Tag: interconnectedness

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Tear Down This Meḥitzah – Behar/Beḥuqqotai 5781

In 1952, working here at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, Dr. Jonas Salk, the son of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe who grew up in the Bronx, developed a vaccine against poliomyelitis. Today there are only a few hundred cases of polio that are contracted each year in the whole world. Polio had been a dreaded disease, causing paralysis in about 5 out of 1000 infected people.

Thank God, we have no need to fear polio today. Thank God for the Divine inspiration, working through the hands of Dr. Salk and his fellow researchers, that led to the development of the polio vaccine. 

I am sorry to say that we will not have as much success with SARS-CoV-2, and that will be largely due to the politicization of health care, and, frankly, everything else.

Vaccination centers have plenty of available doses waiting for arms. We hit a peak of over 3.3 million shots per day in mid-April, and now we are around 2 million per day.  We all saw this coming. But the public discourse has led to a situation in which a whole lot of people are insistent that they would rather take their chances with a virus that has killed officially nearly 600,000 Americans, and perhaps as many as 900,000, a virus that is in fact far more dangerous and deadly than polio. 

Now, before we all start pointing fingers, let’s face it, folks: we are all to blame for this. We are all to blame because of what you might call a meḥitzah in public life.

Let me explain:

What is a meḥitzah? Many of you may be familiar with this word from its Yiddishized pronunciation, with the accent on the “ḥi“. (Being a Zionist and a lover of the Hebrew language, I prefer to place the accent in the correct place, i.e. the final syllable. BTW, it’s related to the word ḥetzi, half, because a meḥitzah cuts things in half.)

The meḥitzah is the divider that you find in Orthodox synagogues between men and women. Since we at Beth Shalom and the Conservative movement are egalitarian, that is, we make no distinction in Jewish law between men and women, we have no need for a meḥitzah. And in fact, it was the elimination of the meḥitzah which was one of the hallmarks of the Conservative movement in its early years, even before Conservative synagogues became fully egalitarian. We want people to be together, families to be together in synagogue.

The Faye Rubinstein Weiss Sanctuary at Beth Shalom, which has no mehitzah.

Metaphorically speaking, however, a meḥitzah is a barrier, a dividing line. And I think that we are living in a time in which the meḥitzot of our lives are causing very real damage. 

We are experiencing a breakdown in communication across our society, and that has everything to do with the fact that we are all living in different media environments. We seek out the news sources that merely reaffirm our own worldview, abetted by social media, and are siloed such that we dismiss arguments for the other side.

And that, by the way, also plays out in the Jewish world.

For example, the metaphorical meḥitzah between Orthodoxy and everybody else has led to complexities surrounding the essential question of “Who is a Jew?”, and in particular around the challenges of who can get married in Israel or be buried in a Jewish cemetery. (Some of you may recall that my name is on a “blacklist” of rabbis whose testimony as to who is Jewish is not accepted by the Orthodox Israeli rabbinate.)

Back on this side of the Atlantic, the challenge of the meḥitzah in public life is now playing out in our efforts to eliminate the coronavirus from our midst. Israel, where politics infuses everything, has many challenges, but thank God, public health is not one of those. My son, who is in the IDF, was fully vaccinated back in January.

I heard a story this week on NPR about a rural area in Oregon, where vaccine resistance is so high, and that people are so angry at each other about it, that local pastors claim that they cannot even talk about it in church on Sunday, for fear of getting people riled up. 

The factors here are complex, but to some extent, listening to this story reminded me of Robert Putnam’s seminal sociological work from twenty years ago, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community. Putnam’s essential argument is that social capital, the glue that connects us to people outside of our regular range of friends and relatives, has steadily declined since the middle of the 20th century. The result has been a decay in the overall resilience of our society, by a range of measures.

Social capital and public health are inextricably linked. One reason that we were able to eliminate polio is that the vaccine appeared at a time when Americans had a much greater level of social capital, of interconnection between people. Now we are all metaphorically bowling alone, not in leagues, disconnected from one another, residing in our own bubbles, and constantly stimulated by the division machine that is the media, which feeds off of your clicks and likes and reactions and shares. 

If we are not interconnected, through civic organizations and sports leagues and bridge clubs and, of course, synagogues, we are less likely to care about the people around us, and therefore understand the need for public health measures, or sustainable energy sources, or anything that requires collective action. And of course we should note that the pandemic isolation has likely caused even further decline in social capital.

We are having a very hard time right now thinking about the greater good. We are all in it for ourselves. And it is just that much easier to throw up a meḥitzah, a dividing line between you and me.

