our purview to reach out to find common ground.

We offer what is for many still a viable spiritual home: adherence to tradition, with a willingness to consider how the world has changed and how our tradition should change with it. Hence counting all adults as equal in Jewish law. Hence treating a marriage between two Jewish men or two Jewish women as being equivalent to that between a man and a woman. Hence understanding that taking lenient positions, like Hillel himself, strengthens our connection to our tradition and widens our tent, creating more peace.

…

Some of you know that our local Federation scholar, Rabbi Danny Schiff, published a book within the past year called, Judaism in a Digital Age, in which he declared that the moment for movements within Judaism has passed. Rabbi Schiff and I had a very spirited public disputation about the Jewish future here at Beth Shalom last winter. I’m a movement guy, by which I mean that I believe that institutions such as the United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism still hold a good deal of value as a “brand” within the Jewish world. And I am proud that we are affiliated with the movement. 

Beth Shalom has emerged from the pandemic not just unscathed, but also with a path forward for sustainability, including the $1 million matching grant for redevelopment from the State of Pennsylvania. 

We have successfully launched the Ḥavurah program, which connects members of our congregation in small groups for social activities, and I am certain it will help build more connections in our community, to make Beth Shalom more highly integrated. (By the way, if you missed joining, it’s not too late! Be in touch with our Executive Director, Robert Gleiberman, and we’ll connect you with other Beth Shalom members like you.)

All of that is wonderful, but it is not enough. The future of Beth Shalom, and the Conservative movement, depends on you. It depends on your willingness to commit yourself not only to belonging, but also to showing up. To take advantage of everything that we do here, and to take it home and make it a part of who you are and how you live.

Now of course, stepping up your involvement may seem daunting. Where do you start? How about coming to see me to talk about how to engage more in Jewish life and your community. I am happy to help you craft a path to enriching your Jewish involvement so that you and your family may benefit more handsomely from everything that Jewish living offers.

And trust me on this: your investment of time and energy and resources into Beth Shalom will be worth it. In being more deeply connected to our tradition and to each other, you will gain a sense of kedushah / holiness, of groundedness which will carry you confidently into the future.

So what will make the future of Beth Shalom and the Conservative movement brighter? Of course there are the essential principles I outlined above, which we must continue to uphold and value – I take those things as a baseline. But here are some other things we will be addressing, moving forward:

  1. Complete egalitarianism with respect to ritual practice. As with all transitions within institutions, change is slow. So while many women in our congregation have embraced the mitzvah of wearing a tallit during morning services, and a small number fulfill the mitzvah of tefillin, we still have a long way to go to ensure that all feel welcome and indeed obligated to participate fully in the time-bound mitzvot which have traditionally only been incumbent upon men. This is an active conversation at the Religious Services Committee.
  2. Telling our story. We need to be able to positively articulate why we do what we do. That is precisely why I gave you the list of seven essential principles today. Having that language available will make you a better ambassador for Beth Shalom, which will lead to a more sustainable future for this congregation. Feel free to cut and paste from above! You need to know this, and you need to be able to share it with others. Our story, our values, our principles, have real value that we must continue to broadcast to the world.

    We also have to tell and retell our story as a congregation, particularly as we enter the upcoming capital campaign. Our future will depend on our being able to describe where we have been and where we are going, and we hope to engage all of you with that as we move forward.
  3. Increased interconnectedness. The Ḥavurot are just one means. The more you come to Beth Shalom – for services, for programs, for lifecycle events – the more that you will feel ownership and connected to others. Just about everything we do includes food and schmoozing opportunities – there is a reason for that! We want you to feel like you are an essential part of this community, that this is your shul, that I am your rabbi.

We have the ability, as the ideological center of the Jewish world, to hold us all together. We are a model for living together even in the face of disagreement,  for peace and love in Torah. And the world needs that now, more than ever.

So go out there and be an ambassador. That will ensure a healthy future for the Conservative movement, and for the rest of the Jewish world as well.

And here is one way you can do so: Rabbi Shugerman and I and a few other lay leaders and staff will be headed to the USCJ Biennial convention (which, for unexplained reasons, they are calling a “Convening” this year) in Baltimore from Dec. 3-5. It will require an investment of time and money, but every time we send a delegation to this convention, we come back with new ideas which help us be a better congregation. If you’re thinking about it, come talk to me. We would love to have you join us.

A final note from the Mishnah I quoted above. The text reads:

אוהב שלום ורודף שלום

Ohev shalom verodef shalom. Loving peace and pursuing peace. Those are two different things! It’s not enough merely to love peace; you have to go out there and make it happen. Likewise for the future of Beth Shalom: it will not be enough for us merely to appreciate Conservative Judaism. Rather, we have to continue to practice it, support it, and spread the word.  

Shanah tovah!

Next in the series:

Kol Nidrei: The Future of Israel

Yom Kippur: The Future Must Be Human

Categories
High Holidays Sermons

Into the Future, Part I: It’s About Us – Rosh Hashanah 5784, Day 1

Once upon a time, I was a big fan of science fiction. I loved the work of Arthur C. Clarke, and in particular 2001: A Space Odyssey, both the book and Stanley Kubrick’s fantastic 1968 film version. Clarke’s visions were often of future worlds where humans interacted with usually-benevolent alien powers. Humanity was not inclined to destroy itself; rather, humans found their way off of our home planet and out into the universe with gradual technological innovation, facilitated by alien assistance. Sure, in 2001 the computer HAL 9000 goes on a murderous rampage in an epic fail of artificial intelligence, but that is just a small hiccup on the way to the creation of the Star-Child by some vastly superior alien power to aid humanity.

I think that many of us are concerned that the future may not be as bright as science fiction writers like Clarke and others envisioned. In our current moment, it may seem as though Clarke misread the future by being hopelessly naive about our species. After all, many things have gone horribly wrong. Consider where we are today:

  • The very people who created artificial intelligence are warning that it may in fact be a real threat
  • We are being relentlessly tracked and mined for data by commercial and government interests
  • What is objectively true has become relative to your political perspective
  • Culture wars have pitted us against our neighbors on multiple fronts
  • Anxiety and depression are on the rise
  • Anti-Semitic activity has increased dramatically
  • Authoritarianism is also back with a vengeance while democracy is in decline

I could go on. Global warming. Opioid abuse. Homelessness. Loneliness. The list of society’s ills continues to grow.

One of my primary jobs as a rabbi is to try to keep us inspired and optimistic about the future. It’s not so easy in today’s environment.

But we Jews have an ancient secret that has enabled us to survive the worst of times for thousands of years. We have survived persecution and dispersion; we have survived exile and genocide; we have survived forced conversions, forced conscriptions, anti-Jewish legislation and regimes of all sorts. We survived the destruction of Jerusalem at the hands of the Babylonians 2600 years ago, and the Romans 2000 years ago. We survived accusations that the Jews caused the Black Death in the 14th century and we survived the Expulsion from Spain a century-and-a-half later. We survived the Holocaust. Even as we in Pittsburgh continue to mourn the 11 holy souls whom we lost on the 27th of October, 2018, we as a community survive and continue to thrive.

And what is that secret Jewish super-power? It is our holy framework, which has unfolded over the last 3,000 years through Torah and its ongoing interpretation. It is the story of our past, coupled with our willingness to continue to engage with it, to retell it, to cling to it, and to apply it to navigate the present. And it is our inclination to gather with other Jews, to be together in community for mutual support and meaningful engagement.

In short, it’s about us. Our story, our community, and our rituals, all intertwined.

One piece of ancient wisdom we learn in Pirqei Avot (4:21):

רַבִּי יַעֲקֹב אוֹמֵר, הָעוֹלָם הַזֶּה דּוֹמֶה לִפְרוֹזְדוֹר בִּפְנֵי הָעוֹלָם הַבָּא. הַתְקֵן עַצְמְךָ בַפְּרוֹזְדוֹר, כְּדֵי שֶׁתִּכָּנֵס לַטְּרַקְלִין:

Rabbi Ya’aqov taught: this world is like a vestibule before the world to come; prepare yourself in the vestibule, so that you may enter the banquet hall.

If we are to enter the future in a way that is healthy and sustainable, we have to be ready for it. And the way that we the Jews can do so, for the benefit of the rest of the world, is to use the framework that we have received from our ancestors, because it has worked for thousands of years. It is our fervent desire, for our collective benefit, that humanity makes it to the banquet hall of the future.

Over these High Holidays, we will be talking about moving “Into the Future” from different angles. Today, it’s about us. Tomorrow, we will be discussing the future of Conservative Judaism. On the evening of Kol Nidrei, we will discuss our future vis-à-vis the State of Israel. And on the day of Yom Kippur, we will be speaking about retaining our humanity as artificial intelligence infuses itself into our lives.

***

In all of the challenges that we have faced at any point in time, the Jewish inclination has always been to look to the past. How did our ancestors survive? By re-reading the Torah, by arguing about it, by following its guidelines for behavior and emulating the better qualities of its major characters, and by applying it to our lives wherever we have been and whatever we have faced.  

And this formula still works today. 

In his 2017 book Homo Deus, the Israeli history Yuval Noaḥ Harari explains what fundamentally differentiates humans from other animals. While there are many species, from ants to chimpanzees, that form social groups in which the individuals cooperate by playing distinct roles, only humans have the potential to act collectively in a way that can change our destiny. In other words, a bee hive is a kind of community, but bee colonies will always more or less be the same – the same structure, the same system of “governance,” with, as far as we know, no long-term sense of past or future.

But humanity is different, particularly due to our ability to gather around shared stories. And all the more so for us, the Jews. Our stories, our texts, our wisdom hold us together and help us move forward, with an eye to our past. Our strength as a people is on our collective bookshelf, and in our hearts and minds. 

One essential lesson, fundamental to Jewish life, is the idea that we are all connected to one another. Two pieces of wisdom in particular say, in essence, that we have to think about “us” before we think about “me” or “you” or “them.” 

  1. Kol Yisrael arevim zeh bazeh (Midrash Sifra on Vayiqra / Leviticus 26:37)

We are all “arevim” – guarantors for one another. The word arevim comes from the Hebrew for “to mix.” We are all mixed up, or integrated with one another. And given the way we live today, not just with fellow Jews, but with our non-Jewish neighbors. We must all be responsible for one another.

  1. Al tifrosh min hatzibbur (Pirqei Avot 2:4)

Do not separate yourself from the community. We cannot all be individuals in complete isolation from one another. Our shared, just, sustainable future depends on our willingness to be in relationship, to acknowledge each other’s humanity. That is, we have to think about us as a collective with a shared destiny. And that is harder to do than it is to say, particularly given that the way our society is constructed today tends to isolate, rather than bring together.

And to universalize once again, the same is true for the entire world. It has become woefully easy to divorce yourself from the people around you. And this is not good for humanity.

Back in August, my son introduced me to a YouTube channel online produced by a “YouTuber” who goes by the name of Mrwhosetheboss. What he does is review hi-tech products, and we watched a review of a new gadget: Apple’s virtual-reality headset, which will be available early next year at the low, low, bargain-basement price of $3500.

After gushing about the revolutionary marvels of this gadget he makes a stunning confession: 

There’s already very little separation between us and our technology. You only have to take your phone out of your pocket and your screen auto-turns-on and you’re blasted by notifications. When the device is on your face, there’s no escaping it, and that’s slightly worrying… But the key thing about this headset that I don’t think any future or vision of this headset can solve is the potential for isolation. I am so incredibly excited that this new era of tech is here, but I’ve never wanted, and NOT wanted, a product to exist at the same time as much as I do with this one, for the simple fact that I do think this is the start of the end for shared experiences.

That is not the future for me, in which we are all in our own sensory bubbles, where all of our communication with others and the outside world is through an intermediary, which controls every aspect of the experience. That seems to me a wee bit too close to The Matrix, rather than Arthur C. Clarke.

Now, I need to state clearly:  I am NOT anti-technology. In fact I believe technology will do wonderful things for us if we use it cautiously. 

But here is the point: every one of us in this room has a wonderful tool at your disposal to build social capital and fight isolation: Judaism. Our faith is one of the best sources of social capital. This synagogue is an ancient technology that still does an amazing job at bringing people together as a force for good in the world. 

Here is a four-point plan (out of many more possible Jewish points) to save our future:

  1. Shabbat (or, setting aside sacred time)
  2. Kashrut (or mindful consumption)
  3. Shemirat halashon (or mindful speech)
  4. Tefillah (or, meditative moments)

Each of these items are among the most important principles of Jewish life, located at the nexus of the personal and the communal. They unite the “me” with the “us.”

Shabbat / Setting Aside Sacred Time

Many of us observe Shabbat in a traditional way in this congregation: we have luxurious family meals, often with guests, on Friday night and Saturday afternoon; we attend synagogue; we “unplug” for 25 hours from sunset on Friday till dark on Saturday night to devote time to family, friends, ritual and reflection.

In my own home, Shabbat is when the imperatives of our busy lives are placed on hold and we play games: Settlers of Catan, Wingspan, Rummikub, building with Legos. And of course, dining and napping as well.

But there are many more of us who do not unplug and reconnect on Shabbat. And even if you have some sense of what you might be missing by not observing Shabbat traditionally, I understand. It’s not so easy to close all your digital devices for that time, to disconnect, to not go shopping or watch YouTube. It’s not so easy even to plan Shabbat meals with family or friends.

