Tag: Qedoshim

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Belafonte, Joy, and the Holiness Code – Aḥarei Mot / Qedoshim 5783

Harry Belafonte died this week. He was among my favorite performers, and although his most successful years as a performing artist were before I was born, I was exposed to his music through my mother’s old vinyl records, and in particular “Belafonte at Carnegie Hall,” his live album from 1959. 

One of the things that made his music so wonderful was his love of a wide range of folk music. Belafonte sang not only the songs of his youth in the Caribbean (his album “Calypso” was the first ever to sell more than one million copies!), but also folk songs from the American, European, Latin American, and yes, even Jewish traditions. He considered Havah Nagilah, which he performed at nearly every live show, to be one of his favorites, and there is a good case to be made that the reason that this song is such an enduring feature of the American Jewish musical landscape is because Belafonte popularized it:

הבה נגילה ונשמחה
הבה נרננה ונשמחה
עורו אחים בלב שמח

Havah nagilah venismeḥah
Havah nerannenah venismeḥah
‘Uru ahim belev sameaḥ.

Let us rejoice and be happy
Let us sing with joy and be happy
Awake, brothers and sisters, with a happy heart.

Although his paternal grandfather was apparently of Dutch Sephardic extraction, Belafonte was not Jewish. Nonetheless, my mother once told me that she and her friends agreed that he would make a wonderful cantor.

But Harry Belafonte’s great talent was bringing people together, and bringing them joy. His audiences were black and white, Jewish and non-, young and old. During his extended version of the calypso classic “Matilda” at Carnegie Hall, you can hear him take great joy in inviting different demographics of the audience to sing along with him during the chorus, lightly poking fun at “all the big spenders” in the orchestra seats, and “those people on scholarship” all the way up in the nosebleeds. And then when he invites “women over 40” to sing along, the whole place erupts in laughter and joy. 

On a more serious note, Belafonte was also an advocate for civil rights, and a personal friend to Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King and the actor Sidney Poitier. And, perhaps due to his charisma, his high profile as an entertainer, and his inclination to bring people together, Belafonte was able to make his voice heard for the benefit of Black Americans. In 1993, he told The Times that he used his songs “to describe the human condition and to give people some insights into what may be going on globally, from what I’ve experienced.”

There were times when he was quite critical, calling out prejudice in unsparing language. Lamenting the roles Black actors received, he said, “TV excludes the reality of Negro life, with all its grievances, passions and aspirations, because to depict that life would be to indict (or perhaps enrich?) much of what is now white America and its institutions. And neither networks nor sponsors want that.”

And Belafonte had the credit to do that, because he was such a master at connecting people through his performance work, because he brought people such joy.

Our tradition, Jewish life and learning, is also heavily invested in joy. But it may not be the first thing that most of us think of when we think of Judaism. Probably the first thing that comes to mind about Jewish life is mitzvot, the 613 opportunities for holiness which our tradition teaches us.

Parashat Qedoshim opens with the line which is, in my humble opinion, the most essential line in the whole Torah (Vayiqra / Leviticus 19:2):

קְדֹשִׁ֣ים תִּהְי֑וּ כִּ֣י קָד֔וֹשׁ אֲנִ֖י’ ה אֱ-לֹהֵיכֶֽם׃

Qedoshim tihyu, ki qadosh ani Adonai Eloheikhem.
You shall be holy, for I the Lord your God am holy.

Our primary duty to other people, our relational mission, is to be holy, to distinguish ourselves as individuals and as a people by acting in a way that understands the presence of God in the other, and the Divine presence found in the space between people. 

And of course, the details are in the passage following, the rest of chapter 19 of Vayiqra / Leviticus, a section known as the Holiness Code: Honor your parents. Keep Shabbat. Leave some of your produce for needy people. Do not steal; deal honestly with your neighbor. And so forth.

What it means to be holy, to emulate God, is to treat others and the Earth with respect, to appreciate what we have been given and not to abuse or take advantage of it. Much of it is a framework of living that is universal; that is, we the Jews read it as having been given to us and required of us.

But let’s face it: the world would be a much better place if we all honored our parents, took a day off to remember God’s creation once a week, and set aside some of our material bounty for others who have none.

The essence of qedushah, of holiness is, in fact, bringing people together rather than driving them apart. Holiness is creating a just society. Holiness is ensuring that other people have food and shelter and clothing. Holiness is following a code of laws which uplifts us all, a set of traditions and customs which bring us framework and meaning.

And we can more easily achieve that when we gather in joy.

I have a student right now with whom I am guiding through the process of conversion. She was raised Catholic, and she has told me that one of the reasons that she was drawn to Judaism was the joy that she has experienced in synagogue, in singing joyfully at the Hod veHadar Instrumental Kabbalat Shabbat service, in watching as we dance as a community for baby-namings and aufrufs. It might be easy for some of us to lose sight, particularly amid Shabbat prohibitions or long Yom Tov days or deep into Yom Kippur afternoon, that Jewish life is filled with music and dancing and joy. We had 85 people here at Beth Shalom on Tuesday evening to celebrate Israel’s 75th birthday, and we danced and ate falafel, after we read the Declaration of Independence. We celebrate together, and even when we are grieving, we grieve together as a community.