The major question that we are facing in the current moment is, how will we get those who are vaccine-hesitant to change their minds? Politicians, it seems, will not be able to do so. (See the meḥitzah problem.) Fervent opinion pieces in major newspapers will not do it either. Noodging your resistant friends and relatives probably will also fail.

New York Times columnist David Brooks, in his column this week on our failure to achieve herd immunity, writes:

A lot of Americans have seceded from the cultural, political and social institutions of national life. As a result, the nation finds it hard to perform collective action. Our pathetic Covid response may not be the last or worst consequence of this condition.

Between the silos of American life, the distrust sown between people in different groups, and the loss of social capital, the challenge here seems insurmountable.

Based on some of the things that I have read in various sources, it seems that only cold, hard facts from a trusted source (e.g. the family doctor) might work. Let’s hope that our medical community still holds some sway here.

But the bigger picture, the one about the meḥitzot of our lives, will be with us for a long time. Until we can all find a way to get past us vs. them, until we can begin to think of ourselves as all being in this together, then we will continue to devolve as a nation. I am of course hoping that synagogues, churches, mosques, gurdwaras, and so forth, as places that still create social capital, will help us with seeing past ourselves, to the others around us, to those not like us, to those with whom we disagree.

One of the gems that is found in Parashat Behar, from which we read this morning, is the quote that is inscribed on the Liberty Bell, Vayiqra / Leviticus 25:10:

וּקְרָאתֶ֥ם דְּר֛וֹר בָּאָ֖רֶץ לְכָל־יֹשְׁבֶ֑יהָ

Ukratem deror ba-aretz, lekhol yosheveha.
Proclaim liberty throughout the land, to all the inhabitants thereof.

Though the Liberty Bell is a powerful symbol of our American freedom, the Torah’s context is a somewhat mundane issue about the jubilee year, the 50th year in the agricultural cycle, in which ancestral lands were returned to each Israelite tribe, so that each tribe would retain its original boundaries. The liberty, found here is in fact an effort to make sure that nobody would be in permanent debt, and that no one person or tribe could swallow up all the other tribes’ land. It preserved a healthy status quo that enabled our ancestors to retain their independence as well as their interdependence.

I am afraid that we will not have learned the most essential lesson of this pandemic, which is that we are all in this together, and that we must work together, to rebuild trust, to re-establish that sense in our immediate communities as well as throughout our society.

We may be able to start gathering again. But will we address the greater challenge, the challenge of the meḥitzah? I certainly think that we should, and that as individuals and as organizations and governmental agencies we should be thinking about this on a high level.

We must sit together, with no meḥitzah. We cannot bowl alone.

Only when we each see the humanity in every other person, no matter who they are, the color of their skin, their ethnicity or sexuality or religion or even who they vote for, will we be able to move forward. Only in this way may we ultimately begin to solve the challenges that we face, and only then might we finally proclaim liberty for all of our inhabitants.

~

Rabbi Seth Adelson

(Originally delivered at Congregation Beth Shalom, Pittsburgh, PA, Shabbat morning, 5/8/2021.)

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Sermons

I’m a Fundamentalist: Kashrut / Mindful Consumption – Shemini 5781

Having just completed Pesaḥ a little more than a week ago, I am still grateful for the dietary freedom that has suddenly re-appeared on my plate.

There is a funny thing about Pesaḥ – just about everybody takes the idea of kashrut over Pesah a wee bit more seriously.

My family actually became kosher (that is, everyday kosher, not just K-for-P) when I was around 11 or 12, mostly at my urging. While my parents both grew up in kosher homes, they had more or less abandoned the practice. But Pesaḥ was always 100% kosher – we went all out. One year, before that time, I was visiting my cousins in Hartford during Pesaḥ, and one afternoon my older cousin Stephen and I walked to a nearby mall. We were hungry, so we went into a non-kosher restaurant to have lunch, at a kind of low-end steakhouse. I was a bit hesitant, thinking that this did not seem quite right during Pesaḥ, but I trusted my cousin. So we ordered steaks, which came with a slice of toast. Stephen rationalized, “OK, so since it’s Passover, we just won’t eat the toast.”

Now my cousin’s family was less kosher by traditional standards than my own. But when my aunt Brenda, Stephen’s mother, heard that we had eaten at a non-kosher restaurant, during Pesaḥ, she absolutely hit the roof. My cousin was caught completely by surprise. I just felt guilty and embarrassed.

