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.

Freedom from Personal Enslavement

Sermon Shabbat Vayikra 5786

Rabbi Sam Cohon, Congregation Beit Simcha 

Pesach is coming up in just twelve days.  The theme of Passover is freedom, of course: Pesach is zman cheiruteinu, the season of freedom, the ultimate festival of liberation, a celebration of the great human need for freedom from slavery, constraint, and bondage.  It is woven into our entire Jewish tradition.

Repeatedly in Judaism we are given the mitzvah, the commandment, to view ourselves as though we personally had come out of Egypt.  That is, we are supposed to think of ourselves as genuinely having been slaves.  Usually, this is explained as the requirement to identify with the downtrodden in every society, to remember that we ourselves were once wretched slaves at the bottom of the heap.  That means that no matter how well we do we are obligated to help those in need, to try to liberate those who are our own generation’s versions of slaves.  Long ago God brought us to freedom, after 400 years of servitude.  Now, we must help those who are similarly in chains.

A great lesson.  But perhaps there is more here.

Repeatedly in the Torah and of course at Passover we are told that we must see ourselves as having literally been slaves.  That may seem like a far-fetched idea to those of us who have grown up and lived in freedom and comfort in a free country.  America is the land of the free, isn’t it?  After all, in practical reality we are not servants to anyone and can make our own decisions about our course in life.

Or can we? The truth is, we are all not really so free as we imagine that we are.  We may not be slaves to Pharaoh in Egypt, we may not wear shackles on our ankles or wrists, but is it possible that we are all slaves to something? 

I remember the way a rabbi I worked with long ago used to explain what being a slave was when he spoke to preschool aged kids at Pesach time.  He would say, “Hold your hands super tight in front of you.  Pull very hard, but hold them so closely and strongly that you can’t get them out.  Keep trying; that’s what it feels like to be a slave.  Now, let them go!  That’s the difference between being a slave and being free.”

As a demonstration for preschool children, it sort of worked, provided the little kids’ hands didn’t fly out and whack the next kid in the nose…

But it was valuable because that’s more or less exactly what we are supposed to be doing this time of year: remembering what it was like to be a slave, the pain, the suffering, the struggle, the constriction.  We create that at the Seder: bitter herbs, memories of hard labor, the bread of affliction, lechem oni.  And always, the knowledge that you could never really just do what you wanted to do.

That sense of being limited, blocked, stuck is an underrated aspect of slavery.  Rabbi Arthur Waskow, of blessed memory, reminded us that the name for Egypt, Mitzrayim, includes the word Tzar, narrow, at its heart, a place of contraction and constraint. 

So, what does this mean for us today?

My friends, I’d like you to try a little thought exercise.  Imagine that you are a slave.  That is, what enslaves you, personally?

Is there something in your own life that holds you, personally, captive?  And what is it that keeps you there?

The physical, practical goal of the Exodus from Egypt was to free us from slavery.  But what God has Moses request from the Pharaoh initially is not physical freedom at all but spiritual freedom, the ability to go and worship God as the Israelites wished to do.  In other words, the real goal of the Exodus was spiritual, emotional, and psychological freedom.  Before the Israelites could value physical freedom, they needed to experience spiritual freedom.

In today’s world we may be physically free.  But by the standards that the story of Exodus establishes, in truth we may not really be so free.

So, I’ll ask again, what is it that enslaves you? 

We know that there are, in every community, people who are slaves to their addictions to alcohol, to prescription drugs, to illegal drugs.  We know that there are, in every community, those who are slaves to their addictions to food, to gambling, to other seriously damaging behaviors.  Less toxically, there are many who are addicted to social media or video games, to viral news feeds and other seemingly harmless but addictive behaviors.  Addiction is a kind of slavery, isn’t it?  

We also know people trapped in damaging relationships, in toxic work situations, in careers that are unfulfilling and unhappy.  And there are many people who are enslaved by financial pressures.  Others are workaholics, unable to free themselves from the prison of eternal obsession with their jobs and careers.  And we all know people who are slaves to physical illness or incapacity, trapped by their own body’s limitations. 

