A MACCABEAN CHALLENGE FOR 21ST CENTURY JEWS

Let’s admit it: Hanukkah is no match for Christmas. Put the two in a boxing rink and Christmas would knockout Hanukkah in the first minute of the first round. Then again, it wouldn’t be a fair fight. Christmas is one of the two major holidays in the Christian faith and Hanukkah is a minor holiday among any number of other really important Jewish holidays. That’s not to say that Hanukkah is unimportant or irrelevant. To the contrary, it deserves better than its reputation among our young folk as the “holiday when you get gifts.” But the minor designation does stem from a few glaring deficiencies about this holiday—

1.       There is no mention of it in Torah;

2.       There is no mention of it in Tanakh or the Jewish Bible;

3.       It involved few restrictions unlike Shabbat or a major festival like Pesah;

4.       Even the rabbis weren’t sure what to make of it and wondered: What is Hanukkah?

Fair question. In truth, Hanukkah was as much a second century BCE Judean civil war as it was a war against the Syrian Greeks. They were Judea’s overlords and unabashedly espoused Grecian values. They glorified the human body, found circumcision abhorrent, chose to embrace the existence of many gods unlike the Jewish insistence on only one, found Shabbat a waste of time, and bristled at the national aspirations of the Judean community. And yet there were plenty of Jews who found common ground with the Syrian Greeks. Frankly, many 21^st century Jews would see the exposed human body as artful, circumcision problematic, the Sabbath as no impediment to labor, and any condemnation of pagans or polytheists as bigoted. The Maccabees, in contrast to Jews then and perhaps today, saw danger in the wholesale acceptance of such foreign values and were willing to wage war to oppose them.

 

It is very difficult to resist a dominant culture that you want to be part of. But what happens when the dominant culture is chipping away at your own? What to do? The Maccabees knew what to do. But in our own day, do we? The fundamental problem with the liberal Jewish world is that even when recognizing the debilitating factors working against our spiritual selves, the resistance needed to oppose those factors contradict everything we have worked for during the past 100 plus years. We wanted to become Americans and did, but did, knowingly or unknowingly, at the expense of our Jewishness. And the fruits of our lopsided efforts are evident in a liberal Jewish world that is largely illiterate in Hebrew, either uninterested in or alienated from Israel, disenfranchised from its own spiritual heritage, and searching for meaning everywhere but in the incredibly rich 3000 years of Jewish meditations on the meaning of life and the human raison d’etre.

 

Bleak a picture as this may be, I have to believe that the will to deepen our own Jewish identities remains intact, and all it takes is a bit of prodding to release that subdued passion. I’m no Maccabee, but let me offer a few ways to reclaim our authentic Jewish selves:

1.       When people say that God is not a fact, believe them. But remind them that man does not live by facts alone. God is a reality, and a reality that has inspired thousands of generations to vigorously pursue liberty and social justice. We dare not abandon such a powerful faith.

2.       That faith and science are forever at odds disparages both faith and science. Faith is about following truths that help us live full lives. Science, in contrast, offers no way to live our lives, but does provide us with tools for ascertaining certain truths. That is why there are many scientists and medical professionals who are themselves people of faith. There need not be any contradiction between the two.

3.       English is the lingua franca of the world, but Hebrew is the lingua Judaica—the language of the Jewish people and we should take pains to enhance our Hebrew vocabulary. It is as difficult to be Jewish with no Hebrew skills as it would to be an American with no English skills.

4.       The fact that the Jewish heritage may have evolved during the Dark Ages (if not earlier) does not make it a relic of the Dark Ages. It was then, as it remains today, an invitation to eternity,  connecting us with ancestors stretching back generations, as with descendants stretching forward for endless centuries. The modern disdain for the past contrasts with the value Jews grant tradition.

5.       Israel is the Jewish homeland and all Jews, citizens of Israel or not, are connected to it. Israel is not a foreign country like Italy or Spain. Love of Israel does not suggest disloyalty to the country of one’s citizenship, no more than close friends undermine the integrity of one’s marriage.

6.       Jewish identity should be based on Jewish values and principles, which may or may not incorporate aspects of the dominant culture. But the guiding hand in the formation of Jewish identity should not be the demands of the dominant culture, but the Jewish values and principles that have guided us throughout the generations.

Every system requires a shot of energy now and then in order to maintain itself. The Jewish world is long overdue for that shot. Which brings us back to Hanukkah. The above six points is what the Maccabees might tell us were they around today. And so Hanukkah, no matter how minor a holiday it may be, delivers a message with a major punch. Anything less than the above prescription for Jewish life is a crude hybrid of Jewish and western secular culture. The first Maccabees would never stand for that. Why should we?

AN ANTI-SEMITE WALKS INTO A SUKKAH…

Among a handful of topics I find the least appealing to address is the issue of anti-Semitism. I primarily don’t like it due to its abuse by Jewish professionals who have used it to galvanize Jewish community. After all, when Jews feel threatened, we tend to regroup, band together, and lift our voices in protest. Hatred generates fear in the hated, and fear compels the vulnerable to seek security in numbers. It’s good to belong to a group. 

Anti-Semites would undoubtedly agree: it’s good to belong. In their case, they seem bound by a common hatred, directed against us, which provides an easy way for disparate personalities and groups to coalesce. Hatred is a fellowship generator. And it’s so easy. Hatred requires doing nothing for the hated, it accesses one’s righteous anger to produce feelings of superiority, and it’s free. Hatred works. Community organizers know that. Politicians know that. Terrorist groups know that. And by this time in our lives as a people, we should know that too. When we actively combat hatred, we are telling people that the group they belong to is founded on a false premise, which means that the whole group is bound by a lie. That’s a threatening message to deliver effectively. It not only calls into question a person’s belief system, it questioning the group itself, the very mechanism that creates fellowship. Even when your group is based on a lie, it still feels good to belong. 

We have reason to be concerned with the fate of our nation. With the waning of the Judeo-Christian ethic in the western world, America’s Christian love has faltered and created a void. It seems that people’s sociological lives abhor a vacuum as does nature, and a host of hatreds have moved in to fill the void, with results markedly different from the effects of Judeo-Christian love. One may argue that given a long history of religious wars and crusades, the whole Christian love thing didn’t work out so well, a point well taken. The difference is this. When people talk of love while beating up their neighbor, it creates a dissonance which may lead to a reconsideration of how one thinks and acts. But when people preach hatred and beat up their neighbor, there’s nowhere to go. It’s honest and consistent, despite it being unconscionable. God’s love was meant for all humanity, and humanity is still grappling with the ramifications of that principle. People who are serious about their love for God must also be serious about their love for God’s creations. 

If you are a Mexican, Moslem, Black, or female, you have been hated. 

If you are a law enforcement officer, a politician, a Democrat or a Republican, you have been hated. 

If you are an evangelical, a scientist, an Asian, or a white male, you have been hated. 

And, of course, if you’re Jewish, you have undoubtedly been hated. 

Actually, if you don’t belong to a group that has been the target of someone’s hate, you should feel insulted. If it all didn’t erupt into violence now and then, anti-Semitism would be comical, but there is nothing funny about it or hatred. 

