Tag: future

Categories
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.)

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
Sermons

AI Will Never Be Human – Bemidbar 5783

Artificial intelligence illustration with blue text AI over binary code matrix background. Abstract concept of cyber technology and automation

There has been much concern lately about artificial intelligence. You may have heard that last week a Senate subcommittee hosted the CEO of OpenAI, the creators of ChatGPT, Sam Altman. In his testimony, Altman (who is, BTW, a nice Jewish boy from St. Louis) actually asked the Senate to regulate AI. Many tech companies have zealously fought against regulation, so to hear Mr. Altman express concern about the potential dangers of AI and to seek regulatory controls may have been a relief for some. 

But the complicated part, and perhaps Mr. Altman is gambling on this, is that (a) Congress moves much more slowly than the rate at which widespread use of AI is unfolding, and (b) it is not immediately clear how exactly to regulate it. The devil (not that we Jews believe in such a thing) is in the details.

Nonetheless, this is clearly something to which Jews, as people whose tradition teaches us to be responsible for humanity and our world, should be paying attention.

Speaking of details, Parashat Bemidbar opens with a commandment to count people, to take a census of the Israelites while they are encamped in the wilderness, for the purposes of determining the fighting strength of their army. Much of the parashah is dedicated to these numbers.

This report of numbers by tribe might appear as a dull, bureaucratic endeavor which obscures the personhood of all of those counted, not to mention the women and people under the age of 20 who are not even counted. The first three chapters of Bemidbar come off looking something like the tape from an adding machine – lots of numbers and then a bottom line, which in this case is 603,550. (The extrapolated estimate of the entire population who left Egypt is therefore about two million, which seems like an impossibly high number. But far be it from me to say that something in the Torah is not true…) 

But here’s something that you might miss if you are not looking closely. The Hebrew instruction to perform this census is phrased thus (Bemidbar / Numbers 1:2):

שְׂא֗וּ אֶת־רֹאשׁ֙ כׇּל־עֲדַ֣ת בְּנֵֽי־יִשְׂרָאֵ֔ל

Se-u et rosh kol adat benei Yisra-el

Now, your translation of this verse in the Etz Hayyim ḥumash says, “Take a census of the whole Israelite company.” But the Hebrew speaks idiomatically. A more literal translation is “Lift up the head of the entire group of Israelites.” The suggestion of “lifting up the head” sounds much more personal: Do not merely count heads; lift them up. Take each individual’s face into account. Acknowledge each member of the group as a human being, and as part of the greater whole. As if to drive the point home, the passages about counting are followed by the  the birkat kohanim, the Priestly Blessing of Bemidbar / Numbers 6:24-26, which occurs in Parashat Naso (which we won’t get to until the week after Shavu’ot). The third verse is as follows:

יִשָּׂ֨א ה’ ׀ פָּנָיו֙ אֵלֶ֔יךָ וְיָשֵׂ֥ם לְךָ֖ שָׁלֽוֹם׃

Yisa Adonai panav elekha veyasem lekha shalom.
May God lift up God’s face to you and grant you peace.

It’s the same verb: נשא / to lift up. 

When it comes to counting people, the details matter. It’s not just a strip of adding tape. Every one of us counts. Every one of us must be acknowledged and lifted up.

A brief report caught my eye this week, regarding the state of religion in America. An organization called the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) published the results of a recent survey of Americans’ attachment to religion. And, as you might expect, the percentage of us for whom religion is important is going down, and the number of unaffiliated folks continues to rise. 

And the Jews, of course, are the same as everybody else, only more so. 

Now, you certainly have all heard me make the case for the value of Judaism, if not religious practice in general, and I don’t need to do that right now. (But just wait until Rosh HaShanah!). Some of the statistics in this report show that people who attend religious services at least a few times a year tend to be more engaged in civic and political activities, particularly those things where people gather and work together. And I think we all know from anecdotal evidence that religious practice actually induces pro-social behavior in many of us.

So all the more so: religion brings people together, and is good for us as individuals and for society. It lifts us up, and helps us to see each other’s faces and acknowledge our shared humanity. And every one of us counts.

Nowadays, we have many fancy adding machines which help us through our lives: silicon slaves which do our bidding, and can help us achieve things which our ancestors could not even have imagined. 

The Israeli historian and social philosopher Yuval Noah Harari opens his book Homo Deus with an explanation for why people no longer need religion: because we have effectively vanquished plague, famine, and war. Yes, we have just been through a minor plague, and war is clearly still around, but the numbers of people who perish due to these things is far fewer than did so in previous centuries. Harari argues that our ability to live and thrive and not be so concerned on a daily basis for matters of life and death have obviated the need for religion, and for God. And indeed, when we have created tools such as artificial intelligence which may seem to have personality, perhaps we have achieved the status of Homo Deus, of God-like people. 

Sam Altman, in his testimony on Capitol Hill, pointed to the fact that when Photoshop was first introduced, it fooled some people initially, but we quickly learned to distinguish between an actual photo and something which had been altered. That sort of technology will of course continue to improve, and I am certain that it is only a matter of time before our adding machines will be able to deceive us in ways we would never have considered before.

And so too with language models like ChatGPT. They may ultimately sound human. But I do not believe that they will ever replace actual humans. And they will certainly never possess the Divine spark that is at the core of each of us.

ChatGPT will never be able to make a minyan. AI will never be able to give a proper hug to comfort those who mourn. It will never be able to get up and dance with joy as we name a new baby or celebrate a couple who is about to be married. It will not seek atonement on Yom Kippur, or sing moving melodies that turn the heart to God, or pray silently or yearn for God’s presence as we welcome Shabbat with Yedid Nefesh. A computer will never understand the value of Shabbat, or the conscious choice to take the holy opportunities of Jewish life, which give our lives framework and meaning.

Rabbi Danny Schiff, toward the end of his book, Judaism in a Digital Age, which we will be discussing after qiddush, addresses the question of whether the future necessitates a human presence. He writes,

Judaism’s answer to this question is yes. No matter how animated, intelligent, responsive, or reliable our AI creations might become, AI will never attain the combination of qualities that will merit the status of being “created in the image” [betzelem Elohim, a reference to Bereshit / Genesis 1:28]… The gulf between achieving convincing human-like qualities and being human is almost certainly unbridgeable. Jews are mandated to expand the Divine image in the world, not to lessen it. That goal demands the preservation of humanity. Judaism provides no license to contemplate an alternative… The irreplaceable human perspective and the poetry inherent within the grandeur and the struggle of human existence are exquisite… Each human life contains the potential for untold significance, and that will remain true even if AI comes to be viewed as functionally superior.

