Parasha Kedoshim

Do Not Stand by the Blood of your Fellow

This weekend marks Yom HaShoah – Holocaust Memorial Day. We will be having our annual Holocaust Memorial Service this Sunday, following our Jewish United Fund brunch. Our speaker will be Jeannie Smith, the daughter of a Righteous Gentile. She will tell the story of her mother, Irene Gut Opdyke, who risked her life to hide her Jewish friends in the home of a German major, where she was forced to work as a housekeeper.  This heroic action, and those of others who put their own lives in danger to help others, were important in their own right. I learned recently that these brave individuals were responsible for saving only 5-10% of the Jews who eventually survived the war. Each life is precious, and each gesture of resistance is praiseworthy. Yet, ninety to ninety five percent of Jewish survivors in Europe were saved not because of the heroic actions of individuals, but because the governments under which the Jews lived did not cooperate with the Nazis in handing them over. The governments of France, Italy, Denmark, Romania, Bulgaria, and Hungary all resisted, in one form or another, the Nazi demand to transport their Jewish populations “to the East”.

I learned something else recently. I learned that Germany was not a particularly anti-Semitic state for most of the modern era up until the Holocaust. Although there were anti-Semitic political parties in the late 1800s, few voters were mobilized to vote for them. Prior to World War l, no party whose main plank was anti-Semitism ever received more than 3.7% of the popular vote in German elections.  Hitler’s hate inspired National Socialist Party received 6.5% of the popular vote in 1924, but only 2.6% of the popular vote in 1928. In the 1932 elections Hitler’s party garnered 37.3% of the popular vote, but by that time they were consciously playing down their anti-Jewish views and attacking government corruption in the depths of the Great Depression.  The Nazis calculated that those who were attracted to their anti-Semitic rhetoric in the past were already voting for them, and they were unlikely to attract other voters by spewing hatred.  Therefore, they concentrated on economic matters.

How did Hitler eventually seize power?  Hatred of Jews in Germany was not strong enough to get most people to support a party that advertised this as the main part of its platform. Yet, distaste for anti-Semitic rhetoric and racist demagoguery was not strong enough to block Hitler’s ascent. The fact, is, most people did not care about the fate of the Jewish minority in Germany, one way or the other. They were willing to look the other way and expose their Jewish countrymen to the fanatical hatred of the Nazi party, although they did not necessarily share that fanatical hatred. They violated one of the most important commandments in our Torah, found this week in Parasha Kedoshim – “Lo Ta-amod al dam re-ecah” – You shall not stand by the blood of your neighbor.  In other words, “You shall not be indifferent”. This was the very sin of the German populace. They certainly did not love the Jews, the majority did not particularly hate the Jews – most were simply indifferent to the fate of the Jews. They were concerned about their own prospects, their own livelihoods, and were willing to expose the Jews to a group of hardcore fanatics who were brought into power for other reasons. [1]

From the violation of this commandment, Lo Ta-amod, “You shall not be indifferent”, the Nazi state proceeded to violate every other commandment in this week’s parasha. Fascism exalts the nation and its race above the universal laws of G-d, setting up the State to be worshipped as the highest good. The Nazi nation stole, they robbed, they perverted justice, they lied, they judged falsely, they spread slander, they cheated and they profaned themselves in every way.  Thus Germany was led by its leaders to the depths of immorality and godlessness.

Then there were these Righteous Gentiles. Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Museum of Israel, has recognized 24,811 “Righteous among the Nations”. They represent men and women from 47 different countries. Who are they, these people who refused to be indifferent in the face of the suffering of others? Many of them were interviewed by sociologists, and six characteristics emerged. The Righteous Gentile more likely had difficulty blending in with their own social environments – they felt different, and were somewhat alienated from the surrounding culture.  They had a willingness to act without the social approval of others – to act out of personal conviction rather than out of social convention. They had a history of doing good deeds and reaching out to the needy. They tended not to see their actions as heroic – they were matter of fact in talking about their good deeds, and saw nothing extraordinary about their actions. They saw Jews as simply “people in need” and not as a stranger or a member of a group different from their own. Finally, they acted in ways that were not planned out or carefully considered; in many instances, they acted impulsively in hiding or rescuing Jews. [2]

May the example of the Righteous Gentile be an inspiration to each of us to not stand idly by when we see people in need. May we remain alert to the dangers of callous indifference to others. May we live lives of grace and dignity and honor, and may G-d keep us far from disgrace and shame.  Let us say, Amen.