Regardless of the outcome, this story is a reminder of the fact that we, the Jews, have a fairly strong historical attachment to dietary guidelines, and that even amongst those of us who do not hew to the letter of the law regarding kashrut, there are still limits to how we eat. Even when my family did not explicitly keep kosher, for example, there was still a strong inclination to avoid pork, and I’m sure that there are many members of Beth Shalom who are in the same boat. 

Data from the Federation of Jewish Pittsburgh’s community study a few years back suggested (not directly – you have to attempt to extract the estimate yourself) that about one-third of self-identified “Conservative” Jews keep some form of kashrut inside and outside the home, and although I would suppose that the figure is somewhat higher for Beth Shalom members, it is difficult to parse out what the respondents meant by kashrut.

Nonetheless, I thought that today would be a good day to return to my very-occasional series on the Fundamentals of Judaism. In certain ways, I am a fundamentalist, and this is the sixth installment in an occasional series on the fundamentals of Jewish life. The others are:

Parashat Shemini, from which we read this morning, includes one of the two passages in the Torah dedicated to things we are permitted to eat and things we are not. Sometimes there are discernible patterns: land animals that are ruminants and that have a split hoof, fins and scales, and so forth, and sometimes there are not, as with birds (while no distinct features are described, the only implicit rule is that they are not birds of prey, which is a behavioral distinction, more so than a physical one). 

But let’s face it: restricting ourselves to particular foods is difficult, and that’s even before all of the complicated layers added in rabbinic law: the rigorous separation of meat and dairy implements, the rules surrounding kosher slaughter (which of course are not found in the Torah), procurement of “hekhshered” products, and so forth. 

And all the more so today, in which boundary-crossing of all sorts has become the norm: we do not like being fenced-in by boundaries that seem arbitrary. On the contrary, in our 24/7 world, in which conventions of the past are being tossed out, seemingly at blisteringly fast rates, traditional dietary restrictions, at least those that are religion-based seem at best somewhat quaint, and at worst downright annoying.

My life has no limits in so many areas. Why should I be limited in what I eat, particularly by guidelines from an ancient book?

This, of course, raises the larger question of why we would want limits on our behavior at all. Judaism is fond of limits: things you should do on Shabbat vs. things that you should not. There are codes of behavior with respect to daily prayer, how we speak, how we interact with others in a business context, how we educate our children, how we grieve, and so forth.

As Americans, we chafe at the idea of being limited in any way. “Don’t tell me how to behave, ” we say. “This is a free country, ” is our persistent refrain.

And yet, we know that there are some problems that come with the principle of “everything is available to me at all times.” Life has to have guard rails. 

All parents and teachers know that setting limits is healthy for the development of children:  it makes them feel safe, builds patience and problem solving skills, resourcefulness, responsibility and self-discipline. If we are the children of God, then all the more so for us as humans. The Sages warn us not to presume to understand God and the reasons for the laws, but I am certain that this is one of the fundamental principles behind kashrut: to set boundaries within Creation.

Even beyond the idea of boundaries, a related challenge that we face is too much choice. Too many options. I have given in the past the relatively innocuous example of the toothpaste aisle, in which there are seemingly endless varieties of toothpaste. Too much choice sometimes makes life more difficult. 

But germane to today’s discussion, we know that too much dietary choice in particular is dangerous: the CDC website, for example, says the following: “Adults who eat a healthy diet live longer and have a lower risk of obesity, heart disease, type 2 diabetes, and certain cancers.” And we all know that many of us are not eating a healthy diet; certainly the range of unhealthy foods easily available for our immediate consumption is contributing to these maladies. To make matters worse, attempts to help limit our consumption of these foods through legislation, like mandating smaller portion sizes, usually fail when political forces intervene. We like having lots of opportunities to make bad choices.

Put more starkly, too much choice is killing us. When confronted with many options, people often do not choose the healthier one, particularly when it is up against foods specifically designed to turn on our pleasure centers: fatty, salty, sweet edibles that our bodies feel like they just cannot get enough of.

And that brings me back to kashrut. You may have been told, as I was growing up, that “kosher food is healthier,” because of diseases like trichinosis, which can be contracted from under-cooked pork. Ramban, who lived in Spain in the 13th century, believed that the flesh of non-kosher fish was toxic. 

But let’s face it: that is a disingenuous argument. Kosher food can be just as unhealthy as non-kosher food. 

The more persuasive argument, in my mind, is that kashrut, particularly in combination with the range of berakhot / blessings surrounding food consumption, heightens our awareness, and simply being aware of what we eat is 90% of the battle. Kashrut is mindfulness of consumption.