My student wants to be a part of that joy. And I suspect that while some of us are here this morning to fulfill the mitzvah of tefillah/prayer, many more of us are here to be joyful together.

You might think of Havah Nagilah merely as a light dance tune. The words are simple. Let’s rejoice, let’s sing with joy. Awake, my brothers and sisters with a happy heart. But we might read that last imperative, ‘Uru, awake, as a call to action. Let’s sing with joy together, so that we can go out tomorrow and work hard to build a better society and a better world. 

Dancing the hora at a displaced persons camp in Germany following WWII

What is the essential point of the Holiness Code found in Qedoshim? To unite people in holiness, so that we can ultimately get down to the business of improving our lives and the lives of others, where we raise our voices for change, just like Harry Belafonte did.

One final thought: Ramban, the Spanish commentator who lives in the 13th century, points out in his commentary to “qedoshim tihyu,” the commandment to be holy, that it is possible to fulfill all the mitzvot of the Torah and still be, in his words, “נבל ברשות התורה,” “naval birshut hatorah,” a scoundrel with the permission of the Torah. That is, one can act fully within the letter of the law and still be a horrible person. You can accept the Holiness Code of Parashat Qedoshim, and keep Shabbat and provide for needy people and honor your parents and not be a thief and so forth, and you can still be mean, ill-tempered, stingy, and all sorts of other negative descriptors.  (Perhaps some of us even know people like that.)

So in order for the system of mitzvot to work properly in helping us to build better lives for ourselves and others, they have to be perceived not as an oppressive set of laws which limit our opportunities for pleasure, but rather as a source of joy. 

And that is why the joy of gathering together for ritual, for singing, for celebrating is so essential. It is the joy which keeps us honest, which reminds us that qedushah, holiness, thrives in that relational space between each of us. We have to keep the focus outward. We have to awaken with a lev sameaḥ, a happy heart, to see the joy in our lives and the holiness in others, in order to effect change.

Awake! Live in the joy right now, so that we can go out tomorrow and face the challenges of improving the state of humanity, with a lev sameaḥ.

~

Rabbi Seth Adelson

(Originally delivered at Congregation Beth Shalom, Pittsburgh, PA, Shabbat morning, 4/29/2023.)

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How to be Holy in Three Easy Steps – Qedoshim 5782

Some of you have surely heard me say that Qedoshim is truly my favorite parashah (e.g. here). That is not merely because, 39 years ago, I was called to the Torah for the first time as a bar mitzvah, one who has inherited the 613 mitzvot / holy opportunities of Jewish life, to read from this part of the Torah. Rather it is because, and I did not really get this 39 years ago, it contains the most essential line in the Tanakh, the Hebrew bible. I would not even dare to fantasize about correcting the great 1st-century BCE sage Hillel. However, if I were in his shoes 2,000 years ago, when he was asked by a potential convert to teach the whole Torah while standing on one leg (as in the famous midrash), I would have said (Vayiqra / Leviticus 19:2): 

קְדֹשִׁ֣ים תִּהְי֑וּ כִּ֣י קָד֔וֹשׁ אֲנִ֖י ה’ אֱ-לֹהֵיכֶֽם׃

You shall be holy, for I the Lord your God am holy.

That is how chapter 19 of Vayiqra / Leviticus opens. Now, it is worth pointing out, as one of my teachers from the Jewish Theological Seminary, Dr. Raymond Scheindlin put it: 

But the chapter doesn’t begin “Be moral, for I the Lord your God am moral” or “Be righteous, for I the Lord your God am righteous.” It begins “Be holy, for I the Lord your God am holy.”

Being holy is not necessarily being moral or righteous or socially conscious or politically engaged, although it may include all of those things. Being holy transcends the day-to-day mundane affairs which fill our lives. It is a much higher template for living. And Chapter 19 of Vayiqra / Leviticus, much of which we read today, teaches us how to be holy in three easy steps! I’ll tell you what they are in a moment, but first let me make the case for why you might want to pursue a holy life.

First, let’s face it: we are living in challenging times. (The working title for my book, by the way, is Torah for Tough Times.) Consider the great sense of isolation many people feel today, climate change, a yawning chasm between political factions in this nation which even cleaves families in two, the ongoing scourge of opioid abuse, rising rates of anti-Semitic activity, and throw in two years of pandemic and a senseless war in Eastern Europe, and a leaked document from the Supreme Court threatening abortion rights, just to name a few of the things that are raising our collective blood pressure.

Second, consider the fact that the spiritual framework which nourished our ancestors has gone away. Our forebears faced the challenges in their own lives by leaning into their Jewish practice. What do you lean into? Facebook? Instagram? No solace to be found there, I assure you.