Then there are those people who remain in mourning after a great personal loss, unable to heal from it, still in servitude to grief.  We also know people who are slaves to their own dysfunctions: some who simply can’t show up on time, others who can’t make a simple decision, some trapped by their inability to tell the truth. 

So, as we approach Passover, when we will tell the story of the Exodus of our people from slavery, what is it that enslaves you, personally?  To be able to answer this question requires something akin to absolute honesty.  It can be hard to admit, but we must answer nonetheless: What traps you, controls you, chains you?  To what are you a slave?

It is possible that you can think of more than one thing that subjugates you and keeps you from being truly free.  But if you can focus on just one thing that makes a slave out of you, that is the crucial first step to becoming free. Because until you know what it is that enslaves you, what chains you, you can’t begin to try to become free.

To begin to seek liberation from that restricting enslavement, that challenging limitation, we each have the ability to imitate what our ancestors were supposed to do first: to seek spiritual liberation.  The first step is to realize that you are enslaved in some way.  The next step—and it’s a big one—is to free your spirit.  It is to realize that you are a unique and sacred image of God in this world, that you can to connect with the great power that belief and hope bring.  Because when you begin that process of freeing your spirit, you can begin to free yourself from the ways that you are enslaved.

That’s the true message of Passover, of our coming Pesach holiday: that each of us has the capacity to seek true freedom, in order to live a life of dedication not to habits or addictions or limitations, but to goodness and truth and love.  May this be God’s will; and ours.

Kein Yehi Ratson.

Generosity

Generosity

Speech by Rabbi  Cohon at “Prayer for Peace” Multi-Faith Service 3 10 26 held at the LDS (Mormon) North Stake, Tucson, AZ

There is a famous story about a rabbi who has a wonderful idea for how to fix the problem of poverty in his village.  He tells his wife, eagerly, ““All we need is to get all the wealthy people in town to give half their money to the poor, and we will be able to take care of the problem.”

His wife smiles indulgently and suggests he try to accomplish this.

Late that night the rabbi comes home, looking exhausted. 

“So how did you do?” his wife asks him.

“I’m halfway there,” the rabbi says.  “I have gotten all the poor people to agree to accept the money.”

Generosity is a funny thing.  We all know we should be generous and give to those in need, and we all do some of that.  But if we really were able to give enough to rectify the profound imbalances in our society, we would have a very different world.

The Hebrew word for generosity is tzedakah, which is also translated as charity.  But that is not an accurate translation.  Tzedakah has the root word of Tzedek, which means justice or righteousness.  In our tradition, the concept of generosity is not simply related to kindness or graciousness or sympathy of even empathy.  It is, at heart, the reestablishment of justice in a world that so often does not reflect that.  It is a profound commandment, very much at the heart of Jewish ethics.  Tzedek Tzedek tirdof, we are commanded in Deuteronomy: justice, justice you must pursue. Equity of opportunity, including financial opportunity, is a central aspect of justice.  And without justice, of course, there cannot be peace.  Which means that without the generosity that enables justice in our society and our world we will never be able to enjoy true peace.

In the Talmud, the great collection of law and lore, Judaism mandates tzedakah, generosity in charitable giving, to the level of 10% to 20% of your gross income.  The concept of tithing that is invented in the Torah was supposed to be the baseline, not the ceiling.  I wonder how many of us meet that standard today?

There is a well-known passage in the Mishna Avot, the ethics of the ancestors in the classic Jewish legal collection from the third century.  It reads:

אַרְבַּע מִדּוֹת בָּאָדָם. הָאוֹמֵר שֶׁלִּי שֶׁלִּי וְשֶׁלְּךָ שֶׁלָּךְ, זוֹ מִדָּה בֵינוֹנִית. ]וְיֵשׁ אוֹמְרִים, זוֹ מִדַּת סְדוֹם.[ שֶׁלִּי שֶׁלְּךָ וְשֶׁלְּךָ שֶׁלִּי, עַם הָאָרֶץ. שֶׁלִּי שֶׁלְּךָ וְשֶׁלְּךָ שֶׁלָּךְ, חָסִיד. שֶׁלִּי שֶׁלִּי וְשֶׁלְּךָ שֶׁלִּי, רָשָׁע:

There are four types of character in human beings: The first is the type of person who says: “what is mine is mine, and what is yours is yours”: this is an ordinary type of person…  A second is the person who says: what is “mine is yours and what is yours is mine”: this is a foolish person (am haaretz); third is the one who says, what is “mine is yours and what is yours is yours;” this is a pious person. And finally, there is the person who says: What is “mine is mine, and what is yours is mine”; that is a wicked person.