When I know that I am limited in what I am permitted to consume, it makes me pay attention: I look for the hekhsher at the grocery store; maybe I check the ingredients as well. I think about my meals in advance: is this a dairy meal? A meat meal? Have I prepared a salad, which is pareve, and can go either way, and then I’ll have some left over that I can use at the next meal? 

I am aware that some things are available to me and some are not. I do not necessarily know why God said this and not that, that and not this, but I do know that this awareness helps me understand that I am interconnected within the greater ecosystem, that I have been shaped by these boundaries to consider the consequences of the choices that I make. I am therefore aware that what I eat shapes our food production system, our economy, our world.

I am aware that the Talmud teaches us that eating food without saying a berakhah is like theft of God’s Creation, that my food is not simply at my disposal to take or to leave, and that even the most mundane human task of eating can be elevated to a holy moment, and that this holiness keeps me grounded firmly in Creation. It reminds me of my obligation to protect and defend what God has given us from unbounded despoliation.

Awareness. Awareness of what and how we eat leads to a greater awareness of ourselves, our world, and the necessity of taking responsibility for what God has given us. 

Kashrut is a fundamental statement of who we are as a people. It helps us to stay connected to each other and to our identity as Jews. But beyond that, it is also an opportunity on a daily basis to reaffirm the holiness in our lives and our world.

As a fundamentalist, 

  • I observe kashrut because it reminds me multiple times each day of the Jewish value of gratitude for what we have
  • I practice holy eating to nourish the spark of the Divine within me by being mindful of what I put into my body
  • I practice kashrut to remind me to respect Creation by considering the resources I consume
  • I observe kashrut to acknowledge my connection to my people

And so should you. If you need any help in stepping up your kashrut game, please give me a call and we’ll talk.

~

Rabbi Seth Adelson

(Originally delivered at Congregation Beth Shalom, Pittsburgh, PA, Shabbat morning, 4/10/2021.)

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High Holidays Sermons

Increase the Love: Beyahad / Community – Kol Nidrei 5779

Wait! You might want to read the first two items in the series before you read this one:

Increase the Love: Ani / The Self – Rosh Hashanah 5779, Day 1

Increase the Love: HaMishpahah / The Family – Rosh Hashanah 5779, Day 2

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Remember the movie Avatar, from 2009? It was about a tribe known as the Na’vi, who worship an invisible-yet-omnipotent god named Eywa, and draw their support from a gigantic tree. If it did not occur to you when you saw it that the writers were drawing on some aspects of Jewish tradition, let me explain: “navi” is Hebrew for “prophet,” Eywa is a simple rearrangement of Yahweh, the ancient name of our one, true God, and the Hometree is a likely reference to the “Etz Hayyim,” the “Tree of Life,” i.e. the Torah. Na’vi society is marked by interconnectedness, with Eywa and with each other through the Hometree. What makes their society seem so seductive is the deep, mystical connection that they all share with all living things in their world, plant and animal – a kind of universal, communal love.

Pandora-HomeTree

We do not generally think of Judaism as a religion of love. That is a theme that, it seems, is usually left to Christians, who often tout the idea that “Jesus loves you.” Nonetheless, those of you who were here for Rosh Hashanah certainly know that love is actually a foundational principle in Judaism, promoted by none other than Rabbi Akiva, the greatest sage of the Talmudic period.

We in the Jewish world could benefit from a greater emphasis on love. That is why the overarching theme of these High Holidays has been ahavah / love – because one of our primary goals today should be to increase the love in this world. We spoke on the first day of Rosh Hashanah about love of self, and on the second day about love of family.

And I hope that by the time this sermon cycle is complete, you will feel the same way. Love will be our theme for 5779, and I am hoping that you will find this theme emerge in the various ways that we at Beth Shalom approach Judaism.

Here is another piece of Jewish wisdom that I want you to have in your list of go-to, pithy Jewish statements on love. It is found in every siddur / prayerbook, right up front. You’ll find it in your Mahzor Lev Shalem on p. 35, and also in the High Holiday Guide on p. 5. It’s known as Mitzvat HaBorei, and it is a unique kind of blessing created by Rabbi Isaac Luria, the 16th-century creator of Lurianic Kabbalah, a branch of Jewish mysticism. Rabbi Luria said that we should begin every day by saying the following:

הריני מקבל עלי מצוות הבורא: וְאָהַבְתָּ לְרֵעֲךָ כָּמוֹךָ

Hareini meqabbel alai mitzvat haborei: Ve-ahavta lereiakha kamokha.