When I want the Jewish people to gather, I want the impetus to be positive. I want them to gather for a celebration, for prayer, for study, for justice. I want Jewish passion to ignite over the fact that we are each 3500 years of age, and bear a message of a life lived with justice and godliness in a world with a deficit of both justice and godliness. But that, of course, is part of the problem. How often have we heard that anti-Semitism persists due to ignorance and fear? When we remain divorced from our neighbors, it’s far easier for them to indulge in fantasies about how horrible we are. 

I’m not a huge football fan but I did take note in the exchange between the Patriots Jewish Julian Edelman and the Eagles’ DeSean Jackson after Jackson posted anti-Semitic comments on his Instagram story. Edelman offered to take Jackson to the Holocaust Museum and offered to go with Jackson to the African American History Museum, both in Washington DC, and afterwards “grab some burgers and…have those uncomfortable conversations.” Edelman’s response was a touchdown. With a click of the “post,” social media allows millions of people to send nonsense and abuse to millions of others out there in invisible and anonymous cyber-land. But real dialogue requires two visible bodies, with two sets of eyes that are connecting, and conversation emanating from two mouths. Social media is a kind of body slam to true dialogue, but people like Julian Edelman have the courage to help it get back on its feet. 

I know some Jews who have gotten really angry about the anti-Semitism that is surging these days. Their anger is understandable, but it remedies nothing. Anti-Semitism has been around for over 2000 years. It’s not going away any time too soon. But if you want to be in the business of combatting antiSemitism, here are three positive actions to take: 

1. Support the Anti-Defamation League that combats anti-Semitism, hatred and bigotry of all forms; 

2. Support AIPAC in its defense of the State of Israel, the hatred of which is anti-Semitism in disguise; 

3. Take to task, politely, those who use anti-Semitic tropes, or engage in stereotypic slurs, that is, take a tip from Julian Edelman; 

And finally, and perhaps most importantly, keep the door of your sukkah unlocked. Ahhh—you thought I forgot the whole sukkah connection by now. I didn’t. Sukkot are famously open for anyone to come and visit and for all of us to generously invite guests into. Of course, this year may not be the best to overindulge in such invitations but the fact is that the sukkah is an abode for everyone to come into and sit, eat, drink, talk, discuss, bond, laugh…eat some more…and wonder about the miracles in our lives. God has given us a world full of mysteries and jaw-dropping beauty. We may be guests in God’s world but we should never be strangers to each other. And should the sukkah become a place for burgers (kosher) and an uncomfortable conversation, that’s a sacred task to be fulfilled—a mitzvah we should all be immersed in, just like sitting in the sukkah.

WALKING THE WALK

 

Gut Yontiff, everyone. I have to begin with an apology. This will take less than a minute: Mayn be’emes antshuldikn, tu di gantse shpeeler fun “Fidler oyfn Dakh” in Eeddish, far vos ikh hob gezogt ven ikh hob ersht gelernt veigen a produktsye fun ​​dem pietza az dos vet gedoyern tsvey vokhn avek fun Brodvey. iz ikh oongerecht!

Well, that felt good. If you didn’t understand what I said, not to worry, I barely understood what I said. If I ever slip into Yiddish during a conversation, you can be sure someone else translated  it for me, in this case, a consortium of helpers including my Uncle Irving, Esther Eisenberg (God bless her) and if you can believe this—Google Translate. But I wanted to start this sermon in Yiddish as an act of teshuvah. You see, when I first heard that Fiddler on the Roof was going to be produced off-Broadway in Yiddish, I said to myself, well, this one ought to last about two weeks.  Then I saw the production. Oh my God—it was fabulous. Beginning in July of 2018, it was slated to run for only six weeks at the Museum of Jewish Heritage, it was extended four times, and then moved uptown to Stage 42 where it played for 11 months until its close in January of this year. Amazing and boy—were my initial instincts about this production off base! 

I didn’t think one could improve on the script by Joseph Stein or the lyrics by Sheldon Harnick, but Shraga Friedman’s Yiddish translation was magical and people walked away from the production thinking somehow it felt more authentic, more genuine than the English version itself. I was shocked in thinking the same thing myself. What is it about that production that made it so popular?

You have to begin with Sholom Aleichem’s “Tevye, The Dairyman,” first published in 1894. Sholom Aleichem, beyond telling stories that would make you laugh, and sometimes cry, was addressing a deeper phenomenon, which was the conflict between tradition and change. It’s no accident that the opening song of Fiddler is Tradition. Tevye and his community have their traditions. Everyone has a role and everyone has a place and everything runs like a well-ordered machine (most of the time). Tevye has four daughters and his daughters will prove the challenge to his beloved traditions. You know the story. The first doesn’t want to accept the matchmaker’s choice for her beloved and instead wants to marry, you’ll excuse the expression, for love. The second one chooses a Jewish man, but a new kind of Jewish man—a revolutionary (or as my father would refer to him---a CommooNEEST). And the third daughter falls in love with a non-Jewish boy, a development Tevye cannot accept. With all these changes, life was no longer the well-ordered, well-structured social construct that Tradition had provided the community, presumably for centuries, whether real or imagined. 

Fiddler ends with Tevye walking away from ole’ mother Russia, sometime in the early 1900’s, with an audience knowing the sequel to the story. How does the audience know the sequel to the story? Because the audience is the sequel to the story. We, the audience, know how far we’ve walked away from the traditions that Tevye adored, how far from those communal structures that kept little Anatevke humming, and even how far from the language of the play, from the Yiddish of our forebears, which if not for our familiarity with the musical to begin with and the blessed English subtitles projected onto the stage, we would not have understood. The conflict between tradition and change is a universal theme which explains the popular notion that Fiddler has been produced some where in the world everyday since its debut in the 1960’s, something which has come to an end due to—what else?—Covid 19.

One of the ironies of Covid-19 is, disruptive though it has been, in an odd sort of way it forced us back into some traditional modes of living. The synagogue was closed but the Zoom Room of Midway Jewish Center has not only not missed a single minyan since we started zooming, but our minyanim, both morning and evening, have never been larger. We chose not to zoom on Shabbat, a decision that was respectful of Jewish tradition, but our pre-Kabbalat Shabbat service sometimes drew over 50 or 60 windows, meaning the number of people participating far exceeded the number that might attend on a typical Friday night. As families were unable to fill their days with the 101 activities and appointments that somehow we have managed to fill our days with, more families were spending more time together. It was challenging but it also gave us pause to think about how we spend our time. Anecdotally we know that there was a whole lot of baking going on during the height of the pandemic, bread and hallah baking in particular. And I can tell you for sure that as often as Tevye turned to the Ribbono shel Olam, the Master of the Universe, for a few private conversations on critical matters of the day, there were a whole lot of conversations going on in our community with the Ribbono shel Olam too, about abundance and scarcity, employment and unemployment, fear and faith, sickness and health, and about life and death. I don’t think Covid made us more religious, but I think it made us more mindful of what religious people think about, which includes human vulnerability, gratitude for little things, dependence on loved ones, and the blessings we all too often take for granted when those blessings are suddenly snatched from our lives. Covid-19 did not necessarily bring out the good in people, but it brought out the genuine character of people. It had a way of exposing peoples’ identities. And for some of us, we found out who were our friends and who were not.