Third, consider how your time has been stolen from you. Not only because the average American adult spends three hours a day staring at a smartphone screen, and the average teen seven hours, but also because work has invaded all the corners of our lives, and the endless options available to us for all kinds of wonderful activities push the possibility for holy, reflective moments off our radar.

Finally, consider how we prize our independence over all else, and how that has gone a long way toward creating a society in which we are all looking out for Number One. I sometimes feel that we have lost the sense of collective, that we can actually accomplish more when we work together to build a better society. Rebuilding that interconnected sense begins with doing things together across racial, ethnic, religious, and social lines – breaking bread, stepping forward to volunteer together, even just speaking with people who are unlike you.

Why should you want to be holy? Because a holy life is one which will make your life better as an individual and will make your neighborhood and your world better for all of us.

So, straight outta Vayiqra chapter 19, here is an easy three-step guide to living a holy life:

  1. Set aside sacred time.

19:30: אֶת־שַׁבְּתֹתַ֣י תִּשְׁמֹ֔רוּ וּמִקְדָּשִׁ֖י תִּירָ֑אוּ. Keep my holy Sabbaths and venerate my holy sanctuary, says God. 

We should read this expansively: by keeping Shabbat and venerating the miqdash, usually understood to be the ancient Temple in Jerusalem, we should understand that we must carve out holy moments in our lives. Now, let’s face it: it’s not so easy to set aside the holy time of Shabbat and holidays to be together with your family and your people and to gather in sacred fellowship with other Jews in our sacred spaces. Our time and by extension, our attention, are precious commodities in high demand; our lives are impossibly crowded with stuff, aided and abetted by the landscape of the Information Age.

Ladies and gentlemen, I shut down all my wired and wireless connections from sundown on Friday evening until dark on Saturday night. I do not spend money. I do not travel anywhere that I cannot get to on foot. I spend quality time with family – meals and games and lounging around, and I most assuredly get more and better sleep in those 25 hours than during the rest of the week.

And you can do that too. Really, you need it. You need the separation from the cut-and-thrust of daily interaction, from the likes and the retweets and your to-do list and schedules and commerce. You will make your life more holy and your weekday more productive if you shut down and spend quality time for those 25 hours as well. 

Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel famously called Shabbat “a palace in time.” It is there for you to enter and to enjoy, and to raise the bar of holiness in your life. This is how we sanctify time rather than idolize things, and that is Step 1.

  1. Remember the other.

There are so many mitzvot here in chapter 19 that speak to this idea. Just a few:

19:18 וְאָֽהַבְתָּ֥ לְרֵעֲךָ֖ כָּמ֑וֹךָ Love your neighbor as yourself.

19:16 לֹ֥א תַעֲמֹ֖ד עַל־דַּ֣ם רֵעֶ֑ךָ Do not stand idly by the blood of your neighbor.

19:14 לֹא־תְקַלֵּ֣ל חֵרֵ֔שׁ וְלִפְנֵ֣י עִוֵּ֔ר לֹ֥א תִתֵּ֖ן מִכְשֹׁ֑ל Do not curse the deaf, or put an obstacle before the blind.

The essence of living a holy life is to remember that you are not an independent operator, that you function in cooperation with all the others around you, and that each of us contains a spark of the Divine. We honor and elevate that spark when we remember to love our neighbor, when we respect each and every person around us by listening, by trying to appreciate their position, and by greeting everybody with a cheerful countenance. We create a better environment for all when we seek to understand rather than simply dismiss, or God forbid insult, those with whom we disagree. And we bring honor back onto ourselves when we model that behavior for our children and our friends as well as the folks with whom we do not get along.

The Torah wants us to see the humanity, the Divine spark of the other, and seek to connect. It is up to us to raise the bar of holiness in all the ways we interact with the folks around us. Remember the other; that is step 2.

  1. Give.

Arguably the most essential mitzvot in Jewish life, the ones which the Talmud tells us explicitly that you must instruct one who joins our faith to know, are those that require us to set aside some of the produce from our fields to give to those in need. Four of them appear in this Holiness code (19:9-10):

וּֽבְקֻצְרְכֶם֙ אֶת־קְצִ֣יר אַרְצְכֶ֔ם לֹ֧א תְכַלֶּ֛ה פְּאַ֥ת שָׂדְךָ֖ לִקְצֹ֑ר וְלֶ֥קֶט קְצִֽירְךָ֖ לֹ֥א תְלַקֵּֽט׃ וְכַרְמְךָ֙ לֹ֣א תְעוֹלֵ֔ל וּפֶ֥רֶט כַּרְמְךָ֖ לֹ֣א תְלַקֵּ֑ט לֶֽעָנִ֤י וְלַגֵּר֙ תַּעֲזֹ֣ב אֹתָ֔ם אֲנִ֖י ה’ אֱ-לֹהֵיכֶֽם׃

When you reap the harvest of your land, you shall not reap all the way to the edges of your field, or gather the gleanings of your harvest. You shall not pick your vineyard bare, or gather the fallen fruit of your vineyard; you shall leave them for the poor and the stranger. 