I hereby take upon myself the mitzvah / commandment of my Creator: love your neighbor as yourself.

In other words, says Rabbi Luria, we should start every day not only by expressing our gratitude to God for waking up healthy and capable (which is the first thing that happens in every morning service at Beth Shalom, every day of the year), but also by remembering our love for the people around us. In fact, this is so essential that Rabbi Luria’s framing suggests that this love is kind of encoded into us. God’s primary reason for creating the world, you might say, is so that we might love our neighbors.

And we say that before we emphasize the requirement to love God, which is in the Shema. So what is the message? We need to love each other before we experience Divine love. Not just our family members, mind you, but our neighbors.

Continuing the theme from Rosh Hashanah, Maimonides’ concentric circles of responsibility continue to radiate outward; today we are going to talk about love of community. That’a a loosely-defined word, of course, but since we are in Mr. Rogers’ hometown, let’s go with his definition: the people in your neighborhood.

Let’s face it, folks: this is probably the hardest type of love. We can learn to love ourselves. Love of our families is kind of a given. Love of the world in general (which we will discuss tomorrow) might be easier in the abstract. But loving the people in your neighborhood, with whom you might fundamentally disagree about important, personal issues? People with whom you most likely occasionally argue with over taxes or city services or synagogue budgets? People who might drive you nuts because they throw their leaves in your yard or fail to shovel the snow off the sidewalk in front of their houses? Can you love the jerk who clearly could have let you take a Pittsburgh left but didn’t? That’s hard.

I want you to consider, for a moment, a Pittsburgher whom you may have heard of, named Bill Strickland. He is probably best known among the Jews for being a driving force in founding the Akko Center for Arts and Technology (“A-CAT”), a career-training center for Israeli Jews and Israeli Arabs in northern Israel.

(We will be visiting A-CAT on Beth Shalom’s trip to Israel, which departs Oct. 28th. I am leading this trip, and 25 members of our neighborhood will be joining us.)

But what Bill is best known for is creating the Manchester Bidwell Corporation, which began with a school in the disadvantaged neighborhood in which he grew up on the north side of Pittsburgh, and has now expanded to similar schools around the country and in a few international locations as well.

Bill tells his story in a TED Talk, which I highly recommend that you watch some time in 5779:

His odyssey began in high school, where he was on his way to failing out, and he met a teacher who taught him how to make pottery. This teacher cared about Bill, and Bill soon discovered that learning how to throw pots gave him something to latch onto, something that made him proud of himself. His schoolwork improved enough for him to get into the University of Pittsburgh, and while he was still an undergraduate there, he launched a vision that would take him decades to build.

His vision was this: if you demonstrate to kids in poor neighborhoods that you care about them – create for them a learning environment that is well-appointed and respectful, with teachers that show their appreciation – then those kids will respond by working harder, pursuing careers, and generally becoming productive members of society. He started by creating the Manchester Craftsmen’s Guild, an after-school program to teach children in Manchester about pottery, but continued to build until his programs, primarily focused on job training, now reach thousands of people, adults and children, giving them a range of skills they need to make it in today’s world. In Bill’s own words:

My view is that if you want to involve yourself in the life of people who have been given up on, you have to look like the solution and not the problem. As you can see, [the center I built in Pittsburgh] has a fountain in the courtyard. And the reason it has a fountain in the courtyard is I wanted one and I had the checkbook, so I bought one and put it there… [I was] on the board of the Carnegie Museum. At a reception in their courtyard, I noticed that they had a fountain because they think that the people who go to the museum deserve a fountain. Well, I think that welfare mothers and at-risk kids and ex-steel workers deserve a fountain in their life. And so the first thing that you see in my center in the springtime is water that greets you — water is life and water is human possibility — and it sets an attitude and expectation about how you feel about people before you ever give them a speech. So, from that fountain I built this building.

In 1996, he was awarded the very prestigious MacArthur Genius Fellowship award.

I met Mr. Strickland a few months back at the Pursuer of Peace dinner at Rodef Shalom, and he is every bit as warm and genuine as he appears in his TED Talk. I remember thinking at the time, this is a man who has found a solution to one of the most challenging, intractable problems of our society. I’m shaking the hand of a true inspiration. How powerful is that? Better than meeting just about any celebrity.

Because what he did was truly an act of love, paid forward from the love shown to him by his first pottery teacher. Bill could have taken the opportunity before him by earning his degree at Pitt and headed off into the world to make a good living in business or law or medicine or finance, and never even consider looking through the rear-view mirror to the blighted neighborhood in which he grew up.