I had a funny experience recently. My laptop, a MicroSoft Surface, requires no password for access as the notebook opens on the basis of facial recognition software. One day, I sat down to work, and the screen clearly indicated that it did not recognize me. I did what most of us would do: turned the computer off and rebooted, and still, the computer did not recognize me. I was mildly offended. And then I realized, I had forgotten to take off my mask and the computer literally did not recognize me. That was actually good news: it meant that both the computer and my mask were working

Facial recognition is one of a series of biometric technologies that identify people on the basis of texture, shape, and movement. One of the most fascinating biometrics, and perhaps the scariest in terms of invasion of privacy, is recognizing people by the way they walk. According to a New York Times article in October of 2019, the latest technology is learning how to decipher identities based on gait, that is how one walks because our walks are as distinctive as our characters. If you think of personalities like Groucho Marx, Walter Matheau, or even Mae West, whose personas were in part a development of a unique walk, it makes sense. But you probably never thought of yourself as having a gait that actually gave away your identity. According to some French and Australian researchers writing in the Journal of Applied Physiology, the way we walk is that distinctive. The way we walk identifies us.

If we were to search for this biometric in the intuitive sense of our ancestors, we might find it in the expression—to talk the talk and to walk the walk. It’s a way of determining whether a person who espouses certain principles actually abides by them. They may talk the talk, but the character is ultimately defined by walking the walk. The walk is one’s true identity. Again, we might find an intimation of the gait theory in the metaphor of path. One person pursues a noble path while another may have gone down the wrong path. And so it is with the whole of our moral character. We may talk the talk, but it’s our walk or the path we take that reveals our identity to the world.

You may think that the path and the walk are easy determinations, as if there were some travel guide out there determining what the path of righteousness actually is. But there isn’t. The moral and right thing to do is not always clear and there are always people on different roads, or let’s say multiple paths, who speak authoritatively and passionately about which direction to go, and muster their arguments or proofs to back up their claims. Which direction shall you go—to the right or to the left? How far to the right? How far to the left? Those are decisions we all must face.

Over Yom Kippur, we read the book of Jonah and there is a puzzling passage at the close of the book which speaks to this issue. You remember that Jonah was charged with going to the Assyrian city of Nineveh to tell them that their doom was fixed and that they would in short order be destroyed. Jonah did not want to do it, runs away, is swallowed by a very large fish, accepts God’s charge reluctantly, goes to Nineveh, and tells the people they are all going to die for their sins. But the people of Nineveh repent, God forgives them, destruction never comes, and Jonah ends up looking like a fool. He was really upset. He was having a bad day. Plus which, it was hot and there was no air conditioning. God shows Jonah compassion and causes this tree to grow shielding Jonah from the blazing sun. He cools down, but the tree withers, Jonah grows depressed and shvitzy, begs for death, whereupon God says to Jonah—“You cared about the plant, which you did not work for and which you did not grow, which appeared overnight and perished overnight. And should I not care about Nineveh, that great city, in which there are more than a hundred and twenty thousand persons who do not yet know their right hand from their left, and many beasts as well!” It’s a response that has caused much puzzlement over the centuries as to God’s exact meaning. Surely in Nineveh, a great city, there must be people who are moral and ethical, who do know their right hand from their left. Then again, maybe God is asking Jonah, and perhaps all of us, to consider our own ignorance about ethical living. We may all know a whole lot less than we believe when it comes to determining which is the right path, the righteous path in life to take. And at those times in life when we are most vulnerable or fragile, when the turmoil that life can be is forced upon us, those are the times when we are most likely to turn to the tried and true, to that which has been done for hundreds if not thousands of years. Those are the times when we turn to tradition because there is in long- established, age-old, time-honored ritual and faith a stability that life does not always offer us with any degree of generosity. We turn to the stability of the past because of the instability and frightening nature of the present. The number of people who turned to prayer or baking hallah with their children over the past few months, is not at all surprising. 

Edmund Burke (1729-1797), the great 18^th century Irish Member of Parliament, philosopher and statesman, was no fan of the French Revolution, sympathetic though he was to some of its ideals. He felt that a movement steeped in the principles of the Enlightenment with its attacks on traditional institutions like monarchy, clergy, religion, and class would surely end in violence and dictatorship. And so it was this  high-minded revolution evolved into what we now refer to as the infamous Reign of Terror in 1793-94, when thousands who purportedly did not tow the new line of enlightenment were put to rest by the guillotine and then later, when disorder threatened most seriously, only a figure like Napoleon, whose rule was tyrannical and absolute, could bring stability back to France. That wasn’t at all what the Revolution had hoped for. The fact is that history gives us multiple examples of damage done by people who thought the world needed something radically new and were seduced by their own inventiveness. The most obvious examples are the Communists who killed in the name of the working class or the Nazis who killed in the name of the nation or volk. Both movements were experiments in social engineering to make the world a better place, both are regarded today as colossal failures, and if there is one thing that both had in common, it was the war they waged against religious tradition. They regarded tradition as a threat. 

On the surface, America still has respect for religion and tradition, but my sense is that it ain’t what it used to be. Our western world remains suspicious of religion, dismissive of God, contemptuous of faith, and disdainful of religious authority. And yet—look at what we’re doing here. We are gathered here in what can only be described as a counter-cultural demonstration. We are doing something that our ancestors have done for centuries, engaged in age-old rituals and appealing to God to cleanse us of sin and move us to set out on a better path in our lives, better for ourselves and those around us. Whoever thinks it backward to look to the past for answers that are enduring and reassuring thinks so because they themselves are apparently facing in the wrong direction.

Tradition is not nostalgia. Nostalgia is nice but it’s the past in memory alone. Tradition is the past  meeting the present and it is an essential component of civilization. It provides stability, comfort, and context to all the challenges we face. Edmund Burke and Reb Tevye would have a meeting of the minds on this very subject, if not a rather peculiar conversation between one speaking with an Irish brogue and the other with a Russian Yiddish accent. Yet both would agree that to look backwards to the tried and true, to that tested by generations of communities that have come to some settled understanding of what makes for stability and peace, is not a naïve thing to do. It’s a smart thing to do. And it’s not that Burke didn’t believe in change; he did. And Tevye himself knew that concessions must be made if one were sensible and prepared to live in the modern world. But neither believed that the past was so obsolete that there was nothing within it to guide us. Burke and Tevye would have agreed that the allure of tradition lies in the order of the past, the assumption that there is purpose and meaning to life, and in the supremacy of God. Tradition is thus a vehicle for navigating the craziness of life. How many times have you heard someone sigh and observe what we are going through right now with the following expression, “This is just crazy!” 

And that is why, so often, you hear in this community an appeal to what we call Halakhah. Halakhah is typically translated as Jewish law, but what it really means is the way we walk. Halakhah is our gait. Halakhah is the way we identify ourselves as Jews, it’s the way we take the beliefs that are most sacred to us and give them legs. We take the talk and turn it into walk. And we don’t wait for a pandemic to turn our lives upside down before we turn to the past for answers. We live this halakhah each day of our lives. 

