Parasha Korach

Silencing Your Critics

When does a controversy that erupts at a student organization at a small college make the front page of the New York Times?  -- When that controversy involves Israel.  A few months ago the students at the Hillel at Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania rebelled. They wanted to sponsor a speaker to talk about Israel. They could not do it, because inviting that speaker violated a policy of Hillel. That policy prohibits inviting speakers that “deny the right of Israel to exist; “delegitimize, demonize or apply a double standard to Israel”; support boycotts, divestment or sanctions against Israel; or “foster an atmosphere of incivility.” These guidelines also prohibit Hillel’s sponsoring programs with organizations that espouse any of these views. Sounds reasonable, right? However, last year a group of fifteen students had dinner at the Harvard Hillel house with Avraham Burg. Burg is an Israeli author and politician, a former chairman of the Jewish Agency, and former speaker of the Israeli Parliament.  Burg had to cross the street to speak in another building, however, because his visit was co-sponsored by the Palestine Solidarity Committee, which supports boycott and divestment from Israel. At the State University of New York in Binghamton, Benjamin Sheriden, a senior, arranged the showing of the Academy Award nominated “5 Broken Cameras”. This is a documentary on the non-violent resistance of a Palestinian farmer to the actions of the Israeli army. Benjamin Sheriden also invited the brother of the filmmaker to talk about the film. This brother is a Palestinian angry about Israel’s actions in the West Bank and Jerusalem. Benjamin Sheriden claims that this movie and invitation led to his being forced to resign from a Hillel board. He also claims that he lost his paid internship for promoting study abroad programs for Israel. “The second I question Israel,” -- Israeli policies, not its existence — all of a sudden I’m a pariah?” he asked. “If Hillel is going to be the group that represents all Jews, how can it say, ‘On Israel we have one policy only’?”

Eric D. Fingerhut, the president and chief executive of Hillel, responded sharply to the rebellious students who declared themselves an “Open Hillel”.  Hillel’s mission, he asserts, is to build Jewish identity and life-long connections to Israel.  Hillels are not permitted to sponsor any activities which are deemed anathema to that mission, or which might interfere with a positive connection to Israel. Supporters of the policy note that there are plenty of places on campus where students can hear dissident views of Israel. Campus Hillels are not the place for that discourse to take place.   

Peter Beinart, an American Jewish writer with leftist tendencies, wrote in the Israeli newspaper Ha-Aretz that under Hillel guidelines, Amoz Oz, the great Israeli writer, would not be allowed to speak at a Hillel. A few weeks ago Oz called the settlers on the West Bank “Hebrew neo-nazis”.  Isn’t that demonizing Israel, asks Beinart. He goes on to argue that half of the Israeli cabinet as well as the late Lubavitcher Rebbe could logically be excluded from speaking at Hillels by the guidelines that Hillel executives have promulgated. [1] The guidelines are so vague, he writes, that they are really an excuse for powerful people in a given Jewish community to exclude those from speaking who they do not agree with. He suggests a simpler formulation for a guideline ““Hillel will only host speakers who affirm the right of both Jews and Palestinians to live in the land of Israel.” This, he says, would exclude racists and exterminationists who dream of the land cleansed of everyone from the other side, but would significantly broaden the intellectual and moral debate that surrounds the Jewish state.

Who has the right to speak, and who must be silenced? That controversy, so central to the issues at Hillel, are also central to our parasha this Shabbat. In it, Moses is faced with a rebellion of his own. Korakh, Moses’ first cousin, issues a challenge to Moses. Who elected you to be our leader? By what right do you call all the shots for our community?  Is Aaron the most qualified person to be our High Priest, or is he High Priest because he is your brother?  The entire community is holy, but you exalt yourself and your brother above us. Why are you privileged to speak on the community’s behalf?

Moses responds with the same answer that all leaders up until the American Revolution have responded with when their authority has been challenged. If they didn’t themselves claim to be a god, they all believed, or wanted their subjects to believe, that they had been appointed by G-d. Having derived their authority from G-d, they had the right to do whatever they pleased.  Moses really was appointed by G-d, but how was Korakh to know this was true?  How was he to know that it was not just something that Moses said to justify his position – like all leaders from time immemorial? Moses was, of course, able to prove that he spoke on behalf of G-d, and Korakh and his followers were silenced.

Who has the authority to determine who speaks at college Hillels? Is it the members of the International Board of Directors, who donate their time, energy, and considerable financial resources to provide support and direction for campus Hillels? These are men and women who have a long term commitment to Hillel and are deeply invested in its mission.  Or should the students themselves; on campus for only four years before they move on, have the authority to invite whoever they want to hear speak? If students were able to take more “ownership” of their programming, have more autonomy in their choices, would this cause more Jewish students to be active in Hillel? Would Hillel then be perceived as being more inclusive, open to more points of view, and thereby draw more Jewish students in – as students in the “Open Hillel” movement claim?

