Rosh Hashanah 5777 Eve : Letting Go of our Baggage

I’d like to begin my sermon this evening by telling you a story. The story takes place in the 1980’s, before the widespread use of personal computers, before smart phones, before ipads and fitbits and all of the technology that we now carry around in our pockets or wear on our wrists. The story begins when Shimon gets off the train in Union Station struggling with two heavy suitcases. As he wrestles his suitcases to the platform, a man he doesn’t know, let’s call him Reuven, comes up to him and asks for the time. Shimon pulls a watch out of his pocket, but instead of looking at the time, he speaks to the watch! “Could you tell me what time it is?” Shimon asks. The watch replies, “It’s four o’clock, pm, Central Time”. “Wow, that’s some watch you have there,” says Rueven. “Oh, that’s nothing,” Shimon says. Speaking to the watch again, the he asks, “What time is it in New York?” “Two O’clock pm,” the voice in the watch responds.  “And in Barcelona?” “It is eleven O’clock pm in Barcelona,” answers the watch. Munich, Shanghai, Buenos Aires, the watch instantaneously provides the exact time in any city in the world.

“I am so impressed,” says Reuven. “I have never seen a watch that can do that!” “Oh, that’s nothing,” says Shimon. Speaking to the watch again, Shimon says, “Get me the Book of Genesis,” and immediately the story of Adam and Eve scrolls down the face of the watch.  “That’s fantastic,” says Rueven.  Seeing how engrossed Rueven is in this technological marvel, Shimon continues. “I’m able to carry around every volume of the Talmud in this little watch,” he says. “What would take up shelves upon shelves of space in my Rabbi’s office, I can carry around in the vest pocket of my suit jacket!”

“This is wonderful,” says Rueven, now beside himself with enthusiasm if not a little envy. “Look,” says Shimon, “My daughter recently had her bat mitzvah. Here’s a video of her chanting her Haftorah on Shabbes morning. We were so proud of her.  And that appointment book that I’m pretty sure you carry in your briefcase. I have it right here on my watch, at the touch of a button.”

“Where did you get such a watch, I have to have one,” says Rueven. Shimon tells him that it’s not available in any stores. “I’ll give you ten thousand dollars for that watch,” Reuven says to Shimon. “Oh, I can’t sell it to you for ten thousand dollars,” says Shimon. “I’ll give you forty thousand dollars for that watch,” says Rueven. “I’m sorry, it’s not for sale,” says Shimon. But Rueven detects a hint of indecision in Shimon’s voice. “I will give you sixty thousand dollars for that watch,” Rueven proclaims, and he pulls out his check book and starts writing a check. Shimon thinks, well, sixty thousand dollars is a lot of money, and I can always make another watch for myself, so Shimon agrees to sell Rueven the watch for sixty thousand dollars. He hands Rueven the watch and Reuven walks away. Shimon yells after him, “Hey, wait a minute. “  Reuven turns around warily. Shimon points to the two suitcases he had been struggling to carry through the station, and says, “Don’t forget the batteries!”

How many times have we wanted something desperately only to find out once we actually got it that it did not bring us the satisfaction we had hoped?  I think back to an early lesson I learned as a child about this. I don’t think boys still play with toy soldiers, as I did when I was a boy. Nowadays a child can just turn on a screen and land in the middle of a hyper-realistic, apocalyptic war zone, but when I was a lad one had to rely more on one’s imagination. I remember desperately wanting a set of two hundred revolutionary war toy soldiers advertised on the back of the comic books I was reading. The illustration accompanying the ad, depicting Redcoats and Patriots engaged in fierce battle, made the toy soldiers look so exciting! I imagined setting a hundred Brits up against a hundred Yankees and re-creating the Battles of Lexington and Concord right there on my bedroom floor. I saved up my money, collected my box tops and sent for the soldiers. Each day I eagerly awaited the mailman. Yet, when those toy soldiers actually arrived they were nothing like they looked in the advertisement!  They were ¾ of an inch tall and a millimeter wide and no sooner did I stand them up for battle than then they all fell over. What a disappointment. Often, that’s the way it is in life. Those things that are told will bring us joy or change our lives for the good often don’t deliver on their promise. Later on it was the automobile that we just had to have that would make us so popular with the girls, the college that we had to get into that would lead to success, the marriage that would complete us, the dream house that would finally bring us happiness. Then we discover that yes, sometimes these things bring us a measure of satisfaction and sometimes they even make us feel whole. Sometimes, however, they become baggage that weighs us down or traps us because they are not what we hoped for or expected after all.

