Tag: humanity

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High Holidays Sermons

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

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

There. Now:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The future must be human.

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

~

Rabbi Seth Adelson

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

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Sermons

You Be the [Bad] Judge – Vayḥi 5782

Do you feel that you are a good judge of people? Personality, potential effectiveness at work, ability to get along with other folks, and so forth?

I do not have much confidence in my own ability to judge people, and I have been thinking about this lately, mostly in the abstract, because of our search for an Assistant Rabbi.

I tend to see the good in everybody, and I assume the best of intentions even when evidence is clearly to the contrary. It might be because I grew up in a small town in rural New England, where we just sort of assumed that the people around us were all good and well-intentioned. Or maybe it’s just my personality – I am a naturally trusting person. Or perhaps I should thank my parents for raising me to be non-judgmental.

Fortunately, seeing the good in everybody, and a willingness to overlook deficiencies in others comports well with rabbinic wisdom on the subject. In Pirqei Avot, for example, a second-century CE collection of rabbinic wisdom, we read the following:

1:6

יְהוֹשֻׁעַ בֶּן פְּרַחְיָה אוֹמֵר, … הֱוֵי דָן אֶת כָּל הָאָדָם לְכַף זְכוּת

Yehoshua ben Peraḥiah taught:.. When you judge others, tip the balance in their favor.

2:5

הִלֵּל אוֹמֵר, … אַל תָּדִין אֶת חֲבֵרְךָ עַד שֶׁתַּגִּיעַ לִמְקוֹמוֹ

Hillel taught: … Do not judge another until you stand in her/his situation.

When we are assessing the character or choices of others, it is upon us to do so generously, to understand that we might only see a part of the story, that we might misinterpret their motivations, and that we should therefore put a finger on the scale in their favor. The rabbinic shorthand invoked by Pirqei Avot is “kaf zekhut” – literally the pan of a metaphorical scale containing one’s merits, as opposed to the one containing the liabilities, when those characteristics are being evaluated. It is our obligation to incline toward kaf zekhut where possible.

Humans are complicated; even those who are generally good-natured can make mistakes, or can be swayed by the forces and situations around them. We all have the potential to make the wrong choices, and sometimes we do, but those errors in judgment do not necessarily crowd out one’s overall good intentions.

And, of course one of the other features of rabbinic Judaism is that our tradition provides us avenues for self-improvement: teshuvah, of course, repentance, but also guides for living such as the framework of mitzvot and the ethical considerations that come with them. Our tradition, and our people, are naturally self-reflective, perhaps in a way that does not comport with contemporary society and the current rapid pace of life, and the reduction of human communications to two-dimensional, 280-character  pronouncements.

The complexity of humanity, it seems, is getting harder for us to wrap our brains around, when our only choices are to “like” or “not like” something. You have to be for or against, yes or no, vaccinated or unvaccinated, etc.

But we are not binary creatures, limited to ones and zeroes. And that is surely true of the Avot and Imahot, the patriarchs and matriarchs of the dysfunctional family featured in the book of Bereshit / Genesis. 

Parashat Vayḥi, which concluded that book this morning, includes the captivating scene just prior to Ya’aqov’s death, when he poetically addresses his 12 sons. Most are pleasant words, blessing-like descriptors, which bode well for the tribes they represent.

But given the idea of kaf zekhut, of judging others with a generous eye,  there is one passage that has long captured my attention, when Ya’aqov actually distances himself, on his deathbed, from Shim’on and Levi. (You may recall that I am descended from the tribe of Levi, and so Ya’aqov’s words sting with an ancient, generational pain.)

שִׁמְע֥וֹן וְלֵוִ֖י אַחִ֑ים כְּלֵ֥י חָמָ֖ס מְכֵרֹתֵיהֶֽם׃
בְּסֹדָם֙ אַל־תָּבֹ֣א נַפְשִׁ֔י בִּקְהָלָ֖ם אַל־תֵּחַ֣ד כְּבֹדִ֑י כִּ֤י בְאַפָּם֙ הָ֣רְגוּ אִ֔ישׁ וּבִרְצֹנָ֖ם עִקְּרוּ־שֽׁוֹר׃
אָר֤וּר אַפָּם֙ כִּ֣י עָ֔ז וְעֶבְרָתָ֖ם כִּ֣י קָשָׁ֑תָה אֲחַלְּקֵ֣ם בְּיַעֲקֹ֔ב וַאֲפִיצֵ֖ם בְּיִשְׂרָאֵֽל׃

Simeon and Levi are a pair;
Their weapons are tools of lawlessness.
Let not my person be included in their council,
Let not my being be counted in their assembly.
For when angry they slay men,
And when pleased they maim oxen.
Cursed be their anger so fierce,
And their wrath so relentless.
I will divide them in Jacob,
Scatter them in Israel.