This is a pretty simple passage to comprehend, of course, and we can easily agree that someone who gives her or his possessions away to help others is some kind of saint; that someone who takes other’s needed possessions or funds is wicked, even evil.  We realize that most of us fall into the general category of “ordinary”: we protect our own stuff, but don’t give enough to others.

However, I’ve always been a little puzzled about that odd category of what is called in the Mishnah, “ignorant people”: those people who say, “what is mine is yours and what is yours is mine.”  I can’t say I know anyone like that, although I do remember the occasional neighbor who borrowed a tool or something and didn’t return it.  I’ve been that neighbor once or twice… But who thinks like that?  Who simple wants to just exchange all their stuff with other people’s stuff?

Odd solutions came to mind: was this some sort of ancient rabbinic objection to socialism or communism, over 1500 years before those concepts were ever conceptualized?  Were the rabbis warning us about the dangers of co-dependency nearly two millennia before Freud?

Or was there something else here? 

What is “mine is yours and what is yours is mine”: what if that means something quite different?

What if we think about that phrase as indicating that we are in society together, and that what you have, and what you need, is connected to what I have and what I need.  It is not a zero-sum game, as the rabbi in our first story believed.  It is much more a matter of how interconnected we all are, how we cannot see others fail without it impacting our own peace of mind, our own sense of justice and trust in our society.

Maybe the great scholars of our past were simply mistaken.  Sacrilege, I know, to say that, but the maybe the point of all this emphasis on generosity is to understand, acknowledge, and address the inequities in our society with our own generosity, because we are all connected.  We are all created in the image of the same God.  We are all responsible for each other.

4:3 הוּא הָיָה אוֹמֵר, אַל תְּהִי בָז לְכָל אָדָם, וְאַל תְּהִי מַפְלִיג לְכָל דָּבָר, שֶׁאֵין לְךָ אָדָם שֶׁאֵין לוֹ שָׁעָה וְאֵין לְךָ דָבָר שֶׁאֵין לוֹ מָקוֹם:

Ben Azzai used to say: do not despise any man, and do not discriminate against anything, for there is no man that has not his hour, and there is no thing that has not its place.

And there is no act of generosity you should not do, in the best way and to the best of your abilities.  Because only when we are truly generous to others will we see justice restored, and will we be able to enjoy true peace.

War with Iran

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

Suddenly, the US and Israel are exactly one week into the war with Iran.  The Islamic “Republic” has widened the conflict by attacking the Gulf States, Saudi Arabia, and even fellow Shi’ite nation Azerbaijan.  As the horrific extremist Shi’ite Islamist regime grows ever more desperate, it is striking out and has even attacked fellow terrorism sponsor and ally Qatar and closet ally Turkey.  The “Supreme Leader”—that is head murderer—is now dead, to be succeeded apparently by his son, who seems poised to be equally horrible, and the Iran regime’s proclamations about destroying its many enemies, and insane attacks on everyone in an effort to blow up the whole Middle East and interdict the flow of oil and gas to the world speak to a level of true desperation.

Iran’s next-to-last remaining ally in the region, Hezbollah in Lebanon, also sent missiles into northern Israel last week and was met with devastating strikes from the IDF.  Amos Harel, the military expert of Israel’s top left-wing newspaper, Ha’aretz, says that Hezbollah has actually played right into Israel’s hands, and with the Lebanese government actually trying to suppress it actively, and approving, to a degree, of the IDF’s attacks on Hezbollah in its Shi’ite enclaves, it may be possible for Israel to truly finish off Hezbollah as a threat.  

You know, a week ago Friday night I preached a sermon here for Shabbat Zachor, the Sabbath of Remembrance that preceded the festival of Purim, when we Jews in ancient Persia were saved from an evil man who sought to destroy us all.  In that sermon I traced the long history of those who sought to wipe the Jews from the face of the earth, the damage they have caused, and their failure to wipe us out.  In every generation this seems to occur, and we are still here, and they are all gone. 

