WHAT KIND OF JEW ARE YOU?

ROSH HASHANAH, 5774 / SEPTEMBER 5-6, 2013

                Shanah Tovah, everyone.  Here we are again, Rosh Hashanah, gathered together in celebration of a new calendar year and in contemplation of yet another personal year added to our own lives.  It is always an inspiration to see so many of us converge on these few days of High Holiday with the express purpose to think about the passage of time, its meaning, the way we use our allotted years in that period, and what changes need to be made.  May it be a year of good health and happiness, but also one of discovery and renewal for us all.

                An evil angel comes to the good Lord one day and says, “God, I can make the greatest tzadik on earth curse You from morning ‘till night.”  God replies, “No you can’t.”  The evil angel counters, “Come on…let’s put a little money down on this now give me your biggest tzadik.”  So God says, “OK—Work your magic on Sadie Sternstein in Great Neck.”  “O, come one, God, you can do better than that.” But God says, “No, really, she’s unbelievable.  She’s the most positive person in the face of adversity you’ll ever meet.”  So the evil angel reluctantly agrees, thinking the challenge is beneath him but he goes to work.  Suddenly, Sadie gets a call on her cell phone from her daughter, “Ma,” she hears her daughter weeping, “Rick wants to divorce me, the baby has 102, I just got fired, and there’s water flooding the basement.  Can you please come over.”  Sadie responds, “Honey, stay put.  I’ll be right over with some Starbucks.”  Sadie terminates the call and thinks to herself, “Such a mehcaye—my daughter’s in trouble and who does she call? Her Mama—such a good girl!”  She drives to the Starbucks and picks up the coffee.  The evil angel realizes that his scam has failed.  So he says, “OK—may her keys be locked in the car.”  Sadie gets to the car and sees her keys are locked inside.  “Oy—she says, it’s a good think I got that On-Star program.  I’ll call the On-Star people and they will unlock the door.”  The evil angel says, “May her cell phone disappear.”  Sadie looks through her purse—no phone.  “Aha”—Sadie thinks, “that nice young clerk at Verizon who sold me the insurance—even though I didn’t want to get it—he was right.  Such a good boy.  In the mean time I’ll go get a hanger from the cleaners across the street and maybe I can jostle the car door open.”  She gets the hanger, returns to the car, so the evil angel says, “Don’t let her succeed in picking the lock,” and sure enough, Sadie fails, whereupon she exclaims, “Oy—these car manufacturers have done an outstanding job in making sure the car doors remain securely locked.  The evil angel is really frustrated since Sadie is not reviling God at all.  So he says, “OK, I’ll send a crook to rob her blind.”  Just then, a motorcycle pulls up alongside her.  It’s filthy, old, sputtering, loud and the motorcyclist is bearded, greasy, is wearing a muscle shirt, his arms are covered with tattoos, he’s wearing a skull rag and a cigarette dangles from his lips.  Sadie, looks at him and smiles, and says, “Young man, do you know how to get a car door unlocked.  He says, “Sure.”  He gets off his motorcycle, grabs the hanger from her hands, sticks it in the lock and within 5 seconds has the door open.  Sadie reaches into her purse to give him a five dollar bill.  He says, “Lady, you’re giving me $5.00?”  Sadie thinks she’s insulted him with such a meager gift so she reaches into her purse to give him a ten dollar bill, whereupon he says, “Lady, you’re giving me $10.00?”  As she begins to reach into her purse yet again, the biker finally says, “Hey lady, look, ya gotta understand.  I’m a crook.  I break into cars for a living.”  “Oy” Sadie says.  She reaches into her pocket book pulls out a $100 dollar bill, hands it to him and says, “I didn’t realize you’re a professional.”