The liberal seminaries these days are filled with young people who have not grown up in religiously observant families, but are nonetheless, drawn to ancient texts that challenge them into thinking how the past might invest a present with richer meaning. And maybe for us, set in our ways as we may be, comfortable without anyone challenging our routines, maybe it’s high time that instead of just watching a musical like Fiddler and dreaming of a past that is no more, actually find a way to incorporate some of that past into the present in order to create a richer, more stable today. This is not an attempt to turn anyolne into a Goldas or a Tevye, but it is a challenge to you to deepen your religious convictions through practice, to pick up some good books and read about ways you can bring a little more Shabbat and a little more kashrut and a little more prayer and a little more study into your lives. In incorporating a little more Halakhah into our lives, we adjust our gait and thus our identities, and we could all begin to walk a little more authentically, because we are Jews. 

In conclusion, I would like to say a few words of apology.  Mayn be’emes antshuldikn tu dem gantsn geshtalt fun “Shtisel,” ven ikh hob ersht ervist az Netflix vet durkhfirn a seriye vegen khareidishe EEden in Yisroyel, alt oyf Yiddish, az dos vet gedoyern be’erekh tsvey vokhn. Iz ikh oongerecht! Oh—that felt good too. I just apologized to the entire cast of Shtisel for having said, when I first learned that Netflix would air a series about Haredi Jews in Israel all in Yiddish, that this one ought to last about two weeks. Was I wrong on that account too!  I can’t wait for Season 3. And if there is a season 4, and the writers are running thin on ideas, I’m thinking that if they were to introduce, let’s say, a Long Island Conservative rabbi into the plot, maybe I could audition. The possibilities for scandal are infinite! Jerusalem meets Oyster Bay!

Shtisel. What is it with tales of religious life, Yiddish, and American Jewry? There is an allure to this spiritual life as defined by Halakhah, one that we are almost afraid to admit to. But why resist its charm? Fiddler ended with Tevye walking away. We are the sequel to that story and the story is not over. We are the Jewish people—the story is never over. We have the ability and resources to walk back toward tradition. And in this topsy-turvy world that we are now thrust into, when we don’t even recognize what our lives have become, tradition may be just the walk we need to remember exactly whom we are.

I want to wish you all a Tzom Kal, an easy fast and a Gmar hatimah tovah, a secure and sealed listing in the Book of Life, of Gezint (health), and a besser Yur (a better year).

SMASHING STATUES & OUR SELVES, AND THE LANGUAGE OF JEWISH REPAIR

 

I am a sinner. I’m not ashamed to say it only because Judaism assumes all of God’s children are sinners, flawed, coming up short, etc., including those who have come before us, those who are destined to come after us, and all those hanging around these days, whether we know them or not. No human is perfect. We are all sinners. Acknowledgement of this reality is a good way to prepare for the holidays.

Every nation has its heroes. They’re all sinners too. But here’s the thing about sinners, the heroic and unheroic alike. The dark, unrepentant, thoroughly corrupt sinner is a rare phenomenon for sinners engage in saintly acts now and then. No one is a total sinner just as no one is a total saint. As the rabbis contend, we all have a yetzer hara, an evil inclination and a yetzer hatov, a good inclination, and the clear majority of people on earth are an amalgam of both praiseworthy and dastardly deeds. When we paint them as one or the other, whether sinner or saint, we turn them into phony persona, a canard only but nothing real. That distortion is a disservice to their humanity and our own, as we promote only a caricature rather than a character.

Those who might tear down statues of American heroes whom we know to be flawed men (the clear majority are men) have an ally in the Torah. When Moses instructs the Israelites as to how they should relate to the pagans of the land which they are about to possess, he says, “Tear down their altars, smash their pillars, put their sacred posts to the fire, and cut down the images of their gods, obliterating their name from that site” (Deuteronomy 12:3). That’s how to handle falsehood according to our biblical ancestors, and there was no falsehood greater than idolatry. We have seen this biblical zeal carried out in our own day. In 1996, the Taliban of Afghanistan systematically destroyed museum collections that were deemed unIslamic and in 2001, they blew up the giant and majestic Buddhas of Bamiyan which dated back to the sixth century. In the last decade, ISIS was responsible for dismantling almost all the churches in Mosul and throughout their reign of terror, destroyed ancient and medieval sites that had been protected for centuries as part of the history and culture of those lands.

It might also be noted that the Jewish people, historically, have not been spared these attacks, though having few structures to burn or tear down, the focus of the ruling party’s purifying powers had been our sacred texts. In 1242, some 1,200 volumes of Talmud were burned in Paris. A favorite action of the Nazis was book burnings of all subversive literature, which would include anything written by Jews. One might argue that a book is not a statue, which is obviously true, but both are expressions of an era, a reality, a point of view, for right or wrong, and their destruction or desecration are almost always carried out by the morality police, officially or self-appointed purists who themselves are sinless.

That “sinless” adjective was a bit of sarcasm. We are all sinners and when harsh judgments are given full reign, we become vulnerable to the very same cruelty when we find ourselves on the outs  of a new wave of self-righteous purists out to purge the sins of the day, or of the past.

The language of religious repair, or let’s be even more specific, Jewish repair, is lost on most moderns. Our highly secularized world, fueled by a destructive political polarization, has drained the color from people and turned them into mere caricatures of good and evil, purity and impurity. But the characters in our lives, as the choices we must make, are rarely that distinct. Most people are a muddle of wisdom and foolishness, honesty and falsehood, morality and its trespasses. And so it is that Judaism teaches us to live life with compassion, and to give people the benefit of the doubt, to forgive, and where we find it difficult to forgive, to in the very least, understand. We are all sinners as we are all capable of good.

According to an old midrash, Rabbi Shimon said that the angels erupted into argument with God’s decision to create Adam. The celestial prosecution charged the future Adam as lying and combative. The defense claimed Adam would be righteous and merciful. God thereby threw the Angel of Truth out of heaven (ouch!) and proceeded to create Adam (see Genesis Rabbah 8:5). It sounds as if the rabbis thought that our species (their’s too) was created at the expense of truth. To the contrary, humanity and truth reside on earth and our destiny is to grapple with the truths of who we are, our righteous and merciful ways, and our sinful and surly selves. We are rarely either/or but rather both/and.

The better way to deal with the darker side of our history is not to destroy the old artistic expressions, but reframe the lives of those so remembered, and most importantly, support those artistic endeavors that would reflect our own understanding and values. So too, at this time of year, when we face our own flaws, I hope we choose not to destroy ourselves, but rather remake or reinvent ourselves, to give ourselves the permission and fortitude to express ourselves in new ways that are more life-affirming and life-fulfilling. If we must protest vigorously, and we should, let’s arm ourselves with the language of Jewish repair work: compassion, understanding, forgiveness, insight, creativity and vision. This is the terminology that can heal the self and a nation, at least temporarily. But rest assured we’ll be back next year because we can never fully escape or extinguish our sinfulness or for that matter, Barukh HaShem, (Praise God!), our saintliness. 