In my talk I connected these ancient, medieval and modern attacks on our people to the current tyranny in Iran, which of course is the same country as Persia, and has some ethnic continuity with the ancient Persians.  And I noted that what was then an American military build-up in the Eastern Mediterranean and its environs was perhaps indicative of an attempt to finally topple the evil regime that has been murdering its own rebellious citizens en masse for months, and has fomented terror world-wide, and is responsible for the murder of many Israelis, Jews, and Americans over the nearly half-century of its evil misrule of a once-great nation.

Some of you came up to me the next day at Shabbat Torah Study and before and after morning services and told me that I was a prophet, able to predict the future; because of course that very night, perhaps beginning during my sermon, the American/Israeli joint attack on the Islamist regime in Iran began.  “You predicted it all, rabbi!” they said.  “And it’s happening on Shabbat Zachor and Purim—is that irony, intention, or destiny?”

Well, frankly, as Isaiah says in the Bible, I am not a prophet nor am I the son of a prophet.  In spite of your kind statements, I did not know that the attack on Iran would begin last Friday night, nor that the “Supreme Leader” Ayatollah Khamanei, who ruled Iran with an iron fist, enforcing Sharia Law with incredible harshness for 37 brutal years, would be killed, as would most of the leadership of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards who tortured and murdered any Iranian citizens who dared question the repressive regime.  While the apparent intent of the US military mobilization into the region was obvious to anyone, the actual attack being carried out effectively and with full intention wasn’t so easy to predict.

When I, or anyone is asked, what the end result of this current war will be, and we answer, please take it with a large shakersfull of salt.  Of course, no one knows if this will truly precipitate regime change in Iran or bring an end to the terrible rule of this extreme form of Islamist oppression.  We don’t know if Iran will cease using its oil money to sponsor terror groups all over the region and the world.  We don’t even know what the US goals are in this war.  But anyone who is upset that a vile, murderous theocratic dictator like Khamanei is gone is, well, quite muddleheaded, at best.  And anyone who protests in support of an Iranian regime that has systematically tortured and murdered women, LGBTQ members of society, and all potential political opponents, all while bankrupting a state rich in oil revenues and putting Teheran on the brink of running out of water before this war started is profoundly confused about what is right and wrong.

We don’t know what’s going to happen here; no one really does.  It’s not clear if there is any real organized opposition to take over even if this war “succeeds” in wiping out a substantial part of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard’s control of the country and of society.  And it’s hard to see how even that can be accomplished solely by airstrikes and missiles and drones, or through Kurdish militias.  But severely degrading the nuclear and missile and drone capacity of the madmen in Iran is an accomplishment in its own right.

So Purim is over, and Israelis continue to have to huddle in bomb shelters and hope the ballistic missiles don’t get through and make direct hits, which they did in killing 10 people, including a family at the synagogue in Beit Shemesh last week. US military personnel have died. Things were pretty weird here in America already, and war often accentuates the weirdest parts.  That execrable Antisemite Tucker Carlson claims that Chabad—Chabad!—drove the US military to this war in order to bring the Messiah and build a Third Temple, a conspiracy theory and blood libel I hadn’t heard before but have now.  The smoke of this war has again drawn our attention 10,000 miles away.  We hope for the fall of this horrifying Iranian regime, and we pray that civilians and innocents are kept out of the maelstrom of destruction that war always causes.

How long will this war last?  It is my hope that it concludes before Passover, now just three and a half weeks away.  Israelis spent this Purim in and out, but mostly in, bomb shelters; we pray that our brothers and sisters are able to celebrate the coming festival of freedom freely and openly.

If you consider the geopolitical situation of Israel on October 7th—or 8th—of 2023 and compare it to where it stands now, you can experience a kind of shock.  Because while Israel was then surrounded by a ring of fire, terrorists and hostile and powerful enemy nations and organizations bent on its destruction and the genocide of the Jews of Israel and the world, now, while again at war, it has vanquished all of its opponents in startling fashion.  It is not a time to gloat or feel great confidence; after all, this is the Middle East, and we are Jews, and both factors must influence us to be extremely cautious about ever feeling overly optimistic. But the change in the landscape is quite stunning.