Like the man in the story who could not enjoy what he had purchased because of the baggage that came with it, we too are unable to fully enjoy the blessings of our lives because of what we bring along with us from the past.

Tomorrow morning we will read the story from the Torah about G-d’s call to Abraham to sacrifice his son, Isaac. It is, of course, not the first time that G-d has called Abraham. Abraham’s story begins with G-d’s words as recorded in the Torah -- "Leave your land, your birthplace, the home of your parents, to the land that I will show you."  Did you ever notice that there was something unusual in that call to Abraham?

Usually, the emphasis, when giving directions, is on the DESTINATION!  After all, a person already knows where they are --they need to know where they are going! In G-d’s charge to Abraham, however, it is the opposite! G-d never identifies the destination to Abraham. The emphasis in G-d’s charge to Abraham is not where he is going. The emphasis in G-d’s charge to Abraham is on where he leaving -- his land, his birthplace, the home of his parents. THAT is what is unusual.

According to Chassidic thought, the Torah is telling us that as we journey through life, we must leave some things behind in order to reach our potential.  Abraham had to leave his country, his city, and his home in order to fulfill his destiny. In a similar way, in order to become who we were meant to be, to achieve our personal destinies, to live healthy and productive and loving lives, we may need to abandon some of the values and beliefs that we learned in our homes, our communities, and our country.  We may need to examine and reassess those social conventions that we have taken for granted.  Many of us grew up believing, for example, that men don’t cry, or that women are the “weaker sex”. Many of us grew up being taught that homosexuality was a sickness, or that certain ethnic or racial groups were prone to violence, or laziness, or dishonesty. We were taught what constitutes beauty in a woman, and what is the measure of success in a man, and as adults we strive to live up to what we learned, often causing a lot of pain, alienation and conflict along the way.  Some of us were taught to always put the needs of others first, to the extent that one’s own legitimate needs are ignored or denied. We run ourselves ragged taking care of others, while neglecting our own emotional, spiritual and physical health. Sometimes we must identify and let go of what we were taught as to how to think about ourselves and others. Trying to conform to society’s ideas about who we ought to be can prevent us from becoming who we were meant to be. We need to be able to identify patterns that we repeat -- those which bring us back time and time again to familiar but hurtful ways of acting.  And we must figure out how we can break those patterns, shed the baggage, that is pulling us back, dragging us down, and making our efforts to recognize and embrace our blessings self-defeating. That’s why the emphasis is on the place where Abraham was leaving.  The Torah is teaching us that we need to pay attention to where we come from and what we take with us, if we are to be successful on our journey to who we want to be, and how we would like to be thought of by others.

There are two kinds of burdens we carry with us through life. There is the baggage we know we are carrying around, but choose to ignore. Perhaps that baggage consists of resentment over a slight we experienced in the past. Perhaps we were treated unfairly in a relationship, and this left scars on us that we carry to this day. Perhaps an employer did not give us the promotion that we felt we deserved, or our partner cheated us in business. Perhaps when you were growing up your rabbi made an unkind or hurtful comment, and made it difficult for you to want to embrace Judaism or feel a part of the Jewish community. Then there is the “hidden baggage” we carry, the baggage we are not as aware of -- a devastating loss that we thought we overcame, a life altering illness that we thought left no scars, a difficult childhood that we thought we outgrew.  As parents we want to do right by our children, but we too carry baggage into our marriages and into the families that we create. At times we unknowingly transfer our baggage onto the shoulders of our children who don’t ever realize that they have taken on the baggage of their parents and are carrying it into a new generation.