I have to admit I do not know the answer. It is perhaps instructive to look at how Moses dealt with the rebellion against him. Moses calls upon the rebels to speak to him. According to Rashi, Moses sent for them so that he could appease them with words of peace. “We will not go up,” was their reply, as they repeated their grievances against Moses. From this our rabbis teach that we should always seek to end controversies through words and through compromise. We need to open our hearts to truly listen to the other side. Angry declarations and defensive missives played out on the front pages of a national newspaper do not a dialogue make.

 

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[1] http://www.haaretz.com/opinion/.premium-1.590602

Parasha Beha-ah-lo-techa

The Purpose of One's Life

This week during our studies we have taken on the big questions of life. For our Tikun lel Shauvot study, Bernie’s subject was “The Purpose in Life”. He asked us, “If someone were to ask you what the purpose of life was according to Judaism, how would you answer that question?” We all gave it a try. One of us said that the purpose of life according to Judaism was to “walk in G-d’s ways.”  Another of us said it was “to serve G-d.” Bernie shared with us the prophet Micah’s answer, “To do justice, to love goodness, and to walk humbly with your G-d.” Then Bernie shared with us a Chasidic story. “Rabbi Baer of Radoshitz once said to this teacher, the Seer of Lublin, “Show me one general way to the service of G-d.” I imagine that Rabbi Baer also came to the conclusion that to serve G-d, or to walk in G-d’s ways, was the purpose of life, only, he wanted to know how he should do it.  His teacher replied, “There is no one way that all people should take. For one person’s way to serve G-d may be through learning, another’s through prayer, another’s through fasting, another’s through eating. Each of us should carefully observe what way our heart draws us to and then choose that way with all of our strength.”

This is beautifully illustrated in our parasha for this week. The parasha describes the formation that the tribes of the Israelites marched in as they set out on their journey through the wilderness. At the head of the formation marched the tribe of Judah, as befitting their leadership status and the fact that royalty would someday descend from among their numbers. The tribe of Judah was also strong in its religious faith, a faith so unshakeable that one day the Temple would be built in her territory. The tribe of Dan brought up the rear. This tribe was so weak in its religious faith that on day her territory would become the site of idol worship. Yet as weak as their religious faith was, they were known for their loyalty and love of their fellow Israelites. It was this quality that made them the best choice to bring up the rear. In the Torah they are described as the “me-ah-sef” of the tribes. The word “me-ah-sef” is related to the word for “collect” in Hebrew.  According to the sages, this tribe would collect all of the lost objects that were dropped on the way by the other tribes and return them to their rightful owners. They would also be responsible for gathering all of the individuals from the other tribes who had strayed from the formation and were in danger of getting lost.  Thus they expressed their service to G-d, their purpose in life, not through the proper form of worship, but through their love of their fellow Jew. This tribe would ensure that no one among the Israelites would be left behind.

You see, not everyone expresses  their religious faith in the same way. This is as true today as it was when the Jewish people first left Egypt. One person who expressed his Jewish faith in an “unorthodox” and highly creative way was Yakov Birnbaum.  He died two months ago at the age of 87 in New York. You have probably never heard of him.  He held no official position, was not the head of a major Jewish organization – but he was one of the most influential Jews of the 20^th century. He would have fit right in with the tribe of Dan, too, because he did not serve G-d in a formal, traditional way.  Like the tribe of Dan,  Yakov Birnbaum was concerned about those who were left behind. For Yakov Birnbaum is credited with being the first person to put the plight of Soviet Jewry on the American agenda. Back in 1964, the Jews of the Soviet Union were a forgotten people. American Jewry was highly involved in the civil rights movement in America, but the Jews of the Soviet Union were left behind in their concerns.  For forty years the Jews of the Soviet Union had been persecuted, exiled, denied the right to emigrate, forbidden to teach their children about their faith and heritage. In 1964, nobody was thinking of them. What about their civil rights – their human rights? There was no lobby group, watchdog organization, sustained campaign or political champion for Soviet Jewry. In April of 1964, Nathan Birnbaum, then 37 years old, began knocking on the dorm rooms of students at Yeshivah University and Columbia University in New York City. On April 27, 1964, Birnbaum convened the first meeting of the Student Struggle for Soviet Jewry, as it became known. A few days later, on May 1, May Day, they held a demonstration for Soviet Jews outside of the Soviet mission in New York City. Over a thousand students showed, many holding freshly inked placards stating “Let My People Go.” A year later the group held the “Jericho March” where they circled the Soviet Mission with shofars, evoking the Biblical imagery of Joshua bringing the walls of Jericho down. Birnbaum urged Shlomo Carlebach to write a song for the event, which we know today as “Am Yisrael Chai” – the People of Israel Live.”

Birnbaum’s was a grass roots organization. He was an outsider who was disliked by the more established Jewish organizations who later took up the cause of Soviet Jewry. Many of the young people he worked directly with and inspired – Joseph Telushkin, Yitz Greenberg, Shlomo Carlebach, Malcolm Hoenlein, Dennis Prager, Avi Weiss, Arthur Green, to name a few – people in their late teens and early twenties at the time – became prominent Jewish leaders and carried the activism they learned from him into all kinds of different areas. Nathan Birnbaum helped not only Soviet Jews to become free, but he helped a generation of American Jews to find their voice. From that time on American Jews were unafraid to flex their muscles politically to help protect the rights of Jews in this country and around the world.

