Parasha Ekev: Coping with Despair

In July of 1854 Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, author of the American classics  which  I am sure some of you know ---  “The Song of Hiawatha”, “Paul Revere’s Ride” and “Evangeline” -- visited the Jewish cemetery of Newport, Rhode Island.  At the time of the visit, cemetery tourism was a popular past time for Americans, and cemeteries were seen as a place for meditation and spirituality.  In 1658, two hundred years before Longfellow’s visit to the Jewish cemetery, fifteen Jewish families of Spanish and Portuguese descent arrived in Newport, Rhode Island. They were drawn to Newport because it was an important colonial trade center. It also was known for its tradition of religious tolerance. Nineteen years after their arrival, in 1677, the Jews of Newport bought land for a cemetery. They continued to worship in private homes until 1763, when they dedicated a synagogue.

But following the Revolutionary War, as the centers of commerce shifted to New York and Boston, the fortunes of Newport declined, and with it the Jewish population. By the time of Longfellow’s visit in 1854 there were few Jewish families left in Newport.

Longfellow wrote a poem on the disorienting experience of visiting a Jewish cemetery in Newport. He begins his poem by noting how strange it is to come across the cemetery in a community that has virtually no Jews. He likens the old tombstones on the graves to the tablets broken by Moses on his descent from Mt. Sinai. He notes how the names on the gravestones are, to him, an odd combination of classic Hebrew names – Abraham and Jacob – with Spanish surnames, Rivera and Alvarez. He writes that in the now closed synagogue adjacent to the cemetery, “No Psalms of David now the silence break, No Rabbi reads the ancient Decalogue.” Longfellow wonders why this ancient people came to these shores, and in the following verse meditates upon the years of persecution that the Jewish people have endured. He writes:

Pride and humiliation hand in hand
Walked with them through the world where'er they went;
Trampled and beaten were they as the sand,
And yet unshaken as the continent. 

In his poem, Longfellow expresses admiration for the Jewish people, who, he writes, stoically endured, though persecuted and oppressed throughout the ages.  But he ends his poem with a lament:

But ah! what once has been shall be no more!
The groaning earth in travail and in pain
Brings forth its races, but does not restore,
And the dead nations never rise again. 

Despite his admiration for the Jews, Longfellow pronounces Israel dead and buried, never to live again.  That could have, in fact, come to pass had the Jewish people given up hope during our long years of exile and wandering. Yet, that hope was kept alive in many ways, not the least of which was through our liturgy and the rhythm of our calendar.

 A few weeks ago we observed Tisha B’av. When the Second Temple was destroyed in 70 CE, Jerusalem was turned by Rome into a pagan city and Jews were not permitted to enter. The Rabbis who lived through these tragic times looked back in history for a way to both mourn the catastrophe that had befallen the Jewish people and find comfort and hope for the future.  These Rabbinic sages turned to Jeremiah’s Lamentations over the destruction of The First Temple and Jerusalem, written 500 years earlier, as a way of giving voice to the sadness and despair they felt at the destruction in their own time. Paradoxically, the reading of Lamentations also gave them hope that just as the Jewish people had returned from exile and rebuilt the Temple in Jerusalem in Jeremiah’s time, so they too, with G-d’s help, would overcome the calamity in their time as well.

The Rabbis also incorporated special Prophetic readings into the Sabbath morning services on the seven Sabbaths that fall after Tisha B’Av leading to Rosh Hashannah.  Usually the prophetic readings, or Haftorahs, are connected thematically to the Torah readings for the week. For example, the week we read about G-d calling Abraham in the Torah, we read a selection from the prophet Isaiah that refers to Abraham and his journey. Or, when we read about the plagues in Egypt in the Torah, we read a selection from the Prophet Ezekiel that mentions how G-d once humbled Egypt.  In these seven weeks between Tisha B’Av and Rosh Hashannah, the prophetic portions are not connected thematically to the Torah readings. They are, instead connected to one another through the themes of comfort and the restoration of hope.

Others may have assigned the Jews to the dustbins of history, but we have always maintained hope in the future. As Jerusalem lay neglected, impoverished, and exploited by her many conquerors throughout history, the Jewish people listened to the promise of Isaiah, that Zion’s “desert will become like the Garden of Eden, and gladness and joy shall one day abide there.”    Longfellow writes, sympathetically, “What once has been can be no more”.  Isaiah responds,

Raise a shout together/O ruins of Jerusalem/ For G-d will comfort his people/ Will restore Jerusalem.