But once you have truly tasted the traditional observance of Shabbat, where our range of activities is minimal and our relationship with the Earth and each other is more immediate and organic, you understand the value of setting aside sacred time.

And furthermore, when the news-and-outrage cycle goes non-stop, as Big Tech vies for your eyeballs and your money, shutting all of that down – even if just for 25 hours each week – is a mitzvah not just for you, but for the future of humanity.

Shabbat is good for your soul, but it also helps you connect with the people in your neighborhood, which is where we should all be at least once a week.

Shabbat / setting aside sacred time: it’s about us.

Kashrut / Mindful Consumption

Sure, you might think that holy eating is just an annoyance, an obstacle to living a full gustatory life, unencumbered by antiquated rules. Come on, Rabbi, what’s wrong with shrimp? Didn’t God also create shellfish? And beef is beef, whether an old guy with a beard blessed it or not, right?

Ask any parent whether they can properly raise children without boundaries. Kashrut is just that: a daily reminder that we cannot merely take all we want when we want it. Kashrut is Jewish mindfulness, a structure to help us maintain a sense of holiness in this world. And if we embrace a mindful consumption practice, it leads to a sense of interconnectedness with each other and all of God’s creatures. If we were all to practice this mindful way of eating, we have the potential to spread that awareness of our consumption patterns far and wide.

Even during my years as a young adult when I was not going regularly to synagogue, I maintained my kashrut practice, because it reminded me on a daily basis of my connection to our people and our tradition. Paying careful attention to what we eat, where it came from, and how our consumption affects God’s Creation models behavior for the rest of the world to appreciate.

Kashrut / mindful consumption: It’s about us.

Shemirat haLashon / Mindful speech

Our tongues need guards. We have to be ever-vigilant about the way we talk, and text, and tweet. With the dissolution of guardrails in speech, and with social media platforms which exercise little control over what is acceptable, we are in danger of creating a future in which words will be weaponized in unimaginable ways. It has never been so easy to destroy a person, an institution, an idea as it is today. If we are to maintain any sense of togetherness as a society, we have to be careful about what we say and how we say it. 

But sanctified speech is that where we acknowledge the power of our words and their potential for danger. Too many today are focused on dividing people through speech; only through shemirat halashon may we succeed in bringing people together for a better humanity and a better future.

Mindful speech is about respecting the humanity in each person.  Shemirat haLashon is about us.

Tefillah / Meditative Moments

There are many paths through Jewish life. But there is only one thing that gathers the Jews like no other, and that is being together in our house, the beit kenesset, the synagogue, the ancient and modern house of Jewish gathering.

Now, I know that tefillah is hard. It requires intent, concentration and practice, all things that can be challenging in a busy sanctuary during the High Holidays. And there is a high bar to entry. To fully participate, you have to be able to read Hebrew, or at least puzzle through transliterations. And there are tunes and choreography and ritual gear, which can be off-putting to the uninitiated.

But when we have prayerful moments together, when all the people in this room sing together, or meditate together, or even mumble together, it is breathtaking. And it is also be liberating – an upward spiral of energy that moves us as a community and ascends heavenward.

The Hebrew word, tefillah, does not mean, “to recite a jumble of ancient words in a language that nobody speaks.” It actually means “self-judgment.” When we stand together, ideally in silence, reciting the words of the Amidah, we create a strong sense of power in the room – hearts united in deep, meditative analysis of the self. If we allow ourselves to be swept up in the sense of tefillah as a community, it will help us all be better people, opening our hearts and bringing us together as a community. And this too has the potential to infuse the whole world with awareness and connection.

Tefillah / meditative moments: it’s about us.

***

OK, Rabbi, that all sounds great, but you have not convinced me. How exactly will this framework create a better future?

We have the power, when we think and act together, when we draw on our shared stories and ritual, to face all the challenges of our world in a way that will enable us to overcome. That is why the Jews are still here. We are a model for resilience, a model which can be shared with others.

My goal as your rabbi is, in facing the future, to recognize the awesome power of our Jewish framework, of your heritage, and to give it to the world. This world, God help us, needs to set aside sacred time, needs mindful consumption, mindful speech and meditative moments.

And indeed, the situation is urgent. We all have the potential to think, “Hey, I’m a good person. I am respectful of my neighbors. I make charitable donations. I replaced my incandescents with LEDs. I buy organic produce.” And hey, those things are great. 

But we have to think wider and greater than that. We have to think not just about ourselves or our immediate relations, but rather how we can influence the world for the better. Our future as a species depends on you to consider how your personal observance of essential Jewish principles can bring us safely and sustainably into the future. And this may only be realized if we take up the reins of our own personal Jewish observance and demonstrate its value to the world.

So here is a suggestion: Take one element of Shabbat – a holy moment every Friday evening at sunset to light candles as a family, for example -and build on that. One element of kashrut. Come once more to synagogue for a service than you ordinarily would, to learn a new prayer, a new tune, a new idea from our rich textual tradition.

And as you come to appreciate these aspects of our tradition yourself, you must share them with your friends and neighbors. Our ancient secret can be universalized and presented to the world. Not that we should try to make non-Jews practice Judaism, but to understand the eternal value of these principles so the whole world can derive the benefits of the Jewish secret. 

Do it for yourself, but all the more so, do it for us, so that we may all enter the banquet hall together. Into the future.

***

Next in the series:

Rosh HaShanah, Day 2: The Future of Conservative Judaism

Kol Nidrei: The Future of Israel

Yom Kippur: The Future Must Be Human

~

Rabbi Seth Adelson

(Originally delivered at Congregation Beth Shalom, Pittsburgh, PA, first day of Rosh Hashanah 5784, 9/16/2023.)

Categories
High Holidays Sermons Yizkor

Being There: Partnership or Death – Yom Kippur 5783 (plus Yizkor coda)

Once upon a time, in a distant empire, the royal fisherman was out on the lake and caught a huge fish. “This is wonderful!” he said aloud. “The Queen loves fish!” The fish thought, “OK, then! I’m going to get to see the Queen.” 

The fisherman took the fish to the kitchen of the castle, and presented it to the royal chef. “Ah, such a beautiful fish! Ze Queen, she loves fish. I will prepare zis fish in ze most perfect way.” The fish thought, “Ooh, I’m going to get special treatment! Maybe a massage…?” 

Before preparing the fish, the chef and the fisherman brought her to the Queen to show off such a perfect specimen of fish, arrayed on a gorgeous silver platter. The Queen beheld the fantastic fish, and her eyes widened. “Such a beautiful fish!” she said. “I love fish! I simply cannot wait to eat it! Go broil it immediately!”

At this point, the fish realized what was happening, jumped up and blurted out, “You don’t love fish! You love yourself!”

What does it mean to be in a loving relationship with the people around us? As we gradually emerge from the pandemic, many of us are still re-learning to be around people once again, to be in public spaces with lots of others, to feel like part of a community. Now is the time, as we have entered 5783, for us to reconsider how we can be better partners, spouses, community members, and citizens of the world. 

This is the fourth and final installment in the “Being There” series. We have up to this point discussed our ḥavurah, program, which we will be rolling out in the coming months; we have discussed the beit kenesset, the synagogue, as a symbol of the continuum of Jewish life; we have considered our relationship with the qehillah qedoshah, the sacred community of Jews around the world, and particularly with those in Israel. 

Today, the theme is ḥevruta / partnership. Ḥevruta usually refers to the traditional Jewish mode of study, native to the beit midrash / study hall, and also refers to the person you study with. Your study-buddy for Jewish text is your ḥevruta.

A well-known slogan about learning in ḥevruta comes from the Talmud, in one of the stories of Ḥoni the Circle-Maker, who is perhaps best known for his talent at being able to draw circles within which rain will fall. But he was also known in his beit midrash as the wisest person, who could answer any question.

The story (BT Ta’anit 23a), in brief, is that Ḥoni falls asleep for 70 years, and upon waking he goes to his beit midrash to learn some Torah. But now, since he has been gone for 70 years, nobody recognizes him, and they do not treat him with respect, so he dies. 

In responding to the story of his death, the sage Rava declares, “O ḥevruta o mituta.” “Partnership or death.” If we do not commit to ḥevruta, partnership, we might as well be dead. We need ḥevruta. We need partners. We need to be in relationship with others.

There are two essential messages of the concept of ḥevruta:

  1. We all learn more effectively when we have a partner.
  2. I cannot learn and be completely satisfied with myself until I have also made sure that my ḥevruta has learned as well. That is, we cannot move on until we both “get it.” So I am not in this just for myself – I am also doing it to help my colleague and friend. A good ḥevruta feels something like mountain climbers tethered to one another, so both can reach the top of the mountain together.

Ultimately, to be in relationship with others means that we give out at least as much love as we receive. And I am not speaking only of romantic relationships, or friendships, or family bonds. Rather, we have to strive to understand that we are in relationship with everybody around us – neighbors, business partners, strangers on the street, even with our perceived enemies. 

What, after all, is society, if not simply a diverse, complex web of interpersonal relationships? Every group, every organization, every institution consists of people in relationship with one another.

Every other person around you is a potential ḥevruta. And Being There for those beyond our family and friends, for those whom we do not know, or come from a different culture, for people with whom we do not see eye-to-eye, for people with whom we might greatly disagree, is very difficult. Eizehu ḥakham? Who is wise, asks Pirqei Avot (4:1)? Halomed mikol adam. The one who learns from every person. 

Each person with whom we interact is a potential partner. Each person has the potential to broaden our knowledge and our opinions to help us improve ourselves and our world. 

There is a wonderful tale in the Talmud about ḥevruta. The story (BT Bava Metzia 84a) features the greatest ḥevruta pair ever: Rabbi Yoḥanan and Resh Laqish, who lived in 3rd-century northern Israel. Rabbi Yoḥanan was one of the most highly-regarded scholars of his age, diligently studying from a very young age and ultimately opening a yeshivah / academy in Tiberias to which students flocked. Resh Laqish came from a more nefarious background: he was a former thief and gladiator. Rabbi Yoḥanan agrees to let Resh Laqish marry his daughter if Resh Laqish commits to studying Torah, which he does.

What makes their ḥevruta so vaunted is that they came from such vastly different backgrounds and had such fundamentally divergent perspectives that they helped each other greatly in their learning. Rabbi Yoḥanan describes their learning relationship as follows:

בר לקישא כי הוה אמינא מילתא הוה מקשי לי עשרין וארבע קושייתא ומפריקנא ליה עשרין וארבעה פרוקי וממילא רווחא שמעתא 

In my discussions with Resh Laqish, when I would state a matter, he would raise twenty-four difficulties against me in an attempt to disprove my claim, and I would answer him with twenty-four answers, and the halakhah by itself would become broadened and clarified. 

In other words, when they studied together, Rabbi Yoḥanan would make some kind of pronouncement about the text, and Resh Laqish would push back with numerous ways in which Rabbi Yoḥanan might actually be wrong. Rabbi Yoḥanan knew that in order to actually understand the Torah, he needed a ḥevruta who would widen his perspective, and thus better interpret what God expects of us. 

Learning Torah, just as with learning about life, requires that our perception be challenged, that we have others pushing back at us, respectfully, to show us a wider picture.

When Resh Laqish died, Rabbi Yoḥanan was bereft; his students suggested that he study with El’azar ben Pedat, but Rabbi Yoḥanan found that El’azar was simply a yes-man: he would always agree with R. Yoḥanan, and Yoḥanan found this useless and frustrating. He missed his ḥevruta so much, that

הוה קא אזיל וקרע מאניה וקא בכי ואמר היכא את בר לקישא היכא את בר לקישא והוה קא צוח עד דשף דעתיה מיניה בעו רבנן רחמי עליה ונח נפשיה 

Rabbi Yoḥanan went around, tearing his clothing, weeping and saying: Where are you, son of Laqish? Where are you, son of Laqish? Rabbi Yoḥanan screamed until he went insane. The Rabbis prayed and requested for God to have mercy on him and take his soul, and Rabbi Yoḥanan died.

O ḥevruta o mituta. Partnership or death.

It is through opposition that we learn. It is by being challenged in our views that we broaden our minds. It is by engaging with the other side with love and respect that we develop nuanced perception which enables us to moderate ourselves.

The principle of ḥevruta is a means to work through differences in order to reach a meaningful understanding of the other’s point of view. Being There, using the ḥevruta model therefore means seeing the humanity of your interlocutor so that you infuse the argument, and indeed the relationship, with respect.

Pulling back the lens, the only way humanity can function sustainably is if we understand that we have to find common ground with others, particularly our rivals in thought, in religious practice, in politics; that we are in relationship with them as well; that we cannot only love ourselves and those like us. We must broaden our perspectives, and for that we need ḥevruta. 

I often feel, ladies and gentlemen, that we have reached a place in our society in which many of us are not listening to one another, in which virtually all of the messages we hear are from those like us, people with whom we find it easy to talk to and to agree. Our media environment has become fractured and even atomized, such that we tune into the outlets which tell the story the way we want to hear it. Our social media platforms enable us to be surrounded by voices that sound just like our own, and we pile on with likes and comments which reinforce our own views. 

We are all out for self-affirmation, for having our perceptions of the world constantly reinforced as the only possibly believable thing. Everybody else is crazy or dangerous. And everybody is angry; we all just want to tear down everything that does not fit our world view, to see only the broken tiles and not the larger mosaic.