We carry these loads around for so long that they become a part of us. We don’t even know they are there until we examine our lives, we identify our grievances, we label our resentments, and we name our pain. That is part of the task of Rosh Hashanah, what we call “Chesbon Ha-Nefesh” taking an account of ourselves. Only when we do this are we able to unload the weight we strain under and begin to walk a little lighter.

The man who unloaded his baggage at the train station to a wide-eyed passerby found an easy way to get rid of an unwanted weight that was a burden to him. For us, it is never that easy. Let’s begin by using this holiday season to acknowledge that we all carry baggage around with us. Let us resolve this Rosh Hashanah to at least make a start at shedding our unnecessary burdens from the past.  Let’s examine our priorities and stop striving for goals that bring neither fulfillment nor true happiness to us or our loved ones. Let us cast away our stubbornness, our bad habits, and our unwillingness to recognize when we need to change. Let’s dispose of our selfishness and our self- centeredness, and free ourselves to share more of ourselves with others.  

May we carry a lighter load with us into the New Year. May we begin our New Year full of hope and confidence, of optimism and of humility, of self-scrutiny and of spiritual renewal.

Parasha Ki Ta-vo-uh: "When you Enter the Land"

These final weeks leading up to the High Holidays we are reading The Book of Deuteronomy. The Book of Deuteronomy is part farewell address by Moses, part exhortation to the Children of Israel, part legislative program intended to be put into effect when the Israelites settle the Land of Canaan. Part of this legislation lays out the requirements for a King, should the people decide they need one. The King needs to be a Jewish king. No foreign King can rule the Jewish nation. The King must not have many wives. Acquiring a harem could distract him from the responsibilities of leadership. The King could not amass silver or gold to excess. Apparently the King might be tempted to misuse his wealth, or, massive wealth might lead him to lose touch with the common people. The King must keep a copy of the Torah by his side at all times, and study it constantly. The King, in other words, is not to be an absolute dictator but a Constitutional Monarch, with the Torah serving as a constitution. The King was to be subject to the same laws of the Torah as everyone else. 

When the modern State of Israel was born in 1948, many of the founding fathers and mothers wanted to enact a modern constitution to guide the political life of the nascent state. However, Israel was unable to adopt a constitution because of a conflict between religious and secular leaders over the role that Torah law would play in Israel. Many religious Jews believed that the Torah ought to serve as the Constitution of Israel, and that the only legitimate law for the nation was the Halacha – the rabbinic law -- that flowed from it. They argued that there was no need for a modern, secular Constitution, which might ultimately undermine Torah law.  After all, adherence to Divine Law had guided Jewish communities in their passage through the Diaspora for two thousand years.

Both religious and secular leaders were able to agree, however, that there ought to be a Declaration of Independence for the Jewish State. The task of drafting this document fell to Mordechai Beham, an undistinguished Ukrainian-born attorney. Mordechai Beham had no previous experience writing a Declaration of Independence, and didn’t know where to begin. Writers know that staring at a blank piece of paper before starting to write is often the most terrifying and difficult step in the creative process. After spending hours doing research in a private library of an American rabbi who was a neighbor, Mr. Beham began with the words, “When in the course of human events……”  Now, if you are charged with writing a Declaration of Independence, you could find worse places to start than stealing the words of Thomas Jefferson!  Mr. Beham also plagiarized from the Book of Deuteronomy as well as from the English Bill of Rights for his first draft of the Israeli Declaration of Independence. The Declaration went through a dozen drafts and many hands were involved until a final document was signed and proclaimed before thousands in Tel Aviv by David Ben Gurion on May 14, 1948, three weeks later. But scholars who have studied these earlier drafts concede that the American model significantly influenced the writing of the Israeli Declaration of Independence.

This is only one example of the influence of the United States on the founding of the State of Israel. We will learn about another important contribution of the United States in Israel’s very survival tomorrow night, when we screen the movie, “Above and Beyond” prior to our Selichot service.