What is your purpose in life? How do you serve G-d in your own way? What is your passion? It is never too late to examine our hearts, and to serve G-d with all of our strength from the best of our talents.

Shabbat Shalom

Shavuot 5774

When Donald Sterling’s racist rant was released publicly by his girlfriend, V. Stiviano, late last month, I was upset not only that an NBA owner would hold such views, but that this NBA owner was Jewish. You remember, this owner of the Los Angeles Clippers was caught on tape telling his girlfriend that she should not come to NBA games with Black people, among other inanities. But I was also upset that the fact that he was Jewish became part of the story. After all, a few weeks before Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy, made headlines for refusing to federal fees for grazing rights.   When he fell from grace by saying that blacks might have been better off as slaves nobody identified him by religion or by nationality. What did Donald Sterling’s religion or ethnicity have to do with his racist remarks, I thought?  Rabbi Mark Golub, the president of Shalom TV wrote that “a number of television commentators have gone out of their way to mention that Mr. Sterling is a Jew, a gratuitous and therefore anti-Semitic racist remark.” I agreed with him, at first.

After further examination of my initial reaction I shifted my views. When a prominent Jewish sports executive makes racist remarks, his Jewish origins are fair game for examination. Even his girlfriend expressed shock that he, as a member of a group that had been the target of vicious racism throughout its history, would harbor such thoughts. “Isn’t it wrong?” Stiviano asks on the tape. “Wasn’t it wrong then? With the Holocaust? And you’re Jewish; you understand discrimination.” In saying these words, his girlfriend gives this story its Jewish context. The Jewish press picked up the story and analyzed it from a Jewish perspective.  The Jewish Forward noted in a headline that the “Banned NBA Owner Represents [the] Benighted Worst of Us.”  Let’s face it. The world expects better of us as a group. We expect better of us. It hurts and it is shameful that a Jewish man has expressed such hideous racist views. 

In the course of reading about the scandal, I learned that seventy five percent of the players in the NBA are African-American and that fully half of the NBA owners are Jewish. The previous commissioner, David Stern, was Jewish and the current commissioner, Adam Silver, is Jewish. On June 3, the owners are holding a meeting to determine whether they will force Mr. Sterling to sell his team. Hopefully, they will do the right thing.  As I was thinking about this, it dawn on me that June 3^rd is Erev Shavuot, and that coincidentally it seems like an appropriate time to hold such an meeting  for the following reason:

Mr. Sterling did not want his girlfriend to bring black people to Clippers games. In other words, he did not want them to be part of his community. Some 2500 years ago, there was another Jewish man who did not want those different from him to be part of his community. Ezra the Scribe was a great Jewish leader sent to Jerusalem by King Artaxerxes of Persia in 458 BCE. He was to help in rebuilding the Jewish community which had been destroyed by the Babylonians a century before.  He found that there was a great deal of intermarriage in the community, and decreed that all men must divorce their non-Jewish wives and send them away, along with their children.

It is likely that it was in response to this decree that the Book of Ruth, which we read on Shavuoth, was written.  In the Book of Ruth, a Moabite widow, Ruth, joins the people of Israel and marries an Israelite man, Boaz. Ruth is portrayed as being gentle, loyal and righteous.  Yet she is also described as a “Moabite woman” and this would have immediately suggested a problem for the original readers of this story. The Moabites were not only Israel’s perennial enemy; they were specifically excluded for all time from joining the Jewish community. Their origins, according to the Torah, are unseemly. Following the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, Lot and his daughters take refuge in a mountain cave.  Believing that they are the only survivors of a world that has been totally annihilated, feeling responsible to continue the human race, Lot’s daughters get their father drunk and become impregnated by him. The one daughter names her son Moab, who is the ancestor of the Moabites.  Thus the Torah ascribes an unflattering origin story to a people that becomes one of their bitterest enemies. Although the Torah proclaims for than once that a Moabite can never enter the congregation of Israel, Ruth, a Moabite, marries a Jewish man and becomes the great-grandmother of none other than King David himself. 

It appears that the author of the Book of Ruth is challenging Ezra’s decree that foreigners, people from other lands, other races, are unwelcome in the Jewish community. Not only are they welcome, but they can become role models -- even found a royal line. This is one of the primary messages of the Book of Ruth, and of the Festival of Shavuoth.  We do not look at bloodlines, at race, at national origin when determining who is a worthy person. We look at character and at values, not at biology and lineage.  Hatred of those who are different from us contradicts the fundamental values of Judaism.

Today, in our own times, we continue to hear echoes of that age old struggle of us versus them, of the audacity of some of us, that like Mr. Sterling, who remain small minded and parochial, who feel entitled to openly and blatantly see others not as fellow human beings, but as “the other” based on the color of their skin, their race, their sexual orientation, their class, their foreignness. This, I believe, challenges each of us to look inwards and ask ourselves where to we stand not only as people but as Jews.  Let’s strive to do the right thing guided by our Jewish values of tolerance, acceptance, and compassion.