                It’s very common to think that what we see in the world tells us about what is actually in the world, but the truth of the matter is what we see in the world tells us a lot about who we are as people.  We see the world not necessarily as is, but with our own eyes, we see the world as we think it is.  Fifty years ago, on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington DC, a rather short but charismatic black leader by the name of Martin Luther King referred to this problematic seeing when in his brilliant speech to some 250,000 civil rights demonstrators said, “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”  What a beautiful sentiment!  What a powerful sentiment!  And yet, the very idea that such a sentiment was expressed not as a fundamental reality of our lives, but only as a goal that our nation may someday reach, only as a dream that some day may come true is truly pathetic.  Shouldn’t it have been obvious to any smart, intelligent, sophisticated human being of that day and age that we look beyond the surface in order to get to know people?  Or were we so simple, so shallow as to think that the surface is all there is?  This peculiar way of seeing, in the context that Martin Luther King used it, is racism, however, suppose this peculiar way of seeing was not relegated to the way people see each other racially, but the way we see the world generally, looking at the surface without ever going deeper?

                The story is told about a professor who brought his philosophy students to a diner and there set about the task of teaching his young scholars an important lesson.  The waitress comes by and asks for their order.  The professor says, I’ll have a bowl of soup.  The waitress says OK—we have matzah ball, minestrone, split pea, mushroom barley or a nice gazpacho.  And the professor replies, No thanks—I’ll just have a bowl of soup.

                There is such a thing called soup.  We might even say to our friends something along the lines of—I like soup.  But in the end, that statement is rather meaningless unless by it we mean that we like every possible variation of soup that exists in the world.  Would that be true?  Can we make such a statement?  Chances are we may come across a form of soup we may not like, as for example in the Indiana Jones movie, The Temple of Doom, when a very hungry Willie, played by Kate Capshaw, innocently asks for a bowl of soup and receives a bowl of hot, steamy liquid with what would appear to be something very unsavory floating around in it and staring back at her.  The question is not whether we like soup, but what kind of soup we like.  Do we like it cold or hot, mild or spicy, veggie or meat based?  Our dependence on a generalized category of soup is a guarantee that we will end up with no soup at all.  There’s something deeper to soup than just a bowl of soup.

                That apocryphal story about the professor is attributed to Sidney Morgenbesser who taught philosophy at Columbia University for close to 50 years, but whom others remember as an ordained Conservative rabbi from the Jewish Theological Seminary.  He was a deeply influential teacher in the world of philosophy and taught us something important about the pitfalls of generalizations.

                I want to share with you one of the great generalizations within the literature of Halakhah, the Jewish path in life.  The question is this:  who is a Jew?  And the answer, according to the Halakhah, is a Jew is someone born of a Jewish mother.  It’s a very clear definition.  It’s also, believe it or not, a very inclusive definition as it excludes no one for lapses in ritual behavior, or for ideological heresy, or for theological blasphemy.  Is your mother Jewish?  If so, then you are a Jew.  Simple.  Period.  But as we have seen, being just a Jew allows one to hide behind a wall of unspecificity.  Exactly what kind of Jew are you?

                Moshe Rabbeinu, our teacher Moshe, was known to be a tireless servant of God and of the Jewish people.  But even a personality like Moshe couldn’t do it all himself.  So God devises a plan whereby 70 elders would be invested with the spirit, that Godly spirit that would, in the end, qualify them as servants of God as well.  Certainly not on a par with Moshe but he would ultimately get the support staff that he so required.  The 70 Jews are appointed and asked to go to the Ohel Mo’ed, the Tabernacle, where the spirit would descend upon them.  Do 70 Jews go out to the Ohel?  Of course not.  God forbid we should all be in agreement even when God asks something of us.  But the success rate was not bad—68 show up and two remain at home watching a football game.  And then, something extraordinary happens.  The spirit of God descends upon all 70.  You would think that it would descend only upon the 68 that actually showed up at the meeting, but no—the spirit descends upon all 70, which prompts Joshua, Moshe’s personal servant, to run to his master and complain that Eldad and Medad, the two who remained at home, have begun to prophesize in their local neighborhood.  They essentially became prophets, the spirit of God having so animated them.  Joshua cries out to Moshe that he should stop them immediately and put an end to this outrageous trespass into a domain solely Moshe’s himself, but Moshe dismisses Eldad and Medad’s so-called affront to his authority, and says—

Josh, If only God would make all the people prophets!