Of course, who in Squirrel Hill has a field, or harvests in this way? It is, rather, up to us to apply the spirit of these laws to how we live today, to remember that when we have plenty, we have to remember those who do not, and to give. 

But not only our money. What is our most precious commodity? Our time. Giving generously of your time fulfills these mitzvot as well. Find a charity that needs you; I’m happy to find you some volunteer work here at Beth Shalom. Spending time with others while you perform a mitzvah, in both the halakhic and the idiomatic sense, is a great way to be holy. Give; that is step 3.

***

This is the formula for holiness. It ain’t rocket science, as they say, but it is essential to living a complete life, and for using the traditional Jewish framework to improve yourself and your world. 

  • Set aside sacred time. 
  • Remember the other. 
  • Give. 

Three simple steps for living a holy life, and God knows this world could benefit from a whole lot more qedushah, more holiness. Please come talk to me if you need help in doing so; I would be honored to help you along your journey.

~

Rabbi Seth Adelson

(Originally delivered at Congregation Beth Shalom, Pittsburgh, PA, Shabbat morning, 5/7/2022.)

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Wants vs. Needs: A Pandemic Primer – Aharei Mot/Qedoshim 5780

Last Tuesday, on the night of Yom HaAtzma-ut, Israel’s Independence Day, we sang a song composed by Hayim Hefer and Moshe Vilensky, two of the greatest Israeli pop music composers, called Hayu Zemanim. It is an Israeli classic from 1948, originally sung by Shoshanna Damari (the Chizbatron, a group of performers who emerged from the Palmach, sang it in 1949). The song is about young soldiers, already veterans of Israel’s War of Independence, envisioning themselves sitting around the fireplace as grandparents, reminiscing and telling war stories about 1948 to their grandchildren about their time serving in the Palmach:

יָבוֹא הַיּוֹם וְעוֹד תֵּשֵב אֶל מוּל הָאָח
וְגַם הַגַּב יִהְיֶה כָּפוּף כַּחֲטוֹטֶרֶת
וְתִזָּכֵר אָז בְּיָמֶיךָ בַּפַּלְמָ”ח
וּתְסַפֵּר עַל זֹאת אַגַּב עִשּׁוּן מִקְטֶרֶת
וּמִסָּבִיב, וּמִסָּבִיב יֵשֵׁב הַטַּף
וְאִשְׁתְּךָ גַּם הִיא מֻפְלֶגֶת בַּשָּׁנִים
תַּזִּיל דִּמְעָה וּתְקַנֵּחַ אֶת הָאַף
וְתֵאָנַח: הָיוּ זְמַנִּים, הָיוּ זְמַנִּים

הָיוּ זְמַנִּים
אָז בַּמִּשְׁלָט יָשַׁבְנוּ
הָיוּ זְמַנִּים
לָחַמְנוּ וְאָהַבְנוּ
עַכְשָׁו דָּבָר אֵין לְהַכִּיר
עַל הַמִּשְׁלָט יוֹשֶׁבֶת עִיר
אוּלַי בִּזְכוּת אוֹתָם זְמַנִּים

The day will come when you will sit by the fireplace
When your back will be bent like a camel’s hump
And you will remember your days in the Palmach
And you will tell about this while smoking a pipe
And around you will sit all the little children
And your wife will also be distinguished in years
A tear may fall and you will wipe your nose
And you will sigh, “Those were the days, those were the days.”

Those were the days
When we sat in the army fortification
We fought and we loved
Now there is nothing left to recognize
Where the fort was stands a city
Perhaps because of those days

The Chizbatron, with Hayim Hefer front center, September 1949.

Of course, it made me think of the times we are in right now. Not like war, of course (there is only one person in America who thinks we are at war), but rather, like being cooped up with people whom we love and strive with in a kind of fortification.

And I hope that one day, in the distant future, we will look back on these times, and we will ask ourselves, what did we learn? How did we manage being apart from so many friends and family and workplaces and favorite haunts? What did we learn about the value of things we had always taken for granted?  

It has now been seven weeks since the Men’s Club Shabbat here at Beth Shalom, which was the last time the Faye Rubinstein Weiss Sanctuary was populated with Shabbat morning service attendees. Seven weeks of social distancing, of face masks and hand sanitizer and not hanging around with your friends on lazy Shabbat afternoons. And I must say that, while my family and I are long past stir crazy, I have settled into a kind of routine – davening via Zoom morning and evening, online meetings, frequent trips to the fridge, making pastoral phone calls, occasionally a walk outside, meals with the whole family, trying to find a quiet place in the house to write sermons, and so forth. The time is moving faster than I would have figured – strangely enough, even though I rarely leave the house, there are not enough hours in the day.

But I’ll confess something that I did not expect: I do not miss my weekly shvitz.

On my day off, up until 7 weeks ago, I would go to the gym to work out, after which I “rewarded” myself with a good shvitz, that is, sitting in the steam room, followed by a few minutes in the jacuzzi. Made me feel all loose and relaxed and calm. For years now, I have been looking forward to this routine; my shvitz time has been essentially sacred. 