A LITTLE FORGIVENESS, PLEASE: A ROSH HASHANAH SERMON, 5781 / 2020

 

              Shabbat Shalom, everyone, and Shanah Tovah—a good and a healthy year to all.

               Mr. Schwartz is taken in handcuffs to court and stands before the judge. The prosecutor rises and says, “Your honor, Mr. Schwartz was caught red-handed stealing a can of peaches from the local grocery and he admits his guilt.” The judge shakes his head and announces, “Mr Schwartz, we cannot have theft in the community. You must bear the consequences of your crime. There are six peaches in this can and I sentence you to six days in jail for every peach stolen,” and the judge slams his gavel on the bench. A woman rises in the back of the court room and calls out, “Your, Honor!” The judge immediately recognizes her and responds, “Mrs. Schwartz, I am not inclined to any leniency in this case,” to which Mrs. Schwartz replies, “I know, but he also stole a can of chick peas.”

              Rosh Hashanah is Yom HaDin—Judgment Day, a day when God judges all of humanity. Judges wield real power. Anyone authorized to take your money, in the form of a fine, or take your liberty, in the form of incarceration, wields real power. But the more immediate power we have had to deal with these days is the power of a pandemic. I was curious. I wanted to know the size of a single Corona virus particle. We’ve all seen its microscopic structure in the media, but what is its actual size? Turns out its size varies between 70-90 nanometers. A nanometer is one billionth of a meter or 10 to the power of negative ten. In other words, it’s really small, yet left unchecked, Covid-19 brought the world to a standstill. That is real power. Who among has not felt during the past several months incarcerated in their own home? And the effects of that pause in our lives still reverberate—in empty sports stadiums, a darkened Broadway, half-empty restaurants, diminished air traffic, masked faces, unemployment, religious services in a tent, and much anxiety even with a rate of infection as low as it is in our own beloved New York State.

              If Covid-19 has not felt like a harsh judgment, perhaps the social unrest in the country does. We’ve had to deal with a lot these past several months—racial tensions, questions about policing protocols, second thoughts on statuary and how we represent our history, and on top of all this, a hot presidential election come this November. I suspect that having been locked up as long as we were exacerbated our responses to some of the more intractable fissures within our social fabric. And it seems very clear, in the polarized atmosphere of our nation, that we are presently engaged in an uncivil war. It’s no longer clear to me that we love our neighbors as ourselves, and if that is the case, if the Torah no longer holds sway over our beliefs and behaviors, it would be worth our while to reflect on that development and explore whether we are comfortable in the place we now find ourselves.

Daryl Davis is a professional musician, a pianist, who has played with BB King and Chuck Berry. Back in 1983, he was playing a gig in Frederick, Maryland, at the Silver Dollar Lounge, and at the end of the session, a man comes up to him and says that he had never in his whole life heard a black man play like Jerry Lee Lewis. So Mr. Davis said to this patron that both he and Jerry Lee Lewis had been influenced by the same black boogie-woogie and blues. The patron said—No, no that just wasn’t possible. So Mr. Davis said, it was possible because he knew Jerry Lee Lewis and the two were friends. So the patron said—No, no that’s not possible either. Then the patron invited Mr. Davis to the bar for a drink. The two sat down at the bar and the patron said that this was the first time he had ever had a drink with a black guy. So Mr. Davis asked why was that. And the patron hesitated for a bit and then said—because I belong to the Ku Klux Klan. That served as a turning point in Mr. Davis’ life as he sought out members of the Ku Klux Klan to talk with them with the intent of dispelling all the stereotypes and misconceptions they had about black people, It culminated in a book published in 1998 entitled, “Klan-destine Relationships: A Black Man’s Odyssey in the Ku Klux Klan.” Mr. Davis eventually infiltrated the office of Robert Kelly, the Grand Dragon or so his title, and over time, moved Mr. Kelly to drop his membership and close down the chapter he ran in the state. Mr. Davis now owns a collection of white robes turned into him by members of the Klan whom he has befriended and influenced to abandon their racist points of view. 

              I don’t think Mr. Davis ever forgave Klansmen for their racism. But he did not see them so much as the enemy as he saw in them an opportunity for dialogue. It would have been easy to scream and protest against them. It was much harder to sit down and speak with them. Davis’ actions were either extraordinary foolishness or extraordinary courage—and maybe a little bit of both.

              We all know that this is a time of selihah, forgiveness. We are encouraged to forgive others for the sins they have committed against us. That’s the pious directive we encounter year after year. Do we succeed? Do we forgive others for their sins? Let me put it another way. Think of the person whom you do not like. We all probably have a few people like that in our lives. This person is not a nice person. How did you think of this person last Rosh Hashanah? Is this person still on your no-fly list? Did you forgive this person? I bet some of you did, but I also bet a much larger percentage did not. How do I know? Because forgiveness is one of the most difficult things in the world to grant. People generally don’t want the sinners of this world to be forgiven. We want them punished. We want justice. Were we to forgive, it be almost as if we didn’t care about justice. And that grates against us. It doesn’t seem fair. And that’s why it is so hard to forgive. If you haven’t forgiven that person or people or whomever it is you’ve got issues with, I don’t blame you. I only want to acknowledge the challenge forgiveness presents and how we by and large resist its fulfillment.

As the western world continues to move further and further away from its religious moorings in Judaism and Christianity, we have replaced the culture of guilt with the culture of shame. I know that we typically use the terms of shame and guilt interchangeably, but they are different. Ruth Benedict (1887-1948), the American anthropologist and folklorist, did great work in defining the difference between a shame culture and a guilt culture. A shame culture is one in which a sin committed renders the sinner an object of embarrassment and ridicule. The sin and the sinner merge and the one is indistinguishable from the other. Time may erode the shame but there isn’t much you can do to rid yourself of it. The sinner may seek refuge in another city, hide, or even commit suicide. Greek culture was very much a shame culture. But Judaism and by extension, Christianity, opted for guilt. We understand guilt. With guilt, the sinner has committed some wrong, might even feel shame, but there is a way to remove the guilt through all the ways we talk about removing guilt—confession, repentance, prayer, doing acts of goodness, etc. In other words, the sin and the sinner are two different entities. There’s a great story in the Talmud (Berakhot 10a) about this. It’s about Rabi Meir and his brilliant wife Beruriah. There were some undesirables in the neighborhood who bothered Rabbi Meir. He prayed to God for their death. Beruriah turned to her husband and said, Meir, the verse in Psalms reads: 

Hata’im yitamu min ha’aretz / may sins disappear from the earth (Psalm 104:35)

It doesn’t say, hot’im, the sinners 

The verse teaches us to pray that sin disappears. How does that happen? It happens when the sinner repents. A sinner repents and sin is removed from the earth. And Rabi Meir accepted her interpretation, prayed accordingly, and the undesirables did repent of their evil ways (Berakhot 10a).

That kind of thinking is not fashionable in America today where the sinner and the sin have merged into one. It is because we are increasingly a shame culture.  Once you have committed the sin, you are a sinner forever. It’s no recipe for a society as diverse as ours if there would be any hope to get along with each other. 

