Redemption: The Connections Between Us

Redemption: The Connections Between Us

Kol Nidrei Eve Sermon 5787

Rabbi Sam Cohon, Congregation Beit Simcha, Tucson, AZ

What invisible threads connect us to other people?  What are the unseen synapses that link human beings together in the great fabric of creation, that allow us to supersede our lonely, isolated individuality and realize we are part of something much greater?  Most of the time in our lives we don’t even know that these connections exist.  But there are moments and events when these nexuses, these unnoticed, hidden strands become visible.  Only then are we likely to become aware of the way our own lives are part of a more complicated system in this cosmos, and understand that we are truly connected to others, and the universe, in a deep and powerful way. 

We can call our becoming aware of this a tale of redemption.  The Hebrew word for that, Ge’ulah, is part of our Jewish prayer vocabulary in every evening and morning service, the Mi Chamocha, in which we remember our salvation from destruction at the shore of the Sea in Moses’ time.  That represented redemption from violent death.  But I think ge’ulah, redemption, to us can mean something quite different.  Redemption truly is those moments of knowing that we are connected to everyone and everything, and so to God.  In fact, maybe that very connection is God.  So, this then is one story about redemption.

My friends, many of you are no doubt fans of the Tucson Festival of Books, but if you aren’t yet, you should be.  It’s quite an event.  It’s one of the major book festivals in the country, ranked third in the US.  Every spring hundreds of authors and over a hundred thousand readers gather at the University of Arizona to hear from writers and to talk about and buy books.  It was launched some years ago by former congregants and friends, Bill and Brenda Viner, and it’s run now by Abra McAndrew Friedman, a member of Beit Simcha, and it’s a lot of fun and an incredible experience.  The Book of Ecclesiastes says:

 עֲשׂוֹת סְפָרִים הַרְבֵּה אֵין קֵץ “of the making of books there is no end,” and the Tucson Book Festival certainly demonstrates the truth of that.

There are many events at the Festival, including plenty of author’s panels, in which a group of writers—typically three or four—talk about their books, and take questions from a moderator and the audience.  Each of these panels has the moderator start the questioning, and over the years, I have been asked to moderate Festival of Books sessions a number times, usually for a subject related to religion or Judaism or ethics, or another topic I am supposed to know something about.  I have moderated Festival of Books sessions on books about paradise, and the afterlife, and on books that dealt with contemporary ethical issues; often the authors were Jewish, which is no great surprise.  I love books and reading and good writing, and writers are always enthusiastic and articulate about their own works.  Plus, I have the advantage of having interviewed hundreds of authors over the 24 years of the Too Jewish radio show and podcast, and I actually read the books before the session, which the authors are genuinely grateful for.

Our Beit Simcha member, Lori Riegel Roman is on one of the Festival of Books’ committees, and I was asked to moderate a session about books focused on redemption, famous people who managed to rise from challenges to achieve some sort of redemption.  When Lori asked me to moderate the panel, she mentioned I was the right choice since two of the books were about musicians—I know something about music—and two had connections to Los Angeles, where I grew up, and all three involved redemptive arcs, which seems quite Jewish; plus, the authors were all Jewish.  At least that was the original panel.  But then, one of the authors withdrew shortly before the festival.  That meant it would be panel of just two books. 

To be honest, I hadn’t paid too much attention to the books or the panel until a few weeks before the festival—I have this day job, you see, as a rabbi—and so when I turned to the books, I realized they formed a most unusual pairing.  Both books were about music and were written by Jewish authors; that much was true.  The first was about Brian Wilson, of the Beach Boys, and was written by an author named David Leaf.  It turned out that Arlene Leaf, an active member of Beit Simcha since our beginnings, is his cousin.  Well and good; I know the Beach Boys’ music—growing up in Southern California you couldn’t help but know it—and was familiar with his story, which indeed combined great success, creative musical genius, a mental breakdown, and a return from the abyss.  The second book, I was pleased to discover, was written by a former top baseball writer for Sports Illustrated, a Jewish guy named Jeff Pearlman whose stories I read in the magazine for years.  He’s written a number of books about sports, including the book Showtime which the popular HBO series Winning Time about the Los Angeles Lakers was based on.  But this book was a departure for him.  It was not about sports.  It was about music, alright: rap music.  It was a biography of Tupac Shakur.

Now I know a lot about Jewish music, and Broadway musicals, folk music, and classic rock; a decent amount about classical music, opera, Gilbert and Sullivan, jazz and madrigals, some country music, and New Wave and popular music through, oh, 1990.  I know some reggae, and heck, barbershop quartets and Civil War music.  I even know pop music from the mid-2000s up until today, because by then I had kids old enough to bring me up to date, and the teenagers in our congregation like to share what they listen to nowadays.

But I don’t know anything about rap music, not at all.  I might know less about hip-hop.  My introduction to rap music came abruptly in rabbinic school in Jerusalem in 1991 when I brought along about 50 CDs—remember CDs?—and a portable sound system, and my younger classmates were briefly thrilled—until they realized that I hadn’t brought the rap and hip hop music that was their pop music of choice.  I know nothing about rap.  While I had heard of Tupac Shakur and knew he died young and violently, that was pretty much the extent of my knowledge of him. 

In my capacity of moderator, I emailed the two authors, noting the panel probably included two books on the whitest American musician of all time, Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys, and the blackest American musician of all time, Tupac Shakur.  Jeff Pearlman, a very funny guy, emailed back, writing:

“I can say, with 100-percent certainty, of all the panels I've been on that involve discussing Tupac and Brian Wilson with an Arizona-based rabbi, I believe this will be best.”  How could it not be?

For those who don’t know—I was certainly among them—Tupac Shakur was a hugely influential rapper, sometimes cited as the greatest ever, and a crucial figure in the development of hip hop. His success was meteoric, including number one hits and albums—he has sold 75 million of them—and although his entire career lasted just 7 years before he was killed, he recorded an incredible amount of music, and made several films as well.  To prepare for this odd task, I opened Jeff Pearlman’s book and started to read. 

And almost immediately I was struck by an extraordinary story he told.

When Tupac Shakur was starting out in music and acting, just 19 years old, he was cast in his first film in a small role.  There’s a lot of down time on a film set, and one day he was reading the newspaper and saw a very rough story about a 12 year-old girl, Brenda, living in public housing who had been raped by a cousin, impregnated, and never told her fractured family about it.  This 12 year-old girl had given birth at home, alone, and, not knowing what else to do, had thrown the baby down a trash chute into a dumpster.  The baby was recovered by a custodian who heard cries coming from a plastic trash bag just before he was going to compact it, and he saved the baby boy.  After he read the story, Tupac told a co-star, Omar Epps, that he needed a minute; he went into his actor’s trailer and wrote a song in twenty minutes called, “Brenda’s Got a Baby.”  It went onto his first album, and became a hit, and a favorite of Tupac Shakur’s. 

In the nearly 25 years since that story came out, the song was written, no one had followed up on what happened to the baby that 12 year-old Brenda discarded in her desperation.  Pearlman decided to find out, and contacted an old friend, Michelle, an ace researcher.  They didn’t know the name of the baby, or anything else about him, except the date he was recovered.  Yet somehow this researcher found a phone number.  Pearlman contacted the number, and it turned out that he had found the right man, who lived in Las Vegas.  He was a nice young man named Devon Hodge, who said, “You found the right guy.  I’m the baby who was thrown down the trash heap.” 

What happened was that the saved baby boy was put up for adoption and raised by a good couple.  Devon Hodge always wanted to know more about his origins.  When he found this out, he sent his DNA to one of the $100 genetic services out there, and discovered he had a huge extended family. These relatives told him he was the baby that inspired Tupac Shakur’s song, “Brenda’s got a baby.”  And he was reunited with his larger, extended family; he went to a big family reunion back east, and even took a photo standing next to the trash dumpster he was rescued from. 

But he still never had met or been connected with his mother.  So, Pearlman went back to his wizard-like researcher, and she found the mother.  The researcher, Michelle, called the woman, and said, “Did you have a baby back in 2001?”  And the woman started screaming, and crying: “Do you know where my son is?  Do you know where my son is?  I’ve been looking for him for years.  I live in Newark, New Jersey, but I’m away from home at a concert.”  The researcher said, “Where’s the concert?”  And the mother answered, “It’s in Las Vegas.”  And the researcher said, “Your son lives in Las Vegas.”  And so that night, in Las Vegas, Devon Hodge met his mother for the first time; it turned out that she had given him his first name at the hospital after he, and she, were rescued by police, and the adopted family kept it.  It was an amazing reunion, filled with crying and hugs and emotions most of us cannot imagine.  A miraculous reconnection.  All because of a song.

Look, Tupac Shakur lived a talented, chaotic, short life.  But that his song brought this mother and child together, in a positive and extraordinary way, is amazing.

There is an odd temporal connection here; you may have heard that Tupac Shakur’s killer was, in fact, finally convicted of murder this month some 30 years after the death. 

So why am I telling you all this?  Am I now suddenly an afficionado of rap or hip-hop music?  Do I want you all to become fans of Tupac’s music?  Is it because Pearlman called his book, using a quote from Tupac, “Only God Can Judge Me,” and it’s Yom Kippur, when we are all, by Jewish tradition, judged by God?

It is an incredible story, of course, improbable—and, in its own way redemptive, which was the excuse for that book session in the first place.  Tupac was shot to death in a period when rap music and hip hop were identified closely with gang violence, when gangsta rap often spread misogyny and glorified bloodshed.  Yet this early song somehow brought about a remarkable reunion, years later.  This extraordinary true story about unlikely family reunion reminds me of three Jewish parallels, imperfect but evocative. 

The first is the story of our great patriarch Joseph in the Torah.  If you recall, Joseph of amazing dreamcoat fame, was thrown down into a kind of garbage pit himself, by his own brothers, before being sold into slavery in Egypt.  His father, Jacob, was led to believe that his favorite son was dead.  He spent the next 20 years mourning his lost son.  And then, against all odds, two decades later, Jacob discovers that his son is not only alive, but the most powerful leader in Egypt.  Their reunion is quite amazing in Genesis: there is crying, and tears, and hugs, and incredibly powerful emotion.  Ultimately, this reunion, of the entire family of Jacob, literally the children of Israel, is the basis for the formation of the Jewish people.  It too, is a miraculous moment of true redemption. 

There are also many extraordinary reunion stories from the time of the Shoah, the Holocaust, of parents who believed their children were dead, of children who believed their parents were dead, of husbands and wives separated by the Nazis who somehow survived and managed to find each other: in DP camps in Europe, on returning to their destroyed hometowns, in Israel, in America.  One of the most remarkable of these true stories was a family of 10 Hungarian Jewish siblings—close to Jacob’s 12 sons in number-- the Katz family, 9 of whom improbably survived the camps, all of whom thought the others were dead, only to be reunited after the war.  Their parents and one sibling were murdered by the Germans.  Yet against all odds the remaining 9 survived and went on to live successful, full lives. 

One day after the end of World War II, one of the surviving brothers, Moshe Katz, who had begun a new life, saw two filthy, gaunt-looking men, sitting on the front steps of his apartment in Budapest. Altruistically, he offered these concentration camp survivors some nourishment. One man pointed to the other and asked if Katz recognized him.  Moshe did not, at first; it turned out that he had been unknowingly offering food to his own brother...

A final Jewish parallel story, of sorts.  This past year, one redemptive event should have had greater resonance than it apparently has.  Last October, just after the end of the Jewish fall holiday season of 5786, the final 20 Israeli hostages, held by the Palestinian terrorists of Hamas for two full years, were released, and came home.  The reunion for these hostages was long in coming, and their experiences since October 7th, 2023, can only have caused massive personal trauma.  And yet, against all the odds, they were finally brought home and reunited with their families and their country.  251 Israelis were taken hostage on that terrible day; 85 ultimately died, either that day, and their bodies were taken into Gaza, or over the two years that followed. 

But over those two years, 166 were saved from captivity, and reunited, in a fulfillment of pidyon shevuyim, the mitzvah of redeeming captives.  If you have watched the emotional scenes of reunion, of the sense that the entire nation of Israel, all 10 million people, breathed fully again for the first time in two years.  This was more than a simple redemption of captives.  It was a redemption for the entire country. The return of the last hostages to Israel was, in its own way, a miraculous national redemption. 

Many things went wrong this past Jewish calendar year; war in Iran and Lebanon; settler violence in the West Bank; antisemitic attacks in England, Australia, Michigan, indeed, seemingly everywhere; the normalization of antisemitism on the political left and the political right.  It is easy to feel that we are in a truly bad time.

But the truth is that these moments of incredible connection are there; they are always there.  If we choose to look, if we work to see the semi-invisible lines that link us all together, we can find these moments of extraordinary redemption.  Because they are truly just a reminder that we are all connected, always; that God is not necessarily in the great and overwhelming experience of revelation or transcendence, but in the many moments of connection that can show us how we are all, truly, part of a greater whole.

It’s true: often we can only become aware of our interconnectedness, our redemptive possibility, through extraordinary events.  Maybe we have to see a baby saved and reunited with his mother years later through a song; maybe we have to see a family saved from its own failures and raised up; maybe we have to see salvation from destruction, and redemption from captivity before we can know that there is more in this world than just us, that there are forces at work that save, and redeem, and sanctify. 

But I can promise: if you look deeply enough, on Yom Kippur, but also on an ordinary day, you will find those connections.  You will find your own moments of true redemption.

Over this festival of Atonement, over this long day of Teshuvah, may you each find those connections.  And so experience true redemption.

Our Own Odyssey

Rosh HaShanah 5787

Rabbi Samuel M. Cohon, Congregation Beit Simcha, Tucson, AZ

There is no truth to the rumor that a major motion picture was made about our congregation, a film about a group wandering in the wilderness for years before finally coming home.  That film was called “The Odyssey,” and although they did not make it about Beit Simcha, the fact that we’ve had five different homes over eight years does make it seem as though the title could have been taken from our peregrinations, our search for our Promised Land.  We haven’t wandered for forty years in the Sonoran Desert; but we have certainly spent eight years trying hard to come home. We hope that, at long last, we finally have, or will soon.

I expect many of you have seen “The Odyssey” by now, or at least experienced aspects of the media frenzy that surrounded it.  Director and writer Christopher Nolan’s reinterpretation of the classic Greek epic poem, attributed to Homer, is powerful, and I recommend it to anyone with the patience for a three-hour Imax movie.  “The Odyssey” struck the public fancy this summer in a way you might not expect a 2800-year-old classic of world literature to do so.  Epic poetry is not a format favored by most people in our time of TikTok videos, Facebook shorts and Instagram Reels, and anything that takes more than 20 seconds to view is quickly skipped over today.  Yet this retelling of the narrative of a soldier/sailor king trying to return home covers 10 years of voyaging—a true Odyssey, named for its protagonist, Odysseus—and the movie takes patience.  Like a High Holy Days’ service, it is longer than the typical theatrical experience of 2026.

It’s a great story, filled with miraculous and insane side trips and distractions.  Inspired by the much older Epic of Gilgamesh, the Odyssey is the source for every wild wanderer’s tale of peregrination and return in western world literature, from Virgil’s Aeneid to Gulliver’s Travels to the Rime of the Ancient Mariner to Huckelberry Finn to the Pirates of the Caribbean and even Star Wars.  But what exactly does the Odyssey really say about the human condition?

To give some context, Homer, blind Greek poet cited as author of this great epic, lived at the same time as our prophet First Isaiah, during the Iron Age, around 750 BCE, roughly 2800 years ago.  He was writing, or singing, or slamming poems about a much earlier time still, the last part of the Bronze Age which collapsed around 1200 BCE.  One of the pleasant surprises of the Odyssey film is that the director included references to the Bronze Age collapse of civilizations.  That historical disaster is relevant to the movie, but it also highly important in understanding the development of Judaism.  And it has lessons for us today.

As those of you who have taken our Tanakh classes on the Books of Joshua, Judges, and Samuel already know, the Bronze Age reached an apex 3300 years ago when major powers flourished in Egypt, Turkey, Mesopotamia, Canaan, Greece, and on the islands of Crete and Cyprus.  At the height of the Bronze Age there was a durable balance of power between these accomplished civilizations, and while conflicts took place, no one kingdom or country tried to destroy another, nor were they strong enough to do so.  In the absence of devastating international wars, agriculture expanded and food surpluses became common.  Where there is plenty of food there are supplies to trade and time to enjoy life.  In an era of balanced power and regional specialization, commerce flourished, cities grew extensively, wealth increased for everyone, and each of the quite different cultures developed to a high level in its own way.  Literacy and culture reached levels never before experienced on earth.

Highlighting the remarkable, cooperative, international world of the late Bronze Age, there is a famous ship from the late Bronze Age, the Uluburun Shipwreck, which sank off the Mediterranean coast of Turkey around 1305 BCE.  This was a 20-ton merchant vessel transporting luxury goods from Africa, Asia and Europe that happened to sink, perhaps in a storm.  It was discovered in 1982 and its contents recovered during thousands of underwater archeological dives from the 1980s to the 90s.  Its cargo was amazing.  On board the ship, incredibly well-preserved, they found beautiful pottery and oil lamps from Greece, Cyprus, Syria, Canaan and Egypt, swords and shields from the Greek and Italian mainland, jewelry from Canaan and Egypt, ebony wood and elephant and hippopotamus ivory and ostrich shells from Africa, tin from Uzbekistan, axes from Bulgaria, perfume and spice jars from Mesopotamia and even India.  Its remarkable cargo testifies to the diversity and quality of the trade goods available in 1300 BCE—a long time before Amazon Prime, but just as diverse as what you might purchase today, if you have deep pockets. 

All that was on just one merchant ship, which proves that the people of the Bronze Age were connected in a mostly peaceful, international network of trade, culture, the arts, and the free exchange of ideas.  That era represented the high-water mark of human civilization to that point. It was during that zenith of the Bronze Age that the myths of the Iliad and Odyssey are set—although, interestingly, the Iliad is about a huge war at the height of this time of peace and plenty.  Moral violations in the conduct of that war are blamed, in the film, for the coming collapse.

It is no surprise that the Israelites’ experience in Egypt, and our Exodus towards Israel, is also set at the end of the Bronze Age, in our classic Iron Age literary works, the Torah and the Tanakh.  It was a memorable, positive time in the ancient world’s consciousness.

Now whether Helen of Troy had anything to do with it, at the very height of the Bronze Age—you could call it the Golden Age of the Bronze Age, but that is mixing metaphors, and metals—things changed suddenly, for the worse.  First, there was a dramatic transformation in the climate of the whole region of the Mediterranean and the Middle East.  Temperatures heated up everywhere, and rain dried up. Droughts became common, agricultural lands grew infertile, and those wonderful food surpluses that supported the development of international trade were gone, replaced by famines, forcing peoples to migrate to survive and creating population pressures in previously self-sufficient regions.  With drought and famine, people became malnourished, starvation and disease spread rapidly, and pandemics ravaged established centers of civilization, weakening them in every way, including militarily.  In a time of increasing scarcity, authority weakened, societal cohesion broke down, and the balance of power between mutually supportive civilizations collapsed.

If that sounds a little bit familiar, well, it should.  Our circumstances today are not the same as Odysseus’ time, but the age of uncertainty we are in, the dramatic changes we see in climate and society, the threats to governmental norms, the breakdown of international agreements and social cohesion and respect for authority and tradition—all of these sound distressingly familiar, as though they came from our news feeds.  

3200 years ago the coup de grace, the final element that broke the Bronze Age, was a sudden influx of invaders from the west.  In his book, 1177 BC—the Year that Civilization Collapsed, Eric Cline delineates the destruction caused by the invasion of the “Sea Peoples.”  We don’t really know where these peoples came from, or why they came when they did.  We do not know their ideology or their original religions.  But we do know they were ethnically different from the Egyptians, Hittites, Mycenean Greeks, Minoans, Canaanites, Cypriots, Babylonians, and Assyrians.  We know that the established civilizations were faced with an existential crisis when the invading Peoples attacked.  Could their weakened societies prevent the invaders from conquering their nations and destroying their cities?

We know most about these Sea Peoples from one country that succeeded in repelling them, Egypt.  In the “Battle of the Nile Delta” the New Kingdom Pharaoh’s army and navy defeated a large amphibious attack by Sea Peoples, preserving the integrity of Egypt.  The murals that survive to tell the tale of that 12th century BCE battle are the first mention in history of the ancient Israelites’ arch-enemy the Philistines, pilegesh.  Repulsed by Egypt, those same Philistines settled in a less-well defended area that today we call Gaza.  They remained a thorn in the Israelites’ side for centuries. 

Even in victory against the Sea Peoples, Egypt was seriously damaged.  She survived afterwards as an independent kingdom but never achieved the same level of power again.  By the time of Homer, Egypt was a paper tiger, soon conquered by Iron Age Empires like Babylonia and Persia. 

