Tag: Honeymoon Israel

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Sermons

Rethinking Na’aseh veNishma: First Connect, Then Teach – Yitro 5780

Last week in this space, I spoke about my trip in January with Honeymoon Israel, a program which seeks to reach the least-connected Jews by providing a heavily-subsidized trip to Israel for couples in their first five years of marriage. The program is not about Israel, per se, but uses the visit to Israel primarily as a backdrop to discuss issues of Jewish peoplehood. I spoke also about a featured presenter on the trip, renowned Jewish educator Avraham Infeld, and discussed his framework of the “Five-Legged Table” of the supporting pillars of Jewish peoplehood. Those “legs” are:

  • Memory
  • Family
  • Mt. Sinai
  • Israel
  • Hebrew

What is at least initially missing from this list is an acknowledgment that , historically speaking, an essential statement of what it means to be a part of the Jewish people is the covenant of mitzvot, the opportunities for holiness that are the central framework of Jewish living and our relationship to God.

Framing that in the form of a question: Isn’t our responsibility as Conservative Jews, as those committed to halakhah / Jewish law and to conserving Jewish tradition, to teach Judaism as a religious tradition? How can we define membership in the Jewish people without the classical religious content?

You might say that the “Mt. Sinai” leg of Infeld’s table includes that. That is, when the Israelites stood at Sinai to receive the Torah, as we did symbolically today, and then they say, “Na’aseh venishma,” we will do and we will seek to understand (Ex. 24:7), that they were effectively saying that membership in the Jewish people mandates performance of the mitzvot first. That is, ours is a religious tradition, based on fulfilling the specific behaviors commanded by God. And there are certainly Jewish communities in which everybody is expected to toe the line, halakhically. Through much of our history, we have had a bit of a judgy streak – in the shtetl, to live among the Jews meant to live as Jews do, and if you did not, you were a threat to the fabric of Jewish society. In the Old World, keeping the mitzvot was also about personal security – you were safe with the Jews if you kept our ways. God and the community would protect you.

Avraham Infeld bellowed at the Honeymoon Israel participants that Judaism is not a religion, but a people. A family, as he puts it. He spoke of his own father, who was a proud atheist, but a committed Jew nonetheless. Some members of our Jewish family put on tefillin every morning. Some refrain from eating pork, but see no problem with ordering steak in non-kosher establishments. Some proudly walk down Murray Ave. on Yom Kippur eating bacon double-cheeseburgers. But all are Jews.

While I place myself firmly in the tefillin-every-morning crowd (and I of course want you all to join me there, when you are ready, of course, with a special invitation to those of us who identify as women), I certainly want us all to continue to be included in, and proudly identify as Jews, regardless of our relationship to the mitzvot.

From the World Wide Wrap at JJEP, February 2020

But there are many Jews for whom the very idea of identification with the Jewish community is fraught. There are many of us who have been turned away by our community. There are many who have felt judged, who have been subjected to intolerance, who were made to feel not welcome for various reasons. 

We have pushed people away. Yes, it’s true that some wandered off by themselves, uninspired, uninterested. But many were turned off by the very people who wanted them to stay, by those of us who insisted on drawing hard lines about who is in and who is out, about what was acceptable behavior for a Jew and what was unacceptable. 

Our role, as Conservative Jews in the vibrant center of the Jewish world is to build bridges. To build a bridge from peoplehood to religion and vice versa; to build a bridge from non-engagement to engagement; to connect Jews from different backgrounds and practices to one another. We inhabit a Jewish environment that can be secular and religious; where doubt can live alongside faith; where an academic Torah-as-human-literature can sidle up to Torah-as-history and not be rebuffed. 

When we say, as Rosh Hashanah begins, “Shalom, shalom, larahoq velaqarov, amar Adonai. (Isaiah 57:19),” we mean it. “Greetings, greetings to those who are far and those who are near, says God.” We have to be open to all who are close, and all those who place themselves beyond the outskirts of our community.

My work as a rabbi is to teach Judaism, to connect you, and everybody else, with the lessons of our text, our history, our culture, our rituals. And there are some who think that rabbis should teach to the top, to those who are committed, to the members of our community who are already steeped in Torah, who have already drunk the Talmudic Kool-Aid.