 

---

[1] The Cambridge Guide to Jewish History, Religion and Culture, Ch. 9 “The Shoah and its Legacies” by Peter Hayes pp 236-37, edited by Baskin, Judith R. and Kenneth Seeskin Cambridge Univ Press, 2010.

[2] http://www.yivoencyclopedia.org/article.aspx/Righteous_Gentiles

Shabbat HaGadol

Hole-y Matzo! 

I am currently reading Taking the Stand, Alan Dershowitz’s account of his professional life as a Harvard Law Professor as  a, high profile attorney, and as an ardent defender of Israel.  Dershowitz was retained by Jim Bakker, the famous televangelist who had been convicted of fraud in relation to his ministry in 1989. The judge had given Jim Bakker a draconian 45 year sentence and fined him a half a million dollars for his crimes.  Dershowitz, hired for an appeal of the sentence, succeeded in getting the court to reduce that sentence to eight years.  Knowing that Alan Dershowitz had a large collection of Haggadahs, some beautifully illustrated and dating back hundreds of year, the Bakkers gave him a gift of a Christian Evangelical Haggadah in appreciation.  (For our guests tonight, the Haggadah is a kind of prayer book that tells the story of Passover, and is used at our Seders.) At the Dershowitz Passover Seder that year, Dershowitz, who loves practical jokes, had a friend and a guest read a chosen selection from that particular Haggadah. When it came to the part of the Haggadah where we explain the reasons that we eat the matzo on Passover, the friend, known for his dramatic and expressive voice, read from the Evangelical Haggadah:

“This is the bread of affliction that the people of Israel had to eat when they fled from Egypt.” So far, so good”, writes Dershowitz. “But then, it went on to describe why matzo has small holes:”

“The holes in the matzo represent the wound in the body of our Savior, who in his body was punctured during his crucifixion.”

Now, there is a reason why the holes are in matzo, but that explanation is, I assure you, NOT in the traditional Haggadah and NOT part of a Jewish Seder.  We’ll come back to the reason the holes are there, at least from the Jewish perspective, later on.  This introduces the topic of tonight’s sermon—why DO we eat matzo, which is unleavened bread, on Passover?  

I would like to highlight three reasons we eat matzo on Passover. The first you probably know. Matzo has to be made quickly – in under 18 minutes, to be precise, or else the dough will start to ferment and rise.    The Torah tells us that when the Israelites left Egypt, they had to leave quickly. In fact, they were literally driven out of Egypt by the Pharaoh following the plague of the “Death of the Firstborn”.  The Torah tells us that Pharaoh arises in the middle of the night to seek out Moses and Aaron and tell them leave. He can’t wait till morning and everybody is up!  It says in the Torah “Egypt imposed itself strongly upon the people to hasten to send them out of the land, for they said, “We are all dying!” (Exodus 12:33) We eat the matzo on Passover as a way to remember the hasty departure of our ancestor from Egypt. They left in such a hurry that they did not have time to let their bread rise.

This is not the first time, however, we hear about matzo in our Torah. This introduces us to the second reason we eat Matzo on Passover.  You see, the Israelites ate matzo before they left Egypt as well. They are instructed in fact, to eat a meal of meat, matzo and bitter herbs on the night BEFORE they leave Egypt, BEFORE the plague of the firstborn and before they leave Egypt.  It is the very first Seder. Matzo is, in fact, poor man’s bread – lechem oni, in the Hebrew. Ha lachma anya –“this is the bread of affliction”, as we recite in Aramaic at the beginning of our Seder.  It is the bread that the Israelites ate the 240 years that they were enslaved in Egypt. A second reason we eat matzo is in remembrance of our ancestor’s enslavement, oppression and impoverishment.

