Tag: compassion

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To Build, and Not to Tear Down – Terumah 5784

I do not usually watch the Super Bowl, but I do enjoy checking out the ads after the fact. There were two ads this year which caught my eye. One, presented by a Christian organization, portrayed scenes of diverse people washing each other’s feet, a reference to an act of compassion performed by Jesus in the Christian scriptures. 

The other presented a former speechwriter for Dr. Martin Luther King talking about how all hatred thrives on silence, and connected that to the current rise in antisemitism. This ad, paid for by Robert Kraft’s Foundation to Combat Antisemitism, ended with interchanging hashtags #StandUpToJewishHate and #StandUpToAllHate.

Some news outlets were quick to point out that there was online backlash against both. Critics of the Christian ad were bothered that the money came from Evangelical organizations which are anti-abortion. The anti-antisemitism ad was criticized by some Jewish commentators for being too vague, while antisemitic extremists were apparently thrilled because the ad also at one point displayed the hashtag #Hitlerwasright.

We have become so accustomed to criticism from all sides, no matter how marginal it may be, that we often lose sight of the value of our larger principles. We forget that it is always easier to tear down than to build up. 

Our good friend and neighbor, Rev. Canon Natalie Hall of the Church of the Redeemer, was disenchanted by some of her Christian colleagues’ criticism of the very Christian message of compassion. In responding to some of this criticism, she wrote, “Despite many theological and political errors Evangelicals often espouse, I can’t look at a good message with disdain because the messengers might contaminate me with their culture-war cooties. We’re not enemies. It’s calmer over here. Want to join me?”

There is an essential moment in Parashat Terumah, from which we read today, when God calls for materials with which to build the mishkan, the portable sanctuary that the Israelites are to use for worship (Shemot / Exodus 25:2):

מֵאֵ֤ת כׇּל־אִישׁ֙ אֲשֶׁ֣ר יִדְּבֶ֣נּוּ לִבּ֔וֹ תִּקְח֖וּ אֶת־תְּרוּמָתִֽי׃

You shall accept gifts for Me from every person whose heart is so moved.

Maybe we should read this not as “every individual whose heart moves her/him,” but rather as “all of us, whose hearts are moving us.” That is, all of the Israelites’ hearts will be moved to bring these gifts with which to build the mishkan. And that is exactly what happens. There’s actually so much stuff that Moshe has to ask them all to stop.

We all want to get behind those causes which our hearts are moving us to support. We all want to help out in ways that are constructive.

A question that we might ask, therefore, in our current moment, is, “We are seeing vast rifts in our society right now over complicated issues. How might we be able to speak to one another across political lines, so that we might build, and not tear down?”

I have been thinking quite a bit about this question, particularly since October 7th. And many of us have been engaged in various ways with events here on the ground in Pittsburgh that are related to what is going on in Israel.

For example, there are members of our congregation who regularly attend the vigils held every Sunday to remember the hostages held in Gaza and advocate for bringing them home, and of course we have a visual reminder here on our bimah.

A few weeks back we hosted the United in Compassion event, at which about 75 people of different faiths and backgrounds and political persuasions shared stories which helped elevate our sense of compassion for one another. This was intentionally NOT focused on Israel or politics, but for some participants, it was of course difficult not to think about the war as we were talking.

A different sort of event which I attended, however, was much more challenging, and much more difficult with respect to mustering compassion. It was a two-hour meeting of primarily clergy: three rabbis and four Christian ministers of different denominations, plus Laura Cherner of the Federation’s Jewish Communal Relations Council. This meeting was organized by Rabbi Ron Symons of the JCC, and the intent was to speak with each other about the situation in Israel and Gaza from our individual perspectives, and ideally to listen to one another and perhaps to find common ground. I agreed to participate, although I knew going in that the Christian participants were people with whom I would disagree vehemently.

And I am proud of myself for successfully listening and not letting my anger boil over as I heard them use the inaccurate and inflammatory language that so many pro-Palestinian activists hurl in public: apartheid, genocide, 75 years of occupation, ethnic cleansing, and so forth. My adrenaline pumped for the entire two hours as they urged an immediate ceasefire without regard to hostages or Hamas’ terrorist activities or the brutal sexual violence which they committed on as many as 1500 Israeli women. I clenched my teeth as they cited the Gazan children killed during this war, without acknowledging that about 40% of the widely quoted figure of Palestinian casualties are actually Hamas terrorists. I bristled at the notion, widely accepted in some quarters, that the Israeli treatment of Palestinians is just like the treatment of Black Americans at the hands of police.