This is, really, a shocking passage. These are Ya’aqov’s final words to two of his sons. Where is the kaf zekhut? What on Earth could Shim’on and Levi have done that warranted such harsh words from their father? 

Well, it ain’t pretty. They slaughtered the family of Hamor and his son Shekhem, members of the Hivite tribe (one of several Canaanite tribes).

In brief, Shekhem took Ya’aqov’s daughter Dinah* by force. When he subsequently asks for her hand in marriage, Ya’aqov and family insist that Hamor agrees to circumcise all of the adult males in their clan. On the third day following the circumcision, when the men are all in pain, in come Shim’on and Levi to kill them all, claiming that they are defending the honor of their sister. It is a brutal, shocking story on all fronts, and their actions are difficult to defend. (Bereshit chapter 34, Parashat Vayyishlaḥ)

Did you miss that one in Hebrew school? Yeah, I thought so. It doesn’t make for good family discussions in the car ride home.

Was Ya’aqov justified in cursing two of his sons? Was it the right thing to effectively estrange himself from them, saying, “Let not my being be counted in their assembly”? Could he not have allowed for the possibility that they have done teshuvah, that they have repented? To me this is quite jarring. It seems exactly the opposite of the principle of kaf zekhut. Could he not, on his deathbed, have found at least something positive to say?

So he must have had a reason for doing so, and also for promising that these two tribes (and particularly the Levites) would be spread among the other tribes. In later centuries, the tribe of Levi had no tribal land of their own, but as religious functionaries lived throughout the region, so at least this aspect of the backstory checks out.

The 15th-century Spanish commentator Yitzḥaq ben Moshe Arama (who, by the way, fled the Inquisition in 1492 and died two years later in Naples) teaches us that 

Ya’aqov here utters a truth which Aristotle has publicized in his Ethics. Anger and temper, though undesirable qualities, may sometimes prove useful in arousing heroism in people. Soldiers in battle are spurred to bravery and courage by anger and indignation… [Ya’aqov believed that] it was advisable that the qualities of anger and passion that had been concentrated in Shim’on and Levi should be dispersed among all the tribes of Israel… A little spread everywhere would prove useful, but if concentrated in one place, would be dangerous.

Arama’s theory is that too much anger is extreme, but a little bit is helpful. It seems as though Ya’aqov, in acknowledging the complexity of human personalities and emotion, is distancing himself from two of his sons as a protective measure. He wants their characteristic anger distributed throughout the Israelite nation, dilute enough to be safe, but nonetheless available when warranted.

How might we interpret this for us today?

Each of us reflect, in some sense, the range of personality that Ya’aqov sees in his sons. We are sometimes happy, sometimes angry, sometimes down, sometimes yearnful, and so forth. None of us are entirely angry, or entirely happy, or 100% of any particular aspect of humanity.

In assessing others with kaf zekhut, giving the benefit of the doubt, we should do our best to remember that sometimes we are ruled by our emotions, and hope that the Shim’ons and the Levis within us are kept at bay, and that we see instead the lion of Judah, the fair judgment of Dan, the richness of Asher, the natural beauty of Naftali.

So, whether you are inclined to see the good or the bad in people, it is worth remembering that all of us are blessed with a rich variety of traits, not easily separated from one another, or discerned at first glance. When we are judging others, we should keep this in mind while trying to view the entire picture. That is what Ya’aqov teaches us with his final words. 

~

Rabbi Seth Adelson

(Originally delivered at Congregation Beth Shalom, Pittsburgh, PA, Shabbat morning, 12/17/2021.)

* Despite her hardship, long-suffering Dinah does not get a deathbed blessing from her father. *sigh*

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Sermons

It’s Not Good To Be Alone – Bereshit 5782

I must say that this past week we celebrated what I think was the most joyful Simḥat Torah of my lifetime. We were outside in the Ohel (tent) at Beth Shalom both Tuesday evening and Wednesday morning, which made it more comfortable for many families with young children to come and join us. So it was wonderful to sing and dance with abandon, and to celebrate the ancient wisdom of our tradition as we do on Simḥat Torah, and to feel some joy after 18 months of isolation and anxiety. 