Put more bluntly, our devices may count us. But no computer will ever lift up our heads and appreciate the fullness of our humanity, of who we are as individuals and as the significant constituent parts of a human collective. 

And furthermore, no amount of technological modification of the human body or mind will make us God-like. God is far too elusive to enable that. Contrary to what Yuval Harari says, the need for religion – for Judaism – will never go away. We will always need to yearn together, to mourn together, to gather for prayer and celebration and comfort. We will always need a transcendent framework which brings us back to the spark of Divinity; no microchip will ever be able to recreate that.

ChatGPT, Google Bard, or whatever else comes after them will surely know Torah. They will be able to recite gemara with ease and probably teach and interpret for knowledgeable Jewish people. But they will hardly be able to convincingly sing ‘Etz ḥayyim hi lamaḥaziqim bah” / The Torah is a tree of life for those who grasp it.

Our strength comes from grasping the words of Torah. And we let that go at our peril. So we just might have to keep holding onto and holding up our tradition, paying attention to the details, and lifting our heads together for the sake of humanity.

~

Rabbi Seth Adelson

(Originally delivered at Congregation Beth Shalom, Pittsburgh, PA, Shabbat morning, 5/20/2023.)

Categories
Sermons

The Future – Tetzaveh 5783

When I consider where we are as a society and where we might be headed, the words of Leonard Cohen, from the title track of his fantastic 1992 album, “The Future,” continue to ring in my ears:

Things are gonna slide
Slide in all directions
Won’t be nothing you can measure anymore
The blizzard, the blizzard of the world
Has crossed the threshold
And it’s overturned
The order of the soul

We, the Jews, are excellent at history. Regarding the future, not so much. 

Just consider what will be happening, Jewishly speaking, for the next few weeks: 

  • On Shabbat we remember Creation. 
  • On this Shabbat Zakhor, we remember Amaleq
  • On Purim, Monday evening and Tuesday, we remember how Esther saved the Jews of Persia. 
  • On Pesaḥ, we remember how we came from slavery to freedom. 

And so on. We are excellent at history.

But where in Jewish life do we remember the future? The most enduring symbol of the Jewish future to be that one that is right behind me, above the ark. Parashat Tetzaveh opens (Shemot / Exodus 27:20) with the mitzvah of kindling the Ner Tamid, the eternal light, which symbolizes the continuity of our connection with God and Torah from all the way back to Exodus. It is tamid – always burning, always reminding us of our past and the eternity of the future before us, always serving as a beacon to call us back to our tradition.

We frequently invoke yetzi-at Mitzrayim, the Exodus from Egypt, in our liturgy. We do so because it serves as a template for our future redemption, the redemption of Olam HaBa, the World to Come. But admittedly, the Olam HaBa model is somewhat inchoate, and frankly, we are in disagreement as to what the real goal in Jewish life is. There are certainly some who understand our performance of mitzvot on this Earth to bring the mashiaḥ, the anointed, supposed descendant of King David, and lead us to Olam HaBa. There are others who see our mitzvot as serving their purpose in the here and now; that is, we fulfill them because it is the right thing to do in the moment, and their reward is intrinsic. (I am in this latter camp.)

But in general, except for mashiaḥ-based ideology, which is somewhat murky and controversial, we do not really speak too much about the future. We are simply not wired that way. Judaism is fundamentally focused on the present.

Which is why Rabbi Danny Schiff’s new book, Judaism in a Digital Age, is so striking. Well-researched and thoughtfully presented, the book addresses not only the future from a Jewish perspective (and in particular, the future of the modern non-Orthodox movements), but also the future from a general point of view, the future of all humanity. And let me say this: the view is mostly pretty bleak.

He opens with a biting critique of the Conservative and Reform movements, explaining in excruciating detail about why movements which emerged “when horses were the dominant means of transportation” are not only no longer relevant, but also destined for continued decline as they confront the “hyper-emancipated” world of the digital age. 

He moves on to take a snapshot of society as it is today, how “modernity” ended in 1990 with the widespread availability of the Internet, and all of the ways that immediate access to information through digital means has changed how we live and think and socialize. He revels in the current thinking by notable futurist authors, including the very real threat to society posed by artificial intelligence, and dangles before the reader the promise of immortality based on so-called “transhumanist” ideas about the blending of technology and the human body, which may ultimately serve to destroy any traditional concept of corporeal human life as we now know it.

And here and there he asks the hard questions about Judaism’s confrontation with post-modernity. What value will there be to having rabbis and teachers when all information is available to us without the intermediaries? How can halakhic principles regarding privacy or leshon hara remain in play when all of the details of every person’s life is available to anybody else through a search engine? How can we confront the challenges posed by rising rates of isolation and economic inequality, the availability of pornography, or the endless amplification of self-importance which social media platforms encourage?

Whatever happens in the future, we will certainly respond by (a) failing to consider adequately the full consequences of new technologies, and (b) managing to eke out a new way of living despite dramatically changed circumstances. Rabbi Schiff cites David Zvi Kalman, a fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute, regarding the way we passively accept potentially harmful innovations:

There’s a new technology in town. A few years ago it seemed like a pipe dream, but it’s now arrived on the commercial market in a big way. Large corporations are lining up to use it even as watchdogs point out serious potential for abuse. Reporters look into it, agree that there is a problem, and pen dozens of articles fretting about the downsides, demanding regulation and responsible use. The public grows concerned, and then they grow resigned. Meanwhile, the technology is adopted. Sometimes it is well regulated, more often it is not. There are a few horror stories. We learn to live with it. We move on. This is the ethical life cycle of modern technology, and its major problem is that it doesn’t know how to distinguish between technologies that complicate morality and those that destroy it – this is, it lacks the ability to say no, absolutely not.

We are seeing this tale play out over and over; consider facial-recognition technology, which is now widespread. Our response, according to Rabbi Schiff, must be to accept that the world has changed, and respond within the new paradigm:

Viewed from a Jewish perspective, the digital age is no longer about adapting Jews and Judaism to a slowly opening world of belonging and enlightenment; it is about asking how human beings should optimally function within the cacaphonous tumult of an accelerating epoch of hyper-emancipation, hyper-connectivity, and hyper-individualism.

And this is where I believe that the modern movements have the greatest potential. We are particularly well-positioned to engage with the Jewish future, perhaps in ways that more traditional forms of Orthodoxy cannot.