While Egypt survived, most of the other great Bronze Age powers were totally destroyed.  We have the desperate letters written by the last ruler of Ugarit as invaders attacked the great trading city on the coast of Canaan, begging allies to send aid.  Help did not arrive; Ugarit was permanently destroyed and never rebuilt. There are burn layers and thousands of arrowheads all around from the ghostly capital of the once-grand Hittite empire from when it fell to the Sea People invaders, never to rise again.  Mycenean Greece—Homer’s imagined Greece of the Iliad and Odyssey—disappeared in the onslaught, as did the Minoan naval empire on Crete, as did the rich civilization of Cyprus.

A couple of more distant national entities survived this disaster in reduced, weakened form: Babylon, far inland in today’s Iraq, and Assyria, to the north and east, managed to resist conquest by these mysterious invaders from the west but they too, were wounded.  The international trade and exchange of ideas, the peace and prosperity, the literacy, artistic accomplishment and cultural richness of the Bronze Age was over, to be followed by a Dark Age of contraction, poverty and illiteracy.

This great civilizational implosion was the Bronze Age Collapse.  It marked an end to what people came to look back on as a glorious earlier age, and it marked the beginning of a dark and dangerous period in human history, in which the quality of life was diminished.  In the movie version of the Odyssey key characters reference the coming of “The Sea Peoples,” and kings and queens and heroes reflect on the possibility—even the likelihood—of the end of their own civilization.  Key characters reference violations of Xenia, “Zeus’s Law”, a kind of foundational principle of their society, in which hospitality must be granted to every stranger, wanderer, or beggar because they might actually be a god in disguise.  Because this “Zeus’s Law” had been disregarded, even deliberately violated, their own civilization is now threatened with destruction.

The same tradition made its way into our Talmud, where we are told we should treat every begging indigent as though he or she might be the Messiah.   There is, however, an important difference.  Zeus’ law was there to protect you from a god in disguise; you show hospitality to protect your own home from an angry camouflaged god.  In the Talmud, the beggar is there so that you can seek redemption for yourself and the world.  You must find the holiness in the lowest member of society.  As the Messiah says in the Talmudic story, “Redemption will come today—if you listen to God’s voice.” 

That’s not the way it works in the Odyssey.  A feeling of impending potential doom hangs over the film version, as Odysseus enters and escapes from a series of epic dangers and traps.  Odysseus, cleverest, wiliest and most complicated of all the Greek commanders who destroy Troy, designer of the Trojan Horse, goes through fantastic trials and temptations before he can return home for a bloody, climactic confrontation.  The story begins with the horrifying sack of the city of Troy, with death and destruction.  After ten years of war, and a victory filled with murder and rapine, Odysseus can go home.  But will he make it back to his wife and son in time to save them?  Will his trickster ways offend various gods to the extent that they destroy him?  Will his own crew abandon him because he has offended the gods?  Can he outwit the magical and destructive creatures, and the gods, who seek his annihilation?

Odysseus, in Homer’s original, is a schemer, a manipulator, cleverer than everyone he encounters, able in a pinch to outwit the gods who so unevenly rule his polytheistic world.  And yet, clever as he is, he is beset by trial and tribulation throughout his journey.    

On the way back to his home, he loses all his ships and his entire crew to bloody deaths.  Will Odysseus, survivor extraordinaire, return whole or unbroken from this long, mad experience? 

Since Homer, or whoever created the Odyssey, was writing in the exact same era when the Torah and Tanakh were written I wondered what the closest Jewish analogies to Odysseus wild journeying might be.  It is, after all, a sea story about an ancient mariner.  We also have famous sea stories.  How do these compare?

In a few weeks we will read the Torah portion of Noah, a sea story even older than Odysseus’.  Noah’s journey appears even more hopeless on the surface: while Odysseus is just trying to get home, Noah’s home is washed away by the greatest flood of all time.  He has nowhere to land but the soggy foot of Mt. Ararat, and although he preserves his crew—his nuclear family and a zoo-full of land and sky animals—he has no control of his literally rudderless ark.  Unlike Odysseus, Noah is far from being a wily, clever, or complicated man.  He is, however, quite the carpenter and incredibly good at following bizarre divine orders, something the Greek hero never cottons to.  Noah’s tale—a simple human being saving all the species on the planet from divine destruction—is compelling, a tale of environmental rescue.  Noah also takes a lot less time than the Odyssey—forty days and nights of rain, less than two years from plan to execution to resolution—and, thank God, it’s much shorter.  And it ends in hope, a rainbow promise, not with the threat of further civilizational destruction. 

However, Noah, like Odysseus, in some ways fails to perform as a good human being, and certainly as a leader.  He never questions God’s decision to kill everyone, evil and good alike, and he never acts to save any human beings that aren’t in his own family.  Noah is merely “righteous in his own generation”, not for all time.   He gets drunk at the end of the portion and shames his sons, and although he does save a breeding remnant of humanity—and all those non-human beasts—he cannot save humankind from its own destructive inclinations.  The rainbow is pretty and promising, but after the floodwaters dry those rotten humans quickly build the disastrous Tower of Babel and again fall into the evil practices that led to Divine punishment in the first place.  The covenant with Noah, and us, is that God won’t destroy humanity again, at least not by flood.  Unlike the Odyssey, there is a moral message: evil acts, hamas in the Hebrew, hatred and violence, lead to destruction, potentially total annihilation.  Under these circumstances, even the best human being of a generation can only do so much.

The other famous Jewish Biblical sea story we know from Yom Kippur afternoon, the troubling book of the prophet Jonah.  Jonah is commanded to go to Nineveh and warn the Assyrians—most murderous empire of antiquity—that God is coming to punish them for their evil ways, but they can still repent and save themselves.  Jonah flees his divine command, heads in the opposite direction out to sea as far from the inland Assyrian capital of Nineveh as he can get.  Jonah, like Odysseus, runs into magical disaster on the rough waters of the Mediterranean, and recognizes it as the punishment of God for fleeing his call.  He forces the non-Israelite sailors to throw him overboard and save themselves.  A magical animal, a giant fish, swallows him and against all zoological logic he survives in the belly of the beast for three days.  This is in line with the wild, magical, terrible adventures of Odysseus and his men, who at one point is abandoned by the crew of his ship.  Inside the fish, miraculously still alive, Jonah prays and atones for his sin of abandoning his God-given mission, is vomited up, walks inland to Nineveh, and delivers the message. 

This time, much to the prophet’s chagrin, the people listen to God’s message of reform and return, of Teshuvah, and save themselves and their city.  At the end, Jonah is reminded that his job of prophet is a moral one: he should seek not to condemn others to destruction but instead show them the path to return to goodness and God.

There are other sea stories in the Torah, most famously the crossing of the Reed Sea in the time of the Exodus.  But the tale of Yetzi’at Mitzrayim in the Torah takes great pains to remind us we crossed that sea on dry land.  It’s not really a sea story at all, at least from the Israelite point of view, although the wandering in the desert, and the difficult adventures, certainly have similarities to the Odyssey.

There are other Jewish sea stories that are definitely historical.  After Spain expelled all its Jews in 1492 and instituted the Spanish Inquisition in its overseas empire, a series of Jewish pirate captains took revenge on Spain and preyed on Spanish shipping, including Moses Cohen Henriques, a Sephardic pirate who in 1628 captured a Spanish silver fleet off Cuba. This was the largest treasure heist in pirate history, gold and silver valued at over $1 billion in modern currency.  My personal favorite Jewish mariner was a man named Samuel Pallache, a successful Spanish-Moroccan privateer, diplomat, and merchant known as the “Pirate Rabbi.”  Now, that’s a cool nickname, no?  “The Pirate Rabbi,” who helped the Dutch take revenge on the Portuguese and Spaniards for brutally expelling and tormenting Jews.  Later, in 19th century America, Uriah P. Levy became the first Jewish Commodore in the US Navy, famous for outlawing flogging and, after retirement, saving Thomas Jefferson’s home of Monticello from destruction, preserving it for the nation. 

Even these more modern Jewish sea stories have a moral element, it seems. 

The Odyssey views the world as a capricious playground of gods, demi-gods, monsters and witches, where human beings are simply pawns of demanding, impulsive deities responding unpredictably to whatever we are trying to accomplish.  It’s all, well, an Odyssey of potential disasters, of changeable storms and cruel dangers we cannot avoid.  We are all—from simple citizens to powerful rulers—at the whim of gods’-driven forces that make little sense to us as mere people.  Crazy things can happen at any time and destroy all of our plans—and us.

By contrast, the Bible, and Judaism, sees the world as controlled not by humans, and not by rival deities, but by one God, a God of morality, who cares whether we choose to observe commandments, who wishes us to be good and ethical and urges us to make decisions that lead us to the right path of life.  Our limited sea stories are not mere Odysseys: they are stories with morals, real people dealing with dramatic crises, responding in ways deserving of both criticism and praise. 

In short, they are human tales, people operating in a world that seeks morality, in which God wants humans to be good, obeying ethical, structured mitzvot that will make the world better.

Perhaps the closest Biblical figure to Odysseus is not a sailor at all—it is King David, who, like Odysseus, goes through a series of remarkable experiences, spends time in the wilderness, is tricky, and the cleverest person of his era.  David, like Odysseus, is a king and warrior, and he, too, has a rather loose relationship with personal ethics.      

Now what could the Odyssey possibly mean for us, we who live in a non-oceanic desert more than three millennia after the events it is supposed to be narrating?  Is our own society poised at the edge of some kind of Bronze Age collapse?  Will future generations talk about the great AI Age Collapse?  Are we doomed to being flooded by disasters, climate change, disastrous wars, collapsed economies, a disintegrating social and governmental fabric, all compounded by migratory invasions, and perhaps runaway super-intelligent computers to boot? 

Perhaps.  Some people always think the end is nigh, of course.  There are plenty of conspiracy theorists and doomsayers about these days, online and on social media and on the air.  For them the world is always about to end.  And if we don’t work to right the wrongs of our society—and there are plenty of them—then perhaps the catastrophizers will eventually be proved right.

But it seems to me that there is a quite different message in all of this.

The Odyssey film has been criticized for including what are loosely called Judeo-Christian values in a Greek, pagan world.  You know, crazy, religious ideas like hospitality to strangers, not murdering or raping civilians in war, respecting legitimate authority, openness and honesty with colleagues and friends, even honor.  That moral sense made the movie less authentically pagan, and less true to the source material.  But it also conveyed some ideals we need to be reminded of today.

In truth, the Jewish versions of this ancient epic, in their own way, always had those elements.  The foundational Jewish ideals of respect for human life, of responding to complex, dangerous situations with the best actions we can manage, of maintaining our values and ethical ideals even when faced with hard and harrowing choices: that was always the Jewish message.  None of our prototypical wanderers—on sea or on land—were perfect paragons.  They—Noah, Jonah, King David, and Abraham and Moses, too—were always human, with strengths and flaws; you know, like us.  Our own lives are indeed a journey, and sometimes an odyssey.  We may wander the sea, or river, or desert, or the whole earth in search of home, and encounter surprising difficulties, even disasters.

But for us Jews, it is not the vagaries of the voyage that matters, nor the vicissitudes of the challenges we must overcome.  It is the way we conduct ourselves, the actions we take to bring hope and healing, to bring the best of our efforts and to build a life, and a world, that reflect that morality.  It is the way we choose to live our lives, the values we embody, the actions we take to improve our community, and our world.

That is most true of all at this holy time of year, when we have the opportunity to make ourselves, our community, and our lives better, when we can do Teshuvah, and return to the best person we can be.  It is the crucial lesson of Rosh HaShanah: it is not the odyssey of the events in our lives that matters, but the quality of the way we choose to live that does. 

May the choices you make over these High Holy Days, and throughout this 5787 year, make your own Odyssey, your own journey, a voyage of goodness, meaning and blessing.  L’Shana Tova.

9/11, 25 Years: Before and Since

Rosh HaShanah Eve Sermon 5787

Rabbi Samuel M. Cohon, Congregation Beit Simcha, Tucson, AZ

Shabbat Shalom, and L’Shana Tovah.  The wonderful Jewish author, the late Grace Paley, wrote a book of extraordinary short stories called, “Enormous Changes at the Last Minute.”  In that collection she wrote, “plot [is] the absolute line between two points which I've always despised. Not for literary reasons, but because it takes all hope away. Everyone, real or invented, deserves the open destiny of life.”  I often think of the beginning of a Jewish New Year in those words: the open destiny of life.  Tonight we have begun a journey, an exploration, a voyage into the unknown.  A fresh year, without advance notes or GPS directions.  Who knows where it will lead?  Who really knows what will happen in 5787?

What is it John Lennon said about expectations?  “Life is what happens to you when you’re busy making other plans.”  Or, in the Yiddish aphorism, Mensch tracht, und Gott lacht: we plan, and God laughs. 

I love Paley’s title: “Enormous Changes at the Last Minute.”  So often that’s exactly what we experience in life—and that has regularly proven to be a simple factual statement around the time of the High Holy Days.  Mind you, I have rabbinic colleagues who believe it is best to write Rosh HaShanah and Yom Kippur sermons in June or July, so they can be prepared long before the High Holy Days arrive and enjoy their summer vacations.  This get-it-done-early approach to the Days of Awe baffles me.  Because the world doesn’t stop in August and September, and powerful, important events can occur right before Rosh HaShanah and change the whole way we are thinking.  You know: Enormous Changes at the Last Minute.

Never was this truer than 25 years ago, when Rosh HaShanah began September 17th, 2001.  That was six days after the shock of 9/11, before we knew most of what was going to change in the world—but we knew there would be profound changes.  My original sermons for Rosh HaShanah that year never got delivered.  Our world was suddenly different, dramatically, shockingly, and it was clear that every congregation needed to hear different messages entirely than the ones their rabbis originally planned to deliver.

Tonight is the beginning of 5787, but it is also the 25th Anniversary of the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center tower buildings in Manhattan, on the Pentagon in Washington, DC, and on the jet targeting the Capitol building whose heroic passengers forced it down in Pennsylvania.  While that day is indelibly burned into the memories of many of us, some of you are too young even to remember 9/11.  My older children, now in their 20s and 30s, were little children at the time of 9/11.  Ayelet was born more than two decades later.  For all of them 9/11 is history, something they learned or will learn about from books, teachers and documentaries.  It is the way of the world that signal events that seem, in the moment, so shocking and terrible that they can never leave our consciousness do, over time, fade, and move from the immediacy of tragedy and trauma to the dimmer recesses of memory. 

In the quarter century that has passed since 2001 other shocking dates have forced their ways into our consciousness—January 6, 2021, for example, and certainly October 7, 2023, a terrible day indeed for Jews in Israel and everywhere in the world, the Simchat Torah massacres and kidnappings in Israel three years ago. 

Yet 9/11 remains unique.  The truth is that there was a world before 9/11, and there has been a different world since that time.  The sense of security we felt in America prior to that day, misguided or not, disappeared in the horrific collapse of the twin towers, in the jet smashing into the Pentagon, and during the seemingly endless war on terror that followed. 

You may remember that before 9/11, anyone could walk all the way to an airport gate to say goodbye to a departing family member, friend or romantic partner.  You didn’t need to show a boarding pass or an ID—real or otherwise—to go through security into the terminal.  You could carry a Swiss army knife in your backpack on planes, and certainly a can of soda or bottle of water.  It really wasn’t security at all; and in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 there were suddenly extremely long, slow-moving lines at airport security… which has never completely changed, although this week TSA announced a new plan to allow some people to go to the gate to say goodbye to relatives, for the first time since 2001.

You know, 25 years can seem like ancient history.  One small fact illustrates that: there are only three videos, just three photographic images of the jets striking the World Trade Center in Manhattan. Three, total.  According to some calculations, those three lonely images have been viewed by two-thirds of the population of the world. 

That there would only be three video images of anything is unfathomable today.  2001 was before cellphone cameras were even sold in the United States, and five years before digital images became ubiquitous.  Today, everything is immediately photographed and videoed by everyone.  But that wasn’t true back then. 

The man who took one of the most famous of the photos of the plane hitting the second, South Tower, was a Jewish photographer named Robert Cumins.  Without realizing a second plane was heading toward Lower Manhattan through his viewfinder, he snapped two quick frames from his apartment in New Jersey.  He did not see the plane in his frame until he developed the film an hour later.  Cumins said that image captured, "the final split second of innocence" because it freezes the exact 17-minute window between the first and second impacts, when people still hoped the initial crash was a tragic accident rather than a deliberate terrorist attack.

In 2001, there were no smartphones, just flip phones, and many people—nearly half the American adult population—did not yet have them.  Huge paper phone books were still part of our lives.  There was no social media yet: Facebook launched in 2004, Twitter in 2006, and the iPhone only came out in 2007.  The internet ran at what today would seem like glacially slow speed, and for almost everyone it ran on unreliable dial-up modems.  9/11 happened before the world was connected so directly and so instantly. 

At the time 9/11 happened, we read newspapers, watched the evening news, and listened to the radio to find out what was going on in the world.  We mostly agreed on the basic facts of what was reported by Dan Rather, or Tom Brokaw, or Peter Jennings. 

Today's information environment of constant connectivity, social media-driven politics, and algorithm-controlled content simply didn't exist.  The fragmentation and division of information and belief in our society that resulted from this technological transformation all happened since then.  It has reshaped everything from how we get news to how movements organize to how misinformation, and conspiracy theories, spread.  We live in a different world.

And yet, some things seem not to have changed at all. I looked back at what I said 25 years ago, less than a week after the 9/11 attacks.  In that Erev Rosh HaShanah sermon, I said:

“[This week] Our nation was profoundly offended by scenes of Palestinians dancing in the streets of Jenin and Jerusalem and Ramallah, rejoicing in the atrocities at the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.  Those photos of celebration at the death of Americans and the destruction of international landmarks, the singing and dancing and the tossing of candy to children, should have seared themselves into our brains on that terrible Tuesday. And while we were revolted by this open display, it made explicit a fact of the terrorist mindset that has been true as long as acts directed against the public have been committed.  It is that terrorists make no distinction whatsoever between armed men in uniform and civilians, between tanks and jets and stockbrokers and janitors—or woman tourists, or little children.  And that terrorists are just as capable of teaching small children to hate as they are willing to kill the small children of others. 

‘The true goal of all humanity ought to be peace.  But Judaism, while strongly favoring peace and working for peace, has never been a fully pacifistic faith.  As the Talmud tell us, if someone comes to kill you, rise earlier and kill him first.  In the case of terrorism, pacifism is neither intelligent nor morally appropriate.  In the prophet Jeremiah's words, Shalom shalom v'ein shalom—we should not speak of peace when there is no peace.  What we should seek is a restoration of justice.  On this day of judgment, this Yom haDin, we need to accept the need to address the mindset of terrorism not as revenge, but as a means to creating justice in our world.

‘In the face of this mindset, we should seek justice.  God grant us the consistency, persistence, and patience to truly succeed in eliminating terrorism from our world.  And while we pray for justice and work to find the perpetrators and their hosts, we know that ultimately there is no triumph over such a loss through revenge or violence.  For what these suicide bombers and hijackers wish to convey is their utter contempt for the sanctity of life, even their own lives.  And only through our own efforts to exalt the holiness of life, to confirm the presence of kedushah through our acts and our character, only then will we triumph over bestiality.’ 

That was naïve, wasn’t it, the idea of “eliminating terrorism from our world”?  Of course, in the moment, you don’t know what you don’t know.  A dark thought: terrorism, in one form or another, has been around forever, literally for thousands of years.  And while we managed to avert another 9/11 from occurring on our own shores—thank God, and the US government—we know that after 25 years of concerted efforts the ideal of eliminating terrorism from the world might be as far from fulfillment as it has ever been.

The war on terror America initiated after 9/11 included the US military, with partner nations, invading and occupying Afghanistan and Iraq for the better part of 20 years.  It saw the rise and fall of ISIS, a horrific Islamist terrorist state and “caliphate” that decimated large swaths of the Middle East.  It is an effort that continues now in our current intermittent war against Iran, a sponsoring nation of terrorism and terrorist states. 

I’m pretty certain we haven’t yet won; frankly, we are probably not winning.

We have even come to see the same Palestinians—or their now grown-up children—who cheered 9/11, and passed out candy celebrating it, idolized here in America for comparable acts of contemporary terrorism.  You have heard the popular chant on campuses in America, “globalize the Intifada”; that is, sow terrorism everywhere.  In the aftermath of 9/11, who would have thought Americans would encourage that?

And some other things haven’t changed, either.  Antisemitic conspiracy theories surfaced within days of 9/11. One of the most widespread libels was that Jews or Israelis were behind the attacks. Another lie claimed thousands of Jews skipped work at the World Trade Center that morning.  In fact, many Jews, including Israelis, died on 9/11.  These accusations were as false then just as they are now.  But they are still around, and they are no longer confined to the lunatic fringe.

Tucker Carlson recently spread several 9/11 conspiracies, including that Israel had advance knowledge of the attacks. Another far right anti-Semite, Candace Owens, told her millions of followers that the Mossad was to blame for 9/11.