There is a time and a place for that. But whenever I can, I am also going to teach to the uninitiated, to invite in the ones who are she-einam yode’im lish’ol, who do not yet know how to ask. Because those are the people we need to reach.

So how do we do this?

It is easy for us to keep doing what we are doing, and not worry too much about the rest of the Jewish world, to assume that everybody knows what to do when they walk into a synagogue, to assume that our customs and wisdom, and indeed the supreme value of what we do are obvious to all. But they are not. I know this because I hear it all the time: it’s not so easy to enter Beth Shalom if you do not know where the door is, figuratively speaking.

So how do we invite in Jewish and Jewish-adjacent folks while not scaring them off with our commitment to tradition? Although we know that our approach to tradition is decidedly modern, egalitarian, and inclusive, often those who are unaffiliated or who have been turned off by other Jews and Judaism in the past may not see that. How do we welcome them into our community in such a way that they stay?

And the answer is as follows: First connect, then teach.

And this is, you might say, orthogonal to the principle of “Na’aseh venishma,” we will do first, and then we will understand, which has been so essential to Jewish life for our entire history. The traditional model of teaching Jewish religious practice is to teach the mitzvah, the behavior first, with the intent that the understanding will follow.

But for many today, there has to be a preliminary step, and that step is connection. That is the Mt. Sinai moment. That is where God speaks to each of the individuals standing at Mt. Sinai. Anokhi Adonai Elohekha. “I am the Lord your God.” It’s the first Commandment of the Top Ten. And the “your” is singular! The first commandment is about individual relationship.

It is only after this relationship is established that the doing and the understanding can begin.

(Yes, I know that this image from the Sistine Chapel is God and Adam. But it is also a perfect image for the Sinai moment.)

First connect, then teach. The connection must precede Na’aseh venishma. That’s the element of Jewish peoplehood, of family, of Mt. Sinai.

Ladies and gentlemen, we are not going to compromise on the mitzvot part of the equation; we will uphold our standards of Jewish practice. What goes on at Beth Shalom will always be kosher, shomer Shabbat, and so forth.

But we also have to take the first commandment seriously, and read it as, “You’re a part of my family.” Whatever you may have experienced in the past, whether you were turned off by Jewish religious practice or felt judged for your choices or your parents denied you a Jewish education or whatever, you are welcome as a part of our family.

And, to go a step further, I want those who are Jewish-adjacent, i.e. not privileged to have been born Jewish or yet joined the Jewish people, but having the hutzpah to have married a Jew, to think of themselves as a part of our family as well.

A brief coda: I received an email this past week from one of the Honeymoon Israel participants that really made my week, a person who is married to somebody who is not Jewish, who had bad experiences with rabbis and Jewish organizations. And this person expressed gratitude for having been welcomed back, for feeling for the first time like one of the tribe. And I would now not be surprised to see this person cross my orbit again, this time open to learn, open to the idea of belonging, open to the idea of na’aseh venishma. 

First connect, then teach. Remember that when you are in the building, and as you saunter out as an ambassador for the type of Judaism we live.

~

Rabbi Seth Adelson

(Originally delivered at Congregation Beth Shalom, Pittsburgh, PA, Shabbat morning, 2/15/2020.)

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Sermons

Honeymoon Israel and Jewish Peoplehood – Beshallah/Shabbat Shirah 5780

Many of you know that I travel to Israel frequently – I have a relationship with Israel that stretches back to the summer of 1987, when I spent eight weeks there at the Alexander Muss High School in Israel program. Since then, I have returned so many times that I have lost count – somewhere between 30 and 40 trips, and of course I lived there for a year and a half during the central portion of my journey from engineering to the rabbinate.

On this trip, I must say that I did something which I consider profoundly Zionist: I went skiing.

My son and I on one of the Hermon chairlifts

I have actually been thinking about doing this for years. Mt. Hermon, which hosts the only alpine environment in the Middle East, is located at the very top of the Golan Heights, and while most of the mountain is divided between Syria and Lebanon, a sliver is contained within the Israeli section of the Golan Heights. Israel conquered the Golan Heights during the Six-Day War in 1967, and officially annexed the area in 1981, and so far only the United States recognizes Israel’s sovereignty there. 