But he didn’t do that. Instead, he did exactly the opposite. And that was truly an act of ve-ahavta lereiakha kamokha, loving your neighbor as yourself. And what he created continues to give back, to radiate love within the community.

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So how do we act on this love of your neighbor? How do we create a community based on love with people whom we may not necessarily like, or even know?

Most of us think of Judaism as a tradition of law. In fact, many of us understand that our relationship with God is based on our fulfillment of halakhah, which is usually translated as “Jewish law,” although a more accurate translation is “going” or “walking.” That is, halakhah is how we walk through life – including the obligations not only to keep Shabbat or kashrut / dietary laws, but also keeping the responsibility to tzedaqah / charity, or to learn the words of our tradition, or to teach our children how to be people, as we discussed on Rosh Hashanah.

How does a tradition of laws guide us to be better people? How does it help shape our interactions with others to benefit the community?

Well, some of our mitzvot, our holy opportunities, are directly about helping others: giving tzedaqah, that is, performing righteous acts, is an obvious one. But did you know that our tradition requires you to build a railing on your roof (if you have a flat roof that people walk on) to prevent people from falling off? How about the obligation to use fair weights and measures in the marketplace? What about the obligation to bury an unclaimed corpse, the highest form of hesed / loving-kindness? Did you know its against our law to withhold earnings from a day laborer lest they go home empty-handed?

By the way, my very favorite mitzvah in the entire Torah is this: If you find your enemy’s ox or donkey in your yard, you must return it! (Exodus 23:4) Think of how ironic and yet essential that particular opportunity is: the person who might very well be inclined to kill you – his is the one whose donkey the Torah tells you to return. Now, probably most of our neighbors do not own donkeys, but the same would be true with your enemy’s wallet or cellphone. Think about that: the Torah expressly protects your enemy’s possessions.

Maimonides, at the end of his famous text, Guide for the Perplexed, insists that the fulfillment of mitzvot, the meticulous attention to halakhah / Jewish law are not, in fact, the ultimate objective. Rather, these things are the means to an end. The line of intent that the 613 mitzvot form is meant to be extrapolated, such that we go beyond the letter of the law, lifnim mishurat hadin, in rabbinic-speak, to do those things for others that are not mandated by the Torah, but rather are the right things to be done. So, while it is a mitzvah to honor your parents and to give tzedaqah, it is an extrapolation, for example, to volunteer your time at a homeless shelter, or to build gardens in impoverished neighborhoods so that people in food deserts can get some good produce.

And yet, I think that the way we live today has made it even harder to connect in a way that enables us to build an interdependent community, one in which we support each other in love. Although more wired than ever, from my perspective we are, ironically, living more isolated lives. The challenges here are great, but, I think, not insurmountable.

Dr. Arnold Eisen, Chancellor of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America (my rabbinic and cantorial alma mater) and a scholar of American Judaism, recently wrote a trenchant article on the role that our tradition can play in the revitalization of community in America.  The article is entitled, “Are We Witnessing the End of Enlightenment?” His opening observation is that the current moment seems to be characterized by a “wholesale retreat from values of human dignity, thoughtful rationality and tolerance of difference—values that Jews, most other Americans, and many individuals and peoples around the world, have long held dear.” He points to suspected culprits like technology that is moving faster than our interpersonal relationships can keep pace with, globalization that is causing rapid economic upheaval, and the various forms of anxiety caused by the Information Age.

It seems undeniable… that all is not well in 21st century North America at the apex of Enlightenment. Social theorists have long worried that the breakdown of traditional communities and roles would cast many of us adrift in multiple ways, and it seems that that in fact has occurred.

The challenge that we have as contemporary Jews is how we take our traditional values and apply them in a way that works today. The entire world is struggling with the challenges posed by modernity; at least we the Jews have our traditional framework to hold onto.

Our ancient wisdom, Eisen says, which we continue to study and and act upon – gives us guidance today, to wit, “concrete laws governing daily human interaction.” He cites the “Holiness Code” of Leviticus (that is, Parashat Qedoshim, my bar mitzvah parashah) and Maimonides as proponents of societal transformation through traditional Jewish behaviors.

We in the Conservative movement, who balance tradition and change, are exceptionally well-placed to assist this transformation, and Dr. Eisen envisions more such communities. He suggests that we build communities marked by “face-to-face relations,” shared experiences, shared celebrations and shared grief, and we endeavor to affirm all members of the community as valued and needed. These communities “teach via experience that differences of politics and generation need not stand in the way of cooperation and mutual respect… [enabling us to] work in the larger, ever-contentious world.”