              If I told you there were people in this world who do not deserve forgiveness, I bet many of you would agree with me. I would agree with me. But guess who may just disagree: God. The Talmud discusses three Jewish kings who were so bad, they were denied entry into the World to Come. One was Menasheh ben Hizkiyahu, a seventh century BCE ruler. The Bible describes Menasheh as having put to death so many innocent people that he filled Jerusalem with blood from one end of the city to another (II Kings 21:16). And yet, one of the rabbis, Rabbi Judah, comes to his defense claiming, as the Bible also lets us know, that Menashe did teshuvah and his years of repentance far exceeded his years of sin. When it came time for Menashe to leave this world, the middat hadin, the Angel of Justice, blocked his entry into the World to Come. In other words, justice demanded that a man with a history of such grave sins be thrown into the dustbin of history, there to decompose and be forgotten. No way could someone with so much blood on his hands make his way into eternity. God disagreed, Rabbi Judah claimed. God dug a tunnel by which Menashe could secretly slip into the World to Come right under the nose of the angel. Think about that—God allowing compassion to override justice. Did Menashe really deserve entry into eternity? I don’t think I’m that forgiving. But according to Rabbi Judah at least, God is.

              I like to think of God’s capacity to forgive and humanity’s resistance to forgive as one of the features distinguishing God from humans. History proves that when it comes to forgiveness, people are infamously not up to the challenge. There is a scene in Schindler’s List where Oskar Schindler, the German industrialist who saved more than one thousand Jews during the Shoah, is talking to Ammon Goth, the SS officer in charge of the construction of the Plaszow Concentration Camp. Goth is heartless and sadistic. He kills Jews as a sport. It makes him feel good. After all, Jews are the problem. The cause of all Germany’s problems points to one and only one source: the Jews. Goth and Schindler are talking power. What is power? “Why do they fear us?” Schindler asks. Goth says they fear us because we can kill them, and that’s power. Schindler says, “That’s not power.” And he tells Goth a story. A criminal is brought before an emperor. The man knows he has committed a crime. The emperor knows that he can put this man to death. But instead of invoking the death penalty, the emperor pardons the man. That, Schindler says, is power. To know that you can ruin another person’s life, but choose not to, to descend into accusations and recriminations against another, but choose not to, that is a kind of unearthly self-control that runs counter to human history and perhaps even human character. That is power.

Goth wants power. He tries to pardon a Jew. Instead, he ends up doing what he always does: he kills yet another Jew. He has no control over the basest of his instincts. He thinks himself justified in every insult he hurls at Jews. He does so not because he is powerful. To the contrary, history exposes him as an utter fool. His problem is not only his inhumanity, which is clear enough, but even more importantly, an almost absolute disconnect from God. 

Ki imekha haselihah / [God], Yours is the power to forgive

Lema’an tivarei / And thus You are feared.

 So Psalm 103:4. Feared? Why? It would seem more likely that the power to forgive would produce not fear but relief or jubilation or wonder. Instead, it is fear that the power to forgive generates. And it does so because the power to forgive runs so counter to ordinary experience. It comes as a surprise or a shock as if you were walking down a street turned the corner and suddenly came face to face with some person you thought dead long ago. Forgiveness is that rare. It’s so contrary to normal human operations. But Judaism is rarely satisfied with normal human operations. It has always sought to guide us in the path of elevated human operations, to go beyond our emotional reflexes. Beyond the animal instinct, and respond in ways more thoughtful, more deliberate. 

               Let’s be real. We are all essentially imperfect beings. We have selective memories, we stretch the truth, we fall victim to jealousy, we may be selfish, we are not above the unkind word, we get stuck in bad habits, we let our tempers get the best of us, and our prejudices sometimes expose the worst of us. How do we live with ourselves? The shame society says you can’t. The guilt society says you can. The guilt society says don’t confuse yourself with your shortcomings, and don’t confuse your neighbors with their shortcomings, because we have the power to reflect, we have the power to regroup, we have the power to repent, and we thus have the power to forgive others as we do ourselves.

              Of course, we could ask ourselves philosophically, if you have a power and never use it, do you really have the power? Whatever the answer to that question is, I’m telling you now that we are all invested with an incredible power, and that in a world so poised to kill the sinners, we ought to focus less on justice, which roots us in the past, and more about forgiveness, which opens up the possibility of the future.

              Two Martians are doing research on earth from the safety of their spaceship, gathering all the information they can on this bi-ped, earth-bound species we know as humans. One says to the other, “Very interesting. They have developed satellite-based nuclear weapons.” The other says, “Interesting, indeed. So we’re dealing here with organisms that are an emerging intelligence.” But the first Martian counters, “I don’t think so. The weapons are pointed at themselves.”

              I think we need to cut each other a little slack. I think we need to admit that no one of us has the total answer. I think if we are serious about this other principle we espouse, “Love your neighbor as yourself,” then we have to embrace the fact that such a principle is without meaning if we think it applies to only the neighbors who share our views, as opposed to those who do not.

              I had a professor at the Seminary who once told a group of us something that always stuck with me and that was this: people are going to have many opinions about you and express them to you. So just remember this. You’re not as good as people say you are, but you’re also not as bad. I found that comforting. And I think it applies to the world in which we live. And don’t get me wrong. I am not as forgiving as God. But I don’t have to be. I’m not God. None of us are. Then again, we could all be a little more forgiving of our neighbors than we have been in this deeply politicized, polarized world that we now find ourselves. We could use the power of forgiveness to begin the conversations that make for a better world. Because though there are clearly people in this world who are in fact, really, really bad, there’s a whole huge demographic out there that are not as bad as they have been portrayed, and another huge demographic that isn’t as good as they have been portrayed. A little more humility all the way around is in order.

              You may ask: well, how forgiving do I have to be rabbi? And I can actually quantify that answer. You have to start somewhere. If you start out small, that’s okay. I would suggest that you all begin to look at each other a little more sympathetically, and with just a little more forgiveness, I would say that all it takes is about 70-90 nanometers worth of forgiveness. If a despicable virus of that size can change the world, think of what just a little more beloved forgiveness in our lives could do.

              Ketivah vahatimah Tovah—everyone—May we all be inscribed and sealed into a year of life and good health, mutual respect, and understanding.

STREAM OF PRAYERFULNESS

 

 

What is prayer? How does one pray? We pen the mahzor, the special prayer book of the High Holidays, we recite the words on the page, and that is prayer.

Is it?

This year, with services abbreviated generously due to our concern with people sitting together for too long a period of time, our moments of prayer must be more efficient, more productive, more moving than ever before. The thoughts the words on the page generate are as much the prayer as the words on the page themselves. Perhaps even more so. I don’t mean the automatic thoughts that pop into our heads like—O my God, Sylvia finally bought a new dress, but more of the thoughts that the prayer itself generates. Let me take you on a journey though a prayer as its words generate other thoughts. The prayer below is a mere snippet from the Unetane Tokef prayer. The bold print are the words on the page.  The regular print are the thoughts those words sometime generate in my brain which become part of the prayer:

Vekhol ba-ay olam / And all those who have come into this world

I am one of those who have come into this world, How did that happen? It’s a miracle. If I am a miracle then everyone around me is a miracle. How many miracles are there in this room—500, 600…? Did God specifically want me to come into this world at this time…?

ya’avrun lefanekha kiveni maron / pass before You like sheep.