Not long after the Six-Day War, Israeli entrepreneurs beheld the huge amounts of snow that are present for a few weeks every winter, and saw an opportunity. On the day that my son and I were there, there were hundreds of people skiing, and many hundreds more who were sledding, riding the alpine slide, playing in the snow, and taking the gondola to the foggy summit. (The skiing, BTW, was awesome!)

Now as with anything in Israel, there are political ramifications to everything. The businesses on and surrounding Mt. Hermon provides jobs for the Druze residents of the city of Majdal Shams, whose officials publicly state their loyalty to Syria, although it is clear that many of them would much rather be in Israel than in Syria. Should there someday be a peace agreement with Syria, there is a significant chance that the Golan Heights, and the ski area and the Golan Heights Druze with it, will return to Syria, so at least officially they profess their loyalty to the Syrian government. 

Meanwhile, Israelis flock to enjoy a little taste of the Alps in their backyard. At the end of a day of skiing, we were stuck in a VERY Zionist traffic jam as everybody headed down the mountain on the windy road toward Majdal Shams.

I also did something that was not quite as Zionist, in the sense that it was pro-Diaspora, and that was to be the rabbi on the second Pittsburgh cohort of Honeymoon Israel.

You might make the case that HMI is not particularly Zionist, because Israel is really only a backdrop, a set on which to give 20 young couples from Pittsburgh, all within five years of marriage and/or partnership, the opportunity to create a micro-community that will ideally thrive back in their hometown. Every HMI trip is city-based, and each busload of 20 couples from the same city is accompanied by an engagement professional from the local Federation (in our case, Karen Podorefsky from the Young Adult Division), an Israeli tour guide, and a rabbi. The goal, different from Birthright, for example, is not to connect American Jews with Israel, but to use Israel as a pretext to discuss issues surrounding Jewish peoplehood. 

The January 2020 Pittsburgh cohort of Honeymoon Israel at Caesarea

It is actually a brilliant idea, one that emerged primarily from the Pew Research Center’s study on American Jews published in 2013, to which you may have heard me refer from time to time. One of the most important pieces of info which emerged from this study is that there is a growing group of Jews who consider themselves proudly Jewish, but are utterly disconnected from Judaism as a religion. That may not bode well for synagogues, but the creators of HMI see this as an opportunity: how to help this segment of self-identified Jews, and in some cases their non-Jewish partners create community? Furthermore, given the fragmented nature of today’s Jewish world, how do we continue to connect Jews to each other, whether through traditional Jewish activities or otherwise?

On a Tel Aviv graffiti and food tour

This aligns very much with what we are trying to do at Beth Shalom: the very point of Derekh is to provide portals, inviting doorways into Jewish life and community. A synagogue is first and foremost a beit keneset, a Jewish place of gathering, even over and above its role as a beit tefillah and a beit midrash (place of prayer and learning). As such, we need to be a center of Jewish life that invites everybody in, and this has been a focus of my rabbinate since I arrived here four-and-a-half years ago. And that is why, when the opportunity came up to be the rabbi on this trip, I jumped at the chance.

So we spent eight-and-a-half days on the ground in Israel, hitting some tourist highlights, of course, but also allowing plenty of free time for couples to enjoy themselves in cosmopolitan Israel (Since this trip is billed as a honeymoon, one goal is not to subject the participants to a jam-packed schedule of lectures and archaeological sites). There was also time built into the trip for discussions about engaging with Jewish life and connection with the rabbi: services on the two Friday evenings, havdalah, and a few discussions and spontaneous Q&A sessions and group processing.