In short, we need communities based on love. And furthermore, when you consider that today fewer and fewer Americans belong to organizations of any kind, religious or otherwise, our synagogues still stand for building an interconnected society. Our berit, our covenant, helps us to stand against the isolation of the contemporary American landscape; we lead in partnership and dialogue.

We know what it means to go through life with a community of capital-M Meaning, and face up to illness and death with the support of such a community. The deep satisfaction of singing “etz hayyim hi” (“it is a tree of life”) as we return the Torah to the ark is not just a function of the music, or the power of shared voices. The words conjure up gratitude at the life that Torah makes possible for us. We cannot imagine living without this Torah. We gratefully choose to walk these paths of peace again and again.

What is the foundational principle of a qehillah qedoshah, a sacred community like this one? It is love. Love of our neighbors, love of family, love of self.

We need, our society needs strong communal centers that give back to the community. Our future as Americans depends on the sustainable future of this synagogue. Because here, we teach Mitzvat haBorei every single day: It is our daily obligation to love our neighbors as ourselves.

And that is why we need, as a synagogue, to tackle our future strategically. That is why we are currently engaged in United Synagogue’s SULAM for Strategic Planners program, and are working on our strategic plan (did you fill out the survey??). That is why we are working on building solar panels on our roof, to emphasize both physical and environmental sustainability. That is why we in the past year we joined the Pennsylvania Interfaith Impact Network, enabling us to be in partnership with Jewish, Christian, and Muslim organizations all over Western Pennsylvania. That is why we are taking journeys to Israel and to the scene of the civil rights struggle in the South. That is why we are here in times of joy and times of grief, in prayerful moments and social moments. That is why we continue to rethink what we do and how we do it.

That is a vision of love of community: ensuring the ongoing strength and viability of not only Congregation Beth Shalom, but all the houses of faith in our neighborhood, so that we all can continue to function in bringing people together in this ever-more-disconnected world.

Now is the time to integrate, to cooperate, to reach out, to walk the paths of peace, to recall that we are all connected through our Etz Hayyim / Tree of Life, to prevent further unraveling of community. That is the daily imperative that we invoke when we recall Rabbi Isaac Luria’s Mitzvat HaBorei, the essential obligation of our creator: love your neighbor as yourself.

Shanah tovah!

 

~

Rabbi Seth Adelson

(Originally delivered at Congregation Beth Shalom, Yom Kippur evening, 9/18/2018.)

 

The final installment:

Increase the Love: Ha’Olam / The World – Yom Kippur 5779

Categories
Sermons

The Kibitzer and the Stop Sign – Emor 5777

Many of you know that Abe Salem (z”l) passed away this week. He was the former minyan leader and Torah reader here at Beth Shalom. As I was preparing for the funeral, I watched the video he made for the Holocaust Center (we sent out the link with the death announcement), and of course struggled to understand him, because he used to switch back and forth between English and Yiddish. So that got me thinking about Yiddish, and then I realized that one thing that we Jews have given to the world is the kibitzer.

What is a kibitzer? Definitions vary. Some kibitzers are funny people, joking and making fun and generally spreading good cheer. Some kibitzers offer unwanted advice. Some are there to throw off the rhythm of others engaged in serious activities, like playing chess or cards.

kibitzer

My wife recalled to me that when she was a little girl, her mother would play cards with her Hungarian friends, and ask Judy to be a kibitzer, but she was not sure exactly what that meant; neither of them spoke Yiddish. (BTW, I checked my trusty Modern English-Yiddish / Yiddish-English Dictionary, by Uriel Weinreich, and apparently the correct English term for “kibitz” is “kibitz.”

But we all know these characters. They are a standard feature of Jewish life steeped in Eastern European ethnicity. Wherever these Jews gathered, historically, there were kibitzers. Along with the nudnik, the schnorrer, and the yente, they form a certain stratum of Jewish society that serve as social connectors. They were part of the fabric of Jewish life that marked close neighborhoods, in which everybody knew each other (and of course each other’s business). We have a talent for connecting people together, and we have particular people that do it in particular ways.

(FYI: nudnik is a pest; schnorrer is a beggar, or somebody who takes advantage of others’ generosity; and a yente is a busybody.)

Of course, as a group, most American Jews today, even though we are mostly descended from people who knew these roles and the people who played them, we no longer have that sense of ethnic interconnectedness. Squirrel Hill, it seems, is something of a throwback among Jewish neighborhoods, but even so, many have told me that it’s not what it used to be. And

And the same is true for the wider society in which we live. As the saying goes, the Jews are like everybody else, only moreso.