Now I must say that up until perhaps this week, for some reason, I had not actually noticed that I had not thought about the shvitz in seven weeks. It simply got pushed down on my list of priorities. While we were trying to cope with the new reality, suddenly other things became more important. 

Now some of you may recall that Qedoshim is probably my favorite parashah (OK, so Aharei Mot comes along for the ride most years – they were together when I became bar mitzvah 37 years ago this week – but Aharei Mot simply doesn’t have the cachet that Qedoshim has.) So why is Qedoshim my favorite? Because it opens with what is essentially the most important piece of guidance from the Torah that we have:

קְדֹשִׁ֣ים תִּהְי֑וּ כִּ֣י קָד֔וֹשׁ אֲנִ֖י ה’ אֱ-לֹהֵיכֶֽם׃

You shall be holy, for I the Lord your God am holy.

And then what flows from that statement is a whole bunch of laws, which scholars refer to as the “Holiness Code,” that guide us in proper behavior. Examples: honoring your parents, leaving some of your produce for the poor to glean, being honest, not bearing a grudge, not mistreating a stranger, having honest business practices, and so forth. What we learn from Parashat Qedoshim, writ large, is that being holy mandates treating others with respect. We must respect their livelihoods, their feelings, their families, their citizenship status, their essential needs. That is what it means to be holy.

In this parashah, Jewish values are on display in abundance. How do we live our values? By acting on them; by walking through life with respect for others; by understanding that every human has fundamental needs, and that we should not stand in the way of the needs of others.

So the challenge we always have, and the challenge that is perhaps most easily answered in the current moment, comes down to two questions: “What do I need?” vs. “What do I want?”

Ours is a society that is saturated with want. Virtually every sponsored message of any kind out there is trying to tell us what we want. Think of the most “sticky” ad jingles that your brain is filled with – here are some that will be forever stuck in mine: “You deserve a break today.” “Have a Coke and a smile.” “Sometimes you feel like a nut, sometimes you don’t,” “Have it your way,” etc. Selling a product is all about telling you not what you need, but what you want.

המבין יבין

One of the things that is truly remarkable, and truly foreboding about this time is how much of the American economy depends on want, rather than need. At least 30 million Americans are now jobless; 1 in 4 workers in Pennsylvania. And that is due to the fact that we have closed non-essential businesses – one might presume that most of those closed businesses serve wants, rather than needs. And let us not forget that all of those newly-jobless people have actual needs, and now no means to pay for them; we should not discount the grave situation which we are now in as a society.

So what do we need? Obviously, food and shelter and clothing and healthcare. (And, as we all know now, you don’t really need that much clothing to attend Zoom meetings. And, BTW, do we really need the Internet? It’s hard to believe, of course, but it was not so long ago that we all managed without it. Not too much before that, at least in historical terms, humanity even survived without electricity.)

But all the more so, we need the intangibles, the things you cannot buy, which are just as essential. “I’ll buy you a diamond ring, my friend, if it makes you feel alright,” sang Paul McCartney a long time ago. “But I don’t care too much for money / for money can’t buy me love.”

We need love. We need companionship. We need friendship. We need family. We need spiritual structure. We need intellectual stimulation. We need meaning. 

Dr. Viktor Frankl, noted psychologist and survivor of Auschwitz and three other camps, documented in his book, Man’s Search for Meaning, the ways in which the Nazi operation dehumanized people, taking away their spirit and ultimately their will to live. Frankl observed that the feature shared by those who survived was that they made the active choice to seek some future goal, to put their current context into perspective and not allow the despair and pain and deprivation of bodily needs sap their desire to look to the future. He describes how he arrived at Auschwitz carrying the manuscript of his unpublished book, which at the time he felt was the most important thing in his life, the thing that he needed the most, hidden in his coat. It was promptly taken away from him and destroyed. His coat and manuscript are replaced by:

… the worn-out rags of an inmate who had already been sent to the gas chambers immediately after his arrival… Instead of the many pages of my manuscript, I found in a pocket of the newly-acquired coat one single page torn out of a Hebrew prayer book, containing the most important Jewish prayer, Shema Yisrael. How should I have interpreted such a “coincidence” other than as a challenge to live my thoughts instead of merely putting them on paper?

Frankl sees the Shema as a kind of divine message: keep these words upon your lips at all times, says the Shema. Speak them, teach them to your children. Live them. It is a sign that daily prayer, that seeking meaning through a spiritual framework, maintains the will to live, the intangible sense that our lives have value, that we are here for a purpose. It is a sign that the constancy of that spiritual framework, uniting past, present, and future, gives us life. He would not survive Auschwitz by lamenting the loss of his book, upon which he had worked so hard; rather, he would survive by knowing that he would write an even better book after the camps, after the Shoah.

Yes, the life-sustaining things are important: the food, the shelter, maybe even the internet. But what ultimately will enable us, as Jews, as a community, and as a nation, to survive is our drive to find meaning in our current predicament, to use it as an opportunity to hone our sense of ourselves and our values, to strive to be better people when we get to the other side.