This documentary was released in 2015 and is produced by Nancy Spielberg, Steven Spielberg’s sister. As you are not doubt well aware, when, on November 29, 1947, the United Nations voted in to create a Jewish State and an Arab State in what was then the British Mandate in Palestine, the Jewish leadership of Palestine agreed to the division. The Arab leadership did not, and five Arab countries prepared to invade the newly declared State of Israel when the British withdrew. Israel, unlike Egypt, had no Air Force. The United States government had imposed an arms embargo on all weapons to the Middle East. This movie tells how a group of Jewish combat veterans from WW ll risked imprisonment and loss of American citizenship to smuggle airplanes out of the United States and create the Israeli Air Force. The film skillfully weaves historical footage with computer generated re-enactments of air battles to dramatize the story of the crucial contribution of that Air Force to Israel’s success in the war. But the driving force behind the movie is interviews with the pilots themselves, now in their late eighties and nineties, as they look back on their experiences as young men and the impact that their decision to join the fighting had on their Jewish identities.

As we look back on the birth of the State of Israel, I hope we will be inspired by the sacrifices that were made to secure her existence by those who did not have to fight, but who chose to fight on behalf of their people.  May their example encourage us to reflect on the importance of Israel, of Judaism, and of the Jewish People in our own lives as this New Year dawns upon us.

Shabbat Shalom

[The documentary "Above and Beyond" will be shown at Congregation Beth Shalom in Naperville Saturday night (motzei Shabbat) September 24, 2016 at 8:00 pm following a brief Havdalah service. Refreshments will follow, then Selichot services. All are welcome]

Parasha Shoftim: The Qualities of a Leader

At the Academy for Jewish Religion, all rabbinic students were required to take a course in Homiletics. For those of us who are not clergy and may not be familiar with this word, “Homiletics” is a fancy way of saying “sermonizing”. Our teacher for the course, Rabbi Richardson, had a long and successful career as a pulpit rabbi and had given thousands of sermons in his time.  His job was to help us to develop into rabbis who would give stimulating and inspirational sermons to our future congregations.  At the beginning of the course he gave us a piece of general advice. Looking quite seriously at all of the men and women in the room, he said, “Ladies and Gentlemen, if you want to succeed as a rabbi on the pulpit, there are two things that you should never talk about in your sermons. The first is politics. The second is religion!”

Well, according to Ecclesiastes, there is a time and a season for everything -- so, why NOT a sermon about politics! We are of course in the very heart of the political season. When I last checked this afternoon we were 59 days, 8 hours, 44 minutes and 10 seconds from Election Day. But who’s counting? When it comes time for us to vote, what should we look for in a leader? The Torah reading for today offers some advice, although it will take a creative reading of the text to understand it.  The Torah states:

You shall appoint leaders for your tribes….. and they shall govern the people with due justice. You shall not plant a sacred tree or any kind of pole or wood beside the altar of the Lord Your G-d.

A rabbinic commentator asks, “Why are these two verses next to one another? Is there any connection between a leader, mentioned in the first verse, and an altar, mentioned in the second? He answers – A leader needs to be like an altar. Just as an altar is made of earth on the inside, and brass on the outside, so a good leader needs to be humble and soft on the inside, like the dust of the earth, and hard and dignified on the outside, like the brass of the altar’s exterior. A leader needs to be strong enough to stand against the powerful, the arrogant and the privileged members of society who seeks to exploit the poor and weak in order to keep them subjugated. In order to succeed that same leader needs to be humble and compassionate on the inside, so that he or she could identify with those who need protection and speak on their behalf.

Lyndon Baines Johnson, our 36^th President, was such a man. I am thinking of him because this week I watched the film “All the Way” on HBO.  It is a great movie and I urge you to see it. It stars Bryan Cranston as Lyndon Baines Johnson in a role that has been recreated from a play that had a run on Broadway in 2014. It is the story about the passing of the Civil Rights Bill of 1964. Upon assuming office following the assassination of John F. Kennedy in November, 1963, Johnson’s first order of business is to see to it that the Civil Rights Bill that President Kennedy had sent to Congress would be passed into law. In order to get this bill passed, Johnson has to overcome the resistance of Southern Democrats in the House and Senate who were usually his allies but who opposed this bill.  The Civil Rights Movement is also building in 1964. The film depicts the pressure on Johnson from the Black Community, in the person of Dr. Martin Luther King, to pass this bill. In addition, Johnson’s upcoming race against Barry Goldwater in November was much on his mind. Johnson’s is concerned that if he does not retaliate to an attack by the North Vietnamese against the United States Navy that might -- or might not – have occurred in the Gulf of Tonkin, he could be perceived as weak by the American people in the upcoming election.