This is why Egg Matzo cannot be used at the Seder to fulfill the mitzvah of eating matzo. The Talmud  calls egg matzo “the matzo of opulence” or “rich man’s matzo”. I suppose if you had enough money to have a chicken to give you an egg, you were not considered poor. Eating egg matzo would not be a proper way to remember poverty. It is also the reason why the Kairites, a Jewish sect, would only eat matzo made of barley, the grain that one feeds to animals. Eating this grain made into matzo, they feel, is the best way to remember.

The third reason we eat Matzo is that it symbolizes purity. The process of leavening, i.e., the rising of the bread which happens when yeast is present, represents “corruption”, or “rot”. How is that so? The process of bread rising involves fermentation. Fermentation is the chemical decomposition of a substance by bacteria, yeasts, or other micro organisms.  In other words, fermentation is rot.

That is, leavening technically, that is chemically, decomposes, that is, rots, the dough. In fact, our Torah teaches in Leviticus that no meal offering brought before G-d can contain leaven.  It cannot contain that which rots. Only pure offerings are suitable as a gift to G-d.

Leavening, which makes dough rise, symbolically represents corruption, represents haughtiness, and represents pride and arrogance. It symbolizes everything that Pharaoh, who thought he was a god, stood for. Matzo reminds us of the humble status of our ancestors in Egypt, and the humility we should seek to cultivate in our daily lives.  The word matzo is related to the three letter root for “to squeeze” (mem-tsadi-hey) or “to struggle against” (nun-tsadi-hey). During Passover we make a special effort to squeeze out every corrupting influence in our lives. We struggle against arrogance and pride when we find it in ourselves.

This is where the holes in the matzo come in. The holes are made in the dough to allow air bubbles to escape during the baking process. This prevents the dough from rising and swelling while it is in the oven.

So, stay away from products with leavening, and keep yourself from having a rotten Passover. In fact, Shabbat Shalom and A Sweet and Kosher Pesach! 

Parasha Metzorah

Life and Death are in the Hands of the Tongue

A midrash tells us that the King of Persia took ill and was advised by his doctors to drink the milk of a lioness in order to be cured. A man came before the King and volunteered to bring the king fresh lion's milk. The man asked the King for ten goats. He took the goats and traveled to where the lions lived. On the first day, when he was sure that a lioness saw him, he threw her a goat from far away. The next day he came closer... by the tenth day he had won her trust and managed to obtain a full jug of lion's milk.

On his way back he had a vision; different parts of his body had a major argument. The legs said, "None of the other limbs can compare to us. If we would not have transported the body, it would have been impossible to obtain this milk." The hands argued that they were without parallel. If they hadn't performed their role gently and efficiently, it would have been impossible to obtain the milk. The heart argued that if it had not come up with the idea of the goats the entire project would have been impossible. The tongue argued that if it had not spoken up, all would have been for naught.

All the other limbs were enraged at the tongue, "How do you even dare to make any claim? You are hidden away in a dark and dank place, and you lay flat on your back all your days!" The tongue told them, "You will see, this very day you will all agree that I am your master."

After the man heard all this, he went to the king and told him, "Your majesty, here is the milk of a donkey!  The king sat on his throne in disbelief. This man had been sent on a mission for the milk of a lioness and he returns with the milk of a donkey?  The King demanded that the messenger should be hung. On the way to the execution, all his limbs began to cry. The tongue told all the complaining parts of his body, "Didn't I tell you that you are all helpless? You see what trouble I can cause if I want to?  If I now save you, will you all acknowledge my superiority?" They all agreed.