Conspiracy theories are also prevalent on the left. Former Pink Floyd frontman Roger Waters, a far-left antisemite, is headlining a 9/11 ‘truth’ conference at a NYC-owned museum promoting antisemitic conspiracy theories, falsely linking Israel to the Sept. 11 attack. The New Jersey branch of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) recently was forced to remove a curriculum link in its back-to-school guide blaming the 9/11 attacks on U.S. support for Israel.

Antisemitic conspiracy theories are timeless perennials.  But 9/11beyond question changed the way we felt about our safety in the world.  There were, of course, terrorist attacks in America prior to that September.  In fact, that wasn’t even the first time the World Trade Center was targeted by Islamist bombs; that happened in 1993, and the terrorist behind that attack, Ramzi Yousef, was the nephew of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the evil al-Quaeda mastermind of the 9/11 attacks. It turned out the 1993 bombing was a murderous dress rehearsal for 9/11, but of course we didn’t realize it at the time.  For that matter, the Oklahoma City bombing, worst act of domestic terrorism ever, was perpetrated in 1995, fully six years prior to 9/11, and by men enamored of conspiracy theories and motivated by anti-government and white supremacist ideologies, concepts familiar to us today a quarter of century later.  America had experienced horrible terrorist attacks and mass death events quite recently prior to September 11, 2001.  For that matter, the Columbine school massacre was in 1999, just two years earlier. 

But somehow, until 9/11, we didn’t really believe that terrorism could happen here, not in the same way that had become nearly commonplace in the Intifadas in Israel, in bombings in Western Europe, in Latin America, in Africa, in India, around the world.  We believed terrorism and violent attacks were things that happened far away, in distant, troubled lands.  They couldn’t happen here.

Then 9/11.  We now knew that it could indeed happen here, because it had happened here: nearly 3,000 people died in one day, thousands more were injured, air travel stopped, there were fears of attacks on bridges and military bases, the whole American world seemed to be at immediate risk.  First responders—many were killed when the second tower collapsed—who survived suffered negative, sometimes fatal, health impacts for years.  PTSD was everywhere.  You had only to look at the New York skyline to see visible evidence of the hole in our society.

In response, an elaborate governmental and military anti-terrorism infrastructure was created, with new names and functions, many of which had quite different rules than traditional law enforcement agencies had previously followed.  Super prisons were created or utilized uniquely, like Guantanamo.  Torture became a part of the unofficial M.O. of some interrogators.  Some of our American norms of decency were also victims of the war on terror.      

Encouragingly, it was not all negativity and loss.  We might not remember this part of the immediate post-9/11 world, but we should. In the aftermath of that awful day, our country pulled together in ways that were affirming and truly surprising.  There was a shared understanding that we were all in this together, that we all had a connection to someone who lost someone in New York or Washington or Pennsylvania.  As one minister said in a 9/11 commemoration I chaired a month after the attacks, “We all came to this country in different boats; but we are all in the same boat now.”  We came together across religious, racial, and political lines, and for a while, we treated each other very differently than we had in more normal times.

People—including me—even went out to protect mosques from the possibility of misguided revenge attacks the next few weeks.  There was a sense of societal solidarity, of coming together and uniting as one country.  Support for then-President George W. Bush skyrocketed: In the weeks following the attacks, Bush's approval rating skyrocketed from 50% to 90%, the highest ever recorded in Gallup polling history.

Those changes were not permanent, but they lasted for a while.  I vividly recall taking my then three very young children on their first visit to New York City.  I had visited New York many times before and found New Yorkers much as you would stereotype them: energetic, in a hurry, somewhat rude, and not at all warm or fuzzy.  But when I schlepped three kids ten and under with me on that visit, a couple of years after 9/11, I found a totally different city: people were extraordinarily kind, helpful, and gentle in ways I’d never experienced in New York.  Guards opened subway gates to let us through with a smile.  Passersby helped when we dropped something on the street; no one pushed past us on the sidewalks, or stole the cab we had haled.  It was a revelation.  New Yorkers were universally nice, even kind. 

Unlike the words a Senate candidate for office this year said, it did not prove that “hurt people hurt people”; the effect of 9/11 was quite the opposite.  Those who had been wounded—and every New Yorker felt that wound, and really, all of America felt that wound—became sensitized to the need to be kinder to our fellow Americans in place of being hostile or indifferent. 

Sadly, this proved to be a temporary change.  In the long run, that societal near-unanimity, that empathy and respect did not, probably could not, endure.  Looking back from the perspective of a quarter century, we can see that the events of 9/11 and after, from the terrorist attacks to the invasion of Afghanistan and—unconnected to 9/11—the invasion of Iraq, began a process that unraveled that sense of solidarity in ways that have been corrosive and destructive.

In the fall of 2000 America had survived a contentious presidential election—a much closer election than, for example, the 2020 election—without violence, uprisings, or insurrection.  Hanging chads and Supreme Court cases devolved into a peaceful transition of presidential power from one party to another and a normal presidential inauguration, as US elections had always done before—and, until this decade, since.

But something fractured following 9/11.  As Israel knew then, and has had to rediscover recently, terrorism isn’t something you fight and defeat permanently.  The wars that arose after 9/11 proved to be the longest in American history, and some of the least fulfilling.  The Taliban, who harbored Osama bin Laden and the training of the 9/11 terrorists, eventually returned to power in Afghanistan.  Iraq did not become a liberal democracy.  Our final withdrawals from both countries proved not to be a triumphant return home with mission accomplished, but a recognition that there wasn’t much being achieved, in spite of all the casualties and all the expenditures and all the suffering.  When we finally withdrew and brought the last troops home, the fact was the American public had not supported those wars for many years. 

It turned out you could remove the Taliban from Afghanistan, which US forces did in short order; you could overthrow an evil regime in Iraq rapidly, which a US-led coalition did.  But you cannot eliminate the ideologies that believe murdering innocents is the surest way to effectuate change in situations in which power is asymmetrical.  And you cannot eliminate the political dysfunction in an entire region through short, explosive conflicts.        

There is debate as to whether in perpetrating the 9/11 attacks Al Qaeda unleashed forces that ultimately helped fracture our society today, or whether those attacks merely exposed the latent divisions that have come to polarize America since then.  There is no debate that the terrorist, extreme Islamist ideology that motivated the 9/11 attacks has reached across the world since then, from the Middle East to Africa, to Asia, to the Americas, to Europe, even to Australia, motivating radicalized individuals and groups to perpetrate atrocities, often, but by no means always, against Jews.

We would have hoped, 25 years on, to have learned more about how to respond to this threat as a society.  Terrorism is not, in spite of the rhetoric, a truly existential threat to our society or civilization.  The horrors and heroism of 9/11 have not been repeated here—nor did they destroy America then, and we are vastly more aware and better protected institutionally than we were a quarter of a century ago.  Terrorism doesn’t end civilizations, or decency, or society.  But it can cause it to come apart at seams that already are fraying.

What I would have wished us to learn from 9/11 was that non-terrorist human beings can unite without the terrible motivation of massive attacks.  That we, as a nation, as human beings, are much stronger together than divided.  That reaching across boundaries of race, religion and heritage to recognize the innate humanity of others makes us a healthier, better, more robust nation and world.  It is strange that these ideas have become less popular now, that demonizing those we disagree with has become a societal—and social media—norm.  That outreach to those who are different should be our standard; because it is the principle Judaism has always espoused, and that our own nation has long sought to emulate. 

There is a beautiful story in the Babylonian Talmud.  I first learned it from an Episcopal rector; it is based on a passage in the Tractate of Blessings, Masechet Brachot, concerning when Jews are supposed to say Shma in the morning.  The Shma, affirming the oneness of God, must be said after sunrise, when night has ended, dawn arrives, and morning has come.  Being the Talmud, there is an elaborate argument about what that means, just exactly when night has ended and morning has come.  One rabbi says morning comes when a person can tell a black thread from a white thread—which doesn’t take much light.  Another rabbi argues this is too lenient, and night is over and dawn has arrived when a person can tell a blue thread from a green thread, which is much harder to see and requires more light.

Finally, the correct answer is given: the dark night is over, dawn has arrived and morning has come when we can look upon the face of another human being - and see there the image of God, the tzelem Elohim.  

The dark night is over and morning begins when we can look on the face of another human being and see there the image of God.  Whatever color, denomination, nationality, race, gender, height, shape, ability.  Each human being is created in the image—if only we are enlightened enough to see it.  We are all created b’tzelem Elohim, in the image of God.  Those who engage in terrorism seek to obliterate that essential concept.  But when we look at others and find there the presence of God, we overcome the superficial differences that separate us. 

The greatest lesson we can learn from 9/11, 25 years later, is that we are all one people, one humanity, and that we can always rise above our differnces and unite in support of one another.  And that if we wish to create a world that values life and good, we must choose to follow that course.   May we do so in this new year of 5787.  L’Shana Tova.

Authentic Prayer: Rosh Hashanah Opening 5787

Rosh Hashanah Opening 5787

One of my favorite stories seems appropriate tonight.

Now, you might not be aware of this, but most Hasidim, a kind of denomination of ultra-Orthodox Jews, don’t have TVs in their homes.  But one Hasidic guy really wants to buy a TV.  So, he goes to a store in Brooklyn, and he says to the salesman, “I want to buy that TV.”  But the salesman says, “We don’t sell TVs to Hasidim.”

Undeterred, the guy goes home, changes into jeans and a t-shirt, puts on a baseball cap, tucks his payos, his sideburn fringes, into his cap, and goes back to the store. 

Again, he says to the salesman, “I want to buy that TV.”  But the salesman says, “We don’t sell TVs to Hasidim.”

Now the guy is really frustrated and mad.  But he is also determined.  He goes home, shaves off his beard and his payos, buys a total hipster outfit, and even gets a tattoo.  Finally, he goes back to the store, and he says to the salesman, “I want to buy that TV.”  But the salesman says, “We don’t sell TVs to Hasidim.”

The guy is furious.  “How did you know I’m a Hasid?”

And the salesman says, “Because that’s a microwave oven.”

You know, while none of us here tonight are Hasidim, I believe that on the High Holy Days we bear some relationship to that story, except in reverse.  For example, tonight many of us dress in fancier clothes than we usually wear to Congregation Beit Simcha in casual Tucson, Arizona: we wear dress shirts in place of t-shirts, dress slacks in place of jeans, dresses where slacks would do on an ordinary Shabbat.  We have flowers on the pulpit, and white mantles on the Torahs.  I am wearing a white robe and tallis that I only use for these Days of Awe.  We spend these long services on these complex holy days trying to impress God, or other congregants, or perhaps ourselves with our desire to be something we might not have been ever before—or at least since last Yom Kippur: pious, repentant, deeply Jewish.  You know—kind of Reform Hasidim over these Ten Days of Awe.

Now, that’s not a bad thing.  I mean, you are here, in shul on Rosh HaShanah, and if you are dressed up and participating, well, that’s a great mitzvah in and of itself.  Still, I wonder: how can we make this the most authentic yomtov season?  How can we make certain that not only will we pray, and repent, and give charity, as the prayer has it, do t’shuvah u’tefilah utzedakah, not only during these services but over the whole new 5787 year? 

Unfortunately, I, as rabbi, don’t have the answer to that.  Because it’s not my choice that matters; it’s yours.  It’s the ways you choose to make your own Judaism relevant, meaningful, and authentic in your own life that will shape your next year.  It’s the ways you choose to live your Jewish life, to do your Jewish learning, to express your Jewish spirit, to show your Jewish pride, to demonstrate your Jewish commitment.

Because while we might be dressed up prettier tonight than we are the rest of the year, underneath it all we are the same folks we were a little earlier.  This High Holy Day experience, these Days of Awe, the Yamim Nora’im, are about doing something very real, committing to change in ways that are authentic and last throughout the whole Jewish year to come. 

My friends, may your process during this Rosh HaShanah and Yom Kippur, over these Ten Days of Repentance, help bring you to real growth, and positive Jewish change.

L’Shana Tova.

Losing It

Sermon Shabbat Ki Teitzei 5786

Rabbi Samuel M. Cohon, Congregation Beit Simcha, Tucson, AZ

Does anyone here have a problem with losing stuff?  I mean, does anyone else have a problem with misplacing things?  I, personally, have the ability to walk into a room holding a critical item—my keys, my breakfast, sunglasses, a credit card bill, my sermon—and ten seconds later have absolutely no idea where I put it down.  If I hadn’t forced myself to develop the habit of putting certain things in only one place in my house I’m quite sure I would never again be able to leave home.  Thank God my cellphone now works as my car key, so I don’t have to worry about keys so much anymore.  Of course, if I misplace my cellphone, the outside world essentially ends for me.

I have often searched the whole building for reading glasses that were perched atop my own head the whole time.  I can lose anything and live in constant fear of that fact.

Now I’m pretty sure I come by this issue quite honestly; that is, I inherited it from my late mother, Claire Cohon.  She was a remarkable woman in many positive ways, may her memory be a blessing, but one of the remarkable ways that was not so great was that every single morning she would panic and have her kids—there were four of us—scouring the house to try to find her missing car keys.  My father, however, never seemed perturbed by this.  One day—I must have been 13 or 14 by then—my dad took me aside while my mom was rushing about desperately trying to find her keys.  He said to me, quietly, “Don’t you realize they are always in her purse?” 

And so they were.  There just were a lot of other things in that purse.

In any case, the tendency to lose things is a profoundly human problem.  While I believe I am quite talented at it, most of us have the capacity to lose things.  I suspect everyone here tonight, at one time or another, has panicked at the thought that they have lost their wallet, even though it usually turns out to be somewhere logical.  And nothing quite reaches the terrible feeling of having the world pulled out from under you like losing your cellphone, carrier of your contacts, your electronic wallet, your theater and plane tickets, your financial information, your photos and videos, and, dare I say it, some of your very identity?

Losing things is a challenge.  If you have ever witnessed a sensitive small child—especially your own child—lose a precious object, say a teddy bear or blanket or doll or new ball, well, you cannot forget the impassioned, tragic hysteria that follows.  Losing items or objects is something we get more used to over time, as we mature.  But I’m not sure we ever quite overcome that sense of loss when we recall a favorite sweater or pen or earring or photograph or any object we have come to care deeply about.  In fact, the Buddhists might have it right on this subject: they preach that attachment to things is a human failure, and that removing the emotion we associate with object or items is an important goal in living a good life.  Christian monks and nuns, when they take their vows of poverty, give up all that they have, too.  There’s an advantage to this: you can’t lose things when you don’t have any.  What is it Kris Kristofferson wrote?  “Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose.”  Not having stuff means you are free of tangible items to lose. 

That doesn’t really work for us Jews, however.  We Jews lack that concept of ending attachment to all items, and there aren’t any Jewish monasteries or convents—although we are buying a building from an order of nuns.  But with our long history of communal loss, we are perhaps more sensitive to the concept of losing what we have than others might be.

Now the issue of losing items of value goes back a very long time.  In this week’s Torah portion of Ki Teitzei, there are a series of laws that reflect on this possibility and seek to help the one who has lost an item.  Most importantly, it includes the following rule:

“If you see your fellow’s ox or sheep gone astray, do not ignore it;

you must surely return it to your fellow… and so too shall you do with anything that your fellow loses and you find: you may not hide yourself.”  (Devarim 22: 1-3)

That is, you must help find what has been lost. If we look beyond the physical items that we might lose—keys, eyeglasses, hats, purses, wallets, phones—we can come to comprehend just what a large place loss plays in our lives.

There is a legend in the Talmud of a large stone that was situated in the main courtyard of the Temple in Jerusalem.  It was called even ha- to’in “the stone of losses.”   The Tractate Baba Metziah tells us “Anyone who lost something would go there, and anyone who found something would go there.  The person who found something would stand by the stone and announce what was found, and the person who lost something would go there and describe the lost object and so reclaim it.” [Babylonian Talmud, Bava Metzia 28B]

This Stone of Losses was the one place in the world where you could go to find something valuable that was lost.  For example, you could stand on one side and call out, “I lost my cloak,” or “My calf escaped, and I am looking for it.”  And someone on the other side of the Stone of Losses would call out that he had such an object; then you would say, “The cloak was grey with a blue design” or “the calf had one white foreleg.”  And once identified properly, you would get your property back and recover what you had lost.  

Different Jewish texts apply slightly differing names to this stone: sometimes it’s even hato’in, with a tet, “the error stone,” probably because the loss was a mistake; or even hato’in (with a taf), literally “the wanderers’ stone” – since stray animals were often recovered there.  While commonly translated as “the stone of losses,” it was also known as its opposite, “the finders’ stone,” for of course when you got your property back you were no longer a loser, but a finder.

So, what would you call out for if you could come to that Stone of Losses in the courtyard of the great Temple in Jerusalem?

Would it be something concrete?  Money, or a home you loved, or a pet who passed away?  Or would it perhaps be something in your personal life—say, that you lost your sense of smell?  Or the opportunity to celebrate a milestone birthday with family and friends?  Or that trip of a lifetime you’ve been planning for years?  Or the chance to see your grandchild walk for the first time?—or would it be something quite different?

What is it that you have lost?

There was a wonderful cartoon called Bloom County that ran for many years, written and drawn by a man with the unlikely name of Berkeley Breathed.  In one strip—it’s there on your Shabbat leaflet tonight—a leading character, Milo, comes up to the counter of a Lost-and-Found in a Sears department store. “Excuse me,” he says, “I’ve lost my youthful idealism.”

“I beg your pardon?” says the bowtied clerk.

“My youthful idealism,” Milo repeats, “I had it once but recently I’ve lost sight of it.  Now I fear it’s been lost completely.  I thought you might have it.”

“Oh, well, actually…” the man stutters.

“And what about my sense of optimism?  Lately I’ve lost that too,” Milo continues.

“Well, I’m afraid I’ve got neither of those things--” the clerk starts to answer.

“Oh, boy,” says Milo, getting huffy, “Now I’ve lost my patience.  I don’t suppose you’ve found THAT either.”

“Well, no…” mumbles the poor clerk.

“That’s just great!” Milo is shouting now, “Now I’ve lost my temper!  So unless you’ve found that I’ll be off you inept oaf!  Good day!!”

The flummoxed clerk calls out plaintively, “P-please!  Hasn’t anybody lost something tangible?!”

And another leading character, Opus, answers from the front of the line “Excuse me.  I’ve lost my marbles.”

Indeed.

What they needed in that comic strip of yesteryear was a kind of spiritual lost and found, a place to go to recover those elusive, ethereal, indefinable things that we have lost but we just aren’t going to find at the Sears’ Lost and Found.  Especially now that we have lost Sears, too.

So where do we go to find this Stone of Losses now?

There is the story of the drunk who is searching for his keys under a lamppost.  A guy comes by and says, “Did you drop them here?”  And the drunk says, “No, but the light is better here.”

Maybe we haven’t yet found what we’ve been looking for because we’ve been looking in the wrong place for what we have lost.

When I was preparing for tonight I thought of a beautiful poem written by a teacher of mine, Tet Carmi, a great Israeli poet and translator and man of letters.  It is called “The Stone of Losses” and comes from the book of the same name.  I have had this book for many years, and I love it, and looked for it in the place where I always keep my favorite Jewish poetry collections.  But of course, when I looked for it and then searched for it and frantically sought it, I discovered it was not there; I had lost the book—that is, I lost the book called the Stone of Losses.  How appropriate…

Fortunately, after much searching, it reemerged in an unexpected location—the bookcase where I had put it away carefully, expecting to find it again someday.  And it turns out that the poem retells the story of the Stone of Losses in a somewhat different way.

I search

for what I have not lost.

For you, of course.

I would stop

if I knew how.

I would stand

at the Stone of Losses

and proclaim,

shouting:

Forgive me.

I’ve troubled you for nothing.

All the identifying marks I gave you…

were never mine.

I swear by my life,

by this stone in the heart of Jerusalem,

I won’t do it again.
I take it all back.

Be kind to me;

I didn’t mean to mock you.

I know there are people here

--wretched, ill-fated—

who have lost their worlds

in moments of truth.

And I search

for what I have not lost…

“At the Stone of Losses”, by T. Carmi

The month of Elul we are embarked on, this final month of the Jewish year, marks the beginning of a quest, a search for t’shuvah, repentance.  Most of all, we are each looking for something precious that we have lost.  Only you know what it is that you lost and would like to reclaim—what it is that you need to reclaim, in order to return to the best that is within you, to make Teshuvah to the person you are meant to be. 

Perhaps what you lost you can find right here.  Perhaps you can find it by looking inside your own heart, and seeking to right the wrongs of the past year.  Perhaps through those old things, repentance, prayer and charity you can find your way back to your best self again.