The story of Rabbi Yoḥanan and Resh Laqish reminds us that a good ḥevruta is also a bar plugta, a partner with whom you stand in opposition, and yet you both understand that you need each other. 

But many of us today are not seeing that need.

And in this environment, our institutions are losing out. Schools, houses of worship, social groups, families, professions, governments, and so forth – all are suffering from the sentiment that my opinion trumps yours, that my picture of the world is the only legitimate one. Libraries must kowtow to demands for books to be removed due to content which is objectionable to some; Zionists on college campuses are likened to Nazis. Politicians speak only to their base, and believe that they represent and must respond only to the people who voted for them.

We are quick to jump to conclusions and assume ill will; we are quick to be offended and not generous enough in spirit to give kaf zekhut, the benefit of the doubt.

And if I don’t like your position, I’ll berate you in public with a tweet or an Instagram post. That is much easier than calling you up and discussing our disagreement and seeking common ground, and it gets a whole lot more attention.

The author and scholar Yuval Levin, in his recent (2020) book, A Time to Build, describes the value of institutions, and how their declining influence is a great challenge to our society.

Institutions are by their nature formative. They structure our perceptions and our interactions, and as a result they structure us. They form our habits, our expectations, and ultimately our character. By giving shape to our experience of life in society, institutions give shape to our place in the world and to our understanding of its contours. They are at once constraining and enabling. They are the means by which we are socialized, and so they are crucial intermediaries between our inner lives and our social lives.

We need institutions, says Levin, even when they are somewhat flawed, because they shape us; they help us react to events in our world in a way that is healthy; they guide us in our interactions with others. But we are not using institutions the way we used to, allowing them to mold us into better people, according to Levin. Institutions, he says, have ceased to be formative, and have become performative. That is, we are using them as platforms through which we can advance ourselves, effectively through public performance, mostly via social media. 

Without the institution of democracy guiding us, how will we ensure that we have a truly representative government? Without the institutions of religion and medicine and law guiding us, how will we ensure that people will make good choices for themselves, for their families, for their neighborhoods? How will we prevent our society from breaking down into a murderous free-for-all?

Rabbi Jonathan Sacks once pointed out that the Hebrew word for responsibility, אחריות / aḥarayut, includes the word אחר / aḥer, other. For us to be responsible human beings, said Rabbi Sacks, we must incorporate the other.

Healthy institutions help create an environment in which the sense of aḥarayut helps to guide our discourse across ethnic or racial or religious or ideological lines, and also guides our public and private behavior. These are the spaces in which ḥevruta flourishes, in which civility is fostered, in which true dialogue triumphs over mere shouting.

Yuval Levin’s solution to our society’s challenge in this regard is to recognize that our institutions need us to Be There.

What’s required of each of us is devotion to the work we do with others in the service of a common aspiration, and therefore devotion to the institutions we compose and inhabit. That kind of devotion calls for sacrifice and commitment. It calls on each of us to pledge ourselves to an institution we belong to unabashedly. To abandon ironic distance and dispassionate analysis and jump in.

Now, of course at this point I could make a plug for more and deeper involvement at Beth Shalom and Jewish life in general, but of course I already did that on the second day of Rosh HaShanah. 

So instead I will suggest the following: consider the ways in which you can bring the spirit of ḥevruta to the world. Think about how you can be in relationship with others who are not like you, to broaden your perspective and theirs. Consider how your group of friends might engage with others for the benefit of everybody.

Your online social network is not your ḥevruta. Your smartphone is not a bar plugta. Your aḥarayut, your responsibility to this world is to be in dialogue with real people, people who are not like you. You don’t need yes-men.

OK, Rabbi. So how about some specifics? How can I commit myself in 5783 to Being There for a better society and a better world? How can I act on the principle of ḥevruta?

  • Bring your energy and your resources in a positive way to the institutions that shape your world. 
  • Join and financially support those organizations that reflect the values of a healthier society. 
  • Volunteer with organizations that provide social services. 
  • Get involved in the bodies of civic life: school boards, community organizations and partnerships, and make sure you do so while honoring the principles of ḥevruta – of listening and helping your partners along, of being open to the possibility that you might be wrong, that there might be a better way.
  • Try to spend less time letting yourself be angered by all the dysfunction of this broken world, particularly as concentrated in toxic online spaces. 
  • Instead, focus on Being There for others, in person, whenever possible. Muster your love of people, and share it with them.

And, of course, come and daven and learn with us at Beth Shalom. By Being There for synagogue life, your involvement will pay off in many ways: in your personal spiritual satisfaction, but also in helping to foster an environment of ḥevruta which permeates the entire world.

***

In August, the Presbyterian minister turned novelist Frederick Buechner died at age 96. In an appreciation of his life and work, New York Times Columnist David Brooks said the following:

“Buechner’s vocation was to show a way to experience the fullness of life. Of death, he wrote, “What’s lost is nothing to what’s found, and all the death that ever was, set next to life, would scarcely fill a cup.”

What we yearn for, when we remember those whom we have lost, is not the pain of their absence. It is rather who they were in life, what they meant to us, how they made us who we are. 

“What’s lost is nothing to what’s found, said Buechner. What we find in the context of death and mourning is the accumulation of a lifetime of memories, of moments when your parents were there for you, when your brother made you smile, when your sister offered comfort, when your spouse gave you a hug and made all of the day’s troubles go away.

The people who are now no longer with us, they are the ones who gave us their life. All of that life is now ours. We do not carry their death; we carry their life.

~

Rabbi Seth Adelson

(Originally delivered at Congregation Beth Shalom, Pittsburgh, PA, Yom Kippur 5783, 10/5/2022.)

Categories
High Holidays Sermons

Being There: Why We Need Israel – Kol Nidrei 5783

First, a brief review: our theme for this year is “Being There” – being physically connected, being here, being present in both mind and body, and in particular how we need this especially right now as the pandemic is winding down and many of us are reconnecting to Jewish life.

I spoke on the first day of Rosh Hashanah about having your own minyan, that is, joining a ḥavurah, which is a small-group program that we at Beth Shalom will be rolling out in the coming months, and we hope you will participate.

On the second day of Rosh Hashanah, I spoke about the fact that Jewish tradition expects you to Be There, to show up. This is a continuum, and the synagogue has always been the primary place of gathering for the Jewish people. We are here for you at the corner of Beacon and Shady all the time, all the days of your life, and the nights as well. Come be here with us.

Tonight the theme is qehillah qedoshah, sacred community. Most of us may not be familiar with this term, but it is the universal Hebrew designation for “congregation.” Not synagogue, mind you (that, of course, is beit kenesset, “house of gathering”), but congregation, which is more a statement about relationship than about a particular building or location. A synagogue is a place. Qehillah qedoshah refers to the people. 

While most of us gathered here tonight are members of this qehillah qedoshah, this sacred community of Beit Shalom, we are also part of a sacred community which extends to all Jewish people around the world. You might call that Qehillah Qedoshah Am Yisrael. The Sacred Community of the People of Israel.

That sense of interconnection has been a part of the Jewish people as long as there have been Jews. Sure, we disagree with each other, and we certainly do not all see eye-to-eye about theology or halakhah / Jewish law or even who is a Jew. Our world-wide community is marked by a great palette of variation in practices and customs, foods and unique rituals, music, and stories. But we are all connected within this community of Jews around the world.

What does that mean, exactly? It means that when you meet another Jewish person from somewhere else, that you know that you share certain things: our Torah, our rituals, our Shabbat and holidays, our Jewish values, our mitzvot, our history. There are certain terms and ideas which transcend language and local culture. 

Years ago, I was at a Shabbat morning service at the Dohány Street synagogue in Budapest, the largest synagogue building in Europe, and I somehow managed to get an honor: hagbahah, lifting the Torah. So I’m sitting in the front row, and there is an older Hungarian gentleman sitting next to me, and he attempts to greet me. Now, my wife, being the daughter of Hungarian Shoah survivors, speaks reasonably decent Hungarian, but I know a few key words and nothing more. 

Dohany Synagogue, Budapest

It became immediately obvious to me and this older gentleman that we had no common language. But there we were, sitting in the front row in this 5,000-seat synagogue. And we shared that moment together, appreciating our mutual membership in the qehillah qedoshah, sacred community of our people.

Some of you know that Rabbi Shugerman and I participated in the Federation’s Mega Mission to Israel in June, along with about 240 other Pittsburghers, including about 25 who are members of Beth Shalom. Among the many things that we did was to visit the organizations and communities which our Federation supports, places like Beit Issie Shapiro in Ra’anana, which provides education and therapy services for people with disabilities of all ages, the United Hatzalah center in Jerusalem, where we dedicated a new motorcycle ambulance, and of course our partnership region in Karmiel and Misgav, all the way up north, where we not only celebrated with new teenage immigrants from the former Soviet Union, but also packed supplies for the hundreds of Ukrainian refugees that the region has taken in.

Most of the Beth Shalom contingent on the June 2022 Mega Mission to Israel

It is something we might occasionally miss, sitting here in Pittsburgh, far away from such communities: we are part of an extended qehillah qedoshah. Our sacred community reaches around the world.

Last year at this time, I gave an emotional appeal for the State of Israel, about our connections to the people and land of Israel through the lenses of tradition, of culture, and of the issues surrounding Jewish power. I spoke of the philosopher Aḥad HaAm’s concept of the merkaz ruḥani, of Israel as the “spiritual center” of the Jewish world. 

This evening, I would like to remind us all about some fundamental truths about the State of Israel, things that we all should know. And I want you all to recall that Being There, that is, being a part of our qehillah qedoshah, our sacred community, includes feeling connected to and supporting our Israeli cousins. And all the more so right now, as American public opinion, and to some extent American Jews, are turning away from the State of Israel.

You may have seen the recent CNN Special Report on anti-Semitism in America, in which the CNN reporter Dana Bash, who is Jewish, covered several stories about the return of Jew hatred here.

One of the segments was about a painful incident which took place within the past year at the State University of New York at New Paltz. A Jewish student at New Paltz, Cassandra Blotner, was a founding member of a support group for survivors of sexual assault, called New Paltz Accountability, or NPA. Last December, she shared the following statement on her personal Instagram account, reposted from another Instagram user:

“Jews are an ethnic group who come from Israel. This is proven by genealogical, historical and archeological evidence. Israel is not a ‘colonial’ state and Israelis aren’t ‘settlers.’ You cannot colonize the land your ancestors are from.”

As a result, other members of the NPA group began to call for her removal from the group, because, in their opinion, anybody who is a Zionist is not welcome in the group, because Zionism is “racist” and “white supremacist” and that Zionists promote “genocide.” Members of the group accused her online of condoning oppression and violence against Palestinians, which she does not. 

The NPA’s Instagram account featured a post stating that, “The origins of sexual violence are rooted in colonialism… Colonialism uses sexual violence as a tool to uphold white supremacy and conquer stolen land,” and that any justification of “the occupation of Palestine” is therefore effectively condoning rape. 

Blotner and another member of the group, Ofek Preis, who is a Jewish Israeli, soon became victims of online harassment, including anonymous death threats. They filed a civil-rights complaint against SUNY New Paltz, claiming that the university failed to protect them from harassment and threats.

What is especially disturbing about this episode is that Ms. Blotner, a sexual-assault survivor who was seeking to help others like her by creating a support group, was further victimized by others who implied that her pro-Israel views were effectively causing sexual violence. If that is not an example of blaming the victim, I don’t know what is.

Along those lines, if you have not seen the new Ken Burns documentary, The US and the Holocaust, it is certainly worth the 6 hours or so of your time. The series deftly defuses the mistaken belief that the United States did not intervene to stop the Nazi horror because Americans were unaware of what was happening in Nazi-occupied Europe. This is a myth with which many of us were raised here in America.

On the contrary: Burns shows in abundance that the whole world knew, and even though President Franklin Delano Roosevelt personally felt that the US should intervene to save Jews, American public opinion was that our country should not open its doors to Jewish refugees. Sadly, this opinion was even espoused by some American Jews as well. 

In one episode, the Holocaust historian Daniel Greene points out that a poll taken in 1938 showed that two-thirds of Americans believed that Jews in Nazi-controlled areas were either partially or completely responsible for their own persecution. Let that sink in for a moment.

Ḥevreh, I cannot stand before you and say with a straight face that all criticism of the State of Israel is rooted in anti-Semitism. I have lived in Israel, and my oldest son is currently serving in the Israel Defense Forces. There is plenty to criticize, with regard to the State’s historical treatment of Mizraḥi Jews, Jews from Arab countries, with regard to recent governments’ poor handling of issues surrounding freedom of Jewish practice for non-Orthodox Jews like us, and of course regarding aspects of the treatment of Palestinians in the territories. Israel is a real nation with real problems, governed by real people; she is also a thriving democracy, with a healthy free press. Citizens of China and Russia and Iran, and really much of the world would be envious of the robust debate and criticism of government policy found in Israel’s public discourse if they were aware of it.

But we as American Jews must also acknowledge that our Israeli cousins are part of our greater qehillah qedoshah, and in doing so we have to call out unfair criticism, particularly when it veers into anti-Semitic territory.