Johnson had to be tough as nails to stand up to these competing pressures and divergent interests. He was battle hardened by the 24 years he spent in the House and Senate. He was prepared to fight for what he believed in. Yet as hard as he was, Johnson had a soft spot for the poor and for African Americans who were struggling to gain civil rights and their share of the American Dream. His commitment to social justice and to racial equality were authentic and lifelong.

Johnson had tough decisions to make, and not everyone was pleased with them, to say the least.

It is not easy to be unbending and flexible, stubborn and compromising, unyielding and accommodating. The movie shows how President Johnson was a master at this in his political life. He was a proud and principled man who was nevertheless prepared to compromise if it meant further advancing his agenda for the poor and the disenfranchised. We can all learn a lesson from this. There are times we need to take a stand against injustice and resist the temptation to make concessions to it. And there are times, especially when we are wronged, that we want to strike back and hurt the other as we have been hurt. This is the time when we must be soft; we must resist the temptation to exact revenge, and be forgiving of the other.

Do you know what a “Sabra” is? You may know it as a brand of Hummus, but it is also a kind of fruit – a prickly pear. Native born Jewish Israelis are called “Sabras” because they are prickly on the outside but sweet on the inside. Israel herself needs to be hard on the outside. She has developed a formidable military presence in the Middle East. When your nation is but 65 years old and you have already fought five major wars; when you have had to be constantly alert to terrorist infiltration; when a major power in the region that is on the verge of nuclear capabilities repeats that they want to “wipe you off the face of the earth’ and when a major political faction within the ranks of those with whom you are called upon to make peace calls for your elimination, it is no wonder that you develop a prickly outer skin as a nation. You have to be hard like brass in order to survive. You have to be unyielding. Yet that hardness is tempered by the compassion and mercy built into the Jewish soul through study of Torah and years of suffering.  Shalom, peace, is the highest value taught by Judaism. I believe that Israel is willing to compromise for true peace – a peace that includes recognition by her neighbors of the right to have a Jewish State in the Middle East.  I think Israel would be able show real flexibility if only the attitudes of her neighbors toward her would change.

I hope I have given you something to think about in choosing leaders this election. I hope I have also taught you some words of Torah. I hope that each one of us finds the right balance in our lives between firmness and flexibility, between dignity and humility. I pray that each of you sitting here this evening, especially those of you eligible to vote for the first time, casts a vote this year.

There, I’ve done a sermon on politics and hardly anyone has walked out. Who knows, next week I may even talk about religion!

Shabbat Shalom

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

Where Flowers Never Grow -- Parasha BeHaalotecha

Our Parasha this week opens with G-d commanding Aaron to light the seven branched Menorah. The Menorah stands in the Ohel Moed, Tent of Meeting, in front of the Ark that holds the Ten Commandments.  Aaron is to light the Menorah daily, so that it burns from evening till morning.  Just as we light the Chanukah Menorah in a particular way, from left to right, so Aaron lights the wicks of the Menorah in a certain order.  He starts with the outermost branch on the right and lights toward the center, then moves from the outermost branch on the left and moves toward the center. This is to convey the idea of having a central point of unity toward which all Jewish people must direct their energies.  The idea of the unity of the Jewish people is also symbolized by the fact that the menorah was fashioned out of one single block of gold.

The idea of the unity of the Jewish people was on my mind this week when I learned that the plan to build an egalitarian plaza at the Western Wall in Jerusalem is once again on hold. In January the Israeli government announced that a permanent government supervised plaza would be built in the area of Robinson’s Arch on which non-Orthodox prayer would be allowed.  However, this week ultra-Orthodox worshipers, led by the Sephardic Chief Rabbi of Jerusalem, Rabbi Shlomo Amar, erected a mehitza at the egalitarian section of the wall to separate men and women in prayer.  When Reform and Conservative Jews held a mincha service outside the formal prayer area of the Western Wall, as a form of protest, Ultra-Orthodox counter-demonstrators threw bottles, sang loudly and yelled “You are not Jews” in order to drown them out. Speaking after the service, Chief Rabbi Amar said a mixed-gender plaza constituted an “unforgivable wrong” that would “weaken Jerusalem” and the Jewish people.