So first of all, I want to reassure you all that reports of the Conservative movement’s death are highly exaggerated. People have been declaring us dead for years, but I do not think that you have to look around too much here at Beth Shalom to see that this is a thriving, multi-generational community that rejoices and grieves together, that cherishes life and celebrates Jewish living and constantly engages with Jewish text and ritual. And while our membership decreased slightly during the pandemic, we are gaining members once again, continuing to buck the national synagogue trend. 

I am grateful for our excellent and committed staff. Our lay leadership is in fine shape, and we are preparing for a capital campaign so we can make much-needed repairs to our building. חזק חזק ונתחזק / Ḥazaq, ḥazaq, venitḥazzeq. Be strong, be strong, and we will be strengthen one another.

And even Rabbi Schiff concedes that if there is a new model for how to be Jewish, we have not yet found it. So meanwhile, while we are waiting for that new paradigm to emerge, we are going to continue to do our traditional-yet-contemporary thing. We will continue to pray together, to learn together, and to offer imaginative new programming through Derekh and otherwise.

Now onto the thorny questions about the future: 

  • Will we all soon be immortal cyborgs? 
  • Will the chips planted in our brains which connect us all to the shared data storage of all of human history extinguish our individual personalities? 
  • Will the AI machines we have created overthrow us or imprison us or simply exterminate us all when they realize that we are weaker and far less efficient than they are? 
  • What will happen to Judaism in a future in which God seems powerless compared to the technology we have created?

Jews have lived through many centuries of change, of social upheaval, of wars and genocides and life-changing innovations. We have made the transition from hand-copied documents to printed books to instantly-searchable gemara on smartphones. And yet, here we are, still reading Torah from a scroll produced essentially the same way for thousands of years, still basking in the glow of a Ner Tamid that – OK, so this one is electric, not an olive-oil lamp – but it is still shining as a beacon, here on Beacon Street.

We have navigated a changing world, and we will continue to do so. We will determine whether halakhah permits us to eat cultured meat that was never actually attached to any animal. We will find a way to grapple with the potential immortality awaiting us in the near future; as Rabbi Schiff points out, our sources do speak here and there about immortality. We will manage to make minyanim a few times a day, even when our physical presence and our consciousness are not in the same place. We will ask the hard questions and answer them within the Jewish system, just as Jews have always done.

Rabbi Schiff lands in a somewhat reassuring place. Regarding the AI-infused future, he says, “No matter how animated, intelligent, responsive, or reliable our AI creations might become, AI will never attain the combination of qualities that will merit the status of being ‘created in the image’ [of God].

We can do this. We in the Conservative movement are especially well-placed to do this. We have been addressing cultural, societal, and technological change for a while, and we will help us all make this transition to whatever awaits us. I’m counting on that Ner Tamid to continue shining, to continue reminding us of the turbulence of our past, the constancy of our present, and the brightness of our future. Our unofficial historical slogan has been, “Tradition and change,” and I expect that we will continue to balance the two successfully.

In the Talmud (BT Avodah Zarah 2a), Rabbi Yehoshua ben Levi said, “All the good deeds Israel does in this world will bear testimony in Olam HaBa.” Perhaps Olam HaBa will not look quite like what R. Yehoshua ben Levi envisioned, seventeen centuries ago. But whatever form it takes, Jews will be there, still meditating over our words yomam valaila, day and night, and looking to the Ner Tamid as a reminder of past and future.

~

Rabbi Seth Adelson

(Originally delivered at Congregation Beth Shalom, Pittsburgh, PA, Shabbat morning, 3/4/2023.)

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
Sermons

Dreams of Your Future – Re’eh 5782

Some of you know that I was invited to throw out the ceremonial first pitch at the Pirates game against the Red Sox on Jewish Heritage Night at PNC Park on August 16th. I’m happy to say that I did not embarrass myself (or you). However, as I’m sure many of you know, it was a lackluster game – the Red Sox scored four runs in the first inning, and the Pirates never quite recovered.

You might have heard that at one point during the game, Dennis Eckersley, a color analyst for NESN, and hall-of-fame pitcher, described the Pirates’ team as “a hodgepodge of nothingness.”

However, I’m told that when the mic was off, he added, “They should send these guys to rabbinical school.”

***

It was almost two years ago to the day that we called my daughter Hannah to the Torah in this sanctuary, with barely a minyan in the room; everybody else was on Zoom. It was a fearful time, still the depths of the pandemic. We had at that point been in high-anxiety mode for less than half a year; vaccines were still many months away; the murder of George Floyd was still fresh in the American consciousness; anti-Semitic conspiracies were being spread by QAnon. I spoke on that day about facing the future without fear, quoting Rabbi Naḥman of Bratzlav’s most famous quotable: כל העולם כולו גשר צר מאוד, והעיקר לא לפחד כלל / Kol ha’olam kulo gesher tzar me’od. The whole world is a very narrow bridge, and the most important principle is not to fear at all.

On this day, on which my son was called to the Torah as a bar mitzvah, we are at least in some ways in a different place. Thank God! I am certainly grateful that Divinely-inspired human ingenuity has yielded vaccines which keep us safe. I am certainly grateful that our children have returned to school, that we can safely gather, that we can see one another again in person, if not entirely fearlessly, at least with somewhat reduced anxiety.

Parashat Re’eh, which Zev read from earlier, is, like the rest of Devarim / Deuteronomy, one long soliloquy by Moshe as his final act before he dies. It opens with, 

רְאֵ֗ה אָנֹכִ֛י נֹתֵ֥ן לִפְנֵיכֶ֖ם הַיּ֑וֹם בְּרָכָ֖ה וּקְלָלָֽה׃

See, this day I set before you blessing and curse.

That first word, the imperative רְאֵ֗ה / re’eh, is curious language. It literally means, “see,” from the common Hebrew verb, לראות “lir’ot,” but of course you cannot actually command a person to see. “Look!” or “Behold!” are appropriate imperatives. But “see” is not.

Rabbi Ovadiah Seforno, the 16th century physician and commentator from Italy, reads this as a suggestion regarding the importance of discernment:

ראה הביטה וראה שלא יהיה ענינך על אופן בינוני כמו שהוא המנהג ברוב

Pay good attention so that you will not be like most people who relate to everything half-heartedly, always trying to find middle ground.

You cannot merely look, says Seforno. Rather, you must see. Moshe is telling the Israelites, you have a choice, and it is a choice of extremes: blessing and curse. This is serious. Your discernment is essential. Don’t just have a glance at the future; read the trends now. Understand the consequences of your actions. Take corrective steps now if necessary. 