I have always been of the opinion, by the way, that if you want to really experience Judaism, and you only have two days out of the year on which to do so, you should be at synagogue on Simḥat Torah and Purim, not on the High Holidays. While the gravitas of Rosh HaShanah and Yom Kippur is certainly powerful, the true joy in Jewish life and practice is found on the celebratory days.

But what concerns me, of course, are the people who were not there, who still do not feel comfortable coming because they are anxious about the Delta variant or cannot get vaccinated for health reasons or have other complicating factors. It is for those people that we of course are still making our services accessible via Zoom, and of course we will continue to do so for some time. 

There is, however, a slight problem with Zooming synagogue services. I’ll come back to that.

***

You may know that I am fond of comparing and contrasting the two Creation stories of Parashat Bereshit; the first Creation story of Bereshit Chapter 1, the one which features six days of Creation followed by Shabbat, is about order, that the world which God created is an orderly one that is, in God’s estimation, “good.”

But the second story, beginning in Bereshit Chapter 2, is the human one, the one in which Adam is fashioned from the adamah, the Earth, and there is almost a sense of human-Divine partnership in that story. Adam is called upon to till and tend the Earth, and to give names to all the creatures and plants in the Garden of Eden. And ultimately, this story is about disorder, about human failure to meet God’s expectations, the messiness of humanity. 

Early on in that second story, Adam is lonely, and God says, (Bereshit / Genesis 2:18):

לֹא־ט֛וֹב הֱי֥וֹת הָֽאָדָ֖ם לְבַדּ֑וֹ אֶֽעֱשֶׂה־לּ֥וֹ עֵ֖זֶר כְּנֶגְדּֽוֹ׃

Lo tov heyot ha-adam levado; e’eseh lo ezer kenegdo.

It is not good for the man to be alone; I will make a fitting helper for him.

It is of course striking that, as the 19th-century Volhynian commentator Malbim notes, that all of the other creatures were created in male-female pairs, yet this human partner to God is unique in that Adam is initially alone. But furthermore, one of the essential features of humanity is, of course, society. There could be no concept of “humanity” without other human beings. 

Rabbi Ovadia Seforno, in 15th century Italy, reads this verse as follows:

The purpose of the human species on earth will not be achieved while the one who is supposed to reflect the divine image will be left to personally carry out all the menial tasks of daily life on earth by being solitary.

In other words, we humans, having been created (in the first Creation story) betzelem Elohim, in the image of God, have a job, and that job is to be God’s hands on Earth, to spread physical manifestations of the qedushah, the holiness embedded in that fundamental relationship with God. And that task clearly cannot be completed by one person. Reflecting the Divine image requires a lot of people; it requires human society.

And so God creates a second human being, to be an “ezer kenegdo,” a term that is not easy to translate. I said “fitting helper” a moment ago, according to the Jewish Publication Society translation. But there is a complication here! The term “fitting helper” does not capture the sense of opposition in the Hebrew.. “Ezer” means helper. But “kenegdo” includes “neged,” which means, “opposing.” So the human partner here can both help and oppose.

If we might envision this moment of the creation of Adam’s ezer kenegdo – when one became two, which became 4 and then 3 and then many others as we journey through the genealogies later in the parashah – as the beginning of human society, then we might read this passage as suggesting that we can stand with or against each other. We can advocate for each other or we can oppose. We can elevate the qedushah / holiness in the world together, or we can disagree about exactly how to go about that and accomplish nothing. We can solve problems, or we can argue about them.

That is one fundamental aspect of what it means to be human, to be in relationship with each other, to be a part of society.

And I am concerned that we are leaning too heavily into the “kenegdo,” the oppositional aspect of humanity today, rather than the “ezer.” 

And while certainly there are some bad actors who are doing this deliberately (e.g. those who knowingly spread false information about vaccines), there are many more of us who are doing this unintentionally. 

What do you mean, Rabbi?

Thanks in part to the Internet, which has allowed people to connect with and gather with each other and create micro-communities across continents and time zones, it is completely possible that today you can find the other people whom you perceive to be just like you all over the world. They think like you, they act like you, they have your particular tastes and inclinations. They watch all the same stuff on YouTube that you do.