And that was hard. To hear that sort of language coming from clergy, people who lead others in faith and compassion, was quite upsetting.

And then we agreed that we should meet again in a month, to keep talking.

And I have been asking myself, why? Why go back, and subject myself to two more hours of adrenaline and clenched teeth. I am not going to change the mind of anybody in that room. I am not going to impact American public opinion on this war, which is gradually shifting away from the Israeli point of view. I am not going to have any control over what is happening in Israel. I am not going to hasten Israeli elections to dump the current coalition for their tremendous failures in allowing all of this mess to happen in the first place. And I am certainly not going to be able to bring the relevant parties to the table to build a hopeful future for the region. 

So why go back? 

And you know the answer. In order to build, and not merely tear down, you have to be in conversation. You have to meet people face-to-face. You have to talk, even when it is painful and uncomfortable. Even when they are spouting misinformation. Even when their words might be effectively calling for the expulsion of your family from their home.

Merely criticizing and/or demonizing people on the other side will not accomplish anything. Rather, those of us whose hearts are so moved must bring gifts with which to build, and in particular, the gift of presence.

Educator and tour guide Avi Ben Hur spoke last week at the first of three lectures co-sponsored by Beth Shalom, on the current state of affairs in Israel. Among the things he said was that only 27% of Israelis still favor a two-state solution. (He did not mention, although I heard elsewhere, that 38% of Israelis want to re-occupy and re-settle Gaza, which is to me a detestable idea.) And likely even fewer Palestinians than Israelis are interested in a two-state solution.

Ben Hur painted a bleak portrait. How can you even talk about peace, about coexistence, about living side-by-side under our own vines and fig trees, when we are shooting at each other? One of the most well-known Israeli peace activists, Vivian Silver, was murdered by Hamas terrorists at Kibbutz Be’eri on October 7, her life’s work gone in a flash of gunpowder.

While I admire Rabbi Symons’ commitment to keeping us talking to each other, here in Pittsburgh, so far away, I am finding it hard to see anything hopeful.

Except right there in the Torah in Parashat Terumah, reminding us that those whose heart moves them can, in fact, make a difference. We may not be able to begin to build yet, but we can hope that some day, when all of our hearts are moved collectively, that time will come. And in the meantime, we have to keep showing up, and to keep talking.

As many of you know, my Lunch and Learn series this year has focused on playing Israeli pop songs from across the 20th century, as a lens through which to see the history of the State of Israel. One of the most influential pop performance groups of the ‘50s and ‘60s was an army band, one many at the time: Lehaqat haNaḥal, which drew musicians and performers from the Naḥal Brigade of the IDF. (Naḥal was conceived not only as an army unit but also a team to develop new agricultural settlements throughout Israel, playing an essential role in the building of the State. Some of the most well-known Israeli performers were alumni of Lehaqat haNaḥal, including Arik Einstein, Haim Topol, Yardena Arazi, and many, many others who have shaped Israeli pop culture.)

In 1963, Lehaqat haNaḥal sang a song of hope written by Naomi Shemer. That was a time when Israel’s very existence was tenuous, when there was a palpable fear that her enemies on all sides could crush the nascent state. And the song they sang was Maḥar (“Tomorrow”):

מחר אולי נפליגה בספינות
מחוף אילת עד חוף שנהב
ועל המשחתות הישנות
יטעינו תפוחי זהב

כל זה אינו משל ולא חלום
זה נכון כאור בצהריים
כל זה יבוא מחר אם לא היום
ואם לא מחר אז מחרתיים

מחר אולי בכל המשעולים
ארי בעדר צאן ינהג
מחר יכו באלף ענבלים
המון פעמונים של חג

…כל זה אינו משל ולא חלום

מחר יקומו אלף שיכונים
ושיר יעוף במרפסות
ושלל כלניות וצבעונים
יעלו מתוך ההריסות

…כל זה אינו משל ולא חלום

מחר כשהצבא יפשוט מדיו
ליבנו יעבור לדום
אחר כל איש יבנה בשתי ידיו
את מה שהוא חלם היום

…כל זה אינו משל ולא חלום

Tomorrow, perhaps we will sail in ships from the shores of Eilat to the Ivory Coast,
And the old destroyers will be loaded with oranges.