There is a saying in Yiddish “Gelt farloren, gor nicht farloren; mut farloren, alts farloren. “You lose your money, nothing really is lost; you lose your hope and courage, everything is lost”.  Or, as the poet Naftali Herz Imber of Ukraine writes in the ninth stanza of his poem, Hatikvah (yes, there are nine stanzas!)

Hear, my people, in the lands of exile/The voice of one of our seers/Only with the very last Jew/ is there the end of our hope!

Shabbat Shalom

Parasha Devarim

Friday Night, August 12, 2016/ 9 Av, 5776

On behalf of Congregation Beth Shalom, I would like to welcome Rosanne Kearny and Don McCallum and Kelly Callahan into our community and into the Jewish people.  You might not be fully aware of this, but this morning you joined a very complicated people . Even our earliest Rabbis were perplexed by the character of the Jewish people. Rabbi Abba bar Acha says in the Talmud, “One cannot determine the nature of this people! When asked to contribute to the making of the Golden Calf, they give. When asked to contribute to the building of the Tabernacle, they give!”

In our Torah this week, Moses compares the Jewish people to the stars of the heavens. In which ways are we like stars of the heavens?  The 11^th century Biblical commentator Rashi , writing in the medieval city of Troyes, France, says that just as the stars are a permanent fixture in the universe, so the Jewish people are a permanent fixture on history’s stage. Whereas other people enter and exit from history, the Jewish people remain. Eight hundred years after the death of Rashi, writing from a continent that Rashi did not know existed and from a country that he could never imagine, Mark Twain said much the same about the Jewish people.  He wrote in 1899:

“The Egyptian, the Babylonian and the Persian rose, filled the planet with sound and splendor, then faded to dream-stuff and passed away; the Greek and the Roman followed, and made a vast noise, and they are gone; other people have sprung up and held their torch high for a time, but it burned out and they sit in twilight now, or have vanished. The Jew saw them all, beat them all, and is now what he always was, exhibiting no decadence, no infirmities of age, no weakening of his parts, no slowing of his energies, no dulling of his alert and aggressive mind. All things are mortal but the Jew; all other forces pass, but he remains. What is the secret of his immortality?”

The Jewish people are also like stars because often we stand out in the darkness.  Jews have been at the forefront in the battle against the Kingdom of Night in the world, first in the struggle against oppression, first to confront the haters in our world.  Yes, we have often paid the price when we have stood up to tyrants, when we have fought for the cause of freedom and for human rights.  We aspire, at least, to fulfill Isaiah’s vision of the Jewish People as a “Light unto the Nations” – a moral beacon toward which people of the world could look for inspiration and as an example of ethical living.

The Torah also compares the Jewish people to the sands of the sea. Each individual grain of sand is insignificant in and of itself, but those grains gathered together on a beach are a force to be reckoned with, a force that can withstand the power of the seas that continuously assault them.  Perhaps as individuals we may at times feel insignificant and weak.  However, when we stand together, we can withstand forces far greater than any one of us can withstand alone. Just as the sands of the sea are battered by the waves but endure, so the Jewish people, though persecuted and pursued throughout our history, have endured.

G-d promises Abraham that his and Sarah’s descendants would be “as numerous as the stars in the heavens and the sands of the sea.”  If Abraham and Sarah could see us now, they would be amazed how, from such a small family, there are now more than 16 million of us on earth. Yet, we are, comparatively, a small number of people, only 16 million in a world population of 7.4 billion. We make up .2% of the world’s population. Still, we are not as numerous as either the stars in the heavens or the sands of the sea, in terms of numbers of people. Yet, the sages never understood the blessing to Abraham and Sarah in term of numbers, in terms of a head count. Rather, the sages understood that the blessings of the Jewish people would be as numerous as the stars of the heavens and the sands of the sea.

Now we have three more blessings  -- Kelly, Don, and Rosanne -- Welcome to our congregation. 

Shabbat Shalom

Parasha -- Matot Massei -- Speaking Up

Shabbat Shalom.    It is wonderful to return home to Congregation Beth Shalom after my vacation. Middy and I had a great time, both resting at home and traveling to the Northwest. Over a period of ten days in July we visited Seattle, Washington, Mt. Ranier, Portland, Oregon and the Oregon coast. I know I speak for Middy as well when I say that it is very special to see all of you, and, most importantly, to gather with you in worship once again.  