Now, you may not know this about Zev, but he is something of a seer. That is, he has very vivid dreams, and he likes to tell us about them, at great length, and with a level of detail which I cannot comprehend (I rarely remember dreams, and if I do, only fragments remain). And I must say, we have often been amused and impressed by the high resolution and, well, fantastic nature of Zev’s dreams.

As you know, our tradition takes dreams very seriously. They feature heavily in the tales of our ancestors, particularly those of Ya’aqov and Yosef, who are both dreamers; the Yosef narrative, in particular, turns on his ability to interpret dreams.

The Talmud (Berakhot 55b) actually suggests a certain prayer that should be said if you have a dream that you cannot understand:

הַאי מַאן דַּחֲזָא חֶלְמָא וְלָא יָדַע מַאי חֲזָא, לִיקוּם קַמֵּי כָּהֲנֵי בְּעִידָּנָא דְּפָרְסִי יְדַיְיהוּ וְלֵימָא הָכִי: ״רִבּוֹנוֹ שֶׁל עוֹלָם, אֲנִי שֶׁלָּךְ וַחֲלוֹמוֹתַי שֶׁלָּךְ, חֲלוֹם חָלַמְתִּי וְאֵינִי יוֹדֵעַ מַה הוּא. בֵּין שֶׁחָלַמְתִּי אֲנִי לְעַצְמִי וּבֵין שֶׁחָלְמוּ לִי חֲבֵירַי וּבֵין שֶׁחָלַמְתִּי עַל אֲחֵרִים, אִם טוֹבִים הֵם — חַזְּקֵם וְאַמְּצֵם כַּחֲלוֹמוֹתָיו שֶׁל יוֹסֵף. וְאִם צְרִיכִים רְפוּאָה — רְפָאֵם כְּמֵי מָרָה עַל יְדֵי מֹשֶׁה רַבֵּינוּ, וּכְמִרְיָם מִצָּרַעְתָּהּ, וּכְחִזְקִיָּה מֵחׇלְיוֹ, וּכְמֵי יְרִיחוֹ עַל יְדֵי אֱלִישָׁע. וּכְשֵׁם שֶׁהָפַכְתָּ קִלְלַת בִּלְעָם הָרָשָׁע לִבְרָכָה, כֵּן הֲפוֹךְ כׇּל חֲלוֹמוֹתַי עָלַי לְטוֹבָה״. וּמְסַיֵּים בַּהֲדֵי כָּהֲנֵי דְּעָנֵי צִבּוּרָא ״אָמֵן״ 

One who had a dream and does not know what he saw should stand before the priests when they lift their hands during the Priestly Blessing and say the following:

Master of the Universe, I am Yours and my dreams are Yours, I dreamed a dream and I do not know what it is. Whether I have dreamed of myself, whether my friends have dreamed of me or whether I have dreamed of others, if the dreams are good, strengthen them and reinforce them like the dreams of Yosef.

And if the dreams require healing, heal them like the bitter waters of Mara by Moshe Rabbeinu, Moses our teacher, and like Miriam from her leprosy … [and then there are a few more examples of healing from the Tanakh]

The gemara then goes on to add that if you cannot say that whole thing, you should say merely:

וְאִי לָא, לֵימָא הָכִי: ״אַדִּיר בַּמָּרוֹם, שׁוֹכֵן בִּגְבוּרָה, אַתָּה שָׁלוֹם וְשִׁמְךָ שָׁלוֹם. יְהִי רָצוֹן מִלְּפָנֶיךָ שֶׁתָּשִׂים עָלֵינוּ שָׁלוֹם״ 

Majestic One on high, Who dwells in power,
You are peace and Your name is peace.
May it be Your will that You bestow upon us peace.
That is, we should all see our dreams as entreaties to peace.

If we were to dream about our future right now, what would we see? If we pause for a moment to think seriously now about the blessings and curses which face us, what might our trend lines indicate?

Do we see a future in which people care about their neighbors, in which we understand that the only way we can successfully navigate the challenges that face our society is by working together for the common good?

Do we accept that it is our responsibility, as Zev read for us from the Torah this morning, to ensure that the needy people around us have food and shelter? כִּֽי־פָתֹ֧חַ תִּפְתַּ֛ח אֶת־יָדְךָ֖ ל֑וֹ וְהַעֲבֵט֙ תַּעֲבִיטֶ֔נּוּ דֵּ֚י מַחְסֹר֔וֹ אֲשֶׁ֥ר יֶחְסַ֖ר לֽוֹ׃. Rather, you must open your hand and lend whatever is sufficient to meet the need.

Do we see a world in which democracy continues to flourish and guarantee freedoms – freedom of speech, freedom of religion, of movement, of belief – for Americans and people around the world?

Do we see a future where all people have enough to eat? Where resources are equitably distributed? Where our wise use of God’s Creation leads not to environmental destruction, but rather to sustainability in holy partnership?

Do we see a world in which discrimination of all types is a thing of the past? In which nobody will feel targeted for their religion, their race, their gender? In which the anti-Semites have returned, cowering, to their holes of hatred?

Can we discern that the future will feature shared truths, or will we all be in our own individual “fact” bubbles, in which the only actual truth is the one that I alone perceive? Or will we acknowledge and maintain the reality that sometimes there are undebatable truths, which cannot be obscured with spin?

Do we see a future in which the digital tools we have created with our God-given ingenuity are used only for the betterment of humanity, and not to harm?

When I stand here, before all of you, before God, and most importantly before my son, who has been called to the Torah today in the context of his family and friends as a bar mitzvah, can I see a future for Zev in which all his dreams lead to peace?

We can create that future by seeing, and not merely looking.

By beholding the people around us. ALL the people around us, and particularly the ones with whom we disagree. By not treating everybody else like a faceless, personality-less other. By not lending ourselves to the tyranny of the majority, the minority, or any sort of orthodoxy. 

By understanding that the true curse of society comes when we look, but do not see. 

“Rabbi” Robert Zimmerman, the 20th century poet and philosopher from Minnesota, had something to say about looking vis-a-vis seeing:

How many times can a man look up, before he can see the sky?
Yes, and how many ears must one man have, before he can hear people cry?

And to echo another one of our 20th-century “rabbis,” “Rabbi” Martin Luther King, Jr., I too, have a dream today. I dream that the world that my son enters as an adult at this moment regains its ability to see, to discern blessing from curse, to understand the consequences of our actions. 