One of the highlights of the trip was a lecture on Jewish peoplehood by Avraham Infeld, the renowned Jewish educator and former president of Hillel International. Mr. Infeld spoke, or, rather, bellowed, about Jewish peoplehood as seen through the lens of what he refers to as a “Five-Legged Table.” The “legs” of the table are as follows:

  • Memory
  • Family
  • Mt. Sinai
  • Israel
  • Hebrew

Memory: The idea that what connects us to each other as Jews is a shared story. Not history, per se, although that is certainly part of the story. But it is our collective memory of being enslaved in Egypt, for example, that drives us not only to the seder table on Pesah, but also to remember our duty to work toward a world in which nobody is enslaved or oppressed. (You might consider how we rose this morning to chant responsively as we read from the Torah Shirat HaYam, the Song of the Sea, as a prime example of living Jewish memory. We continue to express gratitude for our redemption from Egypt every single day of the year by reciting Shirat HaYam as a part of every day’s morning service.)

Family: We are united by the sense of the Jewish people as being one big, inclusive family. And that means not only people who have roots in the Eastern European shtetl, but also those whose grandparents were traders in the souq of Baghdad, those who were flown from Ethiopia to Israel in Operation Solomon in 1991, and even those who were not born Jewish, but, as Infeld put it, had the hutzpah to fall in love with a Jewish person. “You’re a member of my family,” said Avraham Infeld. “and you’re stuck with me.”

Mt. Sinai: We were together at Mt. Sinai, where we received the Torah as a people from God. Whether you follow the mitzvot / holy opportunities of the Torah to the tiniest detail or you reject them, whether you understand God in traditional terms or reject the idea entirely, the Mt. Sinai moment is still ours, the nexus of Jewish memory, and an essential piece of what it means to be Jewish.

Israel: When we recited the Shaharit / the morning service earlier, we recited “Mashiv haruah umorid hagashem” – God makes the wind blow and the rain fall. We prayed for rain, but not here: Jews all over the world pray for rain in the Land of Israel. (On that front, I have good news: while we were there, it rained almost every day!) Our prayer, our rituals, our texts, and our memory continue to connect us back to that land. Meanwhile, the contemporary State of Israel is an undeniably essential feature of today’s Jewish landscape. While not perfect by anybody’s standard, Israel is here to stay and wherever you are in the Jewish world, you cannot discount the outsize role that Israel, the land and the state, plays in world Jewry.

Masada

Hebrew: Our people has a language, and that language is Hebrew. Yiddish, Ladino, Judeo-Persian, Judeo-Pittsburghese and so forth are all Jewish languages, but all of them draw on the one language that we all share, the language of the Torah. There is a reason that Eliezer Ben-Yehudah revived Hebrew to make it the spoken language of Israel, and that is that it unites us all as Jews.

These are the things that we share, the essential building blocks of Jewish peoplehood. Infeld believes that if you relate to at least three of them, you feel connected to the Jewish people; as you may know, a table with three legs can stand, but one with two cannot.

Honeymoon Israel’s goal is to connect its participants with at least a few of these legs, and to build on the stability of that table to welcome more Jews into, and perhaps indeed back into the Jewish community. Am Yisrael hai: the people of Israel lives. And I am certain that it is doing that; at this point over 2000 couples have participated in the program; HMI’s statistics report that 85% of participants feel a “new sense of belonging to the Jewish community and connection to Israel” following the trip.

Tzfat

So you might be wondering now, “OK, Rabbi, so this all sounds great, except for one thing: you’re a rabbi, and your job is to teach Judaism according to the traditional view of Judaism as a religion, right?”

Well, yes and no. Religion and peoplehood cannot easily be separated. And I am going to speak about that next week, when we act on the memory of the Sinai moment in Parashat Yitro. So I am concluding today with a sort of cliffhanger: Come back next week to find out why now is the time to reach out to the least connected Jews, and how we should do that.

Work by Israeli graffiti artist Michal Rosen in Nahalat Binyamin, Tel Aviv

~

Rabbi Seth Adelson

(Originally delivered at Congregation Beth Shalom, Pittsburgh, PA, Shabbat morning, 2/8/2020.)