Right now, we must mourn those whom we have lost, stay home and stay healthy, and look to the future, when we will treasure that much more our sense of respect for one another, our obligation to fashion a society that cares about the neediest among us, our drive for personal enlightenment as individuals and as a qehillah, a community.

I do not miss the shvitz, but I do miss all of you. And someday, far in the future, we will sit around and tell our grandchildren about 2020, about how we survived by learning about our values, about what we really need. 

~

Rabbi Seth Adelson

(Originally delivered via Zoom to Congregation Beth Shalom, Pittsburgh PA, Shabbat morning, 5/2/2020.)

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Sermons

The Great Unbundling – Aharei Mot-Qedoshim 5778

Last week I was in Chicago for a few days, at the convention of the Rabbinical Assembly, the professional organization of Conservative rabbis. Between sessions on ancient theology, medieval disputes about Jewish law, and the state of contemporary Judaism, we had some free time, so I took the L to the Art Institute of Chicago, and since I had limited time, I went directly to my favorite period, the French Impressionists. I saw a Renoir that brought tears to my eyes, ogled some Seurat, beheld several breathtaking Monets.

The Two Sisters
Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Two Sisters (on the terrace), (1881)

sunday on la grande jatte
Georges Seurat, A Sunday on La Grande Jatte – 1884 (1884/1886)

We read today in the Torah my favorite verse in the entire Torah (Vayiqra / Leviticus 19:2):

קְדֹשִׁים תִּהְיוּ כִּי קָדוֹשׁ, אֲנִי ה’ אֱ-לֹהֵיכֶם

“You shall be holy, for I the Lord your God am holy.”

One of the ways in which we as humans are holy is by acting on the creative impulse within us, the Divine gift of art. When I look at beautiful works of art, I am reminded of the fantastic things that humans are capable of; that despite our many flaws and challenges and vulnerabilities, we often have the potential to create great beauty.

Unfortunately, I did not have time to visit other galleries: the American, African, Indian, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Textiles, Photography, Prints and Drawings, Greek, Roman, Byzantine, Film, Video, etc., etc. Pity. I paid $25 for entry, just to see the work of a few 19th-century Frenchmen. I could actually see those items on the Art Institute of Chicago’s website for free.

The Petite Creuse River
Claude Monet, The Petite Creuse River (1889)

Nonetheless, I was moved. I am also grateful that this museum has so many things in its collection, among them Renoir and African fertility goddess dolls and ancient Egyptian stelae and Andy Warhol’s pop art. And I probably will not return there for a long time – I’m not in Chicago very often.

But imagine how weak a museum it would be if it only held one of those things. What makes a great museum wonderful is the range, the comprehensive nature of its offerings; the dedication to the entirety of the holiness in human creativity. Even if I could only have paid, let’s say, two dollars to only see the French Impressionists, the extra $23 in my pocket would represent a loss to me – my ability to take advantage of all that the museum offers – and a loss to the museum – its ability to provide all those other things.

The experience was, it occurred to me, relevant to something that I was planning to speak about today, and that is the so-called “unbundling” of Jewish life.

What is meant by “unbundling”? It’s going on all over the place right now. Show of hands: how many of us are still paying for cable? How many of us still buy CDs (or vinyl albums)? How many of us prefer AirBnB to a full-service hotel? We are in the process of unbundling our lives in many ways. Now, if you only want to watch ESPN, you don’t have to pay for CNN and BET and Lifetime. You don’t need to get the whole bundle.

Unbundling is a term that has come to the fore recently by people in the Jewish world who are advocating a different approach to living Jewishly: to separating the offerings of legacy institutions, particularly synagogues, from each other. That is, if you need a rabbi for a funeral, you hire a rabbi. If you want to learn Talmud, you can go online to find a Talmud class. If you have a 13-year-old child, you can rent an event space for a bar mitzvah. Why do we need big, full-service institutions? Can’t we just cobble together a few Jewish things by ourselves, DIY-style, and call it Jewish life?

The idea has been tossed around liberally by both hosts and guests of the Judaism Unbound podcast, which, for the last two years, has been examining the new ways in which people are engaging with Jewish living and learning today. And it also came up at a recent discussion hosted by Rodef Shalom Congregation about the Jewish future. The featured panel consisted of one of the hosts of Judaism Unbound, Dan Libenson, Rabbi Irwin Kula of CLAL: The Center for Learning and Leadership, Rabbi Aaron Bisno of Rodef Shalom, and two members of Beth Shalom: Rabbi Amy Bardack of the Federation, and Danielle Kranjec, the senior Jewish educator at the Hillel Jewish University Center.

It may be that unbundling is the way we are moving as a society. But that presents a kind of dilemma for synagogues. If I only want High Holiday tickets, or I only want my 2-year-old in the ELC, or I only want JJEP, or to celebrate a bar mitzvah, I have to buy the whole membership. I am effectively paying  a lot of money for services that I do not necessarily need or want.