Like sheep? I like sheep (baa-aaa-aaa) but I don’t think I pass before God like a sheep. Or maybe I do pass before God like a sheep? Is it that God sees me as cute, like a sheep? Oh yes, I’m as cure as Telly Savalas. Maybe the idea is “gutlessness.” Am I gutless. Like a sheep? Maybe. I’m diplomatic? What does that mean? Do  I lie? No. I don’t lie. I try not to lie. Maybe I lack courage… Maybe I am gutless?

Kvakrat ro’eh edro / As a shepherd’s searching gaze meets his flock

God is looking at me? Wait…at me? No…at all of us. God looks at us. Why? Because God is fascinated by us? Are we fascinating? God is the shepherd so God cares about us. Yes, God cares. God looks at us in a caring way. Sure. Wait—all 600 of us? Or 600,000 of us? Yes. God is God and can look at all of us. God is that which can look at all people on earth, all 8 billion of us caringly. New definition of God: that which can look at 8 billion people simultaneously in a caring way. But what if ours is only one universe among many…?

ma’avir tzono tahat shivto / passing every sheep beneath his rod

Sheep again. Gutlessness. What’s with the rod? God needs a rod? God is a shepherd and shepherd’s carry rods. Does God own a dog too? Shepherds have dogs. And play the pipe now and then. Thought: God is lying on a cloud playing the pipe. Contrasting thought: God isn’t lying on a cloud playing the pipe because God is too focused looking at us caringly. Right. Lose the pipe. Lose the cloud. Lose the dog. Wait—keep the dog. God looks lovingly on all living things. Dogs too.

ken ta’avir/ so You too pass Yours [i.e., God’s]

Yours. Who is Yours? I am Yours. We are all Yours. Everything is Yours. Covid-19 is Yours? Is Covid-19 Yours or ours? I’m glad that I am Yours. I’m not glad Covid-19 is Yours. Am I, are we, and Covid-19 in the same category as Yours? No, because God does not gaze caringly, lovingly, at Covid-19. God is weeping over those who have lost their lives to Covid-19. God is a weeping shepherd. Do I believe in a God who is a weeping shepherd? I don’t have to answer all these questions.

v’tispor v’timneh v’tifkod nefesh kol hai / counting and numbering every living thing

God is counting. I hope God is better at math than I am. Am I a number in God’s head? God does not have a head. But God counts. I am a number. We are all numbers. There are what—600 people in this room and we all have a number? What is my number? God has my number!  Oh yea, God has my number. When I can’t figure out who I am, God can, because God has my number. What number am I? What number do I want to be? Suppose I am a huge number like somewhere between five and six billion. Maybe God uses exponents to count us. Maybe God raises us to some power of 10. God counts us to raise us to a power. Gog makes us powerful. We’re going to have brisket for lunch. Why am I thinking of brisket? Lose the brisket. Thin power.

v’tahtokh kitzvah l’khol beriyah / regarding  the soul of every living thing

Every living thing has a soul. Even sheep. There are many souls surrounding me. We are spirits, in the material world. That’s a line from the Police. I wonder if God likes the Police. Spiritus Mundi. God speaks Latin. God speaks every language in the universe (universes?). But spiritus mundi (translation: Spirit of the World) sounds like one spirit, but we are all unique spirits, or maybe we are none of us unique spirits. Maybe that’s why we are all sheep, not in gutlessness but in a shared common spirit. All of our spirits comingle in this room. We sometimes do not understand each other, but our spirits understand one another perfectly. Our spirits and God speak one language.

v’tikhtov et gizrei dinam / writing down their verdict (for the New year).

Oh Lord, the verdict. Guilty or not guilty. Are there only two verdicts? Usually there are only two verdicts. Maybe in God’s head there are more than two verdicts. Maybe in God’s head there a billion verdicts or eight billion verdicts? Do each of us get out own verdict? What is my verdict? What verdict do I deserve? Do I deserve to live another year? I think so. Wait…what does God owe me? What does God owe any of us? God doesn’t owe us anything. Am I prepared to die? Am I prepared to live? I’d like to live another year. I’d like that to be part of my verdict. I want God to raise me to some power of ten.

B’rosh Hashanah yikateivun / On Rosh Hashanah it is written

God—it’s Yontiff. You shouldn’t be writing anything. Does God abide by Halakhah? I love this tune. So is God above the law? Is the president above the law? No. Then God is not above the law. Wait…a president is not God and God is not a president. Halakhah is the way we relate to God, not the way God relates to us. Okay, God, You can write on Yontiff. I love this tune. God loves this melody. Can God sing and write simultaneously? Yes. New definition of God: One who can sing, write, play the pipe, pet a dog and look lovingly at eight billion people simultaneously, while lying on a cloud. What a ridiculous definition! What a marvelous definition. Will I share that with my colleagues? No. Why? Is it the gutlessness?

uv’yom tzom kipur yeihateimun / and on Yom Kippur sealed…

Ten more days until Yom Kippur. So much to do in ten days. I don’t have my Yom Kippur sermon written. I don’t have to worry about that today because on Rosh Hashanah, I can’t write. Only God writes today. I can sing, sing this melody, sing with God. God—let’s harmonize. Wait. What needs to be done in ten days? Lots. That’s my deadline. Don’t say deadline. I’ve never liked that word.

kama ya’avorun v’khama yibareiun /how many shall pass and how many will be born?

Death and birth, both beyond human understanding. I don’t want to do any funerals this year. I will do funerals this year. There has never been a year since 1981 when I have not done multiple funerals. That’s a lot of funerals. But I have done many baby namings since 1981. I have done more funerals than baby namings. I like the baby namings. I like the funerals. Is that true—I like funerals? If I can bring comfort to people than that is satisfying. Will the Jewish people live this year or die? That’s my business. I have to make sure that the Jewish people live this year. And not die. Really—is that all on me? It’s on all of us. We all have to do more baby naming. We’ll have to get rid of this damned Covid-19. Did I just say “damned” in a prayer? Is that a sin counted against me? No, because God looks caringly at us all. God is my, our shepherd.

A final thought on thinking about prayer: I probably cut out more extraneous thoughts than I should have, but this exercise is already a bit too long. Nonetheless, I want to let you know about what happens in my head during prayer, if it in anyway helps your head during your prayer. After all, two heads are better than one, and if two are better than one, I wonder how much better 600 heads might be.

L’shanah Tovah Tikateivu—May we all be written and sealed into the Book of a Purposeful, Healthy, Fulfilling and Prayerful Life.

A MORE SOBER 244TH BIRTHDAY PARTY FOR AMERICA

(or: On the Imperfect Perception of Human Perfection)

Do you ever feel dirty? I'm not talking about what your pants look like after working in the garden or on your car engine, or having just painted the den a new color or cleansing a clogged pipe. I refer now to the kind of dirtiness one might feel having committed some moral wrong. How do we get rid of that sense of dirtiness?