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High Holidays Sermons

שאינו יודע לשאול: The Child Who Does Not Know How to Ask is the Future – Yom Kippur Day, 5778

Before reading this sermon, you might want to check out the first three in the series:

Rosh Hashanah 5778, Day 1: The Wise Child Sees Past, Present, and Future

Rosh Hashanah 5778, Day 2: The Wicked Child Sees Only the Present

Kol Nidrei 5778: The Simple Child Sees Only the Past

arba'ah banim

***

Today, we take a look at the שאינו יודע לשאול / she’eino yodea lish’ol, the Child Who Does Not Know How to Ask. That child is our future.

I hosted my first Pesah seder when I was a sophomore in college. I wasn’t able to go home for sedarim that year, so I figured I would do it myself in my co-operative house at Cornell, where I lived. So, figuring I had to make it somewhat traditional, I got from my mother instructions on how to make certain Jewish foods. Tzimmes. Matzah-ball soup. And, although I was effectively vegetarian at that point, I learned how to cook a chicken for my friends.

The next time I hosted my own seder, I did it my way: fully vegetarian. No tzimmes. No matzah-ball soup. (Maybe there was gefilte fish.) I roasted a beet instead of a shank bone to put on the seder plate. My mother was shocked.

The Passover Seder Plate and New Traditions | The Kitchn

Our expression of Judaism has never ceased to change. Customs come and go. Musical tastes and styles change. What they consider traditional Jewish foods among the Persian Jews, for example, is quite different from what they ate in Poland on Rosh Hashanah, and that has everything to do with geographical separation of these communities, and the changes that took place within each.

And, as I have emphasized over these holidays, we are living in a time of great change here in the New World. So great, in fact, that many of us who are intimately tied to traditional Jewish institutions have not even figured out that it’s going on.

Perhaps the greatest challenge in the Jewish world is reaching the growing number of Jews who are not connected to Jewish life or institutions. We all want to do this – Orthodox, Reform, Reconstructionist, Conservative, Federations – but nobody really knows how. Chabad does it by bringing some Jewish rituals into the public square. We in the non-Orthodox world tend to reach out by putting together great programs and hoping that people show up. (We at Beth Shalom are trying to change this model with Derekh, our new programming area with five entry portals.) But we all want the disaffected Jews to find their way in.

Consider also that Jewish North America is quite different than it used to be.

  • Roughly 60% of Jews who have married in the last two decades have married somebody who is not Jewish;
  • We are no longer exclusively white and Ashkenazi (although of course calling Jews “white” is problematic);
  • We no longer have the expectation that a Jewish household consists of one woman, one man, and a couple of children;

Furthermore, Judaism is attracting new members – not those who wish to convert for marriage, but people also genuinely motivated by the appeal of our rich, ancient tradition. And not only that, but many of those of us who grew up with two Jewish parents and had a Jewish education are uncomfortable in traditional Jewish environments because we don’t know Hebrew, we haven’t learned Talmud, we can’t speed through the Amidah like the old-timers seem to do, or we simply find Jewish rituals baffling.

In short, we have many Jews and people married to Jews who are part of the community, but have not found their way in.

I heard about a new program recently, called Honeymoon Israel, which has come up with a new way of reaching out. The program was founded by Mike Wise, who was at one time the head of the Jewish Federation of Buffalo. He was in Pittsburgh back in the spring to discuss launching a cohort of Honeymoon Israel here. Let me explain how it works:

Basically, it’s a week-long trip to Israel at a heavily subsidized price (I think it’s $1800 per couple) for couples aged 25-40 that are within their first five years of marriage (or commitment – marriage is not actually required). At least one partner must be Jewish, and at least one partner must not have been on an organized trip to Israel (e.g. Birthright). Among the organizers’ stated goals are the following (from their website):

  • We particularly welcome participants of diverse backgrounds, including interfaith couples and LGBTQ couples.
  • One of our goals is to create a fulfilling, welcoming experience for people without strong Jewish connections. There are no rules about how “Jewish” you need to be to participate.

Most importantly, each of the trips builds a cohort from a particular metropolitan area. Thus, if you are from Denver, you will be traveling to Israel with 19 other couples from Denver. Same for New York, Atlanta, DC, and, as of next spring, Pittsburgh. That is an essential part of the experience, because when these couples return to their home cities, they have an instant cohort of other Jews with whom to gather for Shabbat dinner or a Passover seder. They have an entree into community.