Now, I am a big fan of Judaism Unbound, the podcast and the idea. It has been a forum for many good ideas, some of which I have happily appropriated.

But unbundling is short-sighted. It misses the fact that the synagogue is a home for the community. It’s an extension of your living room. It is, literally, a beit kenesset, a house of gathering, the Hebrew term for the Greek word synagogue. This is a place to gather. Not just for services. Not just for baby namings and dancing with the Torah and Shabbat dinners. It’s also a place where we learn about each other, where we share our stories, where we grow together spiritually as individuals, as families, as a community.

What makes us a qehillah qedoshah, a sacred community, is that we understand that in order to have this gorgeous building, in order to have the staff that keeps it open, the people to send our yahrzeit and birthday notices and new baby announcements, in order to be able to host Shabbat dinners or the Hod veHadar instrumental service that we had last night, we have to support it. Just like you cannot have Impressionists without Diego Rivera, Ai Weiwei, and Botticelli, you also cannot have a bar mitzvah or Ne’ilah without a community or an ark to open.

Still, there are skeptics who will say, “So tell me, Rabbi, what does a synagogue offer? Why do I need it?” (I am, in fact, asked variations on this question quite often.)

The synagogue is the place that offers you all the tools you need to thrive in today’s world. We offer you a framework to help you live a better life: one characterized

  • by tzedakah, charity;
  • by understanding and supporting the others in our midst – our family and friends but also the stranger, the immigrant, the poor, the unprotected;
  • by modeling what it means to be a family and to do familial things together in the context of community and Jewish life;
  • by providing opportunities to gather, not in front of a screen, but in real time with real people across multiple generations and demographics;
  • by bringing people together for a multitude of holy purposes, social, ritual, and otherwise;
  • by highlighting the holy moments in our lives and giving us a framework of gratitude, of celebration, and of grief;
  • by teaching ancient wisdom, translated into today’s context, which will:
    • heighten your relationships,
    • improve your understanding of yourself and the world around you, and
    • make you feel more grounded.

We need this.

I am grateful that the Art Institute of Chicago has a solid collection of Impressionists; I am also grateful for the all the other parts of the museum that I did not take advantage of. But just as you cannot unbundle a museum, so too must the synagogue, as the communal center, include and highlight all the aspects of Jewish life.

As we unbundle ourselves, we grow more isolated; synagogues are on the front lines of fighting that isolation. That’s why we need at least 10 people for a minyan, a prayer quorum, and that sense pervades Jewish life. We are a beit kenesset, a house of gathering. That is what this building, this community is here for. We will continue to improve the model of how we bring people together, to connect our ancient traditions and wisdom with how we live today. And we need you to be a part of it to make it happen, and to help shape our future together.

 

~
Rabbi Seth Adelson
(Originally delivered at Congregation Beth Shalom, Shabbat morning, 4/28/2018.)

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Sermons

Find the Holy Moments – Aharei Mot-Qedoshim 5777

What does it mean to be holy? (Take a moment to answer that question for yourself.)

What we read this morning, parashat Aharei Mot – Qedoshim, is entirely about holiness. In addition to the Yom Kippur rituals of the Kohen Gadol (in Aharei Mot), there is also the passage of Qedoshim which is known as the Holiness Code: for example, the instruction not to put a stumbling block before the blind, the commandments not to defraud others or withhold the wages of your employees, the imperative to leave some of your produce for the poor. But most of all, there is my favorite line in the whole Torah (Lev. 19:2): Qedoshim tihyu, ki qadosh ani Adonai Eloheikhem. You shall be holy, for I the Lord your God am holy.

Holiness is an alien concept to us today. We are living in a very concrete world. Thanks to technology, industrialization, the scientific method, and all the ways that we have squelched the mystery out of our daily existence, everything is quantifiable. Everything is measured. Explanations regarding how everything works can be easily found. There is very little room left for the unseen; very few cracks through which the light – the Divine light – can enter our lives.

blog-contemplation

And our understanding of Judaism has been likewise quantified, analyzed, researched. What was an organic folk tradition has, for at least a century and a half, become another field of academic study. This is the tradition from which the Conservative movement emerged; the United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism was founded by American congregations led by rabbis trained, for the most part, at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, where I studied to become first a cantor and then a rabbi.

The modern movements that we know today, Reform, Conservative and Modern Orthodoxy, all emerged from the intellectual ferment of 19th-century Germany, and particularly the approach to Jewish studies known as “Das Wissenschaft des Judentums,” literally, the science of Judaism. It used the tools of rigorous academic inquiry to analyze Jewish texts, history, rituals, laws, and customs. And it appealed to the newly-emancipated, newly-educated Jewish elite of Western Europe, who sought to be Germans on the street and Jews in the home. And its scholarly appeal soon reached across the Atlantic to take root here in America. Congregation Beth Shalom and synagogues like this all across North America grew out of this modern, scholarly approach.

I am about to admit something big. Actually, huge.

I love the history of the Conservative movement. I love the scientific, historical approach to Judaism, the style of teaching and relating to our tradition that views everything on a time line. I love the approach that values the original context of every piece of our unfolding tradition.