To that end, there are three things that you may hear some critics of Israel say which should make you very, very uncomfortable:

  1. Calling Israel an “apartheid” state.
  2. Labeling Israel a “colonial” enterprise, or a “settler-colonial” state.
  3. Accusing Israel of genocide.
  1. Apartheid

Apartheid, the Afrikaans word for “separateness,” was the legally-enshrined racial categorization system that functioned in South Africa for nearly five decades in the 20th century. Under apartheid, all citizens were categorized into four distinct races: White, Black, Indian, and Coloured, and laws about whom you could marry, where you could live and work, how you could vote and for whom, were all a part of that system. It was a system that was fundamentally unjust, denying non-white people many of the rights that we all agree should be universal.

The application of this term to Israel is not only inaccurate, it also diminishes the suffering of Black South Africans under apartheid, and demeans their struggle and loss of life in defeating that system. In Israel, there are Arab doctors and lawyers and professors and judges, and for the last year even an Israeli Arab party in the governing coalition. While Israeli Arabs certainly face discrimination and inequities, many also thrive within Israel and are loyal citizens.

It is certainly true that the Palestinian Arabs of the West Bank live in much worse circumstances, and the failures and intransigence among multiple parties involved in attempting to resolve these challenges continues to extend their predicament, including high unemployment and other serious social ills. And while Israel is certainly a part of this situation, it is not solely the fault of the Israeli government. And even in the Palestinian territories, applying the term “apartheid” is clearly only an attempt to unfairly characterize the situation to make Israel and Jews look bad.

  1. Colonialism

It has become fashionable in some circles to refer to Israel as a “settler-colonial” state, meaning a place where a foreign power sent settlers to colonize the state and establish an outpost of that foreign power. All of the nations in North and South America, and many other places around the world, would fall into that category. But Israel does not, for a few reasons:

  • There has been a continuous Jewish presence in the land of Israel for at least 2500 years.
  • The Jews who left other countries in the waves of Zionist migration from the 1860s and onward were not sent by Russia or Poland or Germany or England or Yemen or Iran to establish outposts of those countries; on the contrary, those folks who relocated saw themselves as returning to the historical home of the Jewish people, and in many cases, were of course fleeing the native anti-Semitism in their former lands.
  • In doing so, they rejected the cultures of their former countries, reviving the Hebrew language, adopting Middle Eastern foods and cultural norms. No other settler movement has done so.

One can only conclude that the terms “colonial” or “settler-colonial,” when applied to Israel, are meant as a slur to delegitimize her, and deny that Jewish people have a right to live there. 

There is no statute of limitations on ancestral land, and we, the Jewish people are entitled to the self-determination that all other nations enjoy.

3. Genocide

This is an especially flagrant distortion. We, the Jews, know what genocide is: we still have living witnesses among us to the Shoah. 

General Dwight Eisenhower with American troops who liberated the concentration camp in Ohrdruf, Germany, April 12, 2945

Genocide, as attempted by the Ottoman Turks against the Armenians, by the Nazis, in Burma and Bosnia and Rwanda and Cambodia, is deliberate and systematic, and the intent is to destroy the targeted group. 

After Israel withdrew from Gaza in 2005, the terrorist group Hamas took control of the territory. Whenever there is fighting between Israel and Hamas, and of course this has continued to happen from time-to-time due to Hamas’ continued attempts to kill Israeli civilians, the number of Palestinians killed is always dramatically higher than the number of Israelis. In May of 2021, in eleven days of Palestinian attacks on Israeli civilians, followed by Israeli reprisals to dismantle terrorist infrastructure, 14 Israelis died, and 256 Palestinians. 

We should never dismiss the loss of any human life, and the pain of loss on both sides of the Gaza border is truly awful. But the asymmetric body count does not make Israel guilty of genocide. On the Israeli side, this is a fight for defensible borders, so that she can protect her people. But for Hamas, the stated goal is, in fact, Israel’s annihilation.

There are no roving Israeli killing gangs deliberately targeting Palestinians. There are no concentration camps, no transports to death camps, not even attempts to physically relocate the Palestinian population to Jordan or somewhere else.

The accusation of Israeli genocide is outrageously hyperbolic, and we should decry it as such.

***

OK, Rabbi. Even if those characterizations are inaccurate or unfair, why should we support the State of Israel if we have to constantly defend her actions? And why should we care, here in Diaspora? Should we not focus more energy on our spiritual needs here?

As tempting as it may be, we cannot look away. We cannot stand idly by while fellow members of our qehillah qedoshah, our sacred community, are slandered. It is up to us, the second-largest Jewish community in the world, to stand with Israel.

And I want to reinforce that that does not mean we cannot be critical. But we should do so in a way that does not amplify the voices of those who want to see Israel just go away. We cannot give ammunition to Israel’s enemies, and she has very real enemies, who are armed and dangerous and located very close by. On the contrary, the only way we are going to guarantee a sustainable future for all the people who live on that tiny strip of land, is to be in conversation with all those who are willing to work toward that future together. Coexistence is the only possible solution.

We cannot turn our backs. We cannot disengage.  We cannot afford to do so.  

On the contrary, we have to work harder to connect with and understand Israel and Israelis. 

As for the question of, “Why should we care?” Two generations ago I would not have had any reason to even address the question. But given some of the statistics which I have shared with you in the past about American Jews’ gradual disengagement with Israel, I find myself making this case again and again: Israel is worth defending. 

The idea of a Jewish homeland is worth defending, even for those of us who are perfectly happy living here in America. And Israel the country – with all her imperfections – is worth defending.  

One of those reasons is that of which we should never lose sight: had Israel existed in the 1930s, it is quite likely that six million souls would not have succumbed to the brutality of the Nazis and their willing collaborators. The Burns documentary makes that abundantly clear, when he reminds us that at the Evian Conference in July, 1938, 32 nations in attendance from around the world all expressed sympathy for the plight of German and Austrian Jews seeking refuge, but only the Dominican Republic and Costa Rica agreed to raise their immigration quotas. Hitler saw that as a green light to dispose of his Jews any way he wanted to; nobody else wanted us.

God forbid we should need Israel for that purpose. But there is a better reason for us to remain firmly connected to Israel: and that is that she is, increasingly, a source of inspiration for contemporary Jews around the world, not only as a tech powerhouse or a proud center of secular Jewish culture, but she is also rethinking Judaism for modern Jews.

In recent years, new batei midrash / houses of study have popped up in Israel, created by and aimed at secular and non-Orthodox Jews, where Israelis from diverse backgrounds are learning Talmud and midrash and other Jewish text. New egalitarian and contemporary congregations have formed, headed by a generation of young, native rabbis, who are re-envisioning what it means to be Jewish. Modern Jewish identity is changing. Rabbi Rinat Safania Schwartz, who leads a congregation in Shoham, recently wrote the following:

I want everyone to feel that the very fact of being Jewish confers both the privilege and the responsibility to take personal and communal ownership of their Judaism – of our language, tradition, culture, literature, and all aspects of Jewish creativity. It’s critical that we move people away from relating to their Judaism as if it were in a museum. People must feel that they can “touch,” feel, renew, and create from within.

From “From the Fruit of the Land: Ten Israeli Spiritual Leaders Reflect on the Budding Opportunities for Israeli Judaism Today,” The Honey Foundation for Israel, 2022.

Rabbi Schwartz’s language is quite different than that of most Orthodox Israeli rabbis; she is not alone in finding new ways for Jewish Israelis to express their Judaism.

The members of our extended Qehillah Qedoshah in Israel will help us all build the new Judaism of the 21st century. It is Israel which will be the Diaspora’s partner in maintaining a healthy non-Orthodox Judaism for the future. 

So what can you do?

  • Get to know our four shinshinim, young Israelis who are between high school and army service, who are with us in Pittsburgh for the year
  • Spend some time learning the history of how and why this patch of land passed from one empire to the next.  Learn how the modern state of Israel came to be.  
  • Become familiar with Israeli politics. This is an exciting time – the fifth round of parliamentary elections in three years, coming up in a few weeks.
  • Go there! We’ll have another congregational trip, probably in 2024
  • Send your kids to Israel! There are so many options now: Ramah, USY, HSI, Nativ, and of course Birthright.

It is up to us to recognize the bonds that tie each and every one of us people together around the world, and to acknowledge that Israel is the gravitational center of our peoplehood, Qehillah Qedoshah Am Yisrael.

Tomorrow, for our fourth and final installment in the Being There series, we will speak about ḥevruta, the essential Jewish concept of partnership.

~

Rabbi Seth Adelson

(Originally delivered at Congregation Beth Shalom, Pittsburgh, PA, evening of Yom Kippur, 10/4/2022.)

Categories
High Holidays Sermons

Being There: It’s a Continuum – Rosh HaShanah 5783, Day 2

This is the second in the “Being There” 5783 High Holiday series. You might want to start with the first one: You Need a Minyan.

***

The Big Book of Jewish Humor is one of the most-beloved items on my bookshelf. My copy was in fact a bar mitzvah present in 1983, and I have managed to hold onto it now for nearly four decades. Rabbi Goodman and I, in fact, are both so familiar with the material in that book that we occasionally walk by each other’s office and just recite a punch line, which sends us both into stitches.

The book includes a few faux-Hasidic tales by Woody Allen (pp. 200-201), including the following:

Rabbi Tzvi Hayyim Yisroel, an Orthodox scholar of the Torah and a man who developed whining to an art unheard of in the West, was unanimously hailed as the wisest man of the Renaissance by his fellow Hebrews, who totaled a sixteenth of one percent of the population. 

Once, while he was on his way to synagogue to celebrate the sacred Jewish holiday commemorating God’s reneging on every promise, a woman stopped him and asked the following question: “Rabbi, why are we not allowed to eat pork?”

“We’re not?” the rabbi said, incredulously. “Uh-oh.”

What’s funny and ridiculous, of course, is that it is clearly impossible that this Hasidic rabbi could have missed the memo on pork. 

And yet, I must say that it is surprisingly easy for even deeply-committed members of our community to miss things that are going on here at Beth Shalom. Yes, it is true that there are many, many things happening. 

But I am often surprised when, for example, a few months after returning from our last synagogue trip to Israel in 2018, a member said to me, “Gee, Rabbi, wouldn’t it be great if we could organize a congregational trip to Israel?”

It is true that we are not always paying attention. Not just to Beth Shalom events, of course, but to lots and lots of things. Part of the challenge is that there are so many more means of distraction today, and you all know what I am talking about. 

But of course there are many other reasons for this as well. Many of us are squeezed for time, as our work has invaded all corners of our lives thanks to the digital leashes that most of us are carrying around in our pockets. Many of us are pulled in so many different directions, between child-rearing or taking care of aging parents or trying to scrape together a living or just trying to find a few moments of peace. 

But the greater challenge regarding our ongoing connection to Jewish life is the disconnection from the institutions which have shaped our lives. Not just organizations like synagogues, but some of the essential ways that our contemporary society has structured itself. 

We are all, it seems, compelled to be independent operators; we are all, to some extent, “bowling alone.” And this disconnection from the established organizing principles of society and religion and culture threaten the foundations of our lives.

Our theme over these High Holidays is “Being There.” And the angle I am taking today is Beit Kenesset – the synagogue, the traditional “place of gathering” of the Jews. What I mean by that is that our Beit Kenesset, Beth Shalom, is here all the time – standing not only at the corner of Beacon and Shady, but also in our hearts. And most of us only set foot in it once in a while: on holidays, on benei mitzvah, or perhaps for a yahrzeit (that is, saying qaddish on the Hebrew date commemoration of a loved one’s death). 

But whether you come here regularly or not, Beth Shalom is always here, and Jewish life is a continuum marked by a set of rituals and traditions and halakhah / Jewish law. And those items, in particular those distinctly Jewish actions, are essential to being Jewish. Without them, without that continuum of practice, Judaism cannot provide the framework that makes you a better person and this world a better place.

I recently heard about a fascinating new book by University of Connecticut sociology professor, Dr. Dimitris Xygalatas. It is called Ritual: How Seemingly Senseless Acts Make Life Worth Living. 

In it, Dr. Xygalatas describes how rituals “help individuals through their anxieties, they help groups of people connect to one another, [and] help people find meaning in their lives.” He describes how, when he was a child growing up in Greece, he was forced to attend church and participate in rituals that did not seem to have any immediate, tangible result. He did not appreciate the rituals, or understand why he had to perform them.

But academic studies have shown that all types of rituals provide a benefit to people, just not necessarily what they are ostensibly for. Fisherman in Papua New Guinea, for example, who perform a ritual before going out to fish in the open sea, cannot prove that the ritual actually helps them catch more fish. But it certainly helps them cope with the stress of open-sea fishing, which can be dangerous, and provides them a framework into which they can lean for support.

But here is the thing about rituals: you actually have to perform them regularly and consistently for them to have that kind of effect. And Judaism goes even one better than this, because if you are performing our rituals properly, and you are paying attention, you also know the textual basis from which they come, and that adds even more meaning and guidance.

Ḥevreh, you have heard me speak fairly frequently about the value of our ritual framework. About the value of prayer, of tallit and tefillin, of Shabbat and our holidays and kashrut and studying our ancient holy texts. 

So here’s the thing: I want you to make your Jewish connection less sporadic. Jewish life, Judaism, is not just something that you do on Shabbat morning, or on the High Holidays, or Purim or Ḥanukkah.

Rather, if you are doing it right, Jewish life is a thread that weaves through all the pieces of the fabric of your life. And it is up to us, following the model of Avraham Avinu / our father Abraham, to say, Hinneni! Here I am, as we read in the Torah this morning. To show up. To be present. To be there.