So on the one hand, that’s great. It’s wonderful to know that people who have been marginalized for various reasons, for example, can find community.

But on the other hand, once you are socializing and forming communities with people who are far away from you, whom you cannot see in person, you are losing some of the essential aspects of what it means to be in relationship – that is, both the “ezer” AND the “kenegdo.”

And we are all actively creating this, even if we are doing it not on purpose. I am certainly not going to stop Beth Shalom from providing services via Zoom to people all over the world, but of course if you’re Zooming into a bar mitzvah from far away, and not actually coming to visit your friends and family in Pittsburgh, yes, you are sparing the atmosphere some carbon dioxide and contributing less to global warming. But you are also missing something else: the idea that synagogue, and, well, life takes place locally.

And of course this applies across all of our platforms, which both connect us and separate us.

The pandemic certainly has upended our lives in many ways, and the Zoom phenomenon is just one. All of the forces of isolation were in play long decades before the arrival of Covid-19, and even the Internet; sociologists and political scientists and psychologists have been talking about these things for years. (Many of you have heard me speak about the “Bowling Alone” phenomenon identified by sociologist Robert Putnam.)

But just one tiny anecdote that might hit home for us: the Pittsburgh Jewish Chronicle published a poll this past week regarding the building and use of sukkot in our community over the recent holiday. A few of the written responses that they published echoed this isolation:

  • “Unable to attend live services and visit the sukkah due to worry about leaving my ill wife!”
  • “I used to be Jewish. I am alone. People have not invited me to anything for a number of years.”
  • “Used to have a sukkah every year when my kids were here.”

There were of course some positive responses as well. But these kinds of statements make my heart ache. Social isolation is a problem in particular for people who are homebound, but it is growing for all of us as well. Perhaps we need to do a better job as a community to reach out to people who feel disconnected.

Fortunately, there is a remedy for that: communal organizations. And even more fortunately, we the Jews are very good at being organized: Bend the Arc, Repair the World, ZOA, NCJW, the Jewish Federation, and of course, your local synagogue are all organizations which help to mitigate the challenge of isolation. 

And in particular, in places like synagogues where you might rub elbows with people who are as much ezer as kenegdo, we need to ensure that we continue to be in touch with and serve all people, people of all walks of life, of all ages, colors, backgrounds, gender identities, financial means and yes, even people of all political persuasions.

That is what it means to be in community; that is what it means to be God’s hands in doing the holy work of being made in the Divine image. And that experience, of doing God’s work together in partnership, is a highly local endeavor, one that we do with ALL of our neighbors.

Yes, the pandemic is still going on, and of course we must continue to emphasize vaccination and the wearing of masks. But just as we saw lots of joy over this Simḥat Torah, just as people expressed their tremendous gratitude to me and other leaders of Beth Shalom for making it possible for us to be able to daven together in the building over the High Holidays, we will learn to live with this, we will continue gradually to protect everybody from the disease, and we will gather with even more joy and celebration and just the pure happiness of being together.

So, while I am grateful for Zoom, I am also looking forward to the day when we can all gather freely once again, to be ezer kenegdo to one another, as God intended.

~

Rabbi Seth Adelson

(Originally delivered at Congregation Beth Shalom, Pittsburgh, PA, Shabbat morning, 10/2/2021.)

Categories
Festivals Sermons Yizkor

Everyone Has a Story – Shavuot Day 2 / Yizkor, 5778

Shavuot is kind of a funny festival. It’s one of the least well-known, mostly because it usually falls after Hebrew schools have concluded for the year. It doesn’t really have all the tactile and gustatory experiences of Sukkot and Pesah, say, or the fun-loving, child-centered holidays of Hanukkah and Purim, or the gravitas of the High Holidays. I don’t think it’s even as familiar as Tu Bishvat, which is not actually a holiday at all.

And yet the story that Shavuot tells is so central to what it means to be Jewish – the celebration of the gift of Torah, and everything that flows from it. Shavuot is the story of the ongoing revelation of our tradition, of how we continue to receive and reinterpret ancient wisdom for our time. As such, it should be the central pillar of the Jewish year, the one holiday that unites everything else we do with our most essential spiritual journey, our lifelong quest for understanding ourselves and our world.

OK, and there’s also cheesecake.