All of this is neither a parable nor a dream; it is as true as the light of the afternoon
All of this will come tomorrow if not today, and if not tomorrow, then the day after…

Tomorrow, when the army will take off its uniform, our hearts will turn to silence
Then each of us will build with our two hands that of which we dreamt today.

***
That dream of peace may seem as far away now as it was in 1963. But Israelis, and Jews all over the world, have never turned away from it. We have to maintain the generosity of spirit that has marked our willingness to contribute since Parashat Terumah. We must continue to bring those gifts, in particular the gift of presence, to keep talking, and seek not to tear down, but rather to build.

~

Rabbi Seth Adelson

(Originally delivered at Congregation Beth Shalom, Pittsburgh, PA, Shabbat morning, 2/17/2024.)

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Festivals Sermons Yizkor

Memory and Compassion – Shemini Atzeret / Yizkor 5776

This is a day of memory, a day when we recall those who shaped us, who gave our lives meaning by their presence and wisdom and love.

We Jews excel at remembering. There is a reason for that: through centuries of exile, persecution, dispersion, displacement, forced conversions, and so on, we had to cling to our history, because often it was all we could take with us.

Memory is what drives the Jewish world. It is what keeps us Jewish. Our past sustains our traditions; our ancient stories have nourished us and comforted us and granted us joy for thousands of years. When we had no homeland, when we had no safe haven, when we were being burned in autos-da-fe or tried for treason or marched into gas chambers, we could always take with us what we held in our hearts, the words of our tradition, our rituals, our ancient stories. We could always take with us our own personal tales of struggle and faith, of our poor yet pious great-grandparents who came from a far-off land to build a new life where they were free to be Jewish.

We are our memories. To borrow from the language of Birkat Shehehiyyanu, which we say upon reaching any milestone, our memories have kept us alive and sustained us and enabled us to reach this day. And that’s a good thing.

But it may not be enough today. It may not be enough for our children and grandchildren, because the world is changing so dramatically. Our memories are catalogued extensively, yes. Today we are blessed to have huge libraries containing millions of volumes about the Jewish world that was, Jewish studies departments at universities all over the world, Jewish scholars and Jewish artists and Jewish websites and archives and museums.

And we have the greatest set of Jewish resources before us in history, resources that would make Rashi and Rambam green with envy, had they foreseen these things in the 11th and 12th centuries. We have electronic resources, instantly searchable, with which you can find virtually anything on the Jewish bookshelf. We have fantastically footnoted and interpreted translations that make the Tanakh and Talmud and midrashim and halakhic codes instantly accessible. We have databases in which you can easily peruse all the great works of the Jewish bookshelf.

And yet, as we move forward, I see the lights of Jewish memory fading in the eyes of our children, lost in the din of billions of gigabytes of information. As we integrate our devices into everything we do, we run the risk of losing sight of what the important things are.

There are rabbis in this world who rail against the use of computers and smartphones and the evil Internet because they are corrupting influences that draw us away from God and Judaism. I am not one of them (as you may know, my sermons are all accessible online). But I am concerned that our electronic interconnectedness has the effect of de-emphasizing distinctiveness, of flattening everything out so that every piece of information is the same value as every other.

So one irony of today’s Jewish world is that while we have more tools at our fingertips thanks to the Information Age, the noise and distractions with which these tools come make our ancient messages, our holy memories, harder to hear.

How do we cut through the noise to ensure that our tradition of memory is carried on? We have to change the tone.

My inspiration here comes not from Rashi or Rambam, but from a contemporary spiritual leader of tremendous importance: Pope Francis. Francis, who is the first Jesuit pope and the first from the Americas, has been masterful in changing the tone of the Roman Catholic church, something that the church sorely needed. In his tour of the United States that coincided with the Ten Days of Teshuvah / repentance (as well as the annual Muslim hajj festivities), the Pope spoke in several venues to re-affirm what has become the trademark of his papacy: to focus less on standard church doctrine and more on the many good things that the church and that religious people of all sorts do all over the world: acts of compassion.

Francis is the Conservative rabbi’s favorite pope. He is a good friend of a Conservative rabbi from Buenos Aires, the rector of the Seminario Rabinico Latinoamericano (the JTS of Latin America), Rabbi Abraham Skorka, with whom he co-authored a book on faith and frequently appeared for public lectures and discussions. Dr. Eve Keller, a good friend and former congregant of mine from Great Neck teaches at Fordham University, a Jesuit school, and she refers to the the Jesuits as the Conservative movement of the Catholic church: dedicated to academic scholarship, progressive, and committed to tradition.