Most of us are familiar with the story of Moses, Aaron and the rock. The children of the Israel were desperate for water and these two intrepid leaders of the Israelites were at a loss as how to proceed. God instructs both of them to order water from the rock, which would quench the thirst of the entire nation. But instead of speaking to the rock, Moses struck the rock with his staff. More importantly, he suggested that the provision of water to the people was a human rather than divine act. And for this sin, both he and brother Aaron were denied entry into the promise land.

After all these two did in the wilderness for the Jewish people, seems a bit harsh, no?

The first part of our parashah covers a less known ritual of the Jewish people which has to do with purification after contamination. The contamination is a result of contact with a dead body or being in close proximity to death. In such a case water mix with the ashes of a burnt red heifer, together with some Cedar wood and “crimson stuff,” is sprinkled over the contaminated people in order to purify them. You’ve never seen that ritual because following the destruction of the Temple, it could not be performed. But at one time, purification was a center stage, spotlighted, central feature of Jewish ritual practice. There are entire Talmudic tractates dedicated to the process. Libera Judaism does not focus on that aspect of Judaism any more. In a sense, according to biblical and Temple era Judaism, we all live in a state of perpetual impurity.

On the surface, there is no apparent connection between the two sections. At a deeper level, perhaps the Torah is trying to suggest a certain reality which we all too often evade. Do we not all commit hundreds of minor acts of varying degrees of sin throughout the course of the day, communicating half-truths, speaking ill of others, killing a helpless bug, etc.? Are we not all guilty of myriad minor infractions daily? Each sin, in and of itself, is a mere trifle, a speck of dust, no more. But taken in the aggregate, as all those mini-sins accumulate, hour after hour and day after day, shouldn’t we feel a certain pain of conscience that would question our own moral posturing? Our ancestors felt this profoundly, most of all in facing death, a sort of existential encounter with human frailty, finitude, and meaninglessness. In a fantasy of sorts, I can hear Moses pleading with God, “I only hit the rock. It was a rock. It has no feelings. People know that I attribute all to you. Really—no Promised Land over that!?”  Moses never said any of that. He didn’t have to. He knew something that most of us ought to know, if we don’t already.

If we were to doubt the effectiveness of the waters of lustration in cleansing ourselves of our own moral failings, I suspect we would be asking a question that began with our biblical ancestors. Did any of them really believe that a few drops of holy water cleansed them of impurities? We are a people with a long history of both obedience and rebelliousness. I can well imagine someone doubting that the waters of lustration were just a weird ritual, but I suspect those same people still faced the troubling anxiety of that which brought the waters of lustration to be: the reality of facing our own human frailties and failings daily. How do we get cleaned when we all too often do dirty work, our own or those of others for whom we are obliged?

Moses and Aaron were two of the greatest leaders that the Jewish people has ever known.  And yet, the Torah tells us a tale of their humanity. They committed a sin. They were not perfect. They were not, in that sense, pure. They were, in a word, human. And as if parashat Hukkat needed to drive home this point even further, we learn of Aaron’s death on a mountain top. And his burial would forever be shrouded in obscurity.

I would hate for anyone to think of themselves as being hopelessly contaminated. On the other hand, I would hope that all of us would journey through the few years allotted us in life with a deeper awareness of our own shortcomings and misdeeds. America is not perfect. The founding fathers were not perfect. Our leaders are not perfect. I am not perfect. You are not perfect. Perfection, for the most part, is an illusion. That does not free of us from pursuing what is right and good and beautiful. It frees us from the disappointment when in the end, we fall short. And so the words of the great prophet Michah (6:8): “He has told you, O Man, what is good, and what the Lord requires of you: Only to do justice and to love goodness, and to walk humbly with your God.”

That’s what seems to be missing: the humility. If we all knew just how limited we all were, we might strike each other less and speak to one another more.

Happy 244^th birthday, America. God bless you. God bless us all. And Shabbat Shalom.

SECOND THOUGHTS ON STATUES AND SINS

Chances are there is some metalwork in your home which you don’t give much thought to: pots, pans, railings, fences, etc. This week’s parashah is a section of Torah that might get you thinking about the metal work in your home, because it touches on just that issue. This week’s parashah is Korah, and you might recall it focuses on the most infamous of rebellions during the 40-year trek in the wilderness. Korah and his followers are unhappy with how much power the two brothers, Moses and Aaron, wielded over everyone else. They demanded that power be more equitably divided among the people for all the Children of Israel were holy. This was very much an internal family squabble. But it was a very large family squabble as it was a very big family. Korah had 250 followers in lock step with his demands.

So Moses constructs a plan to determine where holiness lay and where it does not. He asks Korah and the 250 followers to take their fire pans, used in the burning of incense, and make an offering to the Lord. They do just that. But almost on cue, an earthquake erupts, swallowing the leaders of the rebellion, including Korah and his entire family, and then an overwhelming conflagration breaks out and consumes all 250 men. All that remained were the smoking fire pans. What an extraordinary human tragedy. One would presume at that point to take the fire pans and junk them. But that is not what God instructs Moses and Aaron to do. To the contrary, God asks that all the fire pans be hammered into sheets of metal which will then plate the altar of incense. Now it must be understood that the altar already was plated. This new cover would be a second cover. But why would fire pans used in an attempt to overthrow the legitimate authority of Moses and Aaron be then used for a visible altar, and one that is understood to be integral to the worship of God? It seems strange. The Torah asserts that the visible plating would be a warning to all would-be rebels to reign in their passions. Still, why would such a dark period be given such prominence and reverence within the community?

              America right now is deep into an iconoclastic mood, that is, we want to tear down statues commemorating what many claim to be tributes to racism and bigotry, in particular, statuary that glorified the racism against our black brothers and sisters who have suffered mightily since the founding of this country and even before. By the same token, art provides testimony to an age, for better or for worse, and when we hide such art from view or destroy it, we do damage to truth and that’s something that no moral human being can support. One sure way to misunderstand where we are today, is to ignore or distort who we were yesterday. There is much about our past that we can be grateful for, and much that ought to humiliate us. But that’s who we are and like God’s solution for what to do with the fire pans, it is sometimes better to keep the sins, our sins, visible.

We live at a time that has been very cruel to the arts. It is no wonder that the thrust of social sentiment is to destroy the statuary rather than mold or chip away at new ones that might dramatically express a new sentiment about who we are as Americans today, or at least what we hope to become. Periods of crisis, like the one we find ourselves in, tend to be periods of great creativity, and now is the time to capitalize off the anger, the frustration, and the hopes of people for a nation yearning to be free of racism and bigotry. We have all become very adept at telling each other how terrible we are and damning ourselves for our sins, as if there is anyone in this world who can actually lay claim to living free of sin.  

And yet, there is another way. Like Abraham Lincoln, who hoped to rebuild the South after the Civil War, and Nelson Mandela who evoked widespread amnesty for past crimes in order to kickstart a new and improved South Africa, the time has come to move forward without further humiliation. I am the first to admit that sometimes the only way to effect change is to put up your dukes and fight. Then again, to bring about change forcefully but peacefully, ala Mahatma Gandhi or a Martin Luther King, is a real test of one’s character and proof of one’s true mettle.