Two weeks ago, we laid to rest a long-time member of Beth Shalom, Ruth Lessing. She was a few months shy of a full century when she passed away.

Whenever I perform a funeral, I meet with the immediate family of the deceased to get the full story: who they were, what they enjoyed doing, what they took pride in, their successes and failures, and so forth. With Ruth, this process was not so easy: she had one son who lived in Wisconsin, and was on hospice care when his mother died; he himself passed away a few days later. So I had to rely on a couple of more distant relatives here in Pittsburgh, and they told me what they knew: they gave me as much of Ruth’s story as they could. Getting that information was not so easy. I eventually heard about Ruth’s parents in Germany, who bribed a whole range of officials to get five of their seven children out of Germany prior to the Sho’ah, but who ultimately perished, along with Ruth’s younger brother, at the hands of the Nazis.

But it reminded me of an essential piece of who we are: that each of us has a story.

Yad Vashem
Yad Vashem

One of the poems included in our Yizkor (memorial service) booklet is “Lekhol Ish Yesh Shem / Everyone Has a Name.” It was written by the Israeli poet Zelda Schneurson Mishkovsky (1914-1984), usually referred to as Zelda:

(Note: Hebrew is a gendered language. Please understand that while Zelda wrote entirely in the masculine, it can be read as “he” or “she”; I have modified the translation to reflect this.)

לכל איש יש שם
שנתן לו אלוהים
ונתנו לו אביו ואמו
לכל איש יש שם
שנתנו לו קומתו ואופן חיוכו
ונתן לו האריג
לכל איש יש שם
שנתנו לו ההרים
ונתנו לו כתליו
לכל איש יש שם
שנתנו לו המזלות
ונתנו לו שכניו
לכל איש יש שם
שנתנו לו חטאיו
ונתנה לו כמיהתו
לכל איש יש שם
שנתנו לו שונאיו
ונתנה לו אהבתו
לכל איש יש שם
שנתנו לו חגיו
ונתנה לו מלאכתו
לכל איש יש שם
שנתנו לו עונות השנה
ונתן לו עיוורונו
לכל איש יש שם
שנתן לו הים
ונתן לו מותו
Everyone has a name
given to him by God
and given to her by her parents
Everyone has a name
given to her by her stature and the way she smiles
and given to him by his clothing
Everyone has a name
given to him by the mountains
and given to her by her walls
Everyone has a name
given to her by the stars
and given to him by his neighbors
Everyone has a name
given to him by his sins
and given to her by her longing
Everyone has a name
given to her by her enemies
and given to him by his love
Everyone has a name
given to him by his feasts
and given to her by her work
Everyone has a name
given to her by the seasons
and given to him by his blindness
Everyone has a name
given to him by the sea
and given to her by her death.
(Translated from Hebrew by Marcia Falk, quoted from “Generations of the Holocaust” by Bergmann and Jugovy)

Zelda stamp
Zelda

Our name is our story; captured within those few words, you might say, is all that we stand for as individuals: our likes and dislikes, our deeds and misdeeds, our family connections, our obligations and characteristics and quirks and reputations.

We live in an increasingly dehumanizing world, one in which our individual stories are less and less relevant to all that we do. I am increasingly concerned that, given the way things are moving, we shall all soon be reduced to a pile of numbers. The new algorithms that suck up our information like water, predicting our behaviors, knowing which product we will buy and which candidate we will vote for even before we have thought about it, are sapping our free will. It’s more than a little creepy, and quite alarming. We will soon have no secrets, nothing that is hidden from the rest of the world. Maybe that’s already the case.

Not long after the news broke about Cambridge Analytica, the election research firm that scooped up personal data on 87 million Facebook users without their knowledge and in violation of Facebook’s terms of service, the New York Times ran a few analysis pieces about the information that Facebook and Google and other big data companies collect and use. The author had downloaded and reviewed all the information. Facebook’s data amounted to 650 megabytes, including all of his Facebook activity (likes, shares, posts, etc.), all of this friends’ contact info, including addresses and phone numbers, and a list of all the companies and organizations that had requested his information for the purposes of advertising on the site. (BTW, I downloaded my own Facebook data after reading this article, and among this latter list was none other than Congregation Beth Shalom, which has purchased a few targeted ads on the site.)