I dream that we do not merely look at the others in our midst, but see them. I dream that the peace of which the Talmud speaks, the peace we invoke at the conclusion of every Amidah, of nearly every recitation of the Qaddish in pleading Oseh Shalom bimromav – May the One who makes peace on high bring some peace to all of us down here on Earth – be fulfilled. I dream that that peace will become a reality, not just in Ukraine and Myanmar, in Yemen and Syria and Afghanistan, on the bullet-riddled streets of America and of course in Israel. 

And I dream further that we find peace in our own hearts, and in those of our neighbors; that we find a way out of the culture wars that continue to rattle us all; that we seek to understand and not merely revile those with whom we disagree.

And I give this dream to you, my son, as you enter Jewish adulthood and inherit this ancient framework of mitzvot. As you have shared with me your dreams, I share this one with you.

Do not merely look, or regard the future with indifference. Rather, you must see. And work toward reaching the fabled blessings of which our Torah speaks.

~

Rabbi Seth Adelson

(Originally delivered at Congregation Beth Shalom, Pittsburgh, PA, Shabbat morning, 8/27/2022.)

Categories
Sermons

On Being Imperfect – Emor 5781

I am feeling at least as much anxiety right now as I have throughout the pandemic, and that is despite the fact that I am fully vaccinated.

Why? Because it is easy to shut things down, and just say no to all forms of gathering in person. It is easy to say, you must always wear a mask when you are around other people, or stay 6 feet away from others, and so forth.

It is not quite as easy to make cautious decisions about restarting all the things that we stopped more than a year ago. It is not so easy to say, some may come and others may not, due to their vaccination status. It is not so easy to differentiate between what is permissible outdoors vs. indoors, etc. 

And we have all been in this anxious mode for so long, it is not so simple to turn it off. I went to see my optometrist this week, my first real in-person appointment with a health-care provider in more than a year. And despite the fact that I and the optometrist are both vaccinated, it was still very strange for us to be in a small room, so close to each other. We wore masks, of course. 

We are going to be in this limbo phase for a long time, it seems – until children can be vaccinated, until we know for certain that we are sufficiently protected from the more infectious or more deadly variants. I fear that, for many of us, our anxiety level will remain quite palpable for some time.

One of the lingering concerns that I have, after 13.5 months of isolation and anxiety and uncertainty, is what loss to the Jewish world and the Jewish future that the pandemic will have caused. We have not had in-person Youth Tefillah for all of that time. Registration at both our Early Learning Center and JJEP has been lower than a “normal” year. We have canceled two Family Benei Mitzvah Retreats. And so forth.

Students learning at JJEP, the shared religious school between Beth Shalom and Rodef Shalom

Now, as an astute observer of Jewish life commented on Facebook not too long ago, the Qadosh Barukh Hu is grading on a curve this year. Nonetheless, my feeling is that we have so few opportunities in today’s always-on-the-go society to get Judaism into our children, that a loss of so many things in the past year will have a long-lasting impact on what our kids know and how connected they feel.

These are valuable hours that will never be regained.

So that is a burden that I feel I am carrying with me, as I consider my tiny role in the chain of Jewish tradition. I am sure that you all have similar types of burdens, about your work, your family, your relationships, and so forth.

I must say that the pandemic has reminded me over and over how imperfect I am, how flawed all of our lives are. 

Which brings me to Parashat Emor, and what we read today about the Kohanim / priesthood. One of the things we read about this morning was perfection in the context of the ritual sacrifices that took place in the mishkan, and later in the Beit HaMiqdash / Temple in Jerusalem:

דַּבֵּ֥ר אֶֽל־אַהֲרֹ֖ן לֵאמֹ֑ר אִ֣ישׁ מִֽזַּרְעֲךָ֞ לְדֹרֹתָ֗ם אֲשֶׁ֨ר יִהְיֶ֥ה בוֹ֙ מ֔וּם לֹ֣א יִקְרַ֔ב לְהַקְרִ֖יב לֶ֥חֶם אֱ-לֹהָֽיו׃

Speak to Aaron and say: No man of your offspring throughout the ages who has a defect shall be qualified to offer the food of his God. (Vayiqra / Leviticus 21:17)

Not long after this statement about the perfection of the individual kohanim offering the sacrifices, we find:

כֹּ֛ל אֲשֶׁר־בּ֥וֹ מ֖וּם לֹ֣א תַקְרִ֑יבוּ כִּי־לֹ֥א לְרָצ֖וֹן יִהְיֶ֥ה לָכֶֽם׃

You shall not offer any [animal] that has a defect, for it will not be accepted in your favor. (Vayiqra / Leviticus 22:20)

The Torah insists that everything involved with the sacrificial offering is flawless: the kohen offering it, and the animal being offered. Of course, that expectation could not be put on the person actually bringing the sacrifice, whom, in many cases, would be bringing it because he or she had transgressed in some way.

And that expectation of perfection in ritual still plays out to some extent today. We expect that the person leading services does so fluently in Hebrew, and does not mis-pronounce words, and that this person is Jewishly observant Jew and a model citizen. We expect that the Torah is read perfectly, such that (at least, when we are doing so in person) we even have two people standing by to correct the reader in the event that she or he makes an error. And that is why we teach our children the language and the words and rituals of Jewish life, so that they can offer their own supplications and praise and requests and Torah in a way that comports with our tradition.

But, after a year of isolation, and grief, and economic and social chaos and upheaval, I occasionally feel that I am a broken vessel. I am flawed in ways that we are all flawed. Even as Congregation Beth Shalom goes from strength to strength despite the pandemic – anointing a solar roof, hiring a Development Director and a new Executive Director – I am feeling inadequate in the face of all the lost hours of Torah, the future of Judaism and the Jewish world slipping through our hands with every passing week of not gathering in person. 

I wake up in the middle of the night wondering, have I done enough to teach our tradition? Have I worked hard enough to help you all appreciate the value and meaning of Torah? Have I reached out to enough people to bring comfort and inspiration? Have I sufficiently grieved, or celebrated, or chanted or pleaded or inveighed for or against? Have I been the rabbi that you all need in this moment? Have I been the husband that I ought to be? Have I been the father that I ought to be? The son? The cousin? The friend?

Ladies and gentlemen, I can only offer myself. And I am far from perfect. And I am certain that many of us have similar doubts about ourselves. 

Fortunately, despite the strict imperative to perfection in Parashat Emor, there are other opinions on the Jewish bookshelf.