Consider, for example, a line which my son chanted on the day he was called to the Torah as a bar mitzvah a month ago, in Parashat Re’eh. It is a line that you may know from the Passover haggadah:

Devarim / Deuteronomy 16:3

לְמַ֣עַן תִּזְכֹּ֗ר אֶת־י֤וֹם צֵֽאתְךָ֙ מֵאֶ֣רֶץ מִצְרַ֔יִם כֹּ֖ל יְמֵ֥י חַיֶּֽיךָ׃

Lema’an tizkor et yom tzetkah me-eretz mitzrayim kol yemei ḥayyekha.

In order that you remember the day of your departure from the land of Egypt all the days of your life.

It appears in the Maggid / storytelling section of the seder, in the bit that you may know as follows (although it’s originally from the Mishnah, Berakhot 1:5):

אָמַר רַבִּי אֶלְעָזָר בֶּן־עֲזַרְיָה הֲרֵי אֲנִי כְּבֶן שִׁבְעִים שָׁנָה וְלֹא זָכִיתִי שֶׁתֵּאָמֵר יְצִיאַת מִצְרַיִם בַּלֵּילוֹת עַד שֶׁדְּרָשָׁהּ בֶּן זוֹמָא, שֶׁנֶּאֱמַר, לְמַעַן תִּזְכֹּר אֶת יוֹם צֵאתְךָ מֵאֶרֶץ מִצְרַיִם כֹּל יְמֵי חַיֶּיךָ. יְמֵי חַיֶּיךָ הַיָּמִים. כֹּל יְמֵי חַיֶּיךָ הַלֵּילוֹת

Rabbi Elazar ben Azariah said, “Behold I am like a man of seventy years and I have not merited [to understand why] the Exodus from Egypt should be said at night until Ben Zoma explained it, as it is stated (Deuteronomy 16:3), ‘In order that you remember the day of your departure from the land of Egypt all the days of your life;’ ימי חייך – ‘the days of your life’ [indicates that the remembrance be invoked during] the days, כל ימי חייך – ‘all the days of your life’ [indicates that the remembrance be invoked also during] the nights.” 

The Torah tells us that we should remember the Exodus every day and every night of our lives. This should be read as not just once a day and once per night, but of course we should hold that idea with us at all times. 

There are good reasons for this: they are among the reasons that Pesaḥ is among the most resonant holidays of the Jewish year, still observed by most of us: 

  1. We should never be so proud of ourselves that we forget our origins; our peoplehood was founded in slavery, and we remember what it means to be a slave.
  2. This collective memory should guide us in our interactions with others: recalling our historical oppression guides us to stand up for justice wherever we can.
  3. The redemption from Egypt also reminds us that we can bring future redemption: if we remain faithful to our tradition and to God, that holy partnership will ultimately yield a time of peace for the whole world.

We should remember the Exodus, and all of the symbolism and meaning thereof, all the time. And those of us who attend synagogue on a daily basis know that remembering the Exodus pops up in all sorts of places: in the third paragraph of the Shema, for example, so if you are saying it evening and morning (as mandated in the first paragraph), you are remembering the Exodus every day and every night at Ma’ariv and Shaḥarit. And we also mention it in the Friday night qiddush. And certainly we should remember the Exodus when we sit in the Sukkah. And, well, on every Festival. And it appears multiple times in the scrolls found in every set of tefillin. And so on.

So, if you’re doing Judaism right, the lessons learned from our having left slavery are with us every day, not just for a night or two in the spring. And the daily rituals which frame our lives in the continuum of Jewish practice give us the strength and resilience to appreciate and act on the meaning embedded therein.

But not just that: kashrut, the set of Jewish dietary principles, reminds us every time we put food into our mouths that we have an obligation to be holy. And that what comes out of our mouths should be at least as holy as what goes in. And those two activities, eating and talking, take up much of our days.

And there is more: the Jewish principles of business law which should guide our work activities, principles like not withholding wages from a day laborer (Vayiqra / Leviticus 19:13) and using honest measures in the marketplace (Vayiqra / Leviticus 19:35-36). This is the sort of guidance our tradition offers, and these principles guide us in making just choices every day.

I could cite many more examples of how the nexus of practice and text, of ritual and the Jewish bookshelf, help us be better people. But we cannot just cite them and be done with them; we have to perform these rituals. We have to live by them.

If our Jewish connection is always there, always present with us through our customs and values and text, it will help us through our days.

Yehoshua / Joshua 1:8

לֹֽא־יָמ֡וּשׁ סֵ֩פֶר֩ הַתּוֹרָ֨ה הַזֶּ֜ה מִפִּ֗יךָ וְהָגִ֤יתָ בּוֹ֙ יוֹמָ֣ם וָלַ֔יְלָה לְמַ֙עַן֙ תִּשְׁמֹ֣ר לַעֲשׂ֔וֹת כְּכׇל־הַכָּת֖וּב בּ֑וֹ כִּי־אָ֛ז תַּצְלִ֥יחַ אֶת־דְּרָכֶ֖ךָ וְאָ֥ז תַּשְׂכִּֽיל׃

Let not this Book of the Torah cease from your lips, but recite it day and night, so that you may observe faithfully all that is written in it. Only then will you prosper in your undertakings and only then will you be successful.

… says the book of Joshua, a verse which we read during the haftarah on Simhat Torah. Repeat these words day and night, and live by them, so that you may receive the benefits that our ancient tradition affords us. We recite tefillah / prayer and study and argue over our ancient texts so that we might prosper – not only financially, of course, but in our relationships with the people around us, which of course are far more important than money.

If you’re doing it right, the sense of connection to our tradition, to our text, to our rituals, to our values, should be with you all the time. Try to cut through all the noise in your life to keep these things in front of you all the time.

Think of your beit kenesset, Congregation Beth Shalom, which has been perched up here at the top of Squirrel Hill for an entire century. Stable, solid, consistent – standing here as a reminder to come back. We are the continuous beacon on Beacon Street, symbolizing and promoting what we have done for thousands of years, that ancient continuum of ritual and wisdom.

That is the principle of Being There. In order to reap the benefits, you have to show up. You have to be present. You cannot phone it in, or be using your phone while you are engaging with our tradition. Don’t let all of that day-to-day hustle crowd out the essential pieces of our tradition, the continuum of Jewish life.

And here is something else: the stakes are high. As we read in Pirqei Avot (2:15): 

רַבִּי טַרְפוֹן אוֹמֵר, הַיּוֹם קָצָר וְהַמְּלָאכָה מְרֻבָּה, וְהַפּוֹעֲלִים עֲצֵלִים, וְהַשָּׂכָר הַרְבֵּה, וּבַעַל הַבַּיִת דּוֹחֵק

Rabbi Tarfon said: the day is short, and the work is plentiful, and the laborers are indolent, and the reward is great, and the master of the house is insistent.

Somewhere along the way, in our embrace of modernity, we have forgotten that Judaism is not a “religion” in the Western sense, but a mode of living. That is, you cannot just show up sporadically or include little pieces or symbols here and there. Rather, we should always be striving to do more, to reach higher, to fill our lives with our tradition and its teaching. “Religion” is something you do in church; Judaism colors our lives with meaning.

Because the value is infinite, and our future as a people as well as the future of this world depend on our daily choices.

Rabbi Mark Goodman pointed something out to me recently: that the Zoom participants in our weekday morning services were not able to hear the shofar being blown. Apparently, Zoom’s noise-canceling software heard the shofar and immediately assumed that it was unpleasant background noise that needed to be eliminated, so the folks tuning in via Zoom could not hear it. Yes, indeed: Zoom canceled the shofar.

Now, there are two possible lessons to be gleaned here:

  1. That being in person for services is better. OK, so I certainly agree with that, and I am grateful that the vaccines have enabled us to do so safely, but of course there are still some people who have reason to be concerned due to their compromised immunity, and others who simply cannot physically make it into the building for other reasons, so of course we will continue offering services by Zoom. Nonetheless, it is better to be here in person!)
  2. The other lesson has nothing to do with Zoom, but rather is a question of really hearing the shofar, and everything else that we do. If your world is filtering out the content and meaning of Jewish life, if you find yourself unable to hear the words of the ancient bookshelf, then you are missing something. 

The solution to hearing the shofar over Zoom, by the way, is actually to turn on a setting called “Original Sound.” This setting turns off that technology that mutes the shofar.

I am going to suggest the following: find the settings in your life that will enable you to hear more, to do more, to derive more meaning from what we do. I understand that you may not be able to show up for every service, every program, every type of gathering (and we do offer many, many opportunities to gather). But the only way to keep that thread of Jewish connection flowing through the fabric of your life is to refresh the connection every day and every night. Don’t miss a note of the shofar, or a word of Jewish learning; it is through that continuum of practice, of Being There, that we can all truly benefit from our tradition.

The key to finding the meaning in Jewish life is Being There. And this place, the synagogue, the beit kenesset, both stands for that idea, and serves as the place in which we make it happen. So keep coming back.

On Yom Kippur we will talk about being part of our world-wide qehillah qedoshah, sacred community, and the true value of ḥevruta, partnership.

~

(Originally delivered at Congregation Beth Shalom, Pittsburgh, PA, second day of Rosh HaShanah 5783, 9/27/2022.)

Categories
High Holidays Sermons

Being There: You Need a Minyan – Rosh HaShanah 5783, Day 1

As some of you know, I went to see the Pirates play in PNC Park in August, on Jewish Heritage Night, my first time back to the stadium since 2019. (As some of you know, I threw out the first pitch as well, and didn’t embarrass myself…) And I remembered something extraordinarily important that evening, something which many of us might have lost touch with during the pandemic, an essential principle of human life: being there in person is much better than watching it on a screen.

Jewish Heritage Night, 8/16/2022. (Courtesy of the Pittsburgh Pirates)

And I must say that I am concerned about us, ladies and gentlemen. I am concerned that the pandemic has dramatically accelerated a phenomenon that was already taking shape beforehand: not being there. I am, of course, not referring to Pirates games, but not being physically or spiritually present in general.

What do I mean by “not being there”? It is very easy today for us to be in touch with many people, using all the platforms that we have, without actually being in their physical presence. It is all too easy today to attend a meeting, a class, a work appointment, even a synagogue service, while you are actually somewhere else, and maybe even doing something unrelated. How many of us have Zoomed into work meetings or committee meetings while driving, or reclining on the comfy sofa in your living room? Some of us are doing it right now! It’s OK – I’ve done it too.

Now, on the one hand, that can be good. It certainly allows those who are physically unable to participate – for medical, or physical, or locational reasons – to remain involved with others. On March 15, 2020, Zoom suddenly became my primary means of meeting with people for services, for pastoral conversations, for teaching, and so forth. At the time, our community was acting on the essential Jewish value of piqquaḥ nefesh, saving a life. We likely saved lives in doing so.

But our digital connectivity has also come with a number of downsides. We were already spending lots of time looking at screens prior to the pandemic, and then we were suddenly spending almost ALL of our time doing so. As a result, our ability to concentrate on anything for an extended period of time has been reduced even further, likely due to the infinite amount of amusing material available instantly at our fingertips from TikTok, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, etc., etc., and the constant interruption our mobile digital devices offer us: calls, text messages, alerts, notifications, and so forth. 

Second, all of that constant digital interruption and amusement has made it difficult to discern what is important. Is the latest Internet-generated crisis more important than having a conversation with a good friend who is sitting in front of you? Is watching videos or sharing memes more valuable than spending time in reflection and meditation in the context of your synagogue community? Our affection for our screens has distorted the picture of our lives by pushing into our field of vision ideas and opinions which may not actually be as important as they may seem in cyberspace. The tech giants control our eyeballs; the most frequent posters and influencers tinker with our perception.

Third, while Zoom meetings have made it more efficient for many of us to gather or work or communicate without leaving the comfort of our living room, I hope that the experience of the past couple of years has left you wanting: Wanting human contact; wanting to catch up with a friend before or after the meeting; arguing a finer point in the parking lot; shaking hands or getting a hug when needed. At least as of right now, you cannot do that on any platform in a way that feels like being in another person’s physical presence.

I am dedicating my High Holiday sermon series this year to Being There. (Yes, I borrowed the name from the classic 1979 film starring Peter Sellers, about the naive gardener who, by being in the right place at the right time, accidentally convinces everybody around him that he is the world’s most brilliant and inspiring person.)

Judaism has some essential principles regarding Being There:

  1. Minyan – The principle that daily synagogue services and certain other rituals require a quorum of ten people physically present
  2. Beit Kenesset – The synagogue, as the primary Jewish building throughout history, is the central place of Jewish gathering. Every community needs a gathering space, and both the Greek term “synagogue” and the Hebrew “beit kenesset” reflect that this is a house of gathering.
  3. Qehillah Qedoshah – The Hebrew word for a Jewish congregation; the literal meaning is holy community. Qehillah* is derived from the Hebrew word “to gather,” and is today the preferred term that the United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism uses to refer to its member congregations.
  4. Ḥevruta – This Aramaic word meaning “partnership” refers both to a pair of learners who study Torah together, and also to that style of learning, which is native to the beit midrash, the Jewish study hall. “O Ḥevruta o mituta,” says the Talmud. “Partnership or death.” We need holy Jewish partnerships for us to learn and practice our tradition, so that we might squeeze the most value out of it.