The man then asked the executioner to let him speak with the king once again. His request was granted. He spoke soothingly to the king and convinced him to drink the milk, as it would surely cure him. The king tried the milk and was cured, and the man was spared. Indeed as it says in The Book of Proverbs "Death and Life are in the Hands of the Tongue"! (Mishlei/Proverbs 18:21) (Story adapted from http://www.aish.com/tp/i/m/48939767.html)

The prophetess Miriam certainly learned this lesson the hard way. In the Book of Numbers, she speaks out against her brother, Moses, and G-d strikes her with a scaly white skin disease that leaves her looking quite dead.  Moses prays to G-d to heal her, but she must live outside of the camp for seven days before she is healed and readmitted into Israelite society.   From this episode with Miriam, the sages deduced that the heavenly punishment for slander and gossip was “Metzorah”, a skin disease that is the topic of this week’s Torah reading. The person afflicted with Metzorah was put outside the camp  -- not to prevent the disease from spreading , but to prevent  the spread of the gossip – at least according to the Rabbis!  It also was intended to encourage the person to think about what he or she had done. These reflections would make the slanderer experience the sense of shame and isolation that gossip inflicts upon its victims.

A slanderer is called a “rachil” in Hebrew. This word is related to the Hebrew word for peddler. The Jerusalem Talmud explains: Just as a peddler travels from city to city selling his wares, so the slanderer or gossip goes from one person to another saying, “So and so said this” and “I heard such and such about so and so.”  Maimonides teaches that even though what they say may be true, gossip “destroys the world.” In this sense he   believes that it is a worse sin than murder, idolatry or sexual immorality.

In our own time, with technologies at the tip of our fingers, , fortunes have been made on gossip and slander.  King Solomon, the wisest man who ever lived, foresaw it all when he warned us in the Bible, “Even in your thought, you shall not curse a king, nor in your bedrooms shall you curse a wealthy man, for the bird of the heaven shall carry the voice, and the winged creature will tell the matter.”  In other words – Twitter!  Today, there is no need for the gossip to laboriously go from person to person spreading their poison. Today, thoughts emanating from the privacy of one’s den can race around the world in literally no time at all through the miracle of that little bird called Twitter.

 A few months ago I saw Robert Osborne interview Kim Novak on television. She is of course a 1950’s film icon. She grew up in Chicago in a poor family, and made her way to Hollywood where she met with immediate success in motion pictures.  In very moving interview, she spoke candidly of her hunger for the love of a mentally ill father who was always rejecting.  She spoke of her own struggles with bi-polar disorder. Celebrity interviewers often mine for behind the scene scoops and juicy revelations about other Hollywood stars. When she was asked by Robert Osborne about famously difficult actors and directors she had worked with, Kim Novak had nothing but nice things to say about them.  At the end of the interview, I felt that I had gotten to know her a little. She was  open, undefensive and sincere in her responses to questions about her personal and public life.

So it unsettled and pained me to read that her appearance at the Academy Awards a month ago set off a flurry of malicious activity with Twitter.  The 81 year old actress, appeared with Mathew McConaughy to present the award for the best animated film. . She reportedly walked stiffly and struggled to speak. The Twitter world exploded with unkind jokes and cruel remarks about her physical appearance. The newspapers picked up the story the next day and reported the slandering remarks over and over and over again. Why did the newspapers report on this? Gossip sells newspapers! We want to read it!  But the Rambam cautions us – Gossip kills three people -- the one who says it, the one hears it, and the one about whom it is said – but the one who hears it is harmed more than the one who says it. Even hearing or reading about it damages us spiritually.

 The psalms tell us that the person who desires life should guard their lips from speaking evil of others.  In doing so, the psalmist tells us, that person will learn to cherish each day and live in peace.  Those who gossip and speak ill of others take something precious away from our lives and theirs. Like second-hand smoke, gossip harms not only the speaker but also those who hear it. Let us resolve to be careful with our words. Let us try our best to find good things to say about others, period. For, as we remember, “Death and Life are in the Hands of the Tongue”.

 

 

March 7

(With much talk about Secretary of State John Kerry's peace initiative coming to a conclusion, I wanted to share with you this sermon I delivered on March 7, which I thought I had posted but found this morning in my unsent "draft" box.) 