זִֽבְחֵ֣י אֱ-לֹהִים֮ ר֪וּחַ נִשְׁבָּ֫רָ֥ה לֵב־נִשְׁבָּ֥ר וְנִדְכֶּ֑ה אֱ֝-לֹהִ֗ים לֹ֣א תִבְזֶֽה׃

True sacrifice to God is a contrite spirit; God, You will not despise a contrite and crushed heart. (Tehillim / Psalm 51:19)

The Psalmist is teaching us that it is not only acceptable for us to be imperfect, but that is the absolutely the correct way to offer sacrifice to God. We offer ourselves, our imperfection of spirit in prayer, in meditation, in reflection. Furthermore, that line is just two verses after 

אֲ֭דֹנָי שְׂפָתַ֣י תִּפְתָּ֑ח וּ֝פִ֗י יַגִּ֥יד תְּהִלָּתֶֽךָ׃

O Lord, open my lips, and let my mouth declare Your praise. (Tehillim / Psalm 51:17)

You may recognize this as the line that is murmured in silence before the Amidah, as we take three steps forward (and three steps back first, if necessary) to enter the court of God in true, reflective prayer, prayer which is offered in earnest sacrifice of the soul on the metaphoric altar of awareness.

Rabbi Menahem Mendel of Kotzk, an early 19th-century Ḥasidic rabbi, in a statement that riffs on the line from Psalms, teaches us that, “There is nothing so whole as a broken heart.” It is this line that my teacher Rabbi Ed Feld drew on when he titled the siddur that some of us are holding right now, “Lev Shalem,” which literally means, “a full heart.” We enter tefillah with a broken heart, with the intent to make it complete again.

It is in fact the very intent of our tradition to offer ourselves in prayer, imperfect though we are, as dissatisfied with ourselves and our behavior as we are. 

That is the whole point.

A few years back, when I was on Long Island, a curious thing happened. In an effort to put out practical reading material in the synagogue lobby, I ordered a bunch of pamphlets from a Jewish publisher that were aimed at people who were having difficult times, emotionally and spiritually. The titles were things like, “Caring For Your Aging Parents,” “Bringing Your Sadness to God,” “Coping With the Death of a Spouse,” and so forth. You may have seen these – they are in many synagogue lobbies, and they are written from a Jewish perspective.

A former president of the synagogue, who had invested many, many years in helping to build and support the congregation, saw this and told me, “We cannot have these here. This is not us. This is not who we are.” 

What I think she was saying was, “We are not the kind of people who acknowledge our pain and grief in public. We are stronger than that.” Her knee-jerk reaction was to recoil from the idea that people could see and embrace their own vulnerability.

Being a young rabbi, a year or two out of rabbinical school, and lacking the hutzpah to respond properly, I said nothing. But the display of pamphlets stayed up, and people took them home and read them. Because actually, that is us.

We offer ourselves. And we are not perfect.

And as we look forward to the near future and anticipate that we will soon gather once again, remember that whatever burden you are carrying, whatever anxiety you might be feeling, whatever brokenness you might perceive in your life right now, you are not alone. We are all imperfect, and we are all in this together. That is what synagogue, and tefillah, and Torah are for.

~

Rabbi Seth Adelson

(Originally delivered at Congregation Beth Shalom, Pittsburgh, PA, Shabbat morning, 5/1/2021.)

Categories
Sermons

No Fear – Ki Tetze 5780

As I stand here today, filled with pride as my daughter was called to the Torah as a bat mitzvah, I cannot help but think about how, just a few weeks after you were born, we were at a Shabbat dinner at Temple Israel of Great Neck, and I was leading the song based on the words of Rabbi Nahman of Breslov, “Kol ha’olam kulo, gesher tzar me-od, veha’iqqar lo lefahed kelal.” The whole world is a narrow bridge, and the most essential thing is not to fear at all. She was so tiny; I was actually holding her in one hand.

Our lives are, in fact, moving forward along that narrow bridge. And nothing has reminded me of the precarious nature of human life more than the coronavirus pandemic, which has brought a new level of fear back into our day-to-day existence like no other experience in recent memory.

But you, Hannah, you hold the future in your hands, along with all your peers. And we will depend on you lo lefahed – not to be afraid. 

When Hannah and I sat down back in the winter to start working on her devar Torah, we reviewed the entirety of Parashat Ki Tetze, which she chanted this morning, we encountered the mitzvah, the holy opportunity, that is referred to in rabbinic literature as “shilluah haqen.” If you find a mother bird in a nest with her chicks, and you want to take the chicks as food, the Torah requires us to shoo away the mother bird, so she will not see you taking her chicks. If you perform this mitzvah, the Torah says, you will be rewarded with long life. 

I reminded Hannah that this is my favorite mitzvah. “I know, Abba,” she said.

So why is this my favorite mitzvah? Many of you know that I am a vegetarian, and I certainly do not go about looking for nests and chicks to eat. Rather, it is because the mitzvah of shilluah haqen speaks to so much of what we value as Jews.

First, it relates to a principle that Hannah spoke about earlier: that of tza’ar ba’alei hayyim, the prevention of cruelty to animals. We value the life of all of God’s creatures: maintain life, says the Torah, and you are rewarded with life. Compassion even for God’s smallest creatures is a reflection of the qedushah, holiness in the human spirit. 

Closely tied to that is the sense of wise use and respect for the resources that have been given to us. We do need to eat, and many people like to eat animals. So we can do that, provided that (a) we ensure that the mother bird lives to create more life, and (b) that she does not suffer the emotional stress of watching her children taken from her. 

And the third item is related to a story that the Talmud tells about this mitzvah. A character named Elishah ben Avuyah, who receives the finest rabbinic education from the best teachers of the ancient world, including Rabbi Akiva, loses his faith. He witnesses a young boy climbing up into a tree to get some chicks from a nest. The boy shoos away the mother bird, fulfilling the mitzvah of shilluah haqen, and then falls from the tree and dies. He does not receive the Torah’s promised reward of long life. Elishah’s entire theological framework falls apart. He becomes the most famous apostate in Jewish tradition, referred to often only as Aher, “the other,” because he othered himself.

What value comes from this story? Why did the rabbis include this and other tales of a famous apostate?

The value is that Elishah ben Avuyah is the outlier. That we can, in fact, maintain faith even in the face of evidence that shakes our understanding of the world. Despite what it says all over the Torah, we know that sometimes bad things happen to good people. And vice versa.  Jewish theology (and I am saying this in full acknowledgment that Rosh Hashanah is three weeks from today) is not so simplistic. 