Justice & Making the Ideal Real

Sermon, Rabbi Samuel M. Cohon’s Sermon, Shabbat Shoftim 5786

Congregation Beit Simcha, Tucson, Arizona

One of my favorite passages in the whole Torah comes from Genesis, in the episode of Sodom and Gomorrah.  God informs Abraham that God is about to destroy these two bastions of evil, the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah, the Las Vegas and Atlantic City of the ancient world, places where sin was cultivated and virtue punished.  Abraham objects and asks if God will destroy the cities if 50 righteous people can be found.  “Far be it from You to kill the righteous with the wicked,” Abraham says, “Chas v’challilah, chalilah l’cha.”  So, God agrees not to destroy the cities if 50 righteous live there.  Then Abraham negotiates.  What if there are only 45 righteous people, will God destroy the cities for the lack of a mere 5 righteous people?  Again, God agrees, and in a wonderful, spirited narrative God is bargained down to 10 righteous people being enough to save the city from destruction.  It is ultimately one of the bases for why we require 10 adults to form a minyan, a minimum number for a full prayer service and Torah reading and Kaddish.  10 righteous people are enough to save a city.

But what I love best about this famous section is the line where Abraham summons up the courage—you might say the Chutzpah—to proclaim to God, “HaShofeit kol ha’aretz lo ya’aseh mishpat?  Will the Judge of the whole world not act justly?”  It is a powerful argument, and it works, and God gives in.  Of course, you don’t find a minyan of righteous people in Sodom, and eventually the cities are destroyed.  But still, that phrase is spectacular: shall the judge of the whole earth not act with justice?  It proves beyond question that justice lies at the very heart, as the very essence of the Jewish understanding of God.

And yet, justice must be applied.  High principles only matter when they are actually employed in the real world.  And sometimes that’s quite a complicated process.

All of us Jews, whether Progressive, Orthodox, Conservative, Reform, Reconstructionist, Renewal or something else, come originally from a religious culture shaped by a complex process of applying divine law to a very human, fallible, earthbound population. Our heritage is based on the kind of thinking that takes great, idealistic proclamations designed to further morality and applies them to mundane daily life with sometimes fascinating results.

A core ideal of Judaism is to work to create a society based on justice, which will lead, ultimately, to peace and goodness.  But it is justice that is always the focus, which is embodied in the Torah portion we read this Shabbat, Shoftim, “Judges,” filled with the concept of justice.

Tzedek tzedek tirdof, we are commanded here: pursue true justice!  It is a powerful and remarkable ideal.  Our societies must strive for absolute fairness, must be just in every way.  But justice is more than high ideals.  It is applying sacred principles to the mundane reality of daily life, including rules of ritual observance.  Judaism makes no distinction between ethical and ritual laws.  All are part of creating a society based on justice.

The practical result of trying to apply high principles to basic, common practices is a very intriguing way of thinking about things.  When you are Orthodox and believe yourself bound to follow Jewish law, Halakhah, the way of living that requires adherence to all the many rules about diet, clothing, prayers and ritual observances and study, you sometimes find yourself doing things that don’t make much sense.  But you do them anyway, because they are part and parcel of the elaborate system of Jewish law you believe will bring about holiness in this world. 

For example, Shabbat, the Sabbath, was originated to teach us the need for making a sacred difference in time in our own lives.  The Torah forbids m’lachah on Saturday, “work” broadly understood.  Orthodox Jewish law therefore forbids work on the day of rest by prohibiting a variety of actions on Shabbat: lighting a fire, carrying a heavy object more than a few feet, writing, tearing, elaborate cooking or cleaning, building, swimming and so on. 

These laws, quite complex in their interactions with actual daily life, mean that observant Orthodox Jews do not drive on the Sabbath or turn on electric lights or watch TV or perform a variety of other normal daily actions.  However, lest the rules become too restrictive and make life impossible to enjoy Shabbat, the best and happiest of days, there are all kinds of ways of making it possible to do what is necessary to make the Sabbath pleasurable.  For example, if you are not supposed to carry anything on Shabbat, how do you bring your tallit, your tallis or prayershawl with you to Temple on Saturday morning?  The answer is you wear it over your shoulders, and then it’s no longer an item you are carrying but a garment you are wearing!  Problem solved, even if to the non-Orthodox this may seem slightly absurd.

Which leads to one of my favorite Jewish jokes.  It goes like this:

Question: Is a person permitted to ride in an airplane on the Sabbath?

Answer: Yes, as long as your seat belt remains fastened. In this case, it is considered that you are not riding in the jet, but instead you are wearing the airplane.

These complex rules are primarily observed by Orthodox and very traditional Conservative Jews. But the thinking that went into creating a system that normal human beings could live with, the pragmatic idealism of Jewish law, influences the ways all Jews think.  While we Progressive Jews don’t follow all the strictures of the Sabbath our Orthodox family and friends might, some of us make it a point not to go to the mall or randomly go shopping on Shabbat; we may choose to spend the day with family at home or choose not to check our news feed or our email or Facebook notifications.  It is a matter of personal choice how we make Shabbat special, different, more peaceful and therefore holy.

In fact, every Jew chooses which practices to maintain and how to do them.  And the reasoning, like my own choices about Shabbat observance—I go to temple, but will go out afterwards to a restaurant for dinner sometimes; I study Torah but might watch TV in the afternoon; I will go on a Shabbat morning hike and have a service and Torah reading during the hike; I personally choose to keep a kosher home, although I do not keep Halakhically kosher when I eat out, and so on—are also influenced by a kind of Talmudic thinking that adapts ideals to pragmatic situations.

Maybe that’s why Jews of every denomination are so good at law—while only one Jew is currently on the 9-member United States Supreme Court—not long ago it was 3, fully 1/3 of the highest court in the land when we are at most 2% of the population.  The Supreme Court, of course, is in theory all about applying rules to complex situations to make things work out.  It requires a kind of intellectual flexibility that seeks to keep in mind and heart the highest principles, while making it possible for people to function in society without losing integrity.

But I want to come back to the notion that in Shoftim we are charged not only with being just but pursuing justice.  The Hebrew word used for pursuit, rodef, is the same word used for an atempted murderer pursuing his prey.  It is also used for the concept of Shalom, peace; Aaron, the Kohein Gadol, the High Priest, is called an ohev shalom v’rodef shalom, a lover of peace who pursues peace.  Here we are commanded tzedek tzedek tirdof, pursue justice!

It is the strongest possible word: don’t just act for justice, chase it down!  That means, in pragmatic Jewish terms, that we must find a way not only to make personal choices about how we live, but we also are obligated to work to make our organizations, like our synagogue, and our society more just.  It is this great injunction that underlies the Jewish commitment to religious action and social justice, the need we Jews have to try to make our synagogue, but also our city, our state, our country and our world into something that more closely mirrors our own conception of justice.

Justice is very likely the highest Jewish ideal.  Is justice more important than peace?  Ultimately, yes, because without justice peace cannot truly be maintained; Bob Marley may not have been Jewish—singing about Yah by itself does not make you Jewish—but his song “No Justice No Peace” reflects a centrally Jewish ideal.  Is justice more important than charity?  Yes, because the very idea of tzedakah, charity, is based in the same word, tzedek, justice.  Charity is derived from the need for justice; we seek through charitable giving to right the injustices in the world.  Is justice more important than happiness?  Yes, because real happiness depends upon the trust that things are fair and just for the individual in his or her life.  Is justice more important than love?  Ultimately, again, yes, because for love to truly exist we must be in a relationship that is based in respect and fairness, which are the essence of any deep love.

All Jews, in one way or another, are engaged in a variation of this process of seeking and pursuing justice whenever we seek to live ethically.  But we are also actively engaged in that process when we decide which rituals we choose to celebrate and observe, because it is these experiences that ultimately engage our own Jewish faculties for exploring how to bring justice to the world.  What Shoftim insists is that we seek to apply these high ideals to our own lives in a practical way, that in both rituals and morals we seek justice in our own lives, our communities, our society and in the greater world.  Rituals are there to help us remember our ethical commitments.  And Shoftim teaches us that the greatest of these commitments is—must be—to justice.

Remember that it is always how we apply principles of justice that matters most.  Because ideals alone don’t really matter in Judaism; you must put them into practice.

So, whether or not you think an airplane is really a garment, finding a way to increase justice in the world is your greatest task. And finding rituals that remind you of this responsibility is an integral part of that process.

May this be a Shabbat in which we commit to increasing our awareness and our actions for justice, and may we each find ways of creating greater justice in our lives, in our community, and in our world.

Choices, Choices, Choices

Sermon on Parshat Re’ei 5786, August 7, 2026

Rabbi Samuel M. Cohon, Congregation Beit Simcha, Tucson, AZ

Our society is, by its nature, a place of infinite choice.  The consumerism of America offers a virtually unlimited number of items, objects, and services in every area of life.  Want to buy a car?  There are literally hundreds of models to choose from, and nearly as many ways of purchasing or leasing them; they will even drop one off at your house that you buy online.  Want to go shopping for some obscure Jewish, object—say, a wedding ketubah. You wouldn’t think there would be much to choose from; until you looked at the on-line listing of literally hundreds of ketubah websites offering tens of thousands of different ketubot, all with many choices about what kind of wording you wish to have, what artist’s design, what colors you wish to use, and more.  Comcast and Direct TV and Cox and Hulu and Netflix and Amazon Prime give us the power to choose to watch, well, anything we want on video, and if it’s not there, we can certainly find it somewhere on the internet.  Bruce Springsteen sang at the beginning of the cable TV age, “57 channels and nothing on”, but now, we have quite literally hundreds of channels of choices, and thousands of things to watch. 

Choice is everywhere…

This week’s Torah portion of Re’ei begins with a powerful statement of choice: I set before you today a blessing and a curse: the blessing if you follow God’s commandments, the mitzvot; the curse if you turn aside and choose to do evil.  It is a stark, even harsh statement—but it is also a remarkable and powerful one in its own way, and it comes from the most human and caring of sources.

You see, Judaism believes that we, each of us, have complete free will to make our own decisions about how we will live our lives.  There is no notion of predestination, no sense that we are living according to someone else’s script.  Every woman and man has the chance, and the responsibility, to choose the kind of life he or she will live.

That’s not to say we are able to choose how wealthy or happy we will be.  It’s simply that we each have the opportunity, and the ability, to act in ways that are consistent with what we believe, to live lives of character and commitment, of mitzvot.  If we do, the rewards will be there for us: connection to God and to our people and our tradition, respect and love and honor. 

But what precisely does it mean to say we have free will, we can choose the course of our own lives?

In Re’ei Moses tries to explain the essential issues of choice.  “I set before you today a blessing and a curse, life and death.”  Re’ei is, figuratively speaking, the beginning of the end of Devarim, and the start of Moses final speech to the people he has led for 40 years.  He has been a father to them in virtually every way except the biological.  And now, like every parent, he must let go, give up the responsibility for these difficult children and accept the fact of their freedom.  Still, like any good parent, he wants to get in a last word of advice, a final admonition, an enduring message of love—and, of course, concern.  In its own way it is a bit of a tragic moment.

This is the pathos of Deuteronomy. Moses raised this generation of young, free Israelites, nurtured them, taught them, guided them through the wilderness. Now he must let go and he is afraid of losing them, as he lost their misguided parents—losing them to their fears and instincts, losing them to their immaturity, losing them to the pernicious influences that will surround them—that always surround everyone—losing them to the accidents of history.

Moses’ parental anxiety is felt in every line of the book of Deuteronomy. Devarim is a book of urgency. He speaks to the young Israelites this one last time, pleading at every moral level. He appeals to their powers of ethical reasoning, and to their shared ideals and values. He reminds them of their past, the ordeals and dreams of their ancestors, the covenant upheld by their forefathers.  Moses invokes the power of public reputation and exalts the Children of Israel as "God’s children."  And then, finally, having exhausted all other, gentler means of persuasion, he evokes primitive rewards and punishments: "See! This day I set before you blessing and curse: blessing if you obey the commandments of the Lord your God that I enjoin upon you this day; and curse if you do not obey."

As Rabbi Ed Feinstein puts it, “We know this Moses. Every parent who has ever dropped a kid off at school knows this Moses. Bar and bat mitzvah may be the traditional moment our children are recognized as adults, but the moment it becomes real is this one, when our children move out of our families, our homes, our communities and into the universe via the university. There, they will be confronted with every manner of lifestyle, political opinion, personal values and spirituality.

“The core experience of the university is the ultimate freedom of choice. The university course catalog is the size of large city phone book”—remember phone books?  They were big.  Feinstein continues, “All of human knowledge and opinion is now accessible to them. Campus bulletin boards are heavy with fliers, notices and posters cajoling participation, affiliation and support.  Campus walkways are crowded with booths inviting our kid’s membership in every sort of society and cause.  Chabad, Greenpeace, the Vegan Union, Democratic Socialists and Campus Republicans are curiously juxtaposed on one corner.  Who our children are when we bring them to the campus may have very little relationship to who they will become.  By year’s end, their ideas and ideals, their friendships, their diet and appearance can be radically different.

“We know Moses’ anxiety. "You are about to cross the Jordan to enter and possess the land — take care to observe all the laws and rules I have set before you today."

“What shall we say to our kids at this moment? There are new, creative rituals penned for this occasion. But what the moment demands is deeply personal—sharing our own wisdom, our own feelings, our Deuteronomy. Then let the child go.

“I remember that I am commanded not to let my fears inhibit his freedom to explore and experience the universe and to trust in the character and soul I’ve had these 18 years to nurture.

“And so I say, ‘Have a good year—I love you.’  And I must leave.”

I remember well that when I dropped my oldest son, Boaz, off at college the professionally run parent orientation told us that we shouldn’t call more than once a week, probably on Sunday afternoon or evening; and that we definitely shouldn’t text them regularly… They were now adults.  He was now an adult.  For real.  Sort of… he did call me later that day to ask me to buy him a shirt and tie and dress slacks, since he had neglected to bring any from home, and he needed the outfit for a welcome dinner.  So it goes.

Some of us remember our own beginnings of independence, the thrill of freedom, the wide-open world of possibility that extended everywhere.  But if we are honest, we also remember the doubts, the fears, the confusion.  Yes, we could choose anything.  It was exhilarating.  But what we couldn’t choose was how it would all come out.  Each open door led to a new path, and ended an old one.  And where would it end? 

That freedom can be both empowering and slightly terrifying.

You see, freedom to choose is our essential birthright.  But it is also a challenge.  For choosing well—as adults, in ways we would wish our own children to choose—requires that we internalize Moses’s instructions.  That is, we have free will and the ability, and power, to choose from so many things.  Our mission, as Jews, according to Moses, is to choose to be good.  To decide to give to the poor so that, as Re’ei says, no one will go hungry.  To choose to protect others in our own community through the actions we ourselves take.  To insist on honesty and integrity in our own conduct.  To seek to foster that in our institutions.  Even to choose to take time off, a Shabbat each week, to connect to God and our families and friends.

We have the capacity to choose lives of meaning and sanctity—or to not do so.

Just as our children assert their independence through choices we might not favor, when we choose well and freely, we know there are always risks.  Things may not turn out the way we would like, or the way we expect.  That is the gift, and that is the burden.  That is the price of free will.

But it is that very freedom that makes us truly human; and it is the choices we make that can allow us to be holy, to create goodness, and to come close to the divine through our actions.

On this Shabbat, this final Shabbat before the coming new month of Elul, last month of the Jewish year, may we each choose life and blessing, choose to live in ways that follow ethical commandments and create goodness in our homes and in our world.  May we choose to work to make our families, our synagogue, our community, our society better, more honest, more righteous, more just, holier.

For then we may fulfill the charge of Re’ei: choose well, and so live lives that truly matter.

So may this be; kein yehi ratson. 

Lessons of the Heart

Sermon Shabbat Ekev 5786, Rabbi Samuel M. Cohon

Congregation Beit Simcha, Tucson, Arizona

Do you know this classic joke?  An Orthodox, a Conservative, and a Reform rabbi are each asked whether you are supposed to say a brochah over lobster.

The Orthodox rabbi asks, "What’s a...'lobster'?"

The Conservative rabbi says, “Some say yes, some say no.”

The Reform rabbi says, "What's a brochah?"

Or, what are the main differences between Orthodox, Conservative and Reform Judaism?

At an Orthodox wedding, the mother of the bride is pregnant.

At a Conservative wedding, the bride is pregnant.

At a Reform wedding, the rabbi is pregnant.  And so is her wife.

And so on.  Back in the olden days of the 20th Century, when I was growing up, we used to know that there were three kinds of Jews: Reform, Conservative, and Orthodox.  That was it.  Then I learned that there are other divisions among us: in addition to Ashkenazi Jews, there are Sephardic Jews from the Mediterranean and Oriental, Mizrachi Jews from parts east and south; Israeli Jews, who are different from North American Jews; and English and Australian and South African Jews who speak English, well, funny.  As our horizons broadened, we learned that there are other types of Jews: Hasidic Jews, who are Orthodox but dressed like they are Amish; Reconstructionist Jews, who don’t believe we are the Chosen People; and Renewal Jews, who are very touchy-feely and wear Birkenstocks.  We even learned that there are something called Secular-Humanist Jews, who don’t believe in God and get together in minyans to not pray.

But in recent years there has been a development of new forms of Jewish identity, or semi-identity to complement the old stand-bys:  Gastronomic Jews: I am Jewish because I eat bagels and lox.  Checkbook Jews: I am Jewish because I give to Jewish causes.  Aerobic Jews: I am Jewish because I work out at the Jewish Community Center.  Sensory Jews: I am Jewish because I feel Jewish.  Committee Jews: I am Jewish because I am on the board of a Jewish organization, even though I am Catholic.  Cultural Jews: I am Jewish because I like Woody Allen, Jerry Seinfeld, Mrs. Maisel and New York City.  Political Jews: I am Jewish because I support AIPAC—or J Street, but definitely not both. Post-Facto Jews: I was very Jewish in Detroit or New Jersey or Chicago or Cleveland, but I already did that, so now, not so much...  And of course, minimalist Jews: I am Just Jewish.  But of all the contemporary formulations of Jewish identity, my favorite is one that puts this tendency into sharpest focus:  Cardiac Jews: I am Jewish in my heart. 

Now typically we members of the organized Jewish community are not too favorably disposed to Cardiac Jews.  After all, if the only place you keep Shabbat or the holidays or your connection to Israel or other Jews is in your heart, you are not exactly actualizing your experience of our amazing tradition.  So much for the goodness of cardiac Judaism, I tended to think—at least until I read this week’s Torah portion of Ekev. 

You see, there is a puzzling passage in Ekev.  It tells us to do something physically impossible—in Ekev we are instructed to circumcise the foreskin of our hearts…  This is a new kind of berit milah, and one that smacks of flat-out self-murder.  Circumcise our hearts?  How are we to do that, with a flint knife on top of an Aztec Temple?  And how could that possibly relate to the moral commandments we have been given in this portion, which form the core of our Deuteronomic covenantal connection to the Ethical God?

First, if we were to do that actual act, circumcising the heart, cut off a flap of the essential human organ, we would die, no matter how skilled the mohel.  So, it must be a metaphor.  In fact, this passage defines the fact that the Torah was never meant to be read purely literally and makes it very clear that Torah is and always was a teaching device to create and focus moral direction, not a simplistic piece of ancient lore to be taken literally.  No Jews really read the Torah purely literally.  Not even Chabadniks…  So just what can this odd locution mean? 

A word about the heart.  To our Israelite ancestors and to many authors, poets, songwriters, and greeting card companies, the heart has always been considered the seat of human emotions.  “I give you my heart,” we say, or “I love you with all my heart.”  In the Shema, in last week’s Torah portion, we were commanded to “love God with all your heart, b’chol l’vavcha.”  Sometimes, we give the heart credit for more than just love; hatred too, can be located there.  We are taught, in the Torah, “Do not hate another in your heart” and “he hardened his heart”; and we say things like, “She has a cold heart.” 

The heart is also seen as the locus of knowledge, the place where our essential understanding is kept.  Long ago Arizona’s own Barry Goldwater ran for president with the slogan, “In your heart, you know he’s right.”  He wasn’t, but the appeal to the heart was central.

But of course, this heart stuff is all a metaphor.  Modern science has taught us for generations now that the heart is just a very fancy, very efficient pumping machine, merely an important part of our own indoor plumbing.  Our emotions, our higher cognitive functions, and our memory are all located higher up in our anatomy, within our brains.  Cogito ergo sum, Descartes told us long ago: I think therefore I am.  Generally speaking, scientific research has confirmed this.  The heart is the engine that drives the car but not the operator, a strong, stupid, muscle-and-valve contraption that can be replaced by an artificially built machine.  In fact, you can take a heart out of one body and put it in another successfully, and they used to do this here in Tucson at the U of A’s Sarver Heart Center.

So, the heart isn’t the center of emotion or memory at all.  All those old songs, poems and stories, and our Torah portion of Ekev, they are all wrong about that.  Or are they?

There is some interesting research that has been done on patients who have successfully had heart transplant surgery.  A man named Dr. Paul Pearsall, a neuropsychiatrist on the faculty of several major universities, including doing work at the U of A heart transplant center, wrote 18 best-selling books among many other accomplishments.  He studied transplant patients and found some unexpected results: the background of a new heart affects its recipient directly.  That is, the feelings and preferences, and even the knowledge and personality of the original heart’s owner begin to change the recipient after the transplant.