Today, tomorrow, and on Yom Kippur, I will explore Being There – being connected to each other and our community in real time, in person, through these four essential perspectives, because we all can appreciate right now how much we need that personal, physical connection. And it is fundamental to Judaism and Jewish life, as well.

Today’s topic is minyan, the essential quorum of ten people. But I’m not going to take the angle that you might be expecting.

***

Let me begin with this: You need a minyan. Yes, of course you need a minyan for synagogue services, and we at Beth Shalom provide one every single day of the year, morning and evening. (I’m just going to throw out a quick Todah Rabbah / thank you very much for everybody who regularly supports our daily minyanim by attending, by leading services and reading Torah, by preparing and serving breakfast, by dropping everything to come to shul when we are in need of a ninth or tenth person, and of course by making it possible for all of you to come and daven and recite Qaddish and so forth. You all deserve so much credit, so many mitzvah points for being here frequently.)

But you need another kind of minyan as well. Remember that the word “minyan” does not mean “service,” even though you need a minyan for a service. What it means literally is “count,” “The count is 2 and 0.” 

The count, for Jewish purposes, is ten. (You may also know, BTW, that some Jews have a superstition about not counting people, so some will “count” the people in the room, when checking for minyan status, by “not counting”: not 1, not 2, not 3, etc. My father, the mathematician, loves this; only mathematicians can imagine a world in which ten people is “not 10.”)

What you need – what we all need – is a quorum of people whom you can count as your mini-community within this community.

I have been here in Pittsburgh for seven years now; this is actually my eighth Rosh Hashanah on this pulpit. At this point, I feel like I have a sense of how this community works. And there is something that I have noticed for a while, and I have been struggling for several years to figure out how to address it. 

You all know that Squirrel Hill is the most wonderful neighborhood in America, if not the world. OK, so we may not have the groovy vibes of Lawrenceville or the anything-can-happen, seductively dangerous appeal of East Carson Street on a Saturday night. But we have a center of Jewish life, stable and vibrant now for over a century, a neighborly place where everybody knows who lived in your house before you did. Some of you who grew up in Squirrel Hill have known each other your entire lives; there are days on which I am particularly grateful to the Allderdice Class of 1976 in particular for every way in which they help make this congregation run.

But something else has been happening for a while, something which some of the veteran members of this community may not have noticed: that while there are fifth-generation members of this congregation, and octogenarians who grew up here, there are also a whole lot of people, including yours truly, who are newcomers. We are people who grew up in New York and LA and Wisconsin and Florida and Western Massachusetts, and have relocated to Squirrel Hill. And we do not have the connections that you all do. We do not have cousins who belong to every shul in the neighborhood, and we do not bump into old friends who grew up on our street at the Giant Eagle. And the challenge here is that, as immigrants to Squirrel Hill, we do not feel as deeply rooted in the neighborhood as the people whose great-grandparents used to live in the Hill District.

Williamstown, Massachusetts, where I grew up

So we have on the one hand, a stable population of people who have known each other all their lives and are often related to each other, and a newer, more transient population who are less connected. What can we do about that?

And just to add another complication. As Americans, we are more isolated than we have ever been, and it is not good for our health, mental or physical. 

I was actually somewhat surprised recently to hear a piece on NPR’s All Things Considered about how to make friends. It is fascinating, and a little depressing, that we have reached a point in which we need to be reminded that to make friends, you have to go do things with other people, but that is more or less what the NPR story said.

That is why you need a minyan. 

One of the most powerful principles of minyan is that it brings together people who might not otherwise spend 45 minutes together in the same room. It is a source of social capital a la Dr. Robert Putnam, the Harvard professor of public policy who wrote the book on social capital, Bowling Alone. 

(Very briefly, in case you haven’t heard me describe this before: Putnam demonstrates, using various measures, that social capital, that is, the connections we feel to the people around us, has declined steadily since the early 1960s, and that this lack of connection is not healthy for us as individuals or as a society.)

Social capital – being interconnected with others around you – makes you more resilient. It creates an environment where you are supported by the wisdom, the perspective, and the friendship of the people around you.

So we have a solution, something that will help us build a stronger community and a healthier, more resilient Beth Shalom, and that solution is ḥavurot. 

What are ḥavurot? A ḥavurah is a group of people within the congregation who meet regularly to do things together. The Hebrew word חבורה means “group”; it is related to the word חבר / ḥaver, meaning friend, or לחבר / leḥabber, to connect. Those of us who know some modern Hebrew might also think of the term חבר’ה / ḥevreh, meaning “folks.”

We have a few informal ḥavurot which have formed over the years, but we at Beth Shalom have decided to step up our game and facilitate the creation of these groups. The idea is to bring more of us together in a smaller, more manageable environment, so that you can all be more strongly connected with a wider group of Beth Shalom members. We are a congregation of about 600 families, and I dare say that while many of us know each other, we need to boost our social capital, to be more interconnected.

The idea will be, for those members of Beth Shalom who choose to participate (and I strongly urge you to do so), that we will attempt to group you according to various affinities: demographics like stage-of-life and activity interests. So parents with young children might form one ḥavurah, and people who are interested in social action might form another. Our intent is that these ḥavurot will be no more than about 10 family units (a unit being a family, a couple, or a single person). 

We will also provide some suggestions about how often to meet, and what to do with your ḥavurah. The events that groups will hold will not necessarily be at Beth Shalom, although you might occasionally meet here. All the more so, the idea is to have events that take place under the umbrella of Beth Shalom, but also in your homes, in the park, at a cafe, and so forth. And they do not need to be explicitly Jewish activities, although having a Shabbat dinner or coming together to dance with the Torah on Simḥat Torah could potentially be ḥavurah activities.

I am sure that some of us will welcome this idea, and immediately sign up. Some of us, I’m sure, are thinking, what do I need this for? 

I am going to offer two reasons: the personal and the communal.

  1. The personal: We all need stronger interpersonal connections. We need more robust relationships with one another, with the people immediately around us. Part of the challenge that we are facing today with the polarization of American society is that we barely know each other any more. Yes, I know that Squirrel Hill is bucking the trend (I know many of my neighbors). But there is no question that having more, and stronger interpersonal bonds will have many good outcomes for all of us.
  2. The communal: If we want Beth Shalom to continue to be the center of non-Orthodox Jewish life in Western Pennsylvania, we need to be a more highly integrated community. Everybody here should have the sense that this building is like an extension of their living room, and that the other members of the congregation are like family. And furthermore, we want people on the outside to also think, “Wow! Members of Beth Shalom are really tight. I want to be a part of that.”

Some of you might also be thinking, I have plenty of friends already. Why should I sign up for this? 

Here is something else I will suggest: you can create a ḥavurah with, let’s say, six other families, and then open it up to invite four more in, so that you expand your connections within the congregation.

We are going to be rolling this program out in the coming months, after the holidays, and I hope that you will participate. Watch for the materials that we send you – we will ask you for some information to get the process started. Although this will take months and years to build and grow, we hope that this will ultimately be a benefit of membership that is unique in our neighborhood.

We will build social capital; we will create a more-interconnected, more resilient, more healthy congregation. And, post-pandemic, we absolutely need it; we need that spiritual support which a ḥavurah can provide.

…

Back when I lived in Jerusalem, now more than two decades ago, I would occasionally be walking down the street, minding my own business, when I would be solicited to help make a minyan. I was always glad to help; I met interesting people, heard exotic synagogue melodies from places like Algeria and Syria and Iran, and of course helped out fellow Jews who really wanted to be able to complete their services. It gave me a certain amount of pleasure to do so, if I had time.

No matter how “cool” our devices are, no matter how “talented” artificial intelligence technology becomes, it will never replace the essential human need for personal contact, for being in the presence of others. Our tradition has both relied on and satisfied that need throughout Jewish history. And we need it all the more so today. 

Let Mark Zuckerberg try to make Meta the place where everything is happening virtually; you will still need a minyan of actual people, not just to say qaddish, not just to call 13-year-olds to the Torah for a bar/bat mitzvah, not just for weddings. 

Rather, you need a minyan to get that essential feeling of connection which comes only from being around others, and part of a tight-knit group.

As we enter 5783, we should be looking for ways to renew ourselves, our connections to others and to our community, our relationship with our faith and our people. This is the time to take on new challenges to help improve ourselves and our world, and here is an excellent opportunity to do so.

When the opportunity comes to sign up to join a ḥavurah, please take it. Your willingness to participate will ultimately help to build Beth Shalom in many ways.

Tomorrow we will talk about the continuum of Jewish life, as symbolized by the synagogue itself, the beit kenesset.

~

Rabbi Seth Adelson

(Originally delivered at Congregation Beth Shalom, Pittsburgh, PA, first day of Rosh HaShanah 5783, 9/26/2022.)


* Yes, I know that USCJ and many other folks spell this “kehillah,” with a k. However, this disguises the fact that the Hebrew word is spelled קהילה, with a qof, and the Latin equivalent of the Hebrew qof is a q. They actually are even written alike – just reflections of each other (ק – q). Some Jews (e.g. Iraqis, Yemenites, and Persians), in their historical pronunciation of Hebrew, actually pronounce the ק differently from the כ (kaf), whose English equivalent is a k.

Categories
High Holidays Sermons

Make it Meaningful! – Highlighting the Holy Moments – Yom Kippur Day / Yizkor 5782

Before reading this sermon, which is the fourth and final installment in the “Make it Meaningful!” High Holiday 5782 series, you might want to read the first three: Gathering (Rosh HaShanah Day 1), Seeking the Why (Rosh HaShanah Day 2, and Engaging With Israel (Kol Nidre).

As is standard in many workplaces today, I have occasional performance reviews, and I am grateful to all of you for giving me a very positive review this past spring. There were, however, a few minor complaints – no big surprise for a community of Jews, of course; I would have been really surprised if there were NO complaints. 

But one such complaint was that I speak too often about items in Jewish law like kashrut, Shabbat, tefillah, and so forth. I am sure that some of you have heard or read my series of sermons about the fundamentals of Judaism, called, “I’m a Fundamentalist.” I am committed to the idea that the essential pieces of Jewish living are good for us. So thank you for noticing. 

It reminds me of the apocryphal story about the rabbi who is applying for a position at a synagogue, and when the president picks him up at the airport, she starts asking pointed questions about the sermon the rabbi will give on Shabbat.

“Well,” says the rabbi, “I thought I would speak about the value of Shabbat.”

“I don’t know, Rabbi,” says the president. “Many of our folks work in retail – they all have to open their stores after Shabbat services.”

“OK, so then maybe I’ll speak about the importance of keeping kosher.”

“Not such a great idea, Rabbi. One of our major donors is the largest shellfish distributor in the whole state.”

“Well then,” says the rabbi, “What do YOU think I should talk about?”

“You know, Rabbi,” says the president, “something Jewish.”

But of course, I hope you will understand that advocating for Jewish law and customs and learning and tefillah / prayer is exactly what rabbis do! A rabbi, you may recall, is not a priest; the word “rav” in Hebrew literally means “teacher.” My job is to teach you about being Jewish and doing Jewish – you as individuals and as a community.

However, my approach to teaching Judaism is that I want your Jewish engagement to be meaningful! I want you to feel something, to feel a connection, to “use” Jewish life and learning as a way of improving yourself and your world! Even though I am clearly on the cheerleading team for Torah and mitzvot, I am decidedly not in favor of merely fulfilling a mitzvah for the sake of checking a box. That is why our High Holiday theme for this year is, “Make it Meaningful!”

I believe firmly that the real reason to practice Judaism – keeping Shabbat, kashrut, daily tefillah / prayer, digging into our ancient texts – is that they can fill our lives with meaning, that these things create a lens that will help you see the world a little clearer, that they will help bring the important things into focus, that they will teach you how to highlight the qedushah / holiness in your life and in your relationships with the people around you.

Most of us feel that being Jewish is important to our identities; the most recent Pew Research Center study of American Jews showed that about three-quarters of us agree that being Jewish is very or somewhat important to us. Most of us are quite proud to be Jewish. 

So that is good news! But here’s the less-than-stellar news: most of those folks who agree that being Jewish is important do not feel that doing traditional Jewish things is essential to being Jewish. When asked about the essential parts of being Jewish, only 15% (about one in 7) say that observing halakhah / Jewish law is important. By comparison, 76% (three-quarters) cite “Remembering the Holocaust” as essential to being Jewish.

Now, I know that re-interpreting what it means to be Jewish is all the rage right now, and I certainly do not want to throw shade at that idea. I am, however, concerned that, when the vast majority of Jews do not see learning about and practicing Judaism as being an essential aspect to being Jewish, we may be in an unsustainable situation.  

In order to actually pass on Judaism to your children and grandchildren, something which I know many of you are interested in doing, you have to “do” Jewish. You can’t just “be.”  

And yes, “doing” Jewish can take on many forms. It need not look like what Judaism looks like in black-hat Brooklyn, say, or what it looked like to our great-grandparents. But without the practice of Judaism, with only our sense of pride in being Jewish, we will have no basis for why living Jewishly is meaningful, and without meaning, our children and grandchildren will only be puzzled by their Jewish identity.