Our tradition still holds a great appeal for many of us. Why? Because even though we often understand that literal readings of our text do not always hold up, nonetheless, this ancient framework, which we have upheld for a couple thousand years, is still quite valuable in nurturing and sustaining us. 

Hevreh, we are facing challenges unlike any seen before in my lifetime. The pandemic, of course. The resurgence of anti-Semitism, which yielded the bloodiest attack on a synagogue in American history, just a few blocks from where I stand. The ongoing scourge of racism, coded and overt.

And, thrown into the mix is the ability that bad actors possess today to spread falsehood so easily.

Many of you may have heard of QAnon for the first time in recent weeks. I am actually ashamed and embarrassed that this deliberate attempt to manipulate people with the most outrageous types of conspiratorial falsehoods has made it to this level of visibility. 

QAnon is an online conspiracy theory that claims that a cult of pedophiles is controlling our government; it also includes anti-Semitic accusations against “the Rothschilds” and of course, Hungarian Holocaust survivor and financier George Soros. A community of followers of QAnon has grown around the conspiracy, and soon a congressional district in Georgia will likely be represented by a woman who has publicly stated her support of the QAnon conspiracy. 

(BTW, a JTA article this week pointed out that two years ago she shared a video that indulges in the horrible anti-Semitic Great Replacement Theory, which posits that Jews are actively recruiting brown-skinned migrants to replace white people in Europe and North America; this is the idea that motivated David Bowers to attack the synagogue here in Pittsburgh.)

In a related vein, I am concerned that when a COVID-19 vaccine becomes available (bimherah beyameinu / speedily in our days), many people will not receive it due to misinformation. A recent poll indicated that 40% of Americans say they will not get the vaccine; some will refuse it because of their concerns around vaccine safety, which have been thoroughly debunked, and some are convinced that the coronavirus is just a hoax.

And, lest you think that online falsehoods are limited to a gullible American audience, you might be surprised to know that in the United Kingdom, people are attacking telecom workers who are putting up infrastructure for the new 5G data network, because manipulators online have convinced many that 5G technology actually causes COVID-19 sickness.

We the Jews know the dangers of the widespread dissemination of such falsehoods. The infamous Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a Russian forgery originally published in 1903 that supposedly documented the Jewish conspiracy for world domination, was a pretext for state-sponsored Russian pogroms. (It was later published by Henry Ford in the US, by the way.)

It was the falsehoods that Adolf Hitler published in Mein Kampf, and later screamed into a microphone, that enabled the Sho’ah, the Nazi Holocaust that murdered nearly a third of our people during World War II.

It’s easy to lose hope, like Elishah ben Avuyah. This is not the way the world is supposed to work. This is not what God promised us.

But I am going to remind us all that Elishah is an outlier. He succumbed to the fear that God is not with us. We must remember that the forces of lies and chaos have always been there, and it is up to us, to the righteous ones, not to lose faith, not to succumb.

The real value of our tradition is not the literal reward of “long life.” Rather, the real value of our tradition, as well as that of Christianity and Islam and really every other major religious tradition, is the essential behavioral values that are held up by our traditional texts for us to pursue:

  • The value of compassion, as exemplified by shilluah haqen.
  • The value of truth (Exodus 23:7):  מִדְּבַר־שֶׁ֖קֶר תִּרְחָ֑ק / Middevar sheqer tirhaq. Distance yourself from falsehood.
  • The value of humility (Isaiah 57:15, which appears in the haftarah on Yom Kippur morning) : מָר֥וֹם וְקָד֖וֹשׁ אֶשְׁכּ֑וֹן וְאֶת־דַּכָּא֙ וּשְׁפַל־ר֔וּחַ לְהַחֲיוֹת֙ ר֣וּחַ שְׁפָלִ֔ים וּֽלְהַחֲי֖וֹת לֵ֥ב נִדְכָּאִֽים׃

… I dwell on high, in holiness; Yet with the contrite and the humble — Reviving the spirits of the humble, Reviving the hearts of the contrite.

  • The value of community: Kol Yisra’el arevim zeh bazeh (Babylonian Talmud Sanhedrin 27b). All of us are guarantors for each other. We are interdependent, and we must behave as such. And that goes not only for our Jewish neighbors, but for all of them.
  • The value of freedom, and we have a whole 8-day holiday dedicated to that (Pesah): the responsibility not only to protect our own safety and freedom, but to guarantee those things for others. 
  • The value of tzedakah / charitable giving, for which the Talmud tells us that there is no limit.

And so forth. You know, some people might criticize religious practice as arcane at best, and irrelevant or potentially dangerous at worst. You might have heard people say that all wars have been caused by religion, etc.

But I’ll tell you this: if we follow it, if we commit ourselves to performing the mitzvot, our tradition drives us to be better people. Religious practice, and Jewish practice in particular, living Jewish values, will help create a better world, one marked by the “long life” of which the Torah speaks. And if we lose our faith to the forces of lies and chaos, the world will descend into an unholy pit, from which humanity may never emerge.

So I turn to my daughter Hannah on this day, and implore you thus:

The world that we need you and your peers to create is the one that is hopeful, not hopeless. That is filled with compassion; in which we act with humility; in which we strive for truth and justice in all our dealings; in which we always remember that our essential task in life is to remember the qedushah, the holiness of the other, and act on the Divine imperative to raise the total amount of holiness in this world. 

והעיקר לא לפחד כלל

Veha’iqqar lo lefahed kelal. And the most essential thing is not to fear at all. Now build that world.

~

Rabbi Seth Adelson

(Originally delivered at Congregation Beth Shalom, Pittsburgh, PA, Shabbat morning, 8/29/2020.)

Categories
Sermons

The World is Burning – Re’eh 5778

I mentioned last week that I was out west two weeks ago. My son and I, along with my brother and my nephew, took an epic road trip that began in Phoenix. We spent Shabbat in Grand Canyon National Park, then moved on to Arches NP, Dinosaur NP (which has a Pittsburgh connection, by the way: it was initially excavated by Earl Douglass of the Carnegie Museum beginning in 1909; several of the dinosaur skeletons unearthed there are located in PGH at the museum); Devil’s Tower NP; and ending at Mt. Rushmore, with a few other destinations along the way. It was a long drive and a lot of fabulous locations to squeeze into a week, but it was my first trip out west (excluding California), and the scenery was almost overwhelmingly beautiful. The mountains, the rivers, the cliffs, the arches, the prairies, the unusual rock formations, the spacious skies, the amber waves of grain, etc.