                It’s classic Moshe.  It’s the kind of response you get from a leader who is so self-confident and so secure in his connection with God that what others might see as a an assault or a challenge to their authority Moshe sees only as a blessing.  Yes—this is exactly what he has been aiming for in his wilderness labors: a people so invested with the divine spirit that they too would become prophets.

                There is a group of women in Israel known as Women of the Wall or WOW.  They are a group of women who each Rosh Hodesh, that’s a new month on the Jewish calendar, go to the kotel, the wall in Jerusalem, in order to pray.  A couple years ago I attended that service.  Not exactly with them because mixed davening at the kotel is not permitted.  The area of the kotel is under the jurisdiction of an Orthodox authority that would not permit such a gathering to take place.  There is a mehitzah, a partition that divides the women side of the wall from the men’s side.  The women’s side is much smaller than that of the men’s side but nonetheless, there is this section and I stood right next to the mehitzah where I could hear these women praying and I, too, followed along with their service.  It’s the kind of service that any of us here would all feel very comfortable at.  They sing together, they pray together…it was lovely.  Over the past year, the police of the kotel have arrested several of these women, including two American Conservative rabbis, Rabbi Deborah Cantor of B’nei Tikvo Sholom of Bloomfield, Connecticut and Rabbi Robin Fryer Bodzin of the Israel Center for Conservative Judaism in Queens.  Their crime: chanting Torah out loud at the kotel and wearing a tallit, actions prohibited to women by the Orthodox authorities. 

                The response of the American rabbinate, almost across all denominations, including many Orthodox, was—You did what?!  You arrested women for reading Torah and wearing a tallit?!  And, in fact, at this time, most Israeli authorities have come to the same point of embarrassment:  We did what?!  The Supreme Court of Israel actually found the detentions illegal and in violation of Israeli law, but I want to talk about what exactly did the Orthodox authorities at the kotel see when those handful of women donned tallit.   Did they see people moving closer to God, taking up tradition, reciting words of prayer, words of peace?  Or did they see people challenging their authority, women no less challenging men,  undermining their power base, trespassing into a world of spirit that they have staked out as their own, non-members need not apply.  Did the Israeli Orthodox authorities who sanctioned those arrests see with the eyes of Moshe or the eyes of Joshua?   Did any of them have the guts to step out and say—Would that every Jewish woman don a tallit and recite words of Torah?  No.

                When we give 13 year old girls B’not Mitzvah, when we count women in a minyan, when we call them to the Torah, when we ask them to lead services, when they serve as witnesses during various legal proceedings, it’s not because we’re liberal or lax or uncaring about Jewish law.  L’hefekh—just the opposite.  We are creating a Jewish path of life that recognizes the dignity of every human being, man or woman, and granting them equal access to God.  We look at the world with the eyes of Moshe that go way deeper than the surface.

                America may be different but we still live in a world where some women are prohibited from driving, or can be killed for dishonoring the family, or kidnapped for use in a multi-billion dollar sex trade,  or where she must cover her body, from head to toe, less she be arrested for indecency.  Nev er think for a minute that our egalitarianism as a community emanates from a lax or liberal or uncaring attitude toward Jewish law.   This is a community whose views on women, and the equality they deserve, are reflected in our spiritual practices.  What kind of Jew are you? 