Here are a few examples of the fundamentals of doing Jewish:

  • Holy eating, also known as keeping kosher or kashrut, is meaningful because it reminds us of our role in the world “to till and to tend,” as the second Creation story in Bereshit / Genesis puts it. When we premise our consumption upon God’s expectation of us to live sustainably in cooperation with the Earth, we have a better chance of handing an unspoiled world to our children and grandchildren.
  • Putting on tefillin on a daily basis is meaningful because it reminds us on a daily basis of the need to connect our hearts and minds with our hands. Would that more of us could be mindful of how our actions affect others and our world! Physical rituals such as tefillin help reinforce our daily mindfulness with a tangible action.
  • Learning the words of our ancient texts – which you can easily do -is meaningful because it teaches us how to be better people, how to improve our lives and our community by understanding ourselves and the holiness embedded in all our relationships. Plus, there is the added bonus of keeping our minds flexible and engaged, something that the medical establishment certainly recommends as we get older.
  • Singing Jewish music, liturgical or otherwise, is meaningful because it brings joy to a world that could really use a whole lot more joy. Sometimes melody can express our deepest emotions, particularly when words alone fail us.

And here is something that we perhaps take for granted, and yet in which many of us participate in greater numbers than most mitzvot: lifecycle events.

Yes, you know what I’m talking about: those things that mark our lives as we saunter through: berit milah (you all know that by the Yiddish term “bris”, but I don’t speak Yiddish! I’m a Zionist – I speak Hebrew), baby-naming, bat mitzvah / bar mitzvah, wedding, pidyon haben (redemption of the first-born), funeral and mourning. Some might add confirmation in there, and of course some might add graduation from medical school as well.

And it is wonderful that so many of us are still doing these lifecycle events. Perhaps more so than most Jewish rituals, people still show up, at least to honor and celebrate with the family. Even during the depths of the pandemic, when travel was nearly impossible, people came to lifecycle events in droves: we had benei mitzvah services here at Beth Shalom that attracted well-wishers from Japan and South Africa and France and England and Israel and Thailand and Australia and probably a bunch of places I’m not even aware of. Berit milah, weddings, funerals, shiv’ah – all continue to bring in family members and friends from far and wide.

And that too, is wonderful. The power of the framework of Jewish lifecycle rituals is great. What is more meaningful to us than celebrating a newborn baby, dancing joyously with newlyweds, or mourning the loss of somebody we loved?

One of the greatest features of living a Jewish life is acknowledging holy moments. We actually have a berakhah, a blessing for that, one which you all know well. It’s the same berakhah – Sheheḥeyyanu – that I have been urging you to recite upon your first opportunity to return to the synagogue space after months of isolation. 

We mark our holy moments, not only with a berakhah, not only with ritual, not only by gathering with friends and family and sharing a meal and good times, but with meaning.

Think back for a moment to an especially meaningful lifecycle event for you. Was it your bat mitzvah? Your wedding? Confirmation? A dear friend’s funeral? (I’m guessing it wasn’t your own bris!)

What made it meaningful? Was it the people there? The words of Torah offered by the rabbi? The food?

Maybe all of these things. But also, perhaps what made it most meaningful was the sense of perspective. The feelings surrounding what it took to, as with the the berakhah, vehiggi’anu lazeman hazeh – to arrive to this moment, the feeling of the ancient hand-off play that we keep playing as Jews, from generation to generation.

Two different young people who recently became bat / bar mitzvah here at Beth Shalom asked me, not long before the ceremony itself, effectively, “Why am I doing this?” It seems that this question had not been answered along the way, perhaps lost in the shuffle of preparation, maybe further obscured by the pandemic. 

Now, I suppose I could have said, “Because it says so in the Mishnah,” but that would not have been an effective answer. “Because your parents want you to,” is also not really satisfactory.

Rather, I said the following: “Because you are the next link in a chain that stretches back thousands of years. You are the inheritor of a rich and valuable collection of wisdom and traditions that has crossed continents and centuries, and survived empires and attempted genocide. This ceremony, when you are called to the Torah as bar/bat mitzvah in the synagogue, in the presence of your family, friends, and community, is a signifier of the fact that you are now carrying the Jewish flame, holding it aloft to illuminate the world as our people have always done and will continue to do. We are handing this tradition to you, and now it is your turn to take care of it, cherish it, continue to deepen your understanding of it, and then pass it along to your children and grandchildren.”

They were speechless, perhaps because it had not yet been presented that way.

We should never take for granted that everybody involved in the holy moment of a lifecycle event appreciates the meaning embedded therein. That is why I am going to offer a pro tip for making your Jewish involvement even more meaningful, and this is something that comes from the author and consultant Priya Parker, who I mentioned on the first day of Rosh HaShanah, when we spoke about the meaning and power of gathering. Ms. Parker’s essential tip for making gathering meaningful is to prepare in advance. And yes, of course that means the food and the chairs and the guest list. But more than that, prepare the content. 

Give your attendees an assignment. For a wedding, for example, you could have them write out messages to the bride and groom to be displayed as part of the ḥuppah, or at the reception. For a baby-naming, have your participants do a little research into their own Hebrew name, to share at lunch. For shiv’ah, you could ask people who did not speak at the funeral to prepare in advance three sentences that describe the deceased, or even (as was fashionable a few years back) a six-word-eulogy.

And similar things can be done for holiday observances: have invitees to your sukkah bring an item that tells a story about their Jewish journey. Before lighting the Hanukkah candles, have everybody gathered around give an example of a way that they feel they have personally cast some light in this world. For Pesaḥ, have each participant prepare in advance a piece of the Exodus story to tell in their own words. And so forth. Your creativity only makes doing Jewish things that much more holy and special, and reinforces that sense of being a link in an eternal chain.

The more meaning we derive from these holy moments, the more powerfully connected we are to our history and culture and tradition, and the stronger the link in that generational chain.

It is the holy moments which frame our lives with meaning, give us structure and support, and help us through the tough times together. Ideally, they reflect our values, teach our wisdom, and connect us with our past and our future. Don’t let them slip by without trying to make them more than just gathering for dinner.

“Make it Meaningful!” conclusion:

I hope that over these High Holidays I have given you a few things to think about regarding making meaning in Jewish life: through gathering, through digging deeper into the Jewish bookshelf to understand the backstory, through engaging with Israel, and through framing holy moments.

It is worth putting a fine point on the message by reminding us all that merely “being Jewish” is unsustainable; it will not last another generation here in America, land of freedom and infinite choice. Rather, if you want your children and grandchildren to be links in the ancient chain, you have to “do Jewish” with them, and frame it properly. Teach them to love our tradition the way you do; show them how meaningful it can be by doing. Frame it with intentionality and love. And of course you can always reach out to me for guidance. It would be my pleasure and privilege to provide support on your journey. That is what I am here for.

Yizkor

And one final, related note before we move on to the Yizkor service.

Since Adar of 5780, also known as March of 2020, we have been subject to a worldwide pandemic that has, in many ways, turned our lives upside-down. The 3-year-olds in our ELC only know a world in which everybody is wearing masks in public; children have suffered from the failure of some schools to provide adequate schooling; in addition to the loss of so many loved ones and the suffering of those with long-Covid symptoms, there is evidence of so much more malfeasance in our society – addiction, abuse in all forms, and so forth, and the economic toll has been devastating.

Even if somehow we were all miraculously vaccinated tomorrow, there would still be so much pain – evictions, homelessness, joblessness, anxiety, and so much suffering.

A young man I know recently lost his father, from whom he had been estranged for a number of years. As you can imagine, he was filled with various types of regrets; his grief was palpable.

A recent column by New York Times columnist David Brooks (if you have been paying attention, you surely know that I am fond of David Brooks), spoke about the rising incidence of estrangement from family members. I have encountered this regularly in my pastoral work, and it is one of a range of social ills to which Brooks points as evidence of what he calls the “psychological unraveling of America.” We are suffering in so many ways, and often we have no salve for our pain, no balm for the many sources of grief we all carry right now. Brooks cites the Franciscan friar Richard Rohr, who said, “If we do not transform our pain, we will most assuredly transmit it.”

And we the Jews, of course, have an extra measure of pain – the pain that has been handed to us from our history, from expulsion and pogroms and Holocaust and terrorism and anti-Semitic attacks, one right here in our own neighborhood.

But the silver lining here is that, at least with one kind of pain – the pain that comes from the loss of beloved family members – that we do have a way of transforming that pain: we have the framework of Jewish ritual for grief and mourning, including the Yizkor prayers that we are about to recite. Not only do we have shiv’ah, when we offer comfort to the bereaved for the week after burial, but also sheloshim and a year of mourning and annual yahrzeit observances, and of course Yizkor. 

And all of these are means by which we transform our pain and grief through ritual. By doing traditional Jewish things, we have a mechanism which helps to ease the pain, helps to remember the deceased, helps to remind us all that they are still with us, if not bodily, then at least in spirit. 

If that is not an argument for meaning-making in Jewish life, I do not know what is. 

~

Rabbi Seth Adelson

(Originally delivered at Congregation Beth Shalom, Pittsburgh, PA, Yom Kippur 5782, 9/16/2021.)

Categories
High Holidays Sermons

Make it Meaningful! – Engaging With Israel – Kol Nidrei 5782

Shalom! Before you proceed, you might want to read the first installment in the “Make it Meaningful!” series, from the first day of Rosh HaShanah and the second day of Rosh HaShanah 5782.

Many of my rabbinic colleagues give a sermon about Israel over the course of the High Holidays. I have generally not done so for two reasons: (א) because I give sermons about Israel from time to time throughout the year, and (ב) because the High Holidays seem like the best time to talk about the ways in which Jewish living can enrich your life and our world. So many of us make it to Jewish adulthood without deriving meaning from our customs and rituals, and since most of us are paying attention on the High Holidays, this is the time when I feel I must teach about the essential value and meaning of our tradition.

However, I noticed an opening this year that needs to be addressed. (Or, “needs addressed,” in local parlance.) Our theme this year is, “Make it Meaningful!” and Israel is very, very meaningful to me as a part of what it means to be Jewish today, and I know that Israel is meaningful to many of you as well. But I am, I must confess, a little concerned that it may not be meaningful enough for some of us. I am concerned that American Jews are drifting away from Israel.

And all the more so for me personally right now, since my oldest son, Oryah, is serving in the Israel Defense Forces, in the Ḥeil haTotḥanim, the artillery brigade. So I have, you might say, quite a bit of skin in the game at this particular moment. It’s worth noting that, come November, we will have two more young members of our congregation serving in the IDF: Naomi Kitchen and Ari Gilboa. That is actually a fairly significant group of ḥayyalim, Israeli soldiers directly connected to Congregation Beth Shalom.

Not only am I the father of an Israeli soldier, I am also a proud Zionist. I fell in love with the State of Israel – the people, the land, the culture, the optimistic idea of a modern Jewish state in the historical land of the Jewish people, built on the yearnings and hope of 2,000 years – I fell in love upon touching down at Ben Gurion Airport for my first visit there in the summer of 1987 when I was a participant in the Alexander Muss High School in Israel program. And that love only deepened when I returned there as an adult to live and study there in 1999. 

Not only am I a proud Zionist, but I am also concerned for the welfare of ALL all the people on that tiny strip of land. I have spent time working as an idealistic volunteer on kibbutz, and climbed Masada multiple times and studied every aspect and angle of the contemporary Israeli story and hiked from the Kinneret  / Sea of Galilee to the Mediterranean. I have also visited Israeli Arab and Druze villages, engaged with light political chatter with Palestinian citizens, been in a forum with Palestinian Authority politicians, been to West Bank locales such as Ḥevron and Mt. Gerizim and Jewish settlements and was once even turned back by Palestinian police at the crossing point while trying to visit Shechem, also known as Nablus. I have been and have experienced, in the words of the Israeli author Amos Oz, פה ושם בארץ ישראל, here and there in the land of Israel.

Not only am I concerned for all the people who live there, but I am also concerned that, according to the most recent Pew Research Center study of American Jews, our engagement with Israel is waning. 

For example:

  • 52% of American Jews over 50 consider “caring about Israel” to be “essential” to being Jewish, while only 35% of those under 30 do.
  • For the over-50 crowd, only 10% say Israel is not important to their Jewish identity, while for those under 30, that figure is 27%, nearly three times as much.

The handful of us in the American Jewish community who remember the 1940s know that we helped make the State of Israel a reality. There were the American fighter pilots who volunteered to serve. The Americans who donated to help build the new state. The Pittsburghers, who, as described in our member Dr. Barbara Burstin’s books on the history of our community, created a major hub of Zionist activity all the way back to the 1890s. Dr. Burstin assures me that Pittsburgh was second only to New York in terms of Zionist fervor and support, with a range of organizations and activities.

That is our legacy here. 

But for many American Jews today, Israel is far away and not so consequential; for some Israel is no longer a source of pride. And that is what I find truly disheartening.

And one more brief “not only”: Not only am I concerned that disengagement of the American Jewish community is a threat to the future of Israel, I am also concerned that whatever I say about Israel, I am going to disappoint a whole bunch of people, and perhaps anger a few as well. While once upon a time, an Israel-based sermon was an easy slam dunk, today many rabbis actually shy away from talking about Israel from the pulpit for that reason. 