Devil's Tower

It’s almost impossible to believe or understand how you can drive 90 miles between two intersections and not see a single home or store or even gas station, and barely any other cars on the road. There is a lot of space out there. And, given that we spent most of the time without wifi or mobile phone service, it was easy to forget about the world, to not be reminded of the Russia investigation, or the burning kites released into Israel from Gaza, or the anniversary of Charlottesville.

Except that there was one thing that we could not get away from, something lurking in the background pretty much wherever we went. Lurking in the background is this:

The world is on fire.

On the South Rim of the Grand Canyon, you can clearly see on the North Rim three wildfires. (Smoke by day, actual fire by night.) At several points along the trip, in Arizona, in Utah, and in Colorado, we saw signs and smelled the smoke of wildfires.

Smoke in Grand Canyon
The Adelson boys in the Grand Canyon. Smoke from wildfires can be seen over my left shoulder.

You may be aware that the currently-burning Mendocino Complex Fire is the largest ever recorded in California, having destroyed over 300,000 acres; another current fire, the Carr Fire, has killed 8 people and destroyed over 1,000 homes.

And it’s not just the American West. There are currently 1200 firefighters and 19 aircraft battling wildfires in southern Portugal. Wildfires in Sweden (!) destroyed 61,000 acres of forests in July. A wildfire in Greece killed 90 people in the last couple of weeks. There is an epic heat wave in Europe, such that the cattle who graze in the Swiss Alps are parched – helicopters are airlifting water to them. Sweden’s highest peak, the Kebnekaise glacier, actually dropped into second place because the heat melted the glacier, and it is now 13 feet shorter. There is a severe drought in Australia as well.

Ladies and gentlemen, the world is burning up.

Now, of course we cannot attribute any particular weather event to climate change; please remember that climate is not equal to weather. But when we consider that 7 of the 12 most destructive fires in California’s history have occurred in the last three years; when we consider that we are now losing polar ice at a rapid rate; when some climate scientists are concerned that we have already passed a global “tipping point,” beyond which we may never return to where we were, we have to ask ourselves, where are we headed? If we extrapolate this line, what will our future be?

And, as Jews, we must ask ourselves, what can we do right now to change the outcome?

Up front in Parashat Re’eh, right at the very beginning, is one of the clearest statements of the Torah’s understanding of theology (Devarim / Deuteronomy 11:26):

רְאֵה, אָנֹכִי נֹתֵן לִפְנֵיכֶם הַיּוֹם בְּרָכָה וּקְלָלָה

Re’eh anokhi noten lifneikhem hayom berakhah ukelalah.

See, this day I set before you blessing and curse.

Look, says God, I have put before you today blessing and curse. If you follow My mitzvot, you’ll get the blessings. If you don’t, you’ll get the curses.

It’s very simple. Black and white. You do X, you get Y. If you don’t do X, you don’t get Y. That is also the theology described in the second paragraph of the Shema, and in many other places in the Torah.

However, that is not actually the theology that we hold by, we who live in 21st-century America. We know that God is more complicated than that. And that’s not a contemporary re-reading; even the rabbis of the Talmud (Bavli Berakhot 7a) observe that God does not seem to work like this. And I am grateful for all of the modern Jewish philosophers (Buber, Heschel, Kaplan, Gillman, etc.) who have enabled us to understand God differently.

But there is also something powerful here, embedded in this binary theological formula that cannot be ignored: that we still have to strive for blessings, and we have within our hands, at least in some cases, the potential to earn those blessings. We also have the potential to create curses. In endowing us with free will, God puts before us the power to create our own blessings and curses.

None of the classical commentators picks up on this, but note the presence of the word “hayom” (“today”) in that verse. Look, says God, I have put before you TODAY a blessing and a curse.

It is up to us today to make the choice. And every day we make these choices. Today is not just today; it is yesterday and tomorrow. In every moment, we can fashion the future.

So how do we maintain the blessing? How do we choose the good? How do we honor God’s Creation and make sure that it is there for generations to come? How do we ensure that we do not turn Scandinavia into a desert and drown Bangladesh?

It is that we make the choice today. And not just us, in this room, but all of us. The entire world.

Here is why the challenge of climate change is so hard for us to solve: we all have to cooperate to make it happen.

The reason that we are all here, ladies and gentlemen, gathered together in this building, in a city in North America, is because of the most salient ability of Homo sapiens: the ability to share ideas. Were it not for this remarkable talent, humans would never have passed the stage of nomadic hunter-gatherers. It was this intellectual revolution that enabled agriculture, trade, money, religion, nation-states, human rights, universities, the space program, etc., etc.

And you know what? As individuals, we can all spend all of our energies trying to minimize our carbon footprints, offsetting our transportation by planting trees, and so forth. We can stop eating meat. We can reduce, reuse, recycle all day long. But this will accomplish virtually nothing with respect to climate change – not compared to the 100 million barrels per day of crude oil that the world consumes.

The polar ice caps will continue to melt until every single government in the world commits to some serious legislation that will lessen the amount of greenhouse gases that we are pouring into the atmosphere. That was exactly the point of the Paris Climate Accords, through which the 196 signatories pledged to ensure that total global warming is limited to 2 degrees Celsius. (We are already halfway there.) It’s not enough of a limit according to scientists, but it is something.

Now, I know that there are always those among us for whom government is perceived to be the problem, rather than the solution. To you I offer a challenge: How can the private sector alone solve this problem? Is this something that the free market can solve? If so, I would like to hear those ideas.

Failing some other solution, I think that the only thing we can do is to implore our elected officials to push for legislation. The United States produces 15% of the world’s greenhouse gases; China produces 25%. Changing that will be hard.

But as California burns, I think we have to ask ourselves, can we afford not to do so?

Yesterday morning, I heard an interview with Pastor Ira Acree, who leads a Christian congregation on the west side of Chicago. He was speaking with an NPR reporter about violence in Chicago. The reporter noted that last weekend was especially bloody: 70 people were wounded in gun violence, 11 died. Toward the end of the interview, he quoted Proverbs 29:18:

בְּאֵין חָזוֹן, יִפָּרַע עָם

Where there is no vision, the people perish (KJV)

About half of the population of the world lives within 120 miles of a coast. Without a vision for reining in our production of greenhouse gases, many, many people will die, and for the rest, life will be unimaginably transfigured.

Re’eh anokhi noten lifneikhem hayom.

I put this before you today. Now is the time to act for blessings. Now is the time for vision.

Shabbat shalom.

 

~

Rabbi Seth Adelson

(Originally delivered at Congregation Beth Shalom, Shabbat morning, 8/11/2018.)