Google and Facebook know a lot more about you than your parents do. Even, by the way, if you do not have a Google account: these companies create files for people that are connected to others who do have accounts. They may not know your name, but they know a lot of things about you, and they assume that some day that info will be useful. Google owns the text of this sermon, by the way; in my own Google drive, there are nearly 6 gigabytes of writings and photos and videos and sermon ideas just sitting there waiting to be delivered.

Your genome, by the way, is small by comparison. Your DNA, the chromosomes found in each of the cells in your body, effectively what makes you you account for about 750 megabytes; it can be further reduced to the essential variations that differentiate individual humans from each other, is maybe only about 125 megabytes, depending on the method of storage.

DNA

But that’s not a story. We are not the sum of our data points, or our clicks or our lists of friends or where we purchased groceries. We are not a set of ones and zeros, or even patterns of genetic nucleotides. We have souls. We have journeys. We have lives. We have names. Everyone has a name, which is shorthand for the life we have lived.

You cannot capture love in a digital file. You cannot describe the palette of human creativity, or the full range of human feelings, or the complexity of interpersonal relations. You cannot record the thrill of watching your daughter perform on stage, or the joy of meaningful conversation, or the exultant abandon of group singing around a campfire. A computer would have no reason to argue with another computer over the meaning of a verse in the Torah, or a Talmudic sugya. Microprocessors do not mourn their parents.

What makes us people, what gives us our names, is the full complement of human experiences that we acquire over years of living. It is learning to walk, and failing at dating. It is hiking in the woods, swimming in the ocean, tasting the most fabulous dessert you’ve ever had. It is staying up all night to write a term paper and getting a mediocre grade. It is scoring the winning point and losing a beloved partner.

I must say that I am slightly concerned over the bold new future, in which companies will reduce us to a pile of numbers, but I am not THAT concerned, because we will always have our souls. Nobody can take that away from you.

And nobody can take away the souls of those whom we have known and lost. We carry them all with us. We carry their names. And we carry their stories.

Lekhol ish yesh shem. Each of us has a name, and each of us has a story.

 

~

Rabbi Seth Adelson

(Originally delivered at Congregation Beth Shalom, second day of Shavuot, 5/21/2018.)

 

Categories
Festivals Sermons

Remaining Human – Shabbat Hol Hamo’ed Sukkot 5777

One of the major themes I presented during my series of High Holiday sermons is that the point of fulfilling mitzvot, of “doing Jewish,” if you will, is to connect those holy opportunities with our lives, to bring meaning to who we are and how we live today.

Along those lines, what does building and “dwelling” in the sukkah teach us? That life is uncertain. That even after the Aseret Yemei Teshuvah, the Ten Days of Return, after having been through the process of repairing our relationships with each other and with God, that we are still vulnerable. That although we might be inclined to look around ourselves and say, “Hey, this isn’t so bad. I’ve got another year in front of me. 5777 is looking pretty good,” that we should not forget that things could change. The story is not yet over.

In my mind, I always strongly associate Sukkot with the sights / sounds / smells of fall: trees aflame in color, winds to herald the winter chill, the scent of dead leaves and damp sod. Sukkot is the end of the holiday cycle, and it suggest frailty. Everything comes to an end, chants the latter half of Tishrei. And yet, it’s a joyous time – zeman simhateinu, the season of our joy, as it is called in our liturgy. This is hehag, THE festival.

I recently read an opinion piece from the Wall Street Journal by Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, former Chief Rabbi of the British Empire, in which he reminds us of the need to remember to sanctify life as we sail into the future.

This is not the future of the Jetsons or Star Trek, but rather the future in which artificial intelligence eventually puts everybody out of work. Consider the fact that right here in Pittsburgh, even as we speak, there are driver-less cars prowling the hilly streets for the ride-sharing service Uber. It is only a matter of time before millions of people who drive for a living – cabbies and truckers and bus drivers and railway engineers – will be unnecessary and hence lose their jobs. It will not end there.

https://images.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.borgenmagazine.com%2Fwp-content%2Fuploads%2F2015%2F05%2FBig_Data_Development1.jpg&f=1

Rabbi Sacks points to a trio of futurist authors, who suggest not only that we will soon enough have automated surgeons and teachers and journalists and attorneys, but that the future will belong not to those who can capture our hearts, but those who control our data. “Google, Amazon and Facebook,” he says, “already know us better than we know ourselves. People will eventually turn to them for advice not only on what to buy but on what to be. Humans will have become strings of genomes, little more than super-algorithms.”  Think, The Matrix. The system will only get out of us what it needs based on our numbers.