The changes documented in heart recipients are startling.  One man began to yearn for spicy foods and to study Spanish—and learned that his donor had been Hispanic.  Another found herself going repeatedly to walk along the banks of a local stream for comfort—and learned later that this had been the donor’s favorite place to sit, think, and write.  A quiet, reserved, painfully shy man suddenly discovered new confidence and entered a career in public speaking—only to find out that the donor of his heart had been a TV newscaster.  There are many stories like this in the book called The Heart’s Code.  Pearsall goes on to explain the theory and science behind energy cardiology, an emerging field that is uncovering one of the significant medical, social, and spiritual discoveries of our time.  It turns out that the heart is not just a pump; as the book puts it, “the heart conducts the cellular symphony that is the very essence of our being.”   The heart not only feels, as our ancestors believed, but also thinks and knows and cares.

Pearsall theorized that what is wrong with our own society is that it is run by our brains, not our hearts, and that this damages us on a personal and sociological level.  If we learn to listen to the subtle energy and wisdom contained within our own hearts we can learn valuable lessons about love, work, prayer, healing, and even playing.

I believe the Torah was on to this concept long ago, right here in Parshat Ekev.  Circumcising the foreskin of our hearts means that in order to open our hearts to God, to holiness, and to goodness so that we might learn how to do what God asks, we must cut away a certain layer, klipah, that exists there.   We must remove the hard casing we construct over our innate humanity, the armor of ego, self-interest and self-importance that builds up out of our insecurity, or out of overconfidence—the arrogance of the eternal critic, the cool hostility of the perpetual cynic, the self-righteous anger of the eternally injured.  We must take our heads out of the equation for a bit, shut off the controlling, judging negativity of the brain and let our hearts express the depth of feeling and empathy within them.

It is reflecting the compassion of the heart, rather than the criticism of the mind.  It is emphasizing our shared humanity, not our superficial differences.  It is a kind of spiritual brit milah that Ekev teaches.

When we remove the hard casing around our hearts, when we perform this spiritual milah, we change ourselves for the better.  We can then open our hearts and feel, and know, that God is good, and desires good—that what God wants is something we can offer.  The various ways Ekev advocates exploring how to fulfill God’s desires are really no more than a means to creating good in the world: one path of kindness, ethics, and personal respect. This is the heart of the matter.  This is the lesson of the heart.

On this Shabbat, and over the coming week, may we each learn to listen to our own hearts, to get our heads out of the way long enough to touch that holiness within us.  And then we may become truly cardiac Jews—Jews in our heart, and in all other aspects of our lives.

Listen

Sermon Parshat VaEtchanan/Nachamu 5786

Rabbi Samuel M. Cohon, Congregation Beit Simcha

A famous allegorical story from Israel.  A guy needs a camel to carry him across the Negev desert.  So he goes down to Beersheva to the used camel lot and picks out a big, strong-looking beast and buys him.  Twenty miles out in the middle of the desert the camel suddenly comes to a complete stop and sits down.

The poor guy tries everything to get the camel moving again: he talks to the camel, pulls the camel's rope, shouts at the camel, curses the camel, begs the camel – everything.  But the camel will not budge.  Finally, the poor camel owner is forced to walk twenty miles back through the desert to the camel lot, and find the lot owner.  He complains bitterly that, "You sold me a defective camel!"  Without a world the camel lot owner picks up a huge sledge hammer – the kind you use to pound railroad ties – hops on a donkey, and takes the man back the twenty miles to the middle of the desert, where they find the camel sitting right where he had been. 

"See.  I told you he was a defective camel!" the man says.  Without a word, the camel lot owner takes the sledge hammer, walks over to the camel, and gives him a tremendous whack right between the eyes. 

"Oh my God!" the man yells, "you'll kill him!"

The camel lot owner calmly takes the camel's rope, and gives a gentle tug – and the recalcitrant camel immediately gets to its feet, ready to resume the journey.

"I don't understand– why wouldn't it move for me?" asks the buyer. 

"It's very simple," said the lot owner.  "First – first, you have to get his attention!" 

I think of that story when I read of the relationship between God and the Israelites or, in fact, any teacher and any student, or even any parent and any child.  While I can hardly recommend using sledgehammers for the purpose, the first step is nonetheless the same – first you have to get their attention.  And that seems abundantly clear in the central statement of this week's portion of Va'etchanan, which happens also to be the most important sentence in the entirety of Judaism.

You are all familiar with the text: Shema Yisrael Adonai Eloheinu Adonai Echad – Hear, Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord is One.  The most interesting word in the Shema, for me, is not the word echad, “one,” the core of our belief in monotheism, one God – no, the most interesting word is the first word, Shema.

What does Shema mean?  Essentially, it means Listen – or, since it is in the Tzivui, the command form of Hebrew, it means “Listen up, pay attention, Hear what is about to be said.”  And why was it necessary to order the Israelite people to listen?  Why is it ever necessary to order people to listen?

Well, of course, if everyone was always listening we would never have to command that.  No one insists that people pay attention when they already are doing so.  Have you ever heard a teacher say "Listen to me!" to a group of completely attentive, helpful, cooperative students?  Come to think of it, have you ever seen a group of completely attentive, helpful, cooperative students?  No, this is a sledgehammer tap on the camel's noggin – Listen!  Pay attention!  This is important!  And with the Jewish people that is never an unnecessary summons.

It is also remarkable the next commandment after the command Shema, listen, is V'Ahavta – the commandment to love. A commandment to love God.  First, we’re told to listen – next to love.  It's a fascinating sequence.  “Listen!” is a command we can easily do, at least for a little while.  With luck, you have managed to listen to what I’ve said for the last few minutes, and are hereby commanded to pay careful attention – Shema!  hear! what I’m going to say for the next few minutes.  If I had some authority to enforce my will – say, a short exam after services with rewards for listening and corporal punishment if you don’t remember the sermon – I could even compel you to actually listen.  But how could I ever command you to love what I actually say?  How can anyone – including God – command someone else to love anything?

Love, by definition, is voluntary.  It must be given freely, generously, instinctively, emotionally, or it is not love at all.  As the great Jewish theologian, Franz Rosenzweig, said "Of course, love cannot be commanded.  No third party can command it or extort it."  So how is it possible for God to command us to love?  What methodology has been invented here for compelling love? 

I believe the answer is present right here in the familiar words of the Shema itself, and that it applies to much more than just prayer.  We are commanded to listen – to really listen to God; because if we truly listen we cannot help but love.  There is something precious, something beautiful and sacred about listening that allows us to love, and without which we as human beings are not capable of love.  Unless we really listen, we cannot really love. 

We are not talking about infatuation here.  For that to flourish, the less we know of each other the better.  But for actual love, we must listen to the other person – not just their words or their joys, but their feelings, their pain, their inner messages.  It is only through listening that we find out what makes their lives meaningful, and so come to love them. 

There is a wonderful story about two Russian peasants drinking vodka.  Ivan is very drunk, and puts his arm around Boris, and says sloppily "Boris, I love you!"

"You love me, Ivan," says Boris, who is not as drunk.  "That is very good.  So tell me, Ivan, what hurts me?"

"What hurts you?" says Ivan, "How should I know what hurts you?"

And Boris answers, "If you truly loved me you would know what hurts me."

This week is Shabbat Nachamu, the Shabbat of Consolation after the commemoration of Tisha B'Av, the ninth of Av, our remembrance of the destruction of both Temples.  The great prophet Second Isaiah begins the Haftara "nachamu, nachamu ami – be comforted, be comforted my people."  But how does God comfort the people?  In the whole cycle of these special prophetic readings that will go on until Rosh Hashanah, Isaiah promises again and again that God has heard the people's pain; and since God has listened, it is absolutely certain that God loves the people, that God will answer the people's pain.  Comfort comes from knowing someone else hears your voice.  At times of great loss, often the only comfort comes from knowing that another human being is really listening – and can then supply the love that we need to survive.

But listening goes even deeper than that.  For if we really listened to each other, if we truly knew each other, could any one of us shoot up a Walmart or a school, or attack worshippers at a synagogue or mosque or church, or blow up an airplane, or bomb a shopping mall?  If we were truly listening, could we avoid the news about these attacks on TV? 

If we were truly listening could we ignore starving children around the world?  Could we avoid the images of mass murder in Sudan?

And, for that matter, if each of us was really listening, Shema, could any of us criticize a friend behind his back, or fail to help a local woman in trouble?

We know that our relationship with God is supposed to mirror our relationship with each other; earlier the Torah commanded us to love other people, and only now does it tell us to love God.  You see, only after we have learned to listen to others, and to love them, can we come to listen to God, and so to love God.  Only after we have taught ourselves to listen, can we truly love.

Rabbis Jack Riemer and Harold Kushner wrote a beautiful poem on this –

Judaism begins with the commandment:

Hear, Israel!  But what does it really mean to hear?

The person who attends a concert with a mind on business –

Hears, but does not really hear.

The person who walks amid the song of birds

And thinks only of what will be served for dinner

Hears, but does not really hear.

The man who listens to the word of his friend, or wife, or child,

And does not catch the note of urgency:

Notice me, help me, care about me –

Hears, but does not really hear.

The one who listens to the news, and thinks only of how it will affect business -

The person who stifles the sound of conscience and thinks:

I have done enough already –

Hears, but does not really hear.

The person who hears the Hazzan pray, and does not feel the call to join in prayer –

Hears, but does not really hear.

The person who listens to the rabbi's sermon

And thinks that someone else is being addressed

Hears, but does not really hear.

On this Shabbat Nachamu, God

Sharpen our ability to hear.

May we hear the music of the world, the infant's cry, the lover's sigh

May we hear the call for help of the lonely soul

And the sound of the breaking heart

May we hear the words of our friends, but also their silent pleas and dreams

May we hear within ourselves the yearnings struggling for expression

May we hear You, God.

For only if we hear You

Do we have the right to hope that You will hear us. 

Hear the words that we pray today, our God

And may we hear them too.                                  Shabbat Shalom.

America 250: The Rights and Responsibilities of Freedom

America 250: The Rights and Responsibilities of Freedom

Rabbi Samuel M. Cohon, Congregation Beit Simcha, Tucson, AZ

Shabbat Shalom and happy 4th of July weekend, and mazal tov on the 250th birthday of America!  This weekend, of course, marks the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence in 1776, a remarkable occasion indeed which we will explore tonight. 

So, a personal note about the 4th of July and major commemorations of American celebrations: 50 years ago tomorrow, on America’s bicentennial back in 1976, I was a 15 year old kid living and working on a kfar no’ar, a youth village in the north of Israel called Meir Shefeyah near Zichron Ya’akov.  That day marked the 200th anniversary of the country I loved, the United States of America, celebrated with a tall ship parade and fireworks and concerts and lots more.  The evening of July 4th, as it fell in Israel, I was watching the festivities taking place half a world away in the USA on a small black and white TV with other American Jewish teens when suddenly the whole Kfar No’ar area around us erupted with cheers and shouts and songs.  The Israeli news announced that on that day, July 4, 1976 in the middle of Africa a special squad of 100 Israeli commandoes had just rescued a large group of passengers who had been hijacked by Palestinian terrorists.  The rescue took place in Entebbe, Uganda, and miraculously it had just saved almost all the hostages, 102 of them; two were killed in the crossfire, tragically, one was murdered by a terrorist, and one was later murdered in the hospital by Ugandan soldiers under the orders of Idi Amin.  Just one Israeli soldier died: the mission commander, Yonatan Netanyahu, older brother of the future Prime Minister.  The remaining hostages, and the Israeli commandoes, survived and were coming home.

Every July 4th since that day I have always remembered the unbridled joy that Israelis, and Jews everywhere in the world, expressed on the liberation of their fellow countrymen and women, and what an affirmation of the power of freedom it was on this holiday of American freedom.

Tomorrow, of course, we will mark the 250th Anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, that crucial document.  So here are just a few facts about the Declaration that you might or might not know.

First, the actual vote to declare independence, dramatic as it was, took place on July 2nd, not July 4th.  That’s the date that John Adams thought we would celebrate in perpetuity, with “pageants and pomp and parade… fireworks… bells ringing out…” But it took two days to create printed copies the Declaration of Independence so everyone in Congress could get a good look at what they had voted for.  And so, another approval happened on July 4th, more formality than drama. 

Second, the actual signing ceremony took place in Philadelphia on August 2nd, 1776, a month after the initial vote on independency.  First, Congress waited until New York’s legislature voted to permit their delegation to sign the Declaration, so they could restore the word “unanimous” the document.  Then, well, it took a little time to get everything organized.  John Trumbull’s famous painting is wonderful and not at all historical.

Third, seven of the guys who signed The Declaration of Independence—they were all men, and white men of property at that—didn’t sign it that day, either.  Because of travel, attendance issues, changes in the states’ delegations and so on the remaining men signed over the course of 1776 and perhaps even into early 1777.

Fourth, signing the declaration was an act of profound rebellion against the British king and government.  Publicly signing such a revolutionary document was treason, and subject to capital punishment by the UK’s military and government.  Signing meant you were voluntarily taking the risk of being hung or shot by the British for treason.  It was an act of courage, and a break with established tradition in a truly profound way, whether or not you signed it in Philadelphia in August of 1777 or later in your own drawing room.

I’d like to reflect for a few moments this morning on just how the Declaration of Independence, and more centrally the later Constitution of the United States, impacted Jews in America, both those who were here at the time of the Revolutionary War 250 years ago, and all of us who have come to this land of opportunity over its history.  In order to understand that, it’s valuable to remember what the relationship of Jews to the then mother country of England had been over its history.

While Jews lived in England and contributed materially to the country in antiquity and into the Middle Ages, a series of antisemitic libels, the medieval version of today’s antisemitic conspiracy theories, led to horrifying massacres.  The first Blood Libel ever originated in Norwich, England in 1144, and terrible massacres of Jews took place in waves in England, notoriously in York in the year 1190.  After taxing all Jews at a ridiculously high rate for the next 100 years, exactly a century after the Massacre of York, King Edward I, the evil Edward Longshanks, expelled all Jews from England permanently.  England was thus the first European country to expel all its Jews, robbing them of all the rest of their property and possessions first, of course.  For 360 years after that Jews were forbidden from living in England or its possessions. 

Nonetheless, a few individual Jews sometimes ended up living in England in medieval and Renaissance times, and became famous: Queen Elizabeth had a Sephardic Jewish physician named Roderigo Lopez who served her faithfully, only to be betrayed and executed for trumped up treason charges; Joachim Gaunse, an Ashkenazic metallurgist and innovator, taught the English how to make the metal cannonballs that defeated the Spanish Armada in 1588; another Portuguese Jew, Dr. Hector Nunez, fled the Inquisition and lived in London and was a crucial spy for England against Spain.  But, generally speaking, no Jews were officially allowed to live in England until the reign of the dictator Oliver Cromwell in 1656.

That means that when the first English colonists landed in what later became the United States, at Jamestown and thereafter on Cape Cod, Jews were not officially even permitted to live in England, or technically its overseas empire.  In truth, the rule against Jews wasn’t enforced strictly in the colonies, and usually Jews immigrating to the New World settled in Dutch colonies, where they were generally welcomed.  Again, before 1656, officially Jews weren’t technically even allowed to be in the English colonies in America, and bias against Jews in England remained deeply ingrained—even with no Jews present to hate in person.

In spite of that, there were a few Jewish settlers in the colonies even before permission was granted by Cromwell.  After Cromwell, Jews settled in New York, Philadelphia, Charleston, Boston, Savannah, and elsewhere in the colonies from the mid-17th century on. 

For Jews, what was extraordinary about the newly declared independent American nation 250 years ago, what made America different, unique, was the Enlightenment dedication to the separation of church and state, what was called freedom of conscience and what today we call freedom of religion or belief.  The idea that no one should be denied citizenship in the new republic on the basis of religion was earth-changing at the time, and remains central to everything American.  The Founding Fathers could certainly have proclaimed America to be a Christian nation—they were, in their own different ways, all Christians, to one degree or another, even if some of them were more Deists than they were practicing Christians.  But clearly, they deliberately chose not to make America another Christian nation chained to one religious tradition, with the limitations that would impose on freedom of thought, belief, practice and citizenship.  There was no Christian Nationalism among our Founding Fathers.  There was religious tolerance and acceptance of freedom of belief as core values. 

It’s worthwhile saying that again: with the founding of the American republic, for the first time in human history, a nation that wasn’t Israel or Judah, that wasn’t a Jewish country led by Jews, granted full civil rights to Jews as citizens.  That wasn’t because of any special relationship that Jews were being given, or through special influence.  It was because the mostly Deistic founders of what eventually became the United States of America believed everyone had the same rights to become a citizen, regardless of religion—as long as they were male, of course, and white.  That right was eventually extended to blacks and other non-whites, and finally even to women. 

It is impossible to stress how crucial this difference was, and remains.  If you are born in America, at the age of majority you become a citizen.  And in the early days of America, when everyone here was born in another nation—remember, even if you were born in Virginia or New York or Georgia or Massachusetts, it was part of another country at the time, England—that meant that all immigrants were also citizens, and also shared the protections guaranteed to all citizens, including, especially, freedom of conscience, freedom of religion. 

For Jews this meant that no longer would we be mistreated, at least officially, by the national government.  We couldn’t be robbed and tortured by the US government because we were, or are, Jews.  We couldn’t be expelled.  And when you look at the insane record of persistent persecution of Jews throughout the world over our long, often painful history, you have to be amazed by this revolutionary change.  The only time that this was challenged, during the American Civil War 85 years later, the resulting reversal reinforced the protection of religious freedom, to Jews and all Americans.

That American invention, freedom of religion, spread, albeit slowly.  It took 13 years, but under the influence of the American Revolution, in a document written by the Marquis de Lafayette with the Declaration of Independence’s author Thomas Jefferson’s significant input, France adopted even more specific protections for all citizens in 1789, the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen. 

The great American choice to keep government out of religion, and religion out of the government, and allow all its people freedom of belief and practice is perhaps the core American value.  It has benefitted Jews, and all Americans, since 1776.  Long may it continue to protect us all from the tyranny of governments that sponsor one religion…

250 years on, what else can we take from the Declaration of Independence?

The Declaration, in Jefferson’s paraphrasing of philosopher John Locke, proudly proclaims “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”

A famous reading of this says that Americans indeed have rights; Jews, instead, have responsibilities.  That is, we Jews are obligated to fulfill mitzvot.  Citizens of the United States of America, by contrast, simply affirm their God-given protections from control or domination.

Perhaps the best version of both traditions is what we all should strive for on this 250th Birthday of America: to protect our rights, and those of all Americans, while we fulfill our moral responsibilities to our people and our nation.

That will create not just a country worthy of celebrating at its 250th birthday, but forever. 

The Talking Donkeys of Anti-Semitism

Sermon Chukat-Balak 5786, Rabbi Sam Cohon, Congregation Beit Simcha, Tucson, AZ

This Shabbat we will read the story of King Balak and his attempt to hire a pagan sorcerer, Balaam, to curse the Israelites and destroy them with, well, bad magic, or at least destructive oratory.  I was thinking that we have a modern version of this going on right now, and it is has been much more effective than Balak’s primitive effort to stop Israel through the ancient world’s version of truly bad press.  It has been the quite successful effort to demonize Israel as a colonial, evil, oppressive power, and then to spread that curse to all Jews, everywhere in the world. 

Unlike King Balak and his chosen press agent, Balaam, who is stopped at an early juncture of our Torah portion by a simple talking donkey, the Qatari money and Iranian mullahs funding and leading the anti-Zionism jihad have succeeded in tarring Israel and all Jews throughout the world with a series of lies and slanders that mixes modern anti-Westernism with a deep and virulent Antisemitism.  And it has taken hold here in the US recently in profoundly troubling ways. 

It’s extremely evident Antisemitism is permeating many aspects of American politics in ways we haven’t seen in decades, if ever.  That was clear in the Democratic primaries held last week, particularly in New York City and State, where a series of “Progressives” who ran as much against AIPAC and Israel as they did against their opponents pretty much all won their elections, often defeating more conventionally pro-Israel candidates.  When the largest Jewish city in the world by population, New York City, is electing people who promise to attack Israel and who use profoundly Antisemitic tropes in their campaigns—attacking “Zionist conspiracies” for example, calling Jewish organizations “monsters”, normalizing vicious Palestinian terrorist violence, murders, and rapes as “resistance” and so on—we have a huge problem. 

Perhaps most mind-boggling about these election results is that some significant proportion of Jews have chosen to vote for these “progressives” who advocate profoundly antisemitic stereotypes, claim that Jews have no right to a nation, and that we are not originally from Israel.  Oh, and that it’s perfectly OK to violently attack Jews of all ages everywhere and anywhere in the world—Colorado, Michigan, London, Montreal, Sydney—if you disagree with Israel’s actions.  Clever political analysts now say that supporting Israel is a liability in elections all across America, but this anti-Zionist attitude isn’t about whether or not Israel should attack the Hezbollah terrorists in Lebanon; it is about Israel having a right to exist, something that is never on the table about any other nation on earth.