Prospects for Peace

This evening I would like to share a discussion that we rabbis had with Shlomo Avineri, during the last evening of our January Rabbinic Action Mission t to Rome and Jerusalem. Shlomo Avineri is a distinguished professor of Political Science at The Hebrew University in Jerusalem, a highly thought of intellectual and a frequent columnist for the newspaper, Ha-Aretz, in Israel.   The topic was the prospects for an Israeli-Palestinian peace.  During this time our Secretary of State, John Kerry, was, and continues to be, engaged in a process which would hopefully yield a final peace treaty by March of this year between the Palestinians and the Israelis.  Professor Avineri spoke about four issues that keep the Israelis and Palestinians, as he says, “far from peace”.

The first issue he discussed was the issue of borders. The Palestinians want Israel to evacuate Israeli settlers in the West Bank.  “How does one evacuate 150,000 people in a democracy?” asked Avineri. Although he never thought Israeli settlement of the West Bank was a good idea, it has been an idea supported by all Israeli governments, both Labor and Likud, over the past forty years.  These governments were elected by the people in a democratic process and are an expression of the will of the people. Israel almost came to the brink of civil war with the evacuation of 8000 people from Gaza.  A government that would begin to evacuate 150,000 settlers from the West Bank would be a government that would soon fall.

The second stumbling block for a final peace treaty, according to  Avineri, is the issue of joint sovereignty over Jerusalem. Avineri emphasized that there is no place in the world where joint sovereignty is held by two governments. “Who is going to take care of the lawbreakers?” he asked rhetorically.  He maintains that joint sovereignty is untenable and unworkable.  As an example, Great Britain and Spain both claim sovereignty over the Rock of Gibraltar.  Despite the fact that those two countries are at peace with one another, they cannot come to an agreement on joint sovereignty. How are the Palestinians and the Israelis, who are at virtual war with one another, come to an agreement on joint sovereignty of Jerusalem when Spain and Great Britain, two  country who  have an amicable relationship cannot do so with regard to the Rock of Gibraltar? 

The third irresolvable area,  Avineri points out,  is that of refugees. Some 750,000 Arab refugees fled or were expelled during the fighting that was instigated by the Arabs in an effort to wipe out the nascent Jewish state in 1948. That number has grown to over four and one-half million refugees and their descendants. Avineri said that this is more than just a humanitarian issue.  It is also a symbolic issue for the Palestinians. For Palestinians, granting the “right of return” for refugees means that Israel takes responsibility for what they consider “the nahkbah” – the disaster that happened in 1948 to their national aspirations.  No Israeli government, said Avineri, will accept the right of Palestinians to choose to return to their former homes, let alone accept moral responsibility for the plight of Palestinian refugees.

Finally, there is the issue of security. Israel will insist that any Palestinian state be a demilitarized state. Israel will maintain over-flight rights and will insist on a military presence in the Jordan Valley, which would form the border between a Palestinian state and Jordan. These conditions also would be unacceptable to the Palestinians.

This, he reminds us, is not just a territorial issue. It is a conflict about occupation, about the legitimacy of the use of terrorism, about two different narratives -- two very different versions of history.  There are also religious aspects, on both sides. On the other hand, the status quo is unacceptable, he maintains. 

In a separate op-ed piece published in Ha-Aretz after our visit, Avineri cautions not to expect Abbas to sign any agreement with the Israelis.  He notes that his tactics in the past negotiations has been to wring concessions from the Israelis, then break off negotiations without committing to anything in return.  If Avineri is correct, and no signed agreement will come out of these talks, what is to be done? 

Avineri suggests that there is a third way. This is the way of partial solutions, intermediate steps, partial agreements, unilateral steps and informal accommodations. We need to move our thinking from conflict resolution to conflict management, he says. We cannot be satisfied with the status quo, yet we should not think that there is enough common ground for a final agreement.  The two sides can do things to reduce the friction and bring about significant change even in the absence of a final agreement. This is working today in other areas of conflict – in Cyprus, in Bosnia, in Kosovo.  Perhaps it can work, too, in the Middle East – for the time being.

Shabbat Shalom