But I think that as a guiding principle for the Jewish people in the 21st century, it no longer resonates.

Why? Because it is possible to know a lot but feel little. We may be able to speak authoritatively about our ancient texts, or about the development and structure of our liturgy, or why the eating of qitniyot on Passover / Pesah is permissible even for Ashkenazim, and still not have an emotional connection to our heritage. It is possible to invest yourself in the meaning of the siddur or the humash, and still only hold it at arm’s length, rather than in your heart.

Rabbinical school does not teach you how to be a rabbi. What I have learned in my 10 years in the pulpit is to connect through feeling, through finding ourselves in our ancient texts, through emotional rather than academic engagement. What they failed to teach me at the Seminary is that Judaism is a coin with the emotional on one side and the scholarly on the other. Judaism cannot be relevant without both sides.

What we need to embrace is the decidedly anti-scientific concept of the holy moment.

Why do many synagogues today have difficulty filling the pews? Because, as Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel said in famous speech to the members of the Rabbinical Assembly in 1953, we have become more concerned with the technical aspects of the execution of the service than with the Godliness, the holiness therein. We are very worried about getting it right:

There are many who labor in the vineyard of oratory; but who knows how to pray, or how to inspire others to pray.  There are many who can execute and display magnificent fireworks; but who knows how to kindle a spark in the darkness of a soul?

This is all in service of God, my friends. It’s not about perfection. It’s not about the recitation of words or the singing or chanting. It’s about communication – with ourselves, with each other, with the Divine. It’s about baring our vulnerability. It’s about sincere pleas for mercy and justice and salvation. This is a holy pursuit. It’s not about the how, it’s about the why.  The how matters, but only inasmuch as it is meant to get us to the why. What we do in a Jewish context is a means to an end.

And we live in a time in which the why, the meaning of the words and the rituals and how they are supposed to make us feel and influence our behavior, is the most important thing. Maybe that wasn’t so important to my parents or grandparents. But it’s important to me, living here in 5777 (also known as 2017).

Why do we count the omer? Why do we recite the Shema (other than because it says to do so in the Shema itself)? Why must we avoid using dairy implements for meat meals? We have a million such whys. You might be able to think of many yourself right now.

It’s not enough to answer those whys by saying, “Because it says so in the Torah,” or, “Because we have always done this.” It’s definitely not enough to say, “I don’t know, but I do it anyway.” It’s not enough to respond this way, even though all of those are legitimate answers in Jewish tradition.

Why do we do what we do, as Jews? Because that is how we become holy people. And every person here in this room could use a little extra holiness. Even the diehard skeptics among us.

Counting the omer, for example, gives us a framework through which we connect freedom with Torah. As we rise from 1 to 49, counting off daily for seven weeks, we anticipate the spiritual fulfillment given at Mt. Sinai. We heighten our expectation; we count our blessings; we look forward to ascending yet another rung of self-improvement, of learning, of yearning. Imagine adding an extra moment of holiness to your evening for seven whole weeks! That’s why we count the omer.

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Two years ago, around this time, New York Times columnist David Brooks published a moving essay in which he identified the paradigm shift through which we are all living with respect to how we understand ourselves and our purpose on this Earth. He points to Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel as having been a public theologian, among others in the middle of the 20th century, and how the era of such thought leaders has passed:

Public discussion was awash in philosophies about how to live well. There was a coherent moral ecology you could either go along with or rebel against. All of that went away over the past generation or two…

These days we live in a culture that is more diverse, decentralized, interactive and democratized. The old days when gray-haired sages had all the answers about the ultimate issues of life are over. But new ways of having conversations about the core questions haven’t yet come into being.

The difficulty to which Brooks points is that while our great public sages have set like the sun, we have filled that space with Big Data: knowing everything about everything. Concreteness. There’s an app for that. We have much knowledge, but little wisdom. And hence Brooks says that there is a real hunger for change in this regard:

“People are ready to talk a little less about how to do things and to talk a little more about why ultimately they are doing them.”

We have an answer to the why. And that answer is holiness. The answer can be found in every holy moment that we encounter. And we have to broadcast that message at every opportunity.

And here’s the really good news: the fact that we are all sitting here, on a day when we celebrate the stepping up of a young man into the big leagues of Jewish tradition, indicates that there is still an interest in, and a forum for engaging with holiness. Our tradition offers wisdom. It offers mystery. It offers connection. As we said at our Passover tables a month ago, in Aramaic, kol dikhfin yeitei veyeikhul. Let all who are hungry, come and eat. Come and devour those brief moments of holiness, when the cracks in our reinforced walls of knowledge let in the Divine light.

This synagogue, and others like it stretching back for 2,000 years, have been places where our people have come to seek connection. We have to make sure that it’s not only about the how, but about the why. We need purpose. We need meaning. We need to find the holy moments in our lives.

 

~

Rabbi Seth Adelson

(Delivered at Congregation Beth Shalom, Shabbat morning, 5/6/2017.)