You know, I recently forwarded on social media an article by the clever atheist thinker Sam Harris, who wrote about how his more progressive followers were highly critical of the fact that he supports Israel in preference to the radical Islamists who seek its destruction.  I certainly don’t agree with Sam Harris’ theology, since he is a philosophical atheist who believes firmly that God doesn’t exist.  But I am grateful for his intelligence and forthright approach to a very real situation, and I don’t think I could agree more with him.  As Sam Harris says, “I’m not interested in exploring all the ways that Israel has missed the mark—from Prime Minister Netanyahu’s corrupt alliance with the far right, to the many crimes committed by settlers in the West Bank, to the deaths of innocent noncombatants in several wars—because none of these failings, however grave, will alter my sense that first, the ethical difference between Israel and her enemies remains vast, and second, the global preoccupation with the Jewish state, as though it were the worst villain among nations, is contemptible, being the product of perennial lies and delusions. 

Harris continues, “I think militant Islam is ten times worse than you think it is. When I talk about “jihadists” and their various groups—Hamas, Hezbollah, al-Qaeda, the Islamic State, the IRGC, etc.—I’m talking about people who I consider to be worse than Nazis (jihadists being, essentially, Nazis who are certain of going to Paradise). My views about the conflict in the Middle East will not fundamentally change unless my critics produce evidence that Israel has become as evil as her enemies.

“However, you can rest assured that if the IDF morphs into a death cult that uses its own civilian population as human shields (and yet somehow remains widely popular), if ordinary Israelis begin to celebrate martyrdom above every earthly priority, producing generations of bright-eyed, suicidal fanatics, if the residents of Tel Aviv condone the taking of Palestinian infants, old women, and other noncombatants as hostages and then gather in crowds of thousands, baying for their blood—if, in other words, the Israelis begin to resemble the Palestinians, then I won’t care who wins this war. Short of this, there remains a world of difference between the two sides, and I believe that we should focus on how brutalizing it is for any free society to confront enemies that can sincerely claim to “love death” more than everyone else loves life—for this has been Israel’s predicament for the better part of a century.

“The problem in the Middle East is not, and has never been, the existence of the state of Israel. The problem is jihadism, Islamism, Islamic extremism, Islamofascism, militant Islam—whatever words you want to use to describe the belligerence and triumphal lunacy of those who take the most pernicious doctrines of Islam too seriously.

“What do the Jews and Muslims in the region really yearn to accomplish? What are they willing to sacrifice for? What are they willing to die for? And what are they willing to let their children die for?

“If the Palestinians laid down their arms, there would be peace… If the Palestinians simply stopped killing Jews and stopped building a culture that celebrates pointless murder and martyrdom as its highest values, there could be a diverse, tolerant, and prosperous society between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. There could have been one eighty years ago. But if the Israelis laid down their weapons, there would be a genocide. This was obviously true on October 7th, 2023. And for anyone who has been paying attention, it has been true on every other day since the founding of the state of Israel.

“If Hamas had the power, it would perpetrate a real genocide in Israel. The group has affirmed its commitment to this project on countless occasions, both before and after October 7th…”

I urge everyone to read all of Sam Harris’ extremely accurate and cogent analysis, in which he makes it crystalline clear that this obsessive focus with destroying Israel comes not from an idea of justice but from good old-fashioned Antisemitism.

Now, lest you think all of this rising tide of Antisemitism is coming from the left, look at the far right, which includes prominent figures like the despicable Tucker Carlson, who promotes anti-Jewish conspiracy theories, ancient Antisemitic tropes, and platforms neo-Nazis on his shows.  There are now podcasters like the execrable Candace Owens with more reach than any American Antisemite since Father Coughlan.  There are plenty of white nationalists on the far-right, some embraced by President Trump; Christian Nationalism is an ever-growing part of national and regional politics, and there is increasingly broad acceptance of insane antisemitic lies that are everywhere online and on social media that use evocations of manufactured lies like The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

When AIPAC, a lobbying organization that’s had limited success the last few years, is demonized as a “monster” by the Mayor of New York and described by US Congressmen and podcasters in terms that would make a Czarist Antisemitic propagandist proud, things have gotten bad…     

So, what’s a Jew to do in this summer of 2026 when it seems like expressing Antisemitism is the in-thing to do on both the left and the right and increasingly in the center, when being an anti-Zionist—that is, an Antisemite—is the hottest hot girl of this hot summer?

Without in any way suggesting that we ignore Antisemitism, the first, most important lesson is to express our own Judaism positively.  Do meaningful, enjoyable Jewish acts: light candles Friday night, celebrate Shabbat with family and friends, attend Shabbat Friday night or Saturday services, watch Jewish films, hear Jewish music, laugh with Jewish comedians, do Havdalah, cook a new Jewish recipe, and, of course, of course, listen to past Too Jewish shows on podcast… The truth is that Judaism is a life-affirming, values-based way of life, a fabulous expression of an amazing nearly four-thousand-year-old tradition filled with joy and meaning.  That’s what Judaism truly is, and we need to embrace it in all its beauty, diversity and complexity.

You know, for a long time the Jewish community in America has focused on supporting Israel, remembering the Holocaust, and embracing Jewish kitsch.  Now it’s belatedly responding to the sharp rise in Antisemitism, and that has become the primary cause for many Jews.  That, and, as usual, assimilation.

But that’s not what being Jewish really is.  And we always have the opportunity to live our lives fully, wonderfully, Jewishly, in ways that enhance and elevate us spiritually, communally and intellectually.

So fight Antisemitism; but, even more importantly, live a meaningful, joyful Jewish life.

Bald Truths: How Rebellion Teaches Us About Leadership

Rabbi Samuel M. Cohon’s Sermon on Korach 5786 

Korach chronicles the greatest rebellion in the entire Torah, the palace revolt of the Levite Korach and his 400 followers against the divinely ordained leadership of his fellow Levites, Moses and Aaron.  As so often seems to be the case, we Jews are our own worst enemies.  The result of this insurrection is disastrous, at least for the rebels.  The earth opens and Korach and all of his misguided followers are swallowed up, never to be heard from again. 

By tradition, the rebellion of Korach is the absolute worst revolt of its sort in Jewish history.  But this is hardly the first rebellion of the Israelites against Moses’ leadership, and it is certainly also not the last.  In a couple of weeks, the Torah portion of Pinchas will conclude yet another episode of an insider revolution, that one solved by the point of a spear.  And the rebellions against Moses and God have been pretty continuous: the criticism on the very shore of the Red Sea, the Golden Calf episode, the intense unhappiness of the Children of Israel throughout their peregrinations in the desert right up to last week’s story of the failed spies in Shlach L’cha.  Our ancestors had a very bad habit of constantly being dissatisfied and continuously trying to overthrow the proper order of things.  Whoever was in charge always got the brunt of the criticism and the lion’s share of the hostility.

In fact, that tendency has remained a particularly Jewish one throughout our long history.  While we joke about the stereotype of two Jews having three opinions, the truth is that our heritage is a contentious one.  If we weren’t rebelling against God and Moses we were fighting for control of the monarchy or against Philistines or Greeks or Romans.  And when actual armed insurrection was beyond us, we engaged in intellectual debates so intense that they bordered on warfare: from the endless, detailed Talmudic arguments to the political infighting of the Zionists to the Jewish socialists against the Jewish communists against the Jewish anarchists there is a long and rich and highly developed tradition of Korach-ism.

Since Korach is considered to be the worst of all of these, I wondered if there is any clue in the Hebrew of his name.  The Hebrew root, the Korach, has a few other meanings.  One is to cut or shear things, to slice.  Certainly rebellion is intended as a cutting gesture.  Another meaning of Kuf reish chet is ice or cold, like Kerach—to chill or freeze, again a kind of reflection of emotional distance and hostility.  Put those together, to cut and to make cold and you come up with… well, cold cuts.  Very Jewish. 

My favorite korach translation of the Hebrew is that it has the meaning, “baldness, Karei’ach” which seems to indicate that a lack of hair is potentially untrustworthy… my apologies, on behalf of the Hebrew language, to all bald people who resent this assertion.  In defense, I must say that some of my best friends are bald.  And my father.

There is no word about whether this relates to comb-overs, or bad hairpieces marking their possessors as being intrinsically duplicitous.  Perhaps.

Midrash gives us another kind of clue.  Korach is considered to have been a very wealthy man, a kind of Jewish Croesus, the Rothschild, the Bill Gates, the Mark Zuckerberg, the Elon Musk of the Sinai Desert Israelites.  There is a Hebrew slang term, otzrot Korach, the treasures of Korach, which basically means someone is filthy rich.  Somehow his wealth is associated with the tendency to revel in rebellion.  Super-rich people as uber-powerful revolutionaries, believing they are infallible and the smartest people in every room, seeking to overturn the established order and put themselves in charge?  Sounds a little bit familiar, doesn’t it? 

So, let’s see now: the word Korach teaches us that rebellion against God’s appointed leaders comes from a coldness of heart and a desire to cut, reflects a paucity of the insulating calm of hair—or perhaps just bad hair—and it is inflamed by the financial means to support true rebellion.  Odd and very interesting.

The truth is that leading the Jewish people has never been an easy task—important, rewarding, ethically essential, but never, ever easy.  If it is true that it is shver tzu zain a Yid, hard to be a Jew, it is even harder to be a Jewish leader.  And so I wonder: why would intelligent, caring, reasonable Jews wish to take on this responsibility?  What is there about the opportunity to make this commitment that attracts talented people with other things to do in life to spend time and effort in this contentious arena?  Why would someone wish to engage in the constant give and take, the automatic Jewish flow of criticism and critique that aims itself at any and every leader of substance and integrity?

Perhaps the answer is also to be found in our Torah portion.  Not so much in the desire to see our enemies swallowed up whole by the earth before everyone’s eyes, although that is an attraction.  No, it is in the understanding, as Korach ultimately confirms, that everyone may be holy in this community of priests, but that legitimate, principled, selfless leadership is absolutely necessary in order for us to achieve that holiness.  We Jews need direction, and organization, and the practical details of everyday functionality to be taken care of so that we can grow spiritually in holiness. 

What distinguishes Moses from those who rebel against him, like Korach, is his humble desire to do God’s will, and to further the cause of oneness and sanctity in this world.  What he teaches us is that conflicts are not the goal—it is what happens after the resolution of conflict that defines us and establishes our reputations in this world.

If we are true Jews of principle, we will have legitimate disagreements, and confront serious challenges.  It is our ability to accept those differences, sometimes lose the arguments, and nonetheless continue to work together to serve God with commitment and passion, and further the destiny of our communities and our people.

So whether or not we have hair, whether or not we have cold or warm personalities, whether we are sharp or dull, even, and whether or not we completely agree, if we are to be true followers of Moses, and God, we always must find a way to work together for the greater good.  It’s a fabulous lesson.

May the Holy One bless us all, each of us, with the wisdom to know that our path lies not with Korach and rebellion for its own sake, but with Moses, and a humility based on our commitments to the highest of purposes.  And may we always act in this way, and so truly serve God.

Flag Waving

Sermon, Shabbat Shlach Lecha, Rabbi Sam Cohon, Congregation Beit Simcha, Tucson, Arizona

There is an element in the narrative of the Book of Numbers that is not much studied, but perhaps should be.  Near the beginning of Bamidbar we are told that each tribe has its own flag, and that these standards were carried forward with the tribal members when the people of Israel journeyed across the wilderness towards the Holy Land.  We don’t know exactly what these d’galim looked like, as the Torah, and in fact the entire Bible doesn’t report anything about what they looked like, although later Midrashim tell us a lot about what the tribal flags may have looked like, or at least what people think they looked like a couple of thousand years later.  The flags descriptions of what each tribe used became the model for the illustrations you see in many Jewish works of art based on the symbols for each tribe.

In our own weekly portion of Shlach Lecha, the last Aliyah includes the commandment to place a blue thread, techelet, on every garment.  That blue thread is the origin of the blue stripes on so many tallitot, tallisses, which became the inspiration for the modern Israeli flag, the blue and white of the Magein David on the flag you can see behind me tonight.

Which leads to an interesting and relevant subject: this Sunday is June 14th, which happens to be Flag Day.  While the observance of this holiday has, um, flagged, way when back in the pre-Vietnam War era many, if not most, people used to put up American flags on June 14th simply because they were proud of our country.  In those long-ago times, the flag wasn’t considered some sort of marker of political affiliation, or a means of expressing either your super-patriotism or your anti-patriotism or whatever people are doing these days with American flag symbolism.  The stars and stripes were simply a way of showing that you were proud to be a citizen of the most important democracy in the world, and that you believed in the American experiment of freedom with responsibility. 

And so, on June 14th, you hung up an American flag, sometimes on a stanchion that was built into your house expressly for that purpose.  Nobody thought that marked you as a Republican or a Democrat or a supporter of one guy or another.  It was just a way to show that you were proud to be an American, whatever that meant to you.

The flag back then had only recently changed, by the way—this is a long time ago—to 50 stars, so people bought new ones that included the new states of Alaska and Hawaii.  The flags themselves were made of broadcloth—cloth, not plastic—and had brass grommets.  They were kind of heavy to a kid, and they were folded up after the 14th and put away, to be pulled out again for 4th of July in a few weeks, and then not used again until the following flag day, although some people put them up for Thanksgiving.

It was a simple gesture, putting out the flag for Flag Day, and my family did it every year—and again on the 4th of July—from before I came along and when I was a little kid until sometime in the late 60s, when the mood in the nation changed pretty conclusively from a kind of consensus patriotism to a much more critical and unhappy one.  After the assassinations of JFK, Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy—the real Robert Kennedy—and during the height of the Vietnam War, waving the flag, or at least placing the American flag on your home, didn’t seem like such a positive act anymore, and like most of our neighbors in our middle-class, mostly Jewish neighborhood, we just sort of stopped putting it out.  It wasn’t an act of protest against anything.  It was more of a recognition that the flag as a symbol had lost some of its luster and didn’t signify quite the same thing as it used to.

Now, to be honest, the America of these pre-Vietnam War, halcyon days wasn’t exactly a paradise.  In my own youth I remember the Watts riots taking place fairly close to where we lived in Los Angeles, and I recall that smog alerts were a regular part of my childhood; our pattern was to play outside until our lungs hurt—the sky in the summer was always a brownish color in LA back then—and then we’d go inside and rest for a while until our lungs didn’t hurt, drink iced tea, and go back outside to play some more.  The news was filled with stories about polluted rivers—including some that caught on fire—and they were always recalling consumer products that could, you know, kill you.  Women were barely visible in the workplace—except for schools and hospitals, where they were nurses—and equal rights were, well, not really equal.

Growing up in LA, while we felt very American as kids, we already knew that Jews couldn’t go to work in a variety of industries: banking and finance, insurance, advertising—no Jewish characters on the TV show Mad Men, right?--white shoe corporate law firms, and big business in general, and that we were quota’ed out of many medical and dental schools and most Ivy League colleges.  The virulently Antisemitic John Birch Society was quite big in nearby Orange County, California; in fact,  my family didn’t go to the Knott’s Berry Farm amusement park because its owner was a big supporter of the John Birch Society.  Disneyland was OK, since Walt Disney himself did not seem to be an antisemite, and Jews wrote all the songs in his musical movies.  In my own neighborhood, we had Holocaust survivors living on our street, and when we went to the bakery to get challah for Shabbes you’d see the numbers tattooed by the Nazis on the arms of the women as they reached up to take a number for bread.

It wasn’t a perfect world, but supporting our country as an entity by putting up a flag seemed to be much less controversial.  Until it wasn’t.  And nowadays, in our highly polarized political climate, the flag is often used as a kind of cultural marker of loyalty to one side.

Now to be honest, Flag Day has a special importance in my own family, since it is my oldest son Boaz’s birthday, and he turns 30 this Sunday. That’s a little hard for me to reconcile with my own general immaturity—how can I possibly have a 30-year-old son and two grandsons, especially when I also have a three year old daughter?  In any case, it has always been easy to remember Boaz’s birthday, just as it’s easy to remember my daughter Cipora’s birthday, which falls on December 25th—you know, Jewish Chinese Food Day. 

Birthdays can really focus our attention on some obscure facts.  My own birthday, January 7th, I share with former president Millard Fillmore, who you might recall—or maybe not—as the guy who later became the first presidential candidate of the Know Nothing Party, an anti-immigrant party in the 1850s.  Oddly, my oldest son Boaz shares a birthday with another anti-immigrant president, whose name I can’t recall, although I believe he is celebrating his birthday weirdly by staging an octagon cage fight on the White House lawn. 

You genuinely can’t make this stuff up.

I guess all of this is a way to note that Flag Day, this Sunday, should really be about celebrating what we truly know to be American values, however well they are observed in the present.  And those values include central ideas like freedom of religion, freedom of the press, freedom from corruption, the rule of law, and honesty and transparency in our public life. 

Just one further thought about Flag Day.  There are many symbols used to signify identity and values in our world.  Judaism, of course, uses both the Star of David, the magein David, and the menorah.  Whatever symbol is used, we need to remember that what matters much more than the outward signifier we use is the quality of our conduct.  How we treat others, what values we actually stand for, and what positive actions we take to affirm those values in the real world: that’s what we Jews call mitzvot.  It’s our actions to improve the world that have real value. 

That’s what really counts, no matter what flags we wave.

Bring the Light

Sermon Parshat Beha’alotecha 5786, Rabbi Sam Cohon

This month of June features the longest days of the year in the Northern Hemisphere, with the summer solstice coming up on June 21st.  Interestingly, there are Jewish holidays associated with each of the equinoxes, spring in March—that’s Pesach, the Chag Ha’aviv, the festival of Spring—and autumn in September—that’s Sukkot, the harvest festival of fall—and around the winter solstice in December—that’s Hanukkah, the festival of lights in the darkest season of the year.  But there is no Jewish sun- or light-related holiday in June.  This demonstrates some important things about Judaism, and about all religion.

Judaism, unlike other ancient religions, views God as the Creator of the natural universe.  Rather than seeing the sun and moon as gods, or the stars and planets as independent entities, we have always understood the entirety of nature as being the result of God initiating creation.  You can call this a religious form of the Big Bang Theory, if you like; God began all creation out of nothing, Creation ex Nihilo, and the central idea is simply that the sun, moon, planets, stars, galaxies, and other celestial entities revolve and rotate and expand or contract in ways initiated by God’s original act of creation.  These heavenly bodies aren’t seen as bearing any astrological magic, they don’t impact our lives directly through some spiritual or mystical process, but they are simply objects created by God. 

But we Jews have always been influenced by the surrounding cultures in which we lived, and we have often utilized some of the ideas others have found relevant and important.  We just use them to demonstrate the central idea of one God, and God’s role in forming and shaping the entirety of the universe.

In nearly every culture in the world the place of the sun in the sky has been of interest, and often a central focus of religious practice as well.  In Egypt, the sun god Ra was a central deity, as was Aton, the solar disk. Mesopotamians worshipped Shamash, the sun god, whose name became the word for sun in Hebrew, shemesh.  Other peoples worshipped the sun too, and many created special rituals and monumental religious places dedicated to the solar cycle, from Stonehenge in Britain to the Temple of the Sun in Beijing to the Pyramid of the Sun in Teotihuacan near Mexico City. 

Because of the predictable quality of the solar year, nearly every region and people on earth has ritual holidays associated with the dates when days were shortest and nights longest—the winter solstice, as well as days longest and nights shortest—the summer solstice—and the dates when the days and nights were of equal duration, the spring and fall equinoxes.   Those holidays had various names and rites, from the Babylonian Nisanu spring festival to the Midsommer Day in Scandinavia to the fall festival in Vietnam and China to the Roman Saturnalia that was transformed into Christmas. 

Judaism developed rituals and holidays around these solstices and equinoxes too: Passover, near the vernal equinox in spring, is our chag haAviv, our springtime holiday of freedom.  Rosh HaShanah, the Jewish New Year, and Sukkot, our harvest festival, occur around the fall equinox.  And in winter, of course, Chanukah, our festival of lights, comes at the darkest time of year near the winter solstice.  Even though we don’t acknowledge any special religious significance to the cycles of the sun—our Jewish calendar, of course, is based on the moon—we still manage to cover three of the four special solar times with important festivals.  These holidays are officially unrelated to sun-worship, but in keeping with a Jewish genius for adopting customs of other traditions we utilize them to advance Jewish ideas and values.

We Jews do this for the key spring, fall, and winter dates but not for the Summer Solstice, this month.  It seems slightly odd that we connect to the other three crucial periods of the year for solar religiosity, while on the one day of the year that seems most likely to inspire religious connection we do bubkis, nothing.