Or take the incident that I read about just yesterday. A woman applied for a marriage license in Pehtah Tikvah in Israel. She and her fiancé were refused the license because her conversion to Judaism in the United States was judged to be invalid. The reason given was that the rabbi who had overseen the conversion in the USA was not on the list of Orthodox rabbis approved by the Israeli Rabbinate to perform conversions. This in itself would not be newsworthy except for the fact that the rabbi with whom this woman studied is one of the most prominent Modern Orthodox rabbis in America, Rabbi Haskel Lookstein. In fact, Donald Trump’s daughter studied with Rabbi Lookstein, and she converted to Judaism under his auspices. This is just the latest salvo in a running dispute between Ultra-Orthodox rabbis in Israel and Modern Orthodox rabbis in the United States over the wielding of rabbinic authority.

Incidents like this naturally lead one to wonder, “In what ways are the Jewish people united?” If this is unity, what does “division” look like?

When it comes to internal matters of religious practice and personal status, we Jews are sadly divided. Yet when it comes to a shared history, a shared destiny, and to a sense of responsibility toward one another there is indeed a unity of understanding and of purpose. Anti-Semites, after all, never have, and never will, make distinctions among Jews as to who is secular or religious, Reform or Orthodox.  Just as important, we share the Torah, our sacred book and Hebrew, the sacred language in which it is written. Hebrew is the language of our prayer. In all of these things, we are united.

The power of Torah, and the power of Hebrew language in which it is written, unites us despite our many differences. This is why Jews who may not be able to pray together can always study together. This can be seen in the work of an Israeli organization called Kesher Yehudi, or “Jewish Connections”. The organization was founded in the aftermath of the kidnapping and murder of three yeshiva students -- Gil-Ad Shaer, 16, Eyal Yifrah, 19, and Naftali Fraenkel, 16 -- by Hamas in June, 2014. The founders of Jewish Connections wanted to find ways of sustaining the sense of unity that Israelis experienced during the eighteen day search for the teen agers.   Kesher Yehudi pairs up religious and secular Israelis to study Torah together on a weekly basis. The program is not for everybody. The religious participant is told, “If you view your participation only as an act of hessed  –charity -- for an ignorant secular Jew, this is not the program for you. If you do not believe that every time two Jews meet each has something to offer the other and that both can gain and grow from the relationship, this is not the program for you.”

By Studying Torah together, and learning from one another, Israelis from all walks of life form life-long friendships that bridge the gap of the secular-religious divide. One participant said, “It is fun to rediscover each time we study that the Torah is the precious possession of every Jew. And it does not matter where you are coming from; the Torah is the glue holding us together.”

Ultimately, both passionate differences, and quiet meeting of the minds, in their own way, represent Jewish unity. We argue passionately about Jewish practice because Judaism really matters to us. Wherever we are on the Jewish spectrum, committed Jews are in agreement that Judaism is serious business. Judaism is a big deal. It is worth fighting over what Judaism looks like. These disagreements are, as it says in Pirke Avot "Disputes for the sake of Heaven" which have enduring value. At the same time, we must bring to our conversations, whether they are about religion, or politics or personal conflicts, a sense of love, and even a sense of doubt. The Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai puts it this way, “From the place that we are right, flowers will never grow in the spring.” The sense of certainty and self-righteousness that we often bring to our disagreements provide but sterile ground for productive growth and progress.

The menorah is fashioned out of one block of gold, but it has separate and distinct points of light. To me this teaches us that we all have our own rays of light, our own unique and different perspectives, to bring to the conversation. Unity comes about, perhaps, not when we all agree, but when we see all sides of a dispute and recognize the value of different positions.

Shabbat Shalom