Since I last spoke with you from this pulpit about a month ago, much has happened in the world. On July 2 we lost Elie Wiesel. Elie Wiesel came on to the world stage with the publication of Night in 1958. It was a searing account of Wiesel’s experience in the Holocaust as a teen. The publication of Night brought the experience of the Holocaust out from the shadows and into the daylight. It allowed people for the first time to talk about the extermination of European Jewry. Night gave us a vocabulary and a language in which we could communicate as the world began to come to terms with the trauma of the heretofore unspeakable horrors of what we now call “The Shoah”. Elie Wiesel went on to become one of the great moral voices of our time. He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986. In an announcement awarding the Nobel Peace Prize, the Nobel committee said that:

“Wiesel is a messenger to mankind; his message is one of peace, atonement and human dignity. His belief that the forces fighting evil in the world can be victorious is a hard-won belief. His message is based on his own personal experience of total humiliation and of the utter contempt for humanity shown in Hitler's death camps. The message is in the form of a testimony, repeated and deepened through the works of a great author.

“Wiesel's commitment, which originated in the sufferings of the Jewish people, has been widened to embrace all repressed peoples and races. “

And yet the world keeps spinning. It does not take a day off to honor the death of a great man. I hesitate to remind us of the other events in July. There was the Orlando Massacre that claimed 49 lives in Florida. There was the unthinkable Bastille Day terror in France that killed 80 people, many of them children. Ever more shootings occurred in our American cities and towns, shootings of citizens by police, as in Baton Rouge and in Minnesota, as well as of police officers doing their jobs --like the five officers ambushed in Dallas, Texas. There was an attempted coup in Turkey and the exit of England from the European Union, the aptly named BREXIT. A  Catholic priest was murdered officiating Mass in France by men acting in the name of ISIS.  All of these events taking place in the context of our American political climate and the Republican and Democratic National Conventions and their aftermath. To many it may feels a bit like 1968, another election year where events threatened to spin out of control.   It is a period when many of us are pondering serious questions about how we treat each other, about what constitutes respect, about how we honor one another’s humanity, about peace in our communities; the very questions that Elie Wiesel addressed throughout his life.  

With so much going on, we have a tendency to withdraw, to throw up our hands, to conclude that there is nothing that we can do, to wonder why bother? Our Torah portion for this addresses those feelings. The Torah portion in question deals with the ability of a woman to take and to keep a vow. A vow is a self imposed obligation. It is a binding promise to oneself or to another party to act in a certain way.  The Torah states that if a married woman makes a vow, her husband can annul the vow if he does so on the day he finds out about it. Similarly, if a single woman makes a vow her father may annul the vow if he does so on the day he finds out about it. However, if the husband or father find out about the vow and do nothing on the day they find out about it, the vow will stand.

Of course I am keenly aware and I understand that most of us cringe at the Biblical notion of the husband or father having the authority to keep an adult woman from fulfilling a vow she has voluntarily taken.   Clearly this doesn’t conform to our present day values and sensibilities. But this aside, the Talmud derives an important moral principle from this law. The Talmud states that “silence constitutes assent”. If the husband or father finds out about a vow, but does nothing about it, it is considered as if he is acquiescing to the promise and to the commitment that his wife or daughter has made. From then on, he has lost his right to invalidate the vow. If he says nothing when he hears of it, it is as if he is agreeing with it, and it must stand, even if he changes his mind later on.

The important insight of the Talmud is that “silence constitutes assent”. This is of course true outside of the domestic realm as well. For example, historical research has shown that only a hard-core minority of the people who voted for Hitler in 1933 were anti-Semitic. Most of the people who voted for Hitler did so despite his anti-Semitic ideology, not because of it. They simply decided to sacrifice the protection of a vulnerable minority for what they perceived as their own self interest. They were not actively hostile to Jews; the welfare of Jews simply did not matter to them. Their silence, their indifference to the fate of their fellow citizens, constituted assent for what Hitler planned to do to their neighbors.

Elie Wiesel put it this way:

“The opposite of love is not hate, it's indifference. The opposite of art is not ugliness, it's indifference. The opposite of faith is not heresy, it's indifference. And the opposite of life is not death, it's indifference.”

So, let us choose love of our fellow human being over indifference to their fate; let us choose beauty over indifference to our environment; let us choose faith over our indifference to universal human values.  We cannot evade responsibility by sitting on the sidelines, refusing to get involved. We must not take refuge in silence. As Elie Wiesel said in his Nobel acceptance speech, “We must take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.”

Let us say, Amen.

Shabbat Shalom