Consider the pop singer Billie Eilish, who, in promoting her new album last month, created a series of brief videos on TikTok aimed at her fans in different countries. In the one addressed to her fans in the Israeli market, where there are apparently plenty of Billie Eilish fans, she said, ““Hi Israel, this is Billie Eilish, and I’m so excited that my new album, Happier Than Ever, is out now.” In doing so, a Twitter-storm erupted of people calling her out, for saying nothing more than, “Hi, Israel.” How dare she even attempt to sell albums to Israelis? 

Of course, Billie Eilish is not a rabbi, and the membership of Beth Shalom is hardly akin to a Twitter mob. As one who has had a life-long love affair with Israel, with all its attendant complexity and angst, and as a cheerleader for Jewish tradition, my task is to tell you not only why Israel is so meaningful to me, but why it should be for you as well.

We are going to consider the meaning in our relationship with Israel from three different perspectives: Jewish tradition, Jewish power, and Jewish culture.

Jewish Tradition

At the simplest level, we cannot separate our connection to the land of Israel from our Jewishness. Certainly the arc of the Torah, and indeed the entire Tanakh / Hebrew bible, revolves around getting to or returning to Eretz Yisrael. And from the time that the Romans destroyed the Second Temple in 70 CE, and hastened the Jewish dispersion all over the world, much of Jewish creativity – the Talmud, midrash, commentaries, liturgy, music and art – has been focused on the yearning for return and rebuilding our land.

On virtually every page of every siddur / prayerbook, including the maḥzor many of you hold in your hand right now, this yearning is evident. Consider what you just recited a few moments ago in the Amidah, words which we recite in every Amidah, at least three times on every day of the year: 

וְתֶחֱזֶֽינָה עֵינֵֽינוּ בְּשׁוּבְ֒ךָ לְצִיּוֹן בְּרַחֲמִים

Veteḥezena eineinu beshuvekha letziyyon beraḥamim.

And may our eyes behold Your merciful return to Zion.

The addressee here is, of course, God; but the implication is that if God returns to Israel, so might we as well. (By the way, I’ll never forget seeing those words inscribed on the wall in the secret synagogue found at Terezin, the Nazi concentration camp not far from Prague.) 

The “secret synagogue” in the Terezin (Theresienstadt) concentration camp

Or, right before the Shema, as we say every morning (we’ll say this tomorrow at about 9:20 AM.:

 וַהֲבִיאֵֽנוּ לְשָׁלוֹם מֵאַרְבַּע כַּנְפוֹת הָאָֽרֶץ וְתוֹלִיכֵֽנוּ קוֹמְ֒מִיּוּת לְאַרְצֵֽנוּ

Vahavienu leshalom me-arba kanfot ha-aretz, vetolikheinu qomemiyyut le-artzeinu.

Bring upon us in peace from the four corners of the Earth, and speedily lead us upright to our land.

And, when we chant the berakhot after the haftarah tomorrow morning:

רַחֵם עַל צִיּון כִּי הִיא בֵּית חַיֵּינוּ. וְלַעֲלוּבַת נֶפֶשׁ תּושִׁיעַ בִּמְהֵרָה בְיָמֵינוּ 

Raḥem al Tziyyon ki hi beit ḥayyeinu. Vela’aluvat nefesh toshia bimheira veyameinu.

Have mercy upon Zion, for it is the source of our life; and for the downtrodden of spirit bring salvation speedily in our days.

Zion is not merely some fantastical poetic reference. It is the land of our ancestors. It is the very real place that hosted the establishment of the Jewish people. It was our homeland for a thousand years, thereafter occupied by one empire after another for nearly 2,000 more, with continuous Jewish settlement (at times minimal) throughout that period.

In exile, this yearning for the land of Israel has been our inspiration and salvation and essential Earthly link to our tradition and to God as long as Jews have existed. Our connection to the land is not only inseparable from our tradition, but it has soaked every siddur / prayerbook with tears for two thousand years. 

And, with the modern Zionist movement, which began a century and a half ago in Eastern Europe, the establishment of a Jewish State in that land has become a central plank in what it means to be a contemporary Jew.

Of course, the establishment of this state has come with its share of challenges, some of which the early Zionists anticipated, and some they did not, pre-eminent among them the challenge of creating a respectful living situation for the Arabs who live alongside our people in that land.

Jewish Power

For virtually all of the last two millennia, our people were powerless exiles, and in some cases even refugees. We were subjects of empires, kings and queens, and feudal lords, and lived at their mercy. We survived, but we managed to do so with our wits, while clinging steadfastly to our tradition and to each other.

Our powerlessness enabled the Crusaders’ slaughter, the Expulsion from Spain, the medieval blood libels, and the pogroms. Our powerlessness permitted the Nazis to actually calculate the number of Deutschmarks required to kill each Jew; to realize that one bullet per dead Jew shot by the Einzatsgruppen was too expensive, and hence the use of Zyklon B poison gas and BMW engine exhaust in the death camps.

But, in the wake of the Shoah / Holocaust, in which 6 million of our people were murdered due to their powerlessness, the desperation that our people felt aroused the sympathy of much of the world. Although the return to Zion had begun more than 80 years prior, it was to some extent this sympathy, which played out in the League of Nations partition plan vote on November 29, 1947, that allowed David Ben Gurion to establish the State five and a half months later.

And suddenly the Jews had sovereign state power. But power is complicated. Power requires making ethical choices, sometimes between two bad possible outcomes. The State of Israel is a democracy with a thriving set of checks on power – free elections, a free press, free academia, the rule of law, a court system. Tzahal, the Israel Defense Forces, has a principle of “tohar haneshek,” the purity of arms, that is, the soldier’s obligation to maintain her/his humanity in combat. As a result, there is healthy internal evaluation and criticism of Israel’s military choices.

When I was living in Israel in the summer of 2000, the Camp David Summit broke down with no resolution. The Second Intifada began a few weeks later. In that context, Rabbi Yitz Greenberg, speaking to the General Assembly of the United Jewish Communities in November, 2000, on “The Ethics of Jewish Power Today,” said the following:

Jewish power is never self-validating, so we have to sit in continual judgment upon ourselves… [And] given the evil that cannot be avoided, there is still some best possible or least evil way of exercising power. 

In an ideal world, all people would be treated absolutely equally. In the real world, you distribute your priorities and in fact it may be that some people will get a shorter stick than others. What makes this moral is you try to do the best you can. 

Secondly, you have a continuous process of correction. In a democracy you have elections or you have a free press or other forms of correction, and therefore whatever flaws there are subject to further improvement and further correction. So you have to have both. And the criteria of the moral person is the one who consciously makes those kinds of choices…

So that means in the real world I may err trying to protect the security, overreact and even inflict pain or damage. The criteria of morality is I try to inflict as little as possible and I try to maximize the good. Keep in mind that’s the balance wheel to the other principle, which is that we are only human and we can’t be perfect, so we are going to make some mistakes, which we are then going to go on and try to correct or try to have some mechanism of correction.  

No, Israel is not perfect. But yes, Israel’s democratic process is trying to do the right thing, balancing all the moral criteria with the fact that sometimes people make mistakes. 

Remember the Nazi calculation of how much it cost to murder each Jew, that one bullet per Jew was too much? How much did the State of Israel pay to bring the Jews of Ethiopia to Israel? By one calculation, $35 million was paid to the leader of Ethiopia in 1991 for 14,000 Jews. That was, to put it bluntly, a bribe, just to allow the Jews to leave, and did not account for the price of the airlift itself, or the resettlement in Israel, or all the other ancillary services required.

Operation Solomon, 1991

That is the meaning of Jewish power. So which would you rather have? A situation in which, at any moment, Jews may need to flee out of fear of persecution or expulsion, and have no place to go, as has happened so many times in our history? Or a reality in which there is a sanctuary, even an imperfect one, where the doors are always open? Medieval powerlessness, or the power to be responsible for our own destiny, for better or for worse?

Jewish Culture

Perhaps the greatest value of the State of Israel, and the easiest for Diaspora Jews to appreciate, is its thriving culture. I hope you are familiar with some of the pop-culture products that Israel has exported to the world, particularly the television series (some of which you can find on various streaming services) and films and music and dance.

When I lived in Israel as an adult, now more than 20 years ago, I discovered that Israel’s culture is not merely thriving, but vital; Hebrew rock blasts from outdoor cafes; the theater and dance scene is fresh and exciting; the contemporary architecture is unique and distinctly Israeli. No Jewish Diaspora subculture, even in the mighty United States, the second-largest Jewish population, has come even close to creating as vibrant and distinctive a culture as Israel has. Israel’s entrepreneurial spirit, hatched by necessity from the hardscrabble existence which new olim / immigrants have always faced, is evident in all the ways that Israelis express their singularly Jewish, home-grown national culture.

The vision of Israel as a cultural center, a merkaz ruḥani, did not belong to Theodor Herzl. Rather, it is the vision of one of Zionism’s earliest and greatest internal critics: the essayist and thinker Ahad Ha’am.

Asher Zvi Hirsch Ginsberg, aka Ahad Ha’am

What is a nation without culture? Ahad Ha’am saw Herzl and some of the other leaders of political Zionism as focused on the wrong thing. In his essay from 1888 (!), Lo zu haderekh (“This is not the way”), he took them to task for focusing merely on bringing people to Israel, and not considering what they would do once they arrived. Rather, Ahad Ha’am was laser-focused on drawing on our history and literature to fashion a contemporary Hebrew culture, and the strength of this culture and its values would ultimately lead them to want to face the much greater challenge of building a Jewish national home in Eretz Yisrael.

Israeli reggae band Hativah 6

And, to some extent, when I look at Israeli culture today, when I listen to Israeli hip-hop or enjoy an Israeli wine, I think of Ahad Ha’am and his idea of the merkaz ruḥani. Israel is my spiritual and cultural center.

***

I could speak all night on Israel (and let’s face it: it’s Yom Kippur – what else are you doing tonight?). But I want to add one final note, from Israel’s Minister of Diaspora Affairs from the Labor Party, Dr. Nachman Shai. In a recent blog post on the Times of Israel website, Dr. Shai suggested that rabbis share with their congregants over these High Holidays that Israel wants to make amends for ways in which it may have failed Diaspora Jews, particularly non-Orthodox Jews like us:

Share with your congregants that we in Israel are slowly but surely taking responsibility for our side of the relationship in a way that you have never seen, that we realize we have disappointed you and are doing teshuvah, repentance, with a sincere desire to make things right in the future. Share with them that this new government is committed to bringing back a Kotel Compromise — that is, formalizing an egalitarian prayer section at the Western Wall. It is committed to learning and understanding how our actions impact your communities. Tell them that we believe in you and that we are ready for both your critique and your ideas.

Most importantly, share with your communities that Israel desires to be your partner, to not let our politics or diverse identities serve as barriers to our fundamental belief that we are a people with a common fate and destiny.

I am grateful that Dr. Shai is beginning the process of reaching out to the Diaspora, and in particular the American Jewish community, to, I hope, repair the broken aspects of our relationship with the State of Israel. I am also hopeful that the new coalition (still holding together! And including an Arab party for the first time in Israel’s history) will be good for that relationship.

***

How do we make Israel meaningful? Through understanding the lenses of ancient Jewish yearning, the ethical pitfalls of Jewish power, and the joy of resonating with Jewish culture. 

But most importantly, by going there. By experiencing Ahad Ha’am’s merkaz ruḥani personally. 

Go there. See the land, the historical sites. But also, speak to the people. All the people – the Jews (so many varieties of Jews!), the Palestinians, the Druze, the Circassians, the Armenian Christians, the Filipino nurses, the Chinese and Romanian hired laborers, and on and on. Get to know them and understand the challenges that they face on a daily basis. And you will soon see that beyond the spin, beyond the this-side-or-that-side-ism, beyond the seemingly insoluble political challenges, there are 13 million people on that small strip of land trying to make a living, trying to enjoy time with their families, trying to eke out some kind of respectful existence.

If we could only somehow convince all the extremists in our midst to consider the others around them, we would have a chance to make peace blossom and solve the deep, genuine challenges that the region faces. Alas.

We at Beth Shalom put together a congregational trip to Israel three years ago, and it was a fantastic success. We will have another such trip in the next couple of years, but meanwhile, you might also want to consider going on the Federation Mega Mission next June. (If you’re going on that trip, please let me know.)

***

In 1948, David Ben Gurion was faced with the decision of when to declare independence, knowing that in doing so the neighboring Arab armies would invade the new state. He asked his friend and adviser, Yitzḥak Tabenken, what he should do. Tabenken answered that he would respond in a few days, after he consulted a few other people. When he returned, he told Ben Gurion that it was imperative that Ben Gurion declare the new state right now. 

Later, when Ben Gurion asked him whom he had consulted, Tabenken responded, “I spoke to my deceased grandparents, and my as-yet-unborn grandchildren, and asked them, ‘What do I owe you?’”

Seventy-three-and-a-half years later, we owe it to our people, to ourselves, to be in meaningful relationship with Israel. And how do we do that? By knowing and understanding the Jewish state. By engaging with her culture, her politics, her successes and challenges. By being intimately familiar with her people, her history, her complexity. Yes, by appreciating the value and responsibility of Jewish power. And by continuing to yearn through the words of prayer and tradition.

Make it meaningful!

Shanah tovah! May you be sealed for a 5782 that is full of meaning.

~

Rabbi Seth Adelson

(Originally delivered at Congregation Beth Shalom, Pittsburgh, PA, evening of Yom Kippur / Kol Nidrei, 9/15/2021.)