                 One of our good members was drawn away from Long Island for awhile to attend a family simhah north of us.  And the simhah could not have come at a better time.  It was during those days following Sandy, their electricity was out, the refrigerator was empty…  it was a good time to get away to an area where power was available.  Their trip was not extensive and soon they had to return.  While traveling through Connecticut, they thought it a good idea to stop at a hardware store to pick up a plastic gas can.  And they did just that only to find the store sold out of such containers.  As they turned around to leave, the owner of the store asked, “Where are you people from?”  They told him Long Island.  He said, “Long Island—how did you fare through Sandy?”  And they answered, “A little bit of water damage, not too bad, but still no power.”  The storekeeper took a long look at them and told them to wait, went into a back room and came out with a gas container, his own, and said, “I want you to have this.  Good luck.”  And as they relayed this story, they told me that the encounter was as humbling as it was moving.  With only the exchange of a few innocent words, they had unwittingly become the objects of charity.  But how did that happen?  They were not poor people.  They owned a home, they pay a mortgage, they send their children to expensive colleges, they own a car, and so forth…  How could they have become the objects of charity?  And yet, they were deeply moved by the generosity of one hardware storekeeper for having gifted to them that gas container.  They really needed it.

May we never find ourselves in need of the gifts of others or their loans

So the prayer in birkat Hamazon, the Grace after meals, but that dividing line between those times when we are handing out the tzedakah and when we ourselves become in need of tzedakah can be very thin. 

                When we see a beggar on the street, what exactly do we see?  Do we see a lazy bum?  Do we see a drain on society?  Do we see a drug addict or a loser or an embarrassment to society?  What do we see?  Our tradition teaches us to proceed with great caution because what we see there could some day, God forbid, be us.  We could someday be on the receiving end of those hand-outs because as the Tanakh teaches us:

For the time of mischance comes to all (Ecc. 9:11)

A citation from Ecclesiastes which is eerily identified 9:11, that is, chapter 9 verse 11.  This is no dictate to give a hand-out to every beggar on the street; that would be foolish.  But it’s a question: what is it that we see when we see that homeless person on the street?  Do we see a beggar and automatically define that person as someone else, the other, not me, not possible, never?  Or do you see and appreciate the fragility of our lives, the fact that what we have today may be gone tomorrow and whatever it is that separates us from that beggar is not so thick, or solid, or impassable.  Tzedakah, giving to others is, I think, not a tool to cleanse our conscience but an instrument of God designed to remind us that we are all one.  What kind of Jew are you?

                Last year, a 16 year old girl from Staten Island by the name of Felicia Garcia tweeted a brief message which read, “I cant.  im done.  I give up.”  She later went to the Staten Island Railway station,  where many of her friends take the train home and hurled herself onto the tracks as a train pulled into the station.  Her classmates later admitted that she was the target of vicious bullying and though she seemingly put up with it, some critical threshold was crossed and she saw fit to take her own life.  The statistics on suicide among young people in the country are rather startling.  Suicide is the number three leading cause of death among teens accounting for some 4400 deaths per year, and for every completed suicide there are around 100 attempted suicides (http://www.bullyingstatistics.org/content/bullying-and-suicide.html).

Much has been written about the need to talk to teens about the evils of bullying and that’s fine and I think worthwhile.  But there is something else here that needs to be addressed and it is a question of ownership:  to whom do our bodies really belong?  That seems like a rather straight forward question with a straight-forward answer, but maybe not. Many of us have grown up with, or at least have been exposed to, the idea that our bodies are ours.  And the strength of that position is clear due to the number of people in this world who think that our bodies are theirs, and that they can thereby make decisions for what we can either do or not do with our bodies.    But maybe that answer—that our bodies belong to us—is incomplete.

Over Rosh Hashanah, we read a particularly challenging story known as Akedat Yitzhak, the Binding of Isaac.  And it is a story that is disturbing because we don’t like God’s test of Abraham.  God is testing Abraham’s devotion—all very well and good—but don’t let the success or failure of this test rest on Abraham’s relationship with Isaac.  Don’t ask him to sacrifice his child.

Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, who has been chief rabbi of Great Britain since 1991, has an intriguing interpretation of this troubling passage in Torah.  He tells us that we are all misreading it because we have forgotten the social context in which this passage was written.  It was written at a time when people not only owned land, but people also owned people.  God, we know, promises Abraham both land, the land of Israel, and people, that is, many, many children.  But the Torah lets us know that when it comes to land, although it may be gifted to us, we never truly own it because all belongs to God.  And when it comes to people, even children, we can’t own them either, because they, too, belong to God.  This may still rub you the wrong way, particularly in thinking of your own children, because are they not yours.  Well, yes they are, but not totally.  You can’t do with your children anything you like.  You can’t as minors, send them to work, you can’t abuse them and you certainly can’t God-forbid, punish them by death.  But in Roman law, you could.  The Roman law of patria potestas meant that children were property, you owned them, you owned their income, you owned their assets, and you had the right to punish them, you had even the right to subject them to the death penalty.  The story of Akedat Yitzhak is a question about ownership.  To whom does this body belong?  To the parent on earth or the parent in the heavens above.  And if the body belongs to the parent in the heavens above, then the parent on earth has far fewer rights over that child, than the ancient world though obvious.

You have created the human being with great intelligence…

So we say in the prayers.  It’s a very powerful idea.  This is more than life is sacred.  This is the idea that we are the craftsmanship of God.  We don’t trash a Picasso, a Rembrandt or a Michaelangelo.  We don’t mess with those works of art.  They are too precious, too perfect, too magnificent.  We are too precious, too perfect, too magnificent for any of us or our children to take our lives.  And who are we to take our own lives when our lives do not belong to us to begin with. 

                I hope I don’t get into too much trouble for saying this, but let me go off on a bit of a limb here and tell you that I can save everyone a little bit of money right now.  How?  Because I want to tell you that by and large, you don’t need any tattoos, no body piercings, no nose jobs, no face lifts, no botox, no nothing.  You don’t need any of that because God has made us a masterpiece and whatever imperfection that may be a part of us is that which makes us wonderful and unique.  I want you to know that and more importantly, I want our children to know that.  No one should ever look into a mirror and see anything less than a godly work of genius that requires our love and attention and care.  God forbid we should ever do anything to our bodies that would harm them thinking well, it’s just my property—I can do with it whatever I want.  We can’t.  We belong to God.  What do you see when you look in the mirror?  And based on what you see, what kind of Jew are you? 

                Of course, there are many different adjectives we can apply to our Jewishness.  There are Orthodox, Conservative, Reform or Reconstructionist Jews.  There are secular, cultural, Zionistic, and humanistic Jews.  There are Jews by Choice and Jews by Birth.  There are Jews who are Buddhists, the so-called Jew-Bus.  There are hundreds of other kinds of Jews we could mention but the point here is this:    when someone asks you, even if its yourself, what kind of Jew are you, the answer is not “I’m just a Jew,” because that is the theological equivalent of “I like soup.”  Great.  What kind of soup do you like and what kind of Jew are you?

                That‘s a question that only you can answer but I’ll tell you this.  I hope you are the kind of Jew that is prepared to defend Jews, men or women, who are searching for a path to come closer to God no matter how unorthodox a path they choose.  I hope you are the kind of Jew who sees the oneness of all humanity and can respond with appropriate compassion at the right times.  I hope that you are the kind of Jew who sees the hand of God as having crafted you, as well as operating within you.  Your body, your person is precious and we take care of such a gift the way only a precious gift given to us by a dear friend must be cared for. 

                It’s very common to think that what we see in the world tells us about what is actually in the world, but the truth of the matter is what we see in the world tells us a lot about who we are as people.    I hope that this year we can all move beyond an identification of ourselves as “just a Jew.”  We deserve more than that and the world needs more than that.  May we all be Jews who see deeply, Jews who look below the surface, Jews who see the world with the eyes of Moshe. 

                Shanah tovah, everyone, a good year to all.