Perhaps we don’t do anything for the summer solstice precisely because it was such an important element for many ancient religious traditions.  In Israel, the Essenes, an ascetic Jewish religious group active during the 1st century CE, were the only sect to use a solar calendar, rather the lunar one. At the time, nearly 2000 years ago, Essenes were one of about 24 different Jewish religious sectarian groups in Israel.  Archaeologists found that the largest room of the ruins at Qumran, near where the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered, was in fact a sun temple.  At the time of the summer solstice, on June 21st, the rays of the setting sun will shine at the angle of 286 degrees along the building's longitudinal axis, and illuminate its eastern wall. The room is oriented at exactly the same angle as the Egyptian shrines dedicated to the sun gods, in Luxor and elsewhere. Two ancient Jewish authorities -- the historian Josephus and the philosopher Philo of Alexandria -- wrote that the Essenes were sun worshipers, and we have the evidence at Qumran.

In a world permeated by the glow of sun worshippers, Judaism found itself in a position in which it needed to avoid establishing anything that could become a catalyst for more solar devotion.  And so, no Summer Solstice celebrations for us this month, and no special dedications on behalf of solar devotionals.

But the days are long now, and filled with light.  Which leads to another thought about light.

This week we read the Torah portion of Beha’alotecha, the third parsha in the Book of Numbers.  In Beha’alotecha the command is given for the greatest symbol of Judaism ever created, the menorah, the candelabrum that comes to symbolize everything meaningful about Jewish inspiration and ritual.  Is the menorah the becomes the chief image of Jewish life for over three thousand years, the menorah that is the official state symbol of Medinat Yisrael, the state of Israel, the menorah that is the most important visual representation of what Judaism is all about. 

The seven-branched Menorah represents, in a graphic image, everything that is meaningful about Judaism for millennia.  The oldest Jewish tombstones we have were decorated with menorahs.  In the remarkable collection of ancient Jewish objects that you can find in the Vatican in Rome, for example, there are dozens of images of menorahs.  No wonder Israel made it the symbol of the state, the ancient and yet also the most modern and meaningful expression of Jewish life today.

Now I know that the so-called Star of David, the Magein David, is the picture everyone has in her or his mind about what really represents Judaism.  But the Star of David is actually a Johnny-come-lately.  It has only been used for perhaps 700 years as a Jewish symbol at all.  For much more of Jewish history it has been the menorah that matters.

That menorah is lit in our Torah portion of Beha’altoecha this week to prove the presence of God, the symbolic daily representation of God’s presence in our midst that really represents what is holy and brilliant about Judaism.  The Menorah was the 7-branched light lit in the Tabernacle in the Wilderness and then the Temple in Jerusalem, the sign of God’s eternal presence. When it was lit, God was present.

Now we are all familiar with the Chanukah menorah, the 9 candled lamp that that we tend to think of as a “menorah”.  Actually, that is not a menorah, really, but a Chanukiah, a specific kind of lamp.  The Chanukiah, while a much older symbol of Judaism than the Magein David, the star of David, is still kind of newish—less than 2200 years old, 1000 years younger than the menorah itself. 

The lamp we have here in Beha’alotecha is the 7 branched menorah that was the central symbol of Judaism, the one you can see being carried off by Roman soldiers on the Arch of Titus in Rome.

So, you should be asking yourself an important question by now:  just why are we talking about a 7-branched menorah?  After all, we don’t actually use such a menorah in any Jewish rituals at all today.  It is an archaic symbol, something so out of date that, with all our many rituals and candle lightings and brachot and services, we don’t even have one single rite in which we use a 7 branched menorah for anything.  That symbol has become meaningless.

Which is important.  Because no matter how central the menorah was to our people’s history and symbolism, no matter how much it represented God’s inspirational presence in our midst, it is now, in matter of fact, meaningless to Jews.

Why is that?

Because we didn’t use it. After the Temple was destroyed for the last time we never again lit a 7-branched menorah for any ritual purpose.  And so, it just doesn’t matter.

We do keep it around, as a memento of our great past history.  But it isn’t something you would want to buy in a gift shop, or give for a bar mitzvah or confirmation gift. 

And why not?

Because there is no practical use for it.  A 7 branched menorah is like an outdated computer or a Blackberry or a useless old cellphone today.  No real meaning.

Now, why is this relevant now?

Because that menorah truly can serve one important practical purpose.  Just as our Judaism serves an important practical purpose.

In a basic way, that golden menorah was a way to keep track of the days of the week—a new light was added each day from Sunday through Friday until, finally, all seven branches shone on the holiest of days, Shabbat. 

Each day, we added a bit more light.  Each day, our ancestors added to the illumination of God’s holiness.  Each day they remembered to bring just a bit more brilliance into their lives.  All of it leading up to the full brilliance of Shabbat.

If we can remember to do the same—to add a bit of extra light into our lives each day of the week—then perhaps we, too, will find holiness in our own lives, and reach closer to God.

Be’ha’alotecha instructs us to light the menorah in the holiest place, commands us to bring illumination, to add light to the world.  We Jews have always believed this is our truest task, to brighten the darkness of cruel or thoughtless societies.  There was an entire Jewish movement, the Haskalah, the Jewish Enlightenment in the 19th century, that believed that intellectual honesty, integrity and openness could help bring more light to the dark places on our globe, could inspire us to grow in goodness, holiness, and responsibility.

So too, today, in a society and a world where darkness seems to spread unchecked, it is our role to bring light even into these superlong days, to seek to bring the illumination of intellectual honesty, care, compassion, love and integrity into our world, to brighten everything through our own example.

While our ancestors faced a world that believed in many false gods, today we live in a world in which falsehoods flourish at least as freely, and much more rapidly.  There are dark corners not only of the internet but in the minds of many confused people.  Our task, as Jews, is to seek the truth, always, and to advocate for it openly and honestly.  It is to be bearers of light in the face of darkness, to pursue transparency and practice goodness, to answer falsehoods with veracity. 

It is, of course, to be the light that the menorah represented, in a world that needs it so much now.   May we choose to do so this week, and always.

AI and Human Beings

Sermon Shabbat Naso 5786, Rabbi Samuel M. Cohon

Congregation Beit Simcha, Tucson, AZ

You may have seen in the news that the newish American Pope Leo issued a long encyclical this week called, “Magnifica Humanitas,” which translates roughly to “Magnificent Humanity.”  The issuing of a papal encyclical is a big deal, particularly for Catholics, of course, but often for all religious types, and even for those who aren’t so religious, and they can change public discussion on an issue, not just church policy. 

Papal encyclicals are issued whenever the current Pope chooses to do so, so there isn’t really a set pattern to them.  Sometimes they represent a significant change in the direction of the entire Catholic Church, a huge organization with a hierarchical structure and which still has significant influence in the world, even if it is not what it once was.  While papal encyclicals can be a kind of rebottled piety, or reaffirm conservative positions on contemporary issues, they can also jump the line and change things in the world.

Perhaps most famously Pope John XXIII organized the Vatican II Council and his successor, Pope Paul VI, formally issued the encyclical Nostra Aetate, which transformed the Catholic Church’s relationship with non-Christians, and formally rejected the charge of deicide and all antisemitism after nearly two millennia of its tacit acceptance by the Church.  It created a huge sea change in official church policy, and while it took time to fully impact the large Roman Catholic world, it surely transformed the way that many Catholics saw Jews and Judaism, and built positive relationships that have endured.  So sometimes these things turn out to be incredibly important.  This is the very first encyclical issued by Pope Leo XIV, famously a White Sox fan from Chicago and the first pope ever from the United States. 

The subject of this encyclical is not just how remarkable and extraordinary human beings are, but how and why artificial intelligence is a challenge to our very humanity.  This encyclical is over 40,000 words long—basically, more than half as long as the average book published these days—so my comments on it tonight will be limited by the fact that I have only mostly scanned it and read reviews of it.  And of course, used Artificial Intelligence to analyze it for me…

In some ways, my first impression of it is that coming from the pope of the Roman Catholic Church is reads, in part, shockingly like a Renaissance humanist text.  The focus of this document, generally speaking, is to elevate the extraordinary beauty, talent, goodness, and even fallibility of our shared humanity.  While it certainly views human beings as creations of God, and reflections of the divine image and spirit, it is filled with the kinds of statements about the rich and vibrant qualities that human beings possess, of how amazing and beautiful we are, how our talents and choices and intelligence are unique, special, even sacred, how we are the earthly reflections of God’s grandeur.  In this way, the Pope’s words remind me of that lovely Shakespearean soliloquy from Hamlet:

What a piece of work is a man!

how noble in reason!

how infinite in faculty!

in form and moving how

express and admirable!

in action how like an angel!

in apprehension how like a god!

the beauty of the world!

the paragon of animals!

Of course, Hamlet, being Hamlet, immediately shifts back to noting that we are really just, “the quintessence of dust.”  He is a depressing sort of character, really… but what a beautiful statement of the highest qualities that human beings can reflect.

Now, from the leader of a religion that is profoundly focused on the afterlife and redemption from sin, this is spicy stuff, a quotidian focus on the mortal dressed up in the fanciest robes of the church.  It is much closer to the heady humanism of Erasmus than it is to the more typically pious preaching we might expect from the Catholic Church’s vicar on earth.

After stating the wonders of humanity, the real focus of this long encyclical is on the problem posed by the rapidly increasing use of artificial intelligence in so many aspects of life.  The Pope notes that this is typically done in the name of greater efficiency, even at the cost of true human creativity, of jobs, or the unpredictable and often inspiring randomness of actual people doing their own work.  We are at the forefront, the beginning, the appetizer stage of the use of artificial intelligence these days, and Pope Leo is worried that we will all simply fall into the obvious trap that this still-developing technology offers us. 

Citing the Bible, in this case our Tanakh, the Pope then compares artificial intelligence to the Tower of Babel, a towering city built on pride and, to the pope, dictatorial direction.  It ends badly, of course.  In contrast, he writes about the way that Nehemia worked to rebuild Jerusalem after the return from Babylonian Exile: gathering the people together, creating a communal, shared response, respecting the whole people, sharing responsibility with everyone.  Obviously, for Pope Leo, that is the best, most appropriate way for human beings to use their own intelligence to make a better, holier world.

As he says, “Technology has the power to heal, connect, educate and protect our common home; but it can also divide, exclude and generate new forms of injustice. In the abstract, technology in and of itself is not a solution to humanity’s problems, just as it is not inherently evil. In practice, however, technology is never neutral, because it takes on the characteristics of those who devise, finance, regulate and use it. Therefore, the primary choice is not between a “yes” or “no” to technology, but rather between constructing Babel or rebuilding Jerusalem; between a power that claims to dominate the heavens and a people who work together in the presence of God to rebuild the walls of fraternal coexistence.”

Now, a word about the history of artificial intelligence is called for here.  Computer scientists worked incredibly hard on the “problem of artificial intelligence” for something like 60 years without making much discernible progress.  They started back in the early 1950s, and for a long time the only “AI” machines were rather, well, stupid devices that couldn’t understand your verbal prompts or do, well, much of anything; ultimately the best of them finally could play chess well.  Um, ok.  The AI industry constantly promised that computers would soon be able to think like humans, and just as constantly failed to deliver.  For a long time that was because it takes a huge amount of computing power to create anything like the human brain, and until fairly recently computers just weren’t fast enough with enough memory to do it.  But there were many other problems, and over a period of time that saw so many fabulous technological developments, right up to our ridiculously capable cellphones of today, Artificial Intelligence was the impossible Holy Grail of computer science. 

For some of us, our dark images of Artificial Intelligence and its potential dangers were shaped by the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey, in which the semi-evil computer Hal, kills most of the astronauts to protect itself.  It was not a positive presentation of artificial intelligence.

Behind the scenes, slow progress suddenly produced a series of breakthroughs, which mostly involved the way that machines learn.  Finally, in 2020—less than six years ago—Open AI released the first version of what rapidly triggered a revolution.  And it is that revolution that the Pope is taking aim at.

And he has a point.  You may have noticed that you did not know the name of the Drash writer, the darshan of the piece that was read earlier on the Torah portion of Naso.  Ploni Almoni is the way the Talmud says, “John Doe”, or maybe we say “John Doe” in place of the much older “Ploni Almoni.”  That Drash was written by an artificial intelligence platform, Claude AI, that I have found useful for research.  I think you will agree with me that it’s an excellent Drash, and it was generated in about 30 seconds by Claude.  I’m afraid that my job security as a rabbi is being challenged right now; hopefully, there aren’t too many board members present tonight who will agree that it’s better than my sermons…

You may remember that a couple of years ago, back in the fall of 2023, a Reform rabbi, Rabbi Josh Fixler of a Houston congregation trained AI to write in his own style and produce a voice that sounded like his own delivering a sermon, and had it, well, temporarily fool his congregation.  It caused a stir, and of course the ultimate message was that artificial intelligence cannot replace the empathy and human skills of an actual rabbi…  But it sure can do the pesky research that used to take so many hours to do, can’t it?

A couple of thoughts about Artificial Intelligence then.  First, I personally believe that, like any new technology, it is a new tool with great potential.  All new technologies create disruption, and require adaptation periods, and AI is no different here.  All new technologies benefit some people financially, and hurt others.  There is really no way around this.  Raging against new tech is, well, mostly silly.  I recall one of the first congregations I served as cantor when I was still a teenager, and a kind of sermon one of the lay people gave one Shabbat saying, “They are starting to build cars with robots.  After all the auto workers lose their jobs, which robots are going to buy the cars the other robots are building?” 

As to human creativity: well, I may have even more faith in the human being than the Pope does.  There are painful tasks that we currently have to do that AI can do better and faster, and that’s all to the good. And there will always be things we can do that AI doesn’t do, things that are uniquely human. 

Machines, for all the ways they are being made to simulate human beings, do not feel.  They do not care.  They do not have actual empathy.  They do not build true community.  They do not pray.  They do not love.

But we do.  It is our profoundly human gift, given by God, that in our emotional, inspirational messiness we have the great capacity to care, and love, and, yes, hate, and bring meaning to our limited lives.

And those gifts are something we cannot bestow on a machine, no matter how sophisticated it becomes.

So, use AI where it is useful.  But don’t get too captivated by your devices and your tools. Because what really matters is that remarkable spark of the divine that you carry inside you, that profound, ineffable, innate humanity.

What Constitutes Chill?

Sermon Shabbat Shavu’ot 5786

Rabbi Samuel M. Cohon, Congregation Beit Simcha, Tucson, AZ

So, there we were, standing on a dock in Ha Long Bay, Vietnam.  After a pleasant afternoon on a large ship cruising among the magnificent rock outcroppings, and having explored a cave complex, we had been offered a choice of three options: a calm ride in a slow-moving boat through the beautiful scenery; a chance to paddle a kayak around one of the many islands; or a speedboat ride at a high rate.  There was no hesitation from my wife.  Sophie took one look at Ayelet, our three-year-old, and said, “speedboat”.  Ayelet’s face lit up; ignited might be a better word.  “Yay!”

Of course, they had no life jacket that wasn’t larger than she is to wear, but in Vietnam they really didn’t care, and we knew we could be her seatbelts.  As the boat fired up its engine, Ayelet shouted “Faster, faster!” and off we went.  You have never seen purer joy than our tiny daughter in a racing speedboat bouncing over the waters of the Gulf of Tonin.  “Faster, faster”.  She became the favorite of the French, Canadian, and Chinese passengers in the small craft, and of course of the Vietnamese crew.  Fear is not a big part of her makeup, of course, but joy certainly is.

We returned Wednesday night from our family vacation in Southeast Asia, visiting friends in Bangkok and then traveling in Thailand, Laos and Vietnam.  There may be less Jewish areas of the world, but there can’t be many of them.  The only regular synagogues functioning even in major, gigantic cities like Hanoi and Saigon are small Chabads, and as we weren’t in Bangkok over Shabbat we didn’t explore the limited Jewish options there, but I do know that there also isn’t much Jewish presence in that great city, aside from young Israeli backpackers.   But all three countries are fascinating, beautiful, and extremely interesting, and we traveled a good deal in each of them.  It was a great trip, and as we always hope after valuable travel, I feel that I’ve returned refreshed, albeit with a bit of travel crud in the form of a respiratory ailment that gives me my current bass voice…

One of the more refreshing aspects of going so far away and exploring such different cultures, to be frank, was spending three weeks in a region that has an almost complete lack of concern about Israel or Gaza or wars in the Middle East or Lebanon and all the tzoris going on now.  Aside from occasional comments about the dramatic increase in gas prices, there were no local stories or discussions about the war in Iran, and virtually none at all about Israel or Palestinian rights.  There were neither protests nor rallies, and no Antisemitic attacks to report—I mean, in order to have those you need to have Jews to attack.  During our trip we saw one bit of anti-Zionism graffiti in Chiang Mai, Thailand, and even that had been cleverly altered in order to take the anti-Israel quality right out of it.

Living in America the past few years it sometimes has seemed that all anybody cared about was bashing Israel, except for those of us who were loudly supporting Israel.  Our own Jewish community has been laser-focused on helping Israel and fighting antisemitism—except for some progressive Jews who were busy criticizing Israel’s government and explaining that Israel was bad in some ways and good in other ways, and we shouldn’t be too supportive of Zionism but really, truly Israel has a right to exist.  And of course, the growing American and European public acceptance of antisemitism, both on the left and on the right, including acts of violence against Jews and Jewish institutions, has been a steadily increasing drumbeat over the last few years, growing louder and more distressing all the time.  All this has been exceedingly noisy, and pretty danged problematic.

And so, traveling for a couple of weeks in Southeast Asia, where Jews are few and far between and no one spends much time thinking or shouting about the Middle East or libeling Israelis, was a great corrective.  The three countries we spent time in, Thailand, Laos and Vietnam, all have complex religious traditions and practices, and the syncretism you see between Buddhism, Hinduism, ancestor worship, and Catholicism, with a little Confucianism thrown in and in Laos and Vietnam some Communism as well, is fascinating.  On trains and buses there are even special signs telling you to let saffron-robed monks take any vacant seats.  There are a plethora of temples and shrines, pagodas and monasteries and stupas and religious sites of all sorts, one of which we discovered in Chinatown in Bangkok yesterday has crocodiles living in its ponds.  There is one thing all of these important and varied religious sites share, though; they aren’t Jewish.  So not much obvious Jewish life in Southeast Asia.

Now it must be noted that all three of these countries have long been on the post-IDF Israeli tour, the elaborate after-the-army itinerary that nearly every 22- or 23-year-old fresh out of the Israeli army takes.  Remember, nearly all Israelis enter the military at age 18—boys and girls—before college, and while girls serve 20-24 months (it can be more) boys are in for 32 months to three years.  Men will do reserve duty for many years afterwards, too.  Getting out and going far abroad from the small nation of Israel and seeing the world is considered as much of a rite of passage for Israelis as the military itself.  By the time they return from their grand tour they are ready to attend college seriously, or start working.

Israelis call it Hatiyul HaGadol, and it usually lasts about 6 months.  There are two main routes: the outdoorsy one in Central and South America—I met a lot of them in Cuzco, Peru when I attended a Passover Seder there over ten years ago—and is called the Felafel trail. The more spiritual big trip is through Thailand, India, and Nepal, with other Southeast Asian countries sprinkled in.   It is often said to be quite “chill”, which should mean relaxing and cool.  That is, backpacking through Thailand, Laos and Vietnam plus India and Nepal or Bhutan is “chill.”

Interestingly, on this trip we didn’t see many—frankly, any—Israeli backpackers.  But their definition of chill and ours may come from similar places.  Thailand and Vietnam—and for that matter, India—are crowded, energetic, even frenetic places much of the time.  There is lots of vehicular traffic—Vietnam has 100 million people and 80 million motorbikes, none of them observing any appreciable traffic laws—and there is also some chaos in most situations in general.  All of these countries have currencies that feature way too many zeroes, plenty of heat and humidity, and mosquitoes.  Objectively, they are not chill at all.  But what might make them seem chill for both the IDF veterans and this congregational rabbi is the simple fact that being Israeli or simply Jewish, is not a cause for controversy or criticism here.  They have many other things to worry about, and hating Israel or Jews or Israelis is far from their minds.  

In fact, in Vietnam, which has a lot of reasons to hate Americans—they call the Vietnam War the American War there—they absolutely do not hate Americans at all, and are instead incredibly welcoming.  The Vietnamese we spoke to all said the same thing, with minor variations: “That war was a long time ago, and we are happy to have good relations with America now.  Nobody here is really a Communist these days, and we are all looking to the future.”

I wonder if there is a lesson here.  First, that the very real and serious problems we Jews have been facing over the past several years aren’t nearly as central as we tend to believe they are.  And second, that arch enemies—American planes dropped more bombs on Vietnam than we did in the entirety of World War II on both Germany and Japan combined—past enemies can end up respecting and liking each other eventually.  Peace can follow war, and respect replace hatred.

The world is a big, complex place.  We Jews have survived on it for an incredibly long time, and our belief is that we will continue to flourish for many centuries to come.  Losing sight of that, and thinking enemies must permanently remain so, is the wrong way to go. 

The right way is to end conflict, and to seek understanding and respect.  It is in essence what God requires of us at the revelation of Sinai which we remember and honor on this Shavu’ot holiday.  We are commanded to be a kingdom of priests, and a holy people; to spread understanding, truth and justice.  And to embrace and seek peace.