There are many little ways through which we demonstrate our awareness of and respect for others around us. One small example is how drivers behave at stop signs.

stop

Back on Long Island, I used to live right by an intersection with a four-way stop. From my kitchen window, I could see cars driving through the intersection without stopping all the time. Some slowed down. Some did not. (Some seemed to actually speed up as they were approaching.)

Now, I cannot say that I myself have never rolled through a stop, or exceeded the speed limit. But I think it’s notable that we are living in a time in which it is almost expected that, except when one is in the presence of a law enforcement officer, certain illegal driving behaviors are ubiquitous.

The sociologist Robert Putnam, whom you have probably heard me mention in this space before, wrote a seminal work of contemporary sociology called Bowling Alone, in which he documents the decline of interconnectedness in our society, and the consequences thereof. One of his measures of this sense of interconnectedness is, if you can believe this, stop sign behavior.

A long-term study of intersections in New York, cited by Putnam, yielded this: in 1979, when the study began, 37 percent came to a full stop. In 1996, 97 percent did not stop at all.

Traffic laws, health and safety standards, business regulations, and so forth – these are all designed to create a just society in which people are safe from the yetzer hara, the evil inclination of others. They are all reflections of a deeper set of principles, which the philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau referred to as the social contract: that in order to live in a free society, we as individuals must surrender a few freedoms to protect most of the others.

The Torah, of course, contains principles of law which govern our public behavior, to benefit the general good. One such example is that when you build a house, you must put a parapet around the edge of your roof, to prevent people from falling off (Deut. 22:8). Another is that if you dig a hole in your yard, and somebody’s ox falls in and breaks its leg, you are responsible to pay monetary damages for the ox (Ex. 21:33). And there are many more such examples.

And a whole order of the Mishnah, one sixth of that earliest rabbinic work, is dedicated to what we call today tort law. It’s called Neziqin, “damages.” And several tractates of the gemara are likewise devoted to these cases.

The point, of course, is not merely to protect people or make sure they do not get hurt, but also to maintain our sense of awareness of the other. If you think about your neighbor’s safety, you are going to want to build a parapet on your roof and not leave dangerous holes in your yard. You want to protect the people around you from harm. You care about them. As with every good habit, it takes practice, consistency, and a healthy dose of mindfulness. That’s what the Torah and the Talmud are going for.

So the stop sign is one side of that interconnectedness: the things that we do to protect others from harm. But the other side is the social connection that happens organically when people gather together. And that brings us back to the kibitzer, and to Parashat Emor, which we read this morning.

It’s not explicitly stated, and it’s not really something you can glean from the English translation, and that message is this: some of the holy opportunities of Jewish life are for you singular, the individual. And some of them are for you plural, the collective. Society writ large. And all of them are, as Katriel suggested earlier, for the sake of Qiddush HaShem, sanctifying God’s name.

Last week, in Parashat Qedoshim, we read the Holiness Code, a kind of guide to the kinds of interpersonal mitzvot / holy opportunities that help set up a just society. But mostly they are for individuals, and the language of the Torah reflects that: Do not profit from the blood of your neighbor. Do not bear a grudge. You should not use dishonest measures in the marketplace. And so forth.

But this week in Parashat Emor, we find the holiday cycle, and those mitzvot are in plural. Since we’re in Pittsburgh, yinz all know what the correct colloquial plural for the second person nominative pronoun is. Yinz shall keep My appointed times. Yinz shall observe Passover for seven days. And so forth.

Why plural for the festival cycle? Because those are the things that we do as a group, as Am Yisrael. The suggestion is, yes, you might be able to maintain the holiness in your individual relationships on a one-on-one basis, but yinz better be celebrating together. Because that’s what Jews do. We are individuals who are part of a collective. When we are together, we make a greater whole, and those are the times when we are closest to God.

And whom do you encounter at these group observances and celebrations? The kibitzers, of course, and everybody else.

So you may want to consider this the next time you come to a stop sign, but even more than that, think about it as we kibitz at the luncheon today, and the next week, and for Shavuot in two weeks, and so forth:

If you are doing Jewish right, you are sensitized to and aware of all the people around you. That is what our tradition is for. And that is what we stand for as we make the words of Jewish life and learning alive for us today.

~

Rabbi Seth Adelson

(Originally delivered at Congregation Beth Shalom, Shabbat morning, 5/13/2017.)