While there are some in the church want to hear the pope speak against abortion, contraception, homosexuality, and the hot-button issues of our time, Pope Francis uses every opportunity to remind the world that there are poor, needy people everywhere who lack the essentials for a decent life. He has placed the concept of mercy front-and-center. While he has not changed significantly the church’s position on anything, he has changed the tone, changed the discourse.

When he spoke before the joint session of the United States Congress on September 24th, he quoted the principle that appears in the Christian scriptures (Matthew 7:12) and is known widely as the Golden Rule, but we in the Jewish world know it as the sage Hillel’s advice to a potential convert as the summation of the Torah. The pope said the following:

Do unto others as you would have them do unto you…

Let us treat others with the same passion and compassion with which we want to be treated. Let us seek for others the same possibilities which we seek for ourselves. Let us help others to grow, as we would like to be helped ourselves. In a word, if we want security, let us give security; if we want life, let us give life; if we want opportunities, let us provide opportunities. The yardstick we use for others will be the yardstick which time will use for us.

This was a reminder, in the most public forum that the pope had during his visit, that the social and political flashpoints that divide us are not, as we say in Hebrew, the ‘iqqar, the central principle of the church, or of any religious tradition, including ours. Rather, the essential message is, to use Hillel’s phrasing (Babylonian Talmud, Tractate Shabbat 31a): “Do not do unto others what is hateful unto you; all the rest is commentary. Now go and learn it.”

Ultimately, we will be judged not on our devotion to halakhic minutiae or the dogmatic details of religious belief, but on how we have treated others. Have we made compassion the default option? Have we allowed only the holiest words to emerge from our mouths? Have we really worked to change this world for the better, to improve the lot of the poor, of the disenfranchised?

In the book co-written by Rabbi Abraham Skorka and then-Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio, the rabbi cites a midrash about the Tower of Babel. The Torah tells us one story of God’s objection to the tower. But the midrash suggests that the real reason that God foiled the builders’ plans is that they were more concerned about bricks falling out, and thus slowing down the work, than if a worker were to fall and be killed.

The big picture was lost in the focus on the small details. The sanctity of life, the holiness of our relationships became obscured by the noise of the construction site, the business at hand.

What is our big picture? Is it Jewish law? Is it the performance of mitzvot / commandments? Is it the lifelong commitment to Jewish learning? Is it ritual, services, holidays, waving the lulav/etrog, sitting in the sukkah, etc.?

Those things are all important; they are the behaviors that define us as Jews, and have maintained our distinctiveness and our relationship to God. But the central message to which all of these Jewish activities should lead, the one that we must recall on this day of memory, is compassion.

Each of us has the potential to play a special, sacred role in this very fractured world: to do good works for others, for the sake of those who have come before us.

My grandfather, my mother’s father, alav hashalom, became a ward of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts at age 3. He grew up on a farm near Boston with a foster family, Jewish farmers who were decent people. He did not finish high school. But he was a good person who always took care of the people around him. He operated a candy store during the Depression, but lost it because he gave free stuff away to anybody who came in and asked. I never heard him say a negative word about anybody, except about the people who once sold him some stock that ultimately tanked. My mother tells me that he complimented his wife, my grandmother, on her cooking, no matter how badly dinner was burned. When I think of this sweet, sweet man, I remember how essential it is to be kind and gracious to everybody, to give all people, strangers or loved ones, a fair shake in life.

The memory of our ancestors, of the people they were, of the good things they did, of the hard work that enabled them to survive and us to thrive, should inspire us to continue to do good works in this world, to practice acts of passion and compassion.

That is the essential message, the one that Pope Francis and I hope will rise above the din of all the chaos in our lives, the one that previous generations gave us and that we will pass on to those who come after us.

As we turn now to recall those who endowed us, the living, with the ability to effect positive change in this world, we should not forget that remembrance is not a momentary prayer. It is a daily choice. Let our prayerful moments today translate into good works for others tomorrow.

~

Rabbi Seth Adelson

(Originally delivered at Congregation Beth Shalom, Shemini Atzeret, Monday morning, 10/5/2015.)