You see, the goal of the trip is not necessarily connection to Israel, per se, but rather connection to Jews and Jewish life. Israel may be the destination, but this is more about the journey – the Jewish journey after their return. In fact, each couple is screened (there is a waiting list, particularly in the larger cities) and the ones with WEAKER Jewish connections are actually more likely to be selected for the trip. That pretty much guarantees a greater bang for the investors’ buck – reaching deeper into the ranks of disconnected young Jews and giving them a better chance to connect them.

So here is the fascinating part: the demographics of the 2000 or so who have participated include about 70% interfaith couples, and among the remaining 30% about half include a partner who converted to Judaism. About 9% are same-sex couples. As you may imagine, the participants run the gamut of ethnic, racial, and religious backgrounds. This is an honest portrait of Jewish America. As such, the trip organizers work very hard to make sure that the language is inclusive, that there is no apparent agenda in terms of conversion or other religious pressure.

Now, there are some among you who are clearly thinking right now, “But rabbi, how can this possibly be a Jewish trip if (א) they are not requiring participants to put on tefillin every day and (ב) a third or more of the participants are not even Jewish?”

The early 20th-century German Jewish philosopher Franz Rosenzweig, raised a secular Jew, was on the verge of becoming Christian to further his academic career, but gave traditional Judaism a final shot before taking the plunge. He quickly discovered the richness of our tradition, and went on to write one of the best-known works of contemporary Jewish philosophy, The Star of Redemption, and to establish the Lehrhaus, the contemporary House of Jewish Learning, in Frankfurt. When asked later in life if he was putting on tefillin every day, his answer was, “Not yet.”

Franz Rosenzweig - Wikipedia
Franz Rosenzweig

Let me tell you this, ladies and gentlemen. Yes, we in the Conservative movement accept the traditional idea that halakhah / Jewish law applies to us, that Shabbat and kashrut/dietary laws and daily tefillah / prayer are an essential part of what we do as Jews.

But the approach to take when welcoming marginally-connected folks into the fold should be, “Not yet.” Don’t hit them over the head with dietary restrictions, with shutting down for Shabbat, with diving into Rashi and Rambam.

Rather, we should welcome them by building a network of other Jewish people with whom they can dip their toes in the water. But we need to warmly invite them in rather than push them away by setting the bar too high. We cannot make them feel inadequate for not knowing Hebrew or what Shemini Atzeret is. (Heck, I don’t really know what Shemini Atzeret is!)

Our goal, as contemporary Jews and people who appreciate the value of our tradition, is to open the doors. Just throw ‘em wide open and say, “Come on in! We value you. We want you as a part of our community. We don’t judge you for your sexuality or if your partner is not Jewish. Bring them along!”

Unfortunately, ladies and gentlemen, here is an area where we need to do a little bit of teshuvah. We have been judgmental. I am aware of a number of instances where people who do not match the expectations of others have been told unfriendly things. The tough ones are those who stuck around despite the judginess. The not-so-tough ones probably never came back.

Ladies and gentlemen, we cannot afford to turn our backs on anyone who walks into a synagogue, who seeks to connect with Jewish tradition. Yes, we still have an obligation to halakhah, to Jewish law. But nobody will learn this if they are turned away at the door or made to feel unwelcome.

One thing that Mike Wise mentioned is that in their interviews with potential couples for Honeymoon Israel, there were a lot of tears; many stories of rejection.

But the outcomes have been positive. Honeymoon Israel continues to track their participants afterwards, and have found overall greater levels of engagement with Jewish life, and a greater sense of shared involvement in Jewish life, even when one partner is not Jewish.

We are a synagogue – beit kenesset. A place of gathering. And we should strive to make sure that all are welcome here.

20160620_095719_resized

And for those of you who may be wondering, “But Rabbi, doesn’t the future of Judaism depend on making sure that our children only marry Jews?” I would respond by saying, “Actually, the future of Judaism depends on making sure that all who enter into our synagogues understand the richness of our tradition. The future of Judaism depends on sharing our wisdom and values with the world. The future of Judaism depends on offering a deep sense of connection and spirituality. The future of Judaism depends on supporting each other as a community. Perhaps most importantly, the future of Judaism depends on imparting all of this to our Jewish children and grandchildren. And if some non-Jewish partners get swept up in our enthusiasm for these things, then that is simply wonderful.”