These remain the central goals of Judaism, and should constantly remind us of the possibility, always, of peace.    That would truly be chill, no?

May it come soon to Israel and Jews everywhere. 

The Miracle of Peace

Sermon Israel Shabbat 5786, Shabbat Tazria-Metsora

Rabbi Samuel M. Cohon, Congregation Beit Simcha, Tucson, AZ

This is always an intriguing time in the Jewish year, between the major festival of Passover and the perhaps greater holiday of my father’s 100th birthday… true, but I mean in the early weeks of the period of the Counting of the Omer between Pesach and Shavu’ot we observe two special days, modern events that have their own observances associated with them.

Yom HaShoah and Yom Ha’atzma’ut were both established after World War II, which makes them, respectively, 75 and 78 years old.  In the grand sweep of Jewish history that is but yesterday, of course, and their significance to American Jewry waxed and waned over the years.  I can recall that some of the very first times I ever performed for audiences in public was singing Holocaust songs at Yom HaShoah events in Los Angeles, including for Survivor groups like the Vilna Ghetto Survivors.  It was a common thing growing up to see people reaching up to take a number in the local Jewish bakery on Fridays and to see faded numbers tattooed on their arms; they were concentration camp survivors, of course.  The need to remember, especially as the remaining survivors age and diminish, is powerful.  And so last week was Yom HaShoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day. 

And then, exactly seven days later, on Tuesday, we will celebrate Israel Independence Day.  Now, it is not an accident that Yom HaAtzma’ut takes place just a week after Yom Ha’Shoah.  Historically speaking, the creation of the State of Israel was only possible because World War II ended in Allied victory with the defeat of the Third Reich, and the horrific magnitude of the destruction of the Jews of Europe, who had no country to flee to from the Nazis, was made explicit by the liberation of the death camps, and further publicized at the Nuremberg trials.  For a brief moment, an uncaring world realized that no one was going to save endangered Jews except other Jews who had their own Jewish State.  And in miraculous fashion, that tiny Jewish state survived, and grew and, eventually, thrived.

You are no doubt familiar with the complex history of the rapid development of the underdog state, which absorbed more Jewish refugees in its first decades of life than it had people when independence was won.  That included hundreds of thousands—perhaps over a million—Jews robbed and then expelled from Arab countries they had lived in for literally thousands of years.  It included Holocaust survivors and refugees from repressive regimes in Europe and South America and Africa and Asia and, well, everywhere on the globe.  Over time, that underdog nation won enough existential wars to become the most powerful military in the Middle East and grew to be a much larger but still tiny nation of nearly 10 million people.

We celebrate the survival and incredible development of Israel over the less than eight decades of its existence, how a mostly barren wasteland has been transformed into an incredible, dynamic country, how it has continued to welcome Jewish refugees in the ensuing decades—from Iran, from Russia, from Argentina, from Ethiopia, from Ukraine.  How it has created a dynamic, complex democracy that is also economically vibrant and innovative in so many extraordinary ways.  A nation that changes all the time, that constantly creates art, music, culture and intellectual accomplishments that are too numerous to name.

My friends, this is a complicated Yom HaAtzma’ut for many American Jews, I suspect.  Israel is engaged in war with both Iran and the Hezbollah terrorists in Lebanon, after over two years of war with Hamas in Gaza, and following last year’s battles with Hezbollah, Iran, and the Houthis in Yemen, plus its involvement in preventing Syria’s new government from massacring its Druze population.  While we understand that Israel is fighting genocidal, murderous terrorists, and horrible, evil regimes, and is accomplishing many of its tactical objectives in spectacular fashion, it is an uneasy feeling to see the only Jewish State in the world in what feels like a constant state of war.  Those of us who have friends and relatives in Israel know that they are still constantly dealing with sirens and bomb shelters on a regular basis, that nothing is really back to anything like normal. 

We also know that support for Israel in America has been dropping steadily, influenced in large part by a steady propaganda barrage from the progressive left that treats every Israeli defensive act instantly as evidence of genocide, and on the right by an isolationist element that is heavily tinged with antisemitism.  Both sides would like to see the only Jewish state in the world destroyed, to be honest, for very different reasons that somehow circle back to a foundational Antisemitism.

At a time when the American-initiated war with Iran seems to completely lack overall strategic vision, let alone an actual exit strategy, Israel is a convenient scapegoat, and its very unpopular Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu an obvious, and perhaps appropriate, target.  Now, make no mistake, what America and Israel have accomplished in a military sense in the last month is extraordinary: Iran’s nuclear program and ballistic missile capability have been severely degraded, much of its navy destroyed and its entire leadership killed.  In Lebanon, the hated Hezbollah terrorist network has been hammered, its leadership taken out, and its control of Southern Lebanon seriously diminished. 

We pray that the cease-fire between Israel and Hezbollah, just arranged yesterday, will lead to a productive settlement.  Unfortunately, that doesn’t mean the US and Israel has won this war, or that Iran’s regime will change, or the Straits of Hormuz are permanently open again to oil shipments, or that gas prices will immediately return to pre-war levels, or that Hezbollah will be expelled from all power in Lebanon.  When we celebrate Israel’s 78th birthday this coming week, we will do so with profound prayers not for victory but for the establishment of a durable peace, with security, for Israel and its troubled neighborhood.  And we pray, as well, that these three years of war will end with a better, more stable, healthier Middle East.  

You know, there has always been a certain rueful honesty in the way Israelis look at the world, and that impresses me as profoundly Jewish.  The Israeli jokes used to be things like, “How do you make a small fortune in Israel?  Come with a large fortune.”  And “Never say things can’t get worse; sure they can, just wait five minutes!”  Nowadays, that kind of cynicism can lead to a fatalism: “Peace with the Palestinians?  That will come just a little while after the Messiah arrives.”

The truth is, as Ben Gurion said, “In Israel, in order to be a realist, you must believe in miracles.”  This year, I think that is essential to understanding that this semi-permanent state of war is not the true destiny of Israel.  In fact, there will be a better time, and I firmly believe that eventually we will see something we never believed could be: that Israel will live in peace with all its neighbors.  And I believe that time is coming sooner than we might imagine.

After all, Israel’s very existence is a miracle.  It’s thriving culture and state is a miracle.  And its military power, which has protected all of that, is a kind of miracle as well.  Why not the miracle of peace, too? 

Yom HaShoah: A Reflection on Resilience

A Thought on Yom HaShoah Today: on Resilience

From Rabbi Samuel M. Cohon

There is no doubt that the destruction wrought on our people over the many centuries of persecution has taken a fearsome toll.  Demographers say that without the enemies who have tried to destroy us, in every generation, there would now be hundreds of millions of Jews in the world; today there are only 16 million Jews.  We have been brutally attacked by powerful empires, republics, kingdoms, sultanates, ​czars, cossacks, dictatorships, Reichs​, and jihadists, and it has always damaged us terribly. 

And yet, we Jews survive, and all those who sought our annihilation in the past are gone, afterthoughts of history.

That testifies to a profound and poorly recognized aspect of Jewish identity: resilience, the ability to rise from defeat and loss and destruction and to insist on living active Jewish lives.  As Jews, we always ​b​elieve that our amazing, ever-evolving tradition affirms life, ethics and holiness in unique and precious ways. 

And we know that each of us carries both the responsibility and the capability to continually renew Jewish life: through prayer, study, communal celebration and, most of all, righteous action.

Resilience is not a gift; it is a choice, a continual choice, to live our Judaism actively every day.

The Shoah was unique, an utter annihilation of the Jewry of Europe and half the Jews in the world in the early 1940s.  It is our responsibility as Jews to demonstrate the resilience that is ​so central to our tradition and our identity, and affirm “Am Yisrael Chai—the people of Israel live, and will always live.”

The Strength of Integrity - Gevurah

Sermon, Shabbat Shemini 5786, Rabbi Sam Cohon, Congregation Beit Simcha, Tucson, AZ

I must admit that my favorite Passover joke—perhaps not entirely appropriate from the bimah, but all those days of matzah have damaged my judgment—the story goes like this:

A rabbi brings his kosher for Pesach lunch to the park to eat, and he sits down on a bench.  Looking over, he realizes that the man on the other end of the bench is blind and apparently has no lunch to eat.  Feeling compassion for the blind man, the rabbi offers him a square of his matzah, which the guy accepts.  But a few minutes later the blind man reaches over, taps the rabbi on the shoulder and says, indignantly, “Who wrote this garbage?”

You see, the blind man tries to read the matzah, thinking it’s written in Braille… ah, never mind.

So, now that Passover is, well, past, and over, we are in the period of the Counting of the Omer, the time between the beginning of Passover and the holiday of Shavuot, the 7 weeks that extend from the 2nd night’s Seder of Pesach, the great festival of freedom, until the night of Shavu’ot, the holiday of receiving the Ten Commandments at Sinai.  As you know, each night of this period we perform the brief ritual, counting the Omer, reminding us of the ways our ancestors brought a special barley offering to the Temple in Jerusalem, connecting them especially closely with God in this period.  These subsequent seven weeks create a time for deepening the experience of freedom at Passover through the slow and steady work of self-exploration: examining the habits of thought and behavior that have kept us enslaved, seeking to jettison them and embrace liberation.

According to mystical tradition, each day of this seven-week period of the Omer is viewed as a time for spiritual and moral transformation.  Each of the 49 days is viewed as an opportunity to meditate on specific qualities through which we can refine ourselves during the journey back to Sinai, to prepare, if you will, to receive revelation once again.  It’s an opportunity for personal awareness and moral growth in this springtime period of the year.

The first week of the Sefirat Ha’Omer, the counting of the Omer, last week was focused on Hesed, love or kindness.  This week we are asked to focus on Gevurah, which is usually translated as strength, but which really reflects moral restraint and consistency in our good conduct.  Next week the quality we are to pay special attention to is Tiferet, harmony and beauty.  It’s a lovely way to seek greater human quality in your life, to reflect on how to improve your experience of those around you, and to make yourself a better person.

While this way of thinking about the period of the Counting of the Omer is usually called Kabbalistic, that is, mystical, and it certainly derives its ideas from the Sefirot, the spheres of divine energy in Kabbalah, Jewish mysticism, I believe it is in fact much more oriented towards Mussar, the Jewish practice of practical morality, individual ethics and self-improvement.  Whatever the origins of this Sefirat Ha’Omer practice, the concept of focusing on internal growth in the season of natural growth surely can be a beautiful and meaningful process.

Now, focusing on Hesed, love or compassion, is an easy sell.  Everyone can use more love, and certainly our world would benefit for a great deal more focus on compassion, and much less on resentment and hatred.  Love is something we all can relate to, and compassion is something we all need.

But Gevurah, strength or justice, even divine justice?  That seems much less appealing, and a lot harder to relate to.  So, how might we think about Gevurah, the element of Divine energy, or personal character, that we are asked to reflect on this week? 

Yes, Gevurah means strength or power, and in Kabbalah the Sefirah, the divine orb associated with Gevurah, is also called Din, or judgment.  In general, Jewish mysticism seeks to show balance between various divine attributes, and Gevurah, power or strength and judgment, is always balanced by Chesed, love or kindness or compassion.  Both are essential elements of character, as they are believed to be integral aspects of God’s identity; chesed is the core of all religion, love for humanity and compassion for all creatures.  It must be balanced by gevurah, justice, without which love cannot flourish in society, supported by moral and inner strength. 

Generally, we associate the positive aspects of religion with love and compassion, the chesed aspects, and the negative ones with strength and judgment, the gevurah aspects.  In fact, that’s not entirely correct.  Love, of course, is profoundly important.  But striving to act well in the world, conducting ourselves as good people in challenging environments, takes strength.  And, in particular, it takes self-control. 

In considering Gevurah this week, in this spirit of the Omer counting, we might consider ways that we can control our actions and our intentions towards positive ends in a more directed, focused way.  It is not enough to intend to do good; it is essential that we actually do good.  Judaism certainly wishes to see us feel good about acting ethically.  But it cares a great deal more about us actually acting ethically.  For example, it is not enough to intend to give Tzedakah, or even to feel the need to give Tzedakah; it is far more important to give Tzedakah, no matter how you feel about it or how grudgingly you give it, than it is to have a good attitude about intending to give Tzedakah and then, well, not do it.

If this Omer association with Kabbalah, or Mussar, seems a little preachy, well, it is.  But that is not always a bad thing.  For the journey from the celebration of freedom at Passover to the celebration of covenant at Shavu’ot can be one of true personal growth.  It can make us better Jews and better people.  And to accomplish that we must choose to reflect on just how we might best successfully change over this period.

We always say when we do the short blessing for the Counting of the Omer, “we count each day so that we might make each day count.”  Perhaps the best way to do that during this spring season is to focus on how to use Gevurah, personal strength and integrity, to improve.

May this be God’s will, but more importantly, may this be our will.   

The Hearts of Children: A Great Sabbath

Shabbat HaGadol Sermon 5786

Rabbi Sam Cohon, Congregation Beit Simcha, Tucson, AZ

A story.  For my radio show and podcast, Too Jewish with Rabbi Sam Cohon and Friends, I always try to find new Jewish musical cuts to play, especially around holidays.  One year recently I found a remarkable English language version of the Chad Gadyo sung by actor and musician Jack Black.  It goes kind of like this: Then came a cat and ate the kid, that father bought for 2 zuzim, Chad Gadyo, only weirder and with a certain extremely crazy energy.

Jack Black is Jewish of course, and a famous actor and musician—he starred in movies like School of Rock, High Fidelity, and the Jumanji series, among many other comedies that required someone stocky, Jewish, brilliant, and crazier-seeming than Seth Rogen.  He is also half of the rock duo Tenacious D.  So, Jack Black recording Chad Gadyo is fun, a celebrity Jewish guy doing a Seder song with real innovative flair—if in slightly garbled Aramaic pronunciation at times.

The rest of the story is this.  I have a friend, Rabbi Joe Black, a past guest of Too Jewish, who is a Jewish music recording star—remember, that’s Jewish recording star, which means not giving up the day job because you can’t make a living at that.  He composed the music for the prayer we sing near the beginning of services, “May it be beautiful”, among many other pieces.  Rabbi Joe Black was also the rabbi of a big congregation in Denver, Colorado, and he and his wife visited us in Tucson not long ago.  Anyway, when I played the Jack Black song for my wife Sophie she commented that she was surprised that a rabbi like Joe had garbled the pronunciation of the Aramaic a few times.  Then she asked how that song would have sounded if Jack Black had sung it.

But of course, Jack Black had sung it!  Sophie thought that Rabbi Joe Black did the recording, not Jack Black… Which I immediately texted to Rabbi Joe Black.  Who laughed, by text.  You might say, I have it all there in black and white.  Sorry…

Anyway, Chad Gadyo and Jack Black—and Joe Black—aside, we are approaching the freedom festival, the great holiday of Passover, now just five days away, which means this Sabbath is Shabbat HaGadol, literally the Great Sabbath preceding Passover.  Pesach is perhaps the most observed of all Jewish holidays, and it is certainly ideologically central to Judaism: the Exodus from Egypt and the theme of liberation from oppression is at the heart of our understanding of how the world should be and has inspired countless movements for freedom around the world throughout history. 

This Sabbath before Passover is also a big Shabbat because it marks a time of preparation for a holiday that requires lots of getting ready: removing the leavening from our homes, doing a thorough spring cleaning, and then cooking and prepping all the food for the Seder and the week of Passover.  So, a Shabbat Ha,Gadol indeed, a big Sabbath in every way.

However, the name for this day comes not solely because it’s the Shabbat prior to Pesach, but from the words of a special Haftarah, the selection from the prophets, chanted during the Torah service.  This prophecy comes from a man called Malachi, who is known as the last prophet in Jewish tradition, the author of the final book in the middle section of the Tanakh, the Hebrew Bible.  According to Judaism, Malachi—which means “my servant,” and is likely a description of his function, rather than his actual name—was the last person to receive direct communication from God commanding him to address the Jews. 

Malachi lived in the 5th century BCE, about 2400 years ago, when the Temple in Jerusalem had been rebuilt but religious motivation was waning.  As Rabbi Gunther Plaut put it in his commentary, “Malachi describes a priesthood forgetful of its duties, a Temple that is underfunded because the people have lost interest, and a society in which Jewish men divorce their Jewish wives to marry out of the faith.”

In other words, a time in some ways much like our own. 

In the special Haftarah chanted on this Great Shabbat, Malachi seeks to inspire the people of Israel to return to God and to worship, to connect again with their powerful ancient tradition.  He tells them, “For you who revere My name, a sun of righteousness will rise with healing on its wings… Remember the Torah of Moses, My servant, the ritual and practical laws I commanded him at Mt. Horev for all Israel.”  And then he concludes, “Here, I will send you Elijah the prophet before the coming of the great and awesome day of the Lord, to turn the hearts of parents to their children, and the hearts of children to their parents.”  In ritual tradition, part of that sentence is repeated, the coming of the great and awesome day, HaGadol v’HaNora.

I have always appreciated Malachi’s words: there will come a time when God will send Elijah the prophet, to turn the hearts of parents to their children, and the hearts of children to their parents, to bridge the great generation gaps and unite us across all that might otherwise divide us.

Malachi, prophesying in the 400s BCE, during the period of the Persian Empire, evokes the great, powerful, mystical hero prophet Elijah, his predecessor by some 300 years even then, saying, Hinei, Aochi sholeaich lachem et Eliyah HaNavi, lifnei bo yom Adonai, HaGadol v’haNora.  “Here, I will send you Elijah the Prophet, before the great and awesome day comes, to turn the hearts of parents to their children and the hearts of children to their parents.”  That beautiful sentence rings down to us through the ages.  What parent has not desired a greater closeness with his or her child, certainly at one point or another?  And what child has not desired greater closeness with her or his parent, certainly at some point?  Elijah must be something special to effect this great reconciliation, no?

Elijah of course figures prominently in the Passover Seder, theoretically visiting each table and drinking from the special kiddush cup set aside for him.  It is a beautiful, mystical moment in the later stages of the evening of Pesach: a time when we indeed can feel the closeness of reunited family at Passover.

I don’t know if your tradition for Elijah at the Seder is the same as my own family, but naturally we always have a large Elijah’s Cup, a Kos Eliyahu—or, depending on the number of Seder attendees and tables, sometimes multiple cups for Elijah.  When it’s time to invite him in we dim all the lights, and have children open the door, and add remembrances: of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising nearly 80 years ago that began on the night of the first Seder; of the sacrifices made by our brothers and sisters to establish the State of Israel and defend it; of the struggles for freedom that are taking place in our world today.  While the entire Seder—indeed, the whole holiday of Passover—is focused on reflecting the message of freedom by appealing to every one of the senses, and in many other intellectual and spiritual ways, it is this moment of Elijah’s cup that has perhaps the greatest emotional appeal.

There is a kind of magic that takes place, if you allow it to, with the lights dimmed and the wine of Elijah’s cup theoretically diminishing a little.  At the proper time, after the Birkat HaMazon, the Grace After Meals and the third of our four cups of wine, we open the door for Elijah, sing “Eliyahu HaNavi,” among the best-known of all Jewish melodies, and invite this symbolic man to join us for a few moments.

For children, especially, by this time well fed and a bit sleepy, it is a great opportunity to draw them in for this mystical moment.  Malachi’s words ring especially true today.  This is the time when parents’ hearts are turned to their children, and children’s hearts are turned to their parents.  It is when all of our hearts should open to those who still seek freedom, who cannot celebrate as we do at this special season.

One of my favorite stories about Passover is a Hollywood tale, and it comes from Sandy Hackett, writing about his father, the late, great comedian Buddy Hackett (“the guy with the marbles in his mouth”):

“Ever since I was a little kid, I remember Dad having an open house for Passover.  Actors, fellow comics, singers, they were all there for the Seders. One thing vividly stands out in my mind.  I went to open the door to let Elijah the Prophet in—and standing there was Gregory Peck.  He asked me if it was too late for the service, and I said ‘No, go right in; we’re all expecting you.’”

I guess if you open the door for Elijah the Prophet and Atticus Finch comes in, you are still doing pretty well.

And of course, at our first, very successful congregational seder at Beit Simcha, the children present rushed to open the door for Elijah—and saw a rattlesnake sitting just outside the door.  We chose to keep the door closed, called some animal handlers to pick up the snake, and instead of Eliyahu HaNavi we named him Eliyahu haNachash—Elijah the Snake.

We are thrilled that Wednesday night we will be able to hold a large public Seder—and we haven’t invited the snake to come back.

But what we have done, and encourage everyone to do, is to reach out to family, including those you haven’t seen for a while or may even be estranged from.  And see if a bit of that magic that Elijah conjures up at the Seder can enter your own life, and help bring about that magical turning—of the hearts of parents to children and the hearts of children to parents.  It is certainly worth making the effort at this Passover season, on this Shabbat HaGadol.  Even if you aren’t estranged from you kids, give them a call or a video chat and wish them a Chag Sameiach.  And then this will truly be a great Shabbat, and a holiday of blessing.