The antidote to this particularly dire vision is our ongoing commitment to recalling the sanctity of human life. We can never be reduced to numbers if we are reminded of our fundamental humanity.

Although the coming technological change is unprecedented in its scope, there is no question that Judaism has managed such change historically. I spoke on Yom Kippur about Rabban Yohanan ben Zakkai’s choosing Yavneh over Jerusalem, that is, learning Torah over sacrificing animals. RYBZ chose to move forward, to choose Torah – words – over the barbaric practice of offering rams and sheep up to God on a fiery altar. In addition to progressing from the Bronze Age to the Information Age, we have managed expulsions and slaughters, dispersions and forced conversions. We have survived assimilation and secularism. We made it through the disco years and decades of questionable taste.

We know how to handle change.

But the future will require the acknowledgment that no matter how much Big Data knows about us and can convince us to behave this way or that, that we continue to learn and teach, to seek holiness in our relationships with each other, to elevate ourselves through our traditions. The futurists, says Rabbi Sacks, point to a new form of idol-worship for today, and citing a verse from Psalms, he says:

“Their idols are silver and gold, the work of human’s hands.” When technology becomes idolatry it ceases to be life-enhancing and becomes soul-destroying. The moment humans value things, however intelligent, over people, they embark on the road to ruin.

So what does this have to do with Sukkot, Rabbi?

This is why this festival is so essential. Actually, let me expand to the entire month of Tishrei. Rabbi Sacks wrote about the essential concern of Rosh Hashanah as being the creation of humans in the image of God. It is this Godliness, with which our humanity is imbued, that leads us to seek forgiveness from each other during the first half of the month of Tishrei, and to celebrate with each other, even as we are reminded of our essential vulnerability, in the second half.

Sukkot is tactile. It’s not a heady holiday like Yom Kippur. It involves building, and marching around with greenery, and slapping willow branches against the ground with all your might in climactic ecstasy with the conclusion of this festival (join us tomorrow morning for Hoshana Rabbah if you want to find out what THAT’s all about). And then we conclude with singing and dancing with the Torah in joyous abandon. This is a physical journey much more so than an emotional one.

One of the pleasures of Sukkot is sukkah-hopping – going to friends’ sukkot to hang around, to schmooze, to eat, to spend quality time with each other. A good friend of mine, a former congregant in New York, is convinced that Sukkot is the secret weapon in the Jewish arsenal of re-engaging disaffected American Jews. He has a grand scheme to put free, easy-to-build sukkot in the hands of people who would otherwise not buy one, with the only condition that they use it during the holiday. This festival brings people together, he reasons. It is joyous and fun and builds community and connection. If more Jews participated in the mitzvah of leshev basukkah, he figures, then we have a better shot at rebuilding our connection to Judaism.

He has asked to remain anonymous, but he donated four such sukkot to this community this year, and so there were four more families celebrating in their own sukkot in Pittsburgh in 5777. Maybe next year we’ll get even a few more.

The Slonimer Rebbe taught that Yom Kippur appeals to the middah (attribute) of yir’ah, of fear of God, but the middah for Sukkot is ahavah, love. The two balance each other out, and so the month of Tishrei includes equal measures of yir’ah and ahavah. But let’s face it: in simply counting the number of people in the room, far more Jews are motivated by yir’ah to show up on Yom Kippur. Couldn’t we use a little more ahavah in Jewish life?

Our goal as Jews is to avoid living in the dystopian future of The Matrix; we cannot become subjects to our technology. We have to continue to be human, to live in the here and now, to worship only the God of Abraham and Sarah. Ritual binds us to reality, and qal vahomer, all the more so on Sukkot, when the rituals are all so physical.  These holy opportunities are all the ways that we maintain our connections to the physicality of Creation, to God, and to each other. This is how we maintain our humanity, the sacredness of life in all of its loving, fearful, vulnerable glory.

So while the future may be filled with robots and data, and may be more and more dehumanizing, the antidote might be found by peering through the sekhakh (the greenery on the roof of the sukkah) in order to see the stars, while we dine and socialize in those frail booths, and feel the ahavah, the love of this holiday. Hag sameah!
~

Rabbi Seth Adelson

(Originally delivered at Congregation Beth Shalom, Shabbat morning, 10/21/2016.)