Now of course we are still bound by halakhah, Jewish law in the Conservative movement, but I’ll tell you this: in 5777 I welcomed 15 new Jews into our berit, our covenant. Six of them were women married to Jewish men and their children. That is what we stand to gain by being open.

We need to look for those who do not know how to ask, and help them, gently, assuredly, to find their way in.

And certainly, I understand why many of us are concerned about opening up the tent. We are, as the philosopher Simon Rawidowicz declared in the title of his 1948 essay, “The Ever-Dying People,” on how Jews have always been anxious about their nascent disappearance.

Rabbi David Hartman addresses this issue in his book, A Heart of Many Rooms (Jewish Lights, 1999). He says the following:

“If we can rid ourselves of the obsession with certainty and finality – if we can internalize the spirit of the covenantal idea – then the uncertainties of the modern world will not deter us from renewing the vital interpretive processes that define our religious heritage.”

OK, so I know Rabbi Hartman’s prose is slightly impenetrable, but his point is that embedded in our berit, our covenant, is God’s keeping God’s word to us regardless of the uncertainty that modernity has brought us. It’s going to be OK. But if we want Judaism to continue, we have to be less focused on merely practicing Judaism and more interested in the meaning behind what we do, and making sure that we continue to interpret and redefine for today. Judaism did not stop moving forward in the shtetl of Eastern Europe. Ever since the destruction of the 2nd Temple in 70 CE (remember from the first day of Rosh Hashanah?), Judaism has never ceased to grow and change; that is the source of its resilience. And we have to continue to let it move forward today, given the realities of where Jews are.

And where might we find the meaning that our tradition teaches? How might we engage those vital interpretive processes to which Rabbi Hartman refers? You could throw a dart onto just about any page on the Jewish bookshelf and hit something powerful.

The bottom line of Judaism, drawn from our historical texts, is treating each other well. About society. About the providing for the needy among us; about treating the refugee among us respectfully, about ensuring that the orphan, the widow, the homeless in our neighborhood are taken care of. All of that comes from the same books that speak about kashrut and Shabbat. We read in the haftarah today, the words of Isaiah (58:5-7), speaking of the fast day of Yom Kippur:

“Is such the fast I desire, a day for people to starve their bodies?…

No, this is the fast I desire: to unlock fetters of wickedness, and untie the cords of the yoke

To let the oppressed go free; …

It is to share your bread with the hungry, and to take the wretched poor into your home;

When you see the naked, to clothe them, and do not ignore your own flesh.”

That is the Judaism we must teach to the she-eino yodea lish’ol, the child who does not know how to ask. That is the future we must create.

I spent a good deal of this sermon speaking about the mysterious “they” who are unconnected to Jewish life. Ladies and gentlemen, we are all the ones who do not know how to ask, because we have been conditioned not to ask. We have been intimidated by the apparently high bar of knowledge it seems you must have to enter and learn from Jewish text.

That’s gotta stop. The Jewish future depends on your willingness to invest your mind and heart in our rich tradition, in the words that have enabled us to survive the last 2000 years, through persecution and oppression and genocide.

The challenge, moving forward, is to find your way in. And not just you who are here today, but the many more who are not. And we’re going to help you with that.

Over these holidays, we have built a bridge across the Jewish year, uniting the framework of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur with the Pesah theme of the Four Children. When we complete this High Holiday cycle this evening with Ne’ilah, you do not have to wait until Hanukkah or Pesah to reconnect; this thread of Jewish connection, of the Jewish operating system, is there for you all year long. Come back to Beth Shalom regularly; stay connected; watch for the Derekh programming coming your way. Make a little more room in your heart and mind for what we are doing now – what you put into this community will be paid back to you doubly in the satisfaction of creating a better you, and a better world.

 

~

Rabbi Seth Adelson

(Originally delivered at Congregation Beth Shalom, Yom Kippur day, 9/30/17.)