There has been a high price paid.  But we can hope that perhaps by Pesach we will see a reason to celebrate the festival of freedom in a new Middle East in which Israel is far more secure and far better accepted as a powerful and positive force for good.

Kein Yehi Ratson; may this be God’s will.

Forgetting in Order to Remember

Sermon Shabbat Tetzaveh/Zachor 5786

Rabbi Samuel M. Cohon, Congregation Beit Simcha

It seems that the supreme leader of Iran is not feeling well and is concerned about his mortality. And so he goes to consult a psychic about the date of his death.

Closing her eyes and silently reaching into the realm of the future the psychic finds the answer: “You will die on a Jewish holiday.”

“Which one?’” he asks nervously.

“It doesn’t matter,” replies the psychic. “Whenever you die, it’ll be a Jewish holiday.”

If that’s the case, that holiday would certainly resemble Purim.  In fact, seeing that some view the leaders of modern-day Iran as kind of contemporary versions of Haman, the leading authorities in today’s Persia and totally obsessed with destroying the Jews, that holiday might well turn out to be Purim.  It happened that way once in ancient Persia, so why not again?  And if you remember, it also happened that way in 1991, when the Gulf War, and the awful, anti-Israel regime of another leader obsessed with Israel, Saddam Hussein, ended on Purim day, stopping the rain of Scud missiles on Israeli homes and the reign of a tyrant who also had many Haman-like qualities. 

So it goes with the season of Purim, when we Jews recall those who tried to destroy our people at this time of year in days gone by but failed to do so.  It is a related but rather different experience than all those other times of the year when we remember the enemies who sought to destroy us, and succeeded: Tisha B’Av, when we recall the destruction of both the First and Second Temples and the expulsion from Spain, or Yom HaShoah, when we remember the Holocaust victims, or Yom Kippur, when we recall all the martyrs of our long history.

But Purim falls into that sequence of festivals from Chanukah to Passover that can famously be summed up neatly in 9 words: they tried to kill us, we survived, let’s eat…

In a larger, more serious sense, memory is truly a central part of Judaism.  In the Ba’al Shem Tov’s memorable phrase, “Memory is the source of redemption; exile comes from forgetting.”

But sometimes memory is a very curious thing indeed, and the very desire to remember seems paradoxical, even perverse.

This Shabbat we observe Shabbat Zachor, the Sabbath of Remembrance in Jewish tradition.  By custom, after reading the weekly Torah portion that falls just beore Purim we add a short section of text that recalls the attack by the enemy nation Amalek on our Israelite stragglers as we escaped Egypt during the Exodus.  This attack, considered both vicious and cowardly by the commentators, is memorialized each year on the Shabbat prior to Purim.  This short maftir section both begins and ends with words of memory: Zachor et asher asa lecha Amalek, it begins, “remember what Amalek did to you,” and it concludes with the powerful statement timcheh et zecher Amalek mitachat Hashamayim; al tishkach, “Obliterate the memory of Amalek under heaven; don’t forget!”   

We always read this section the week before the holiday of Purim, the fabulous festival that we will enjoy Sunsay night at our Wicked Purim for Grown Ups and Monday night at the Megillah Reading, commemorating the great salvation of the Jews of Iran in Mordechai and Esther’s time, 2400 years ago, because Haman, the villain of the Purim story, is supposed to be a descendant of the Amalekites.  By some other traditions, all deep enemies of Judaism and Jews are linked to Amalek and Haman, including, in some peculiar readings, Torquemada and even Hitler.  Perhaps strangest of all, the Nazis seem to have embraced this association.  After all, they considered themselves true Aryans, and ancient Persia was an Aryan nation as well.

Adolf Hitler even banned the observance of Purim throughout German-controlled territory.  In a speech made on November 10, 1938, the day after Kristallnacht, the Nazi anti-Semitism chief Julius Streicher, creator of Der Sturmer, surmised that just as "the Jew butchered 75,000 Persians" in one night, the same fate would have befallen the German people had the Jews succeeded in inciting a war against Germany; the "Jews would have instituted a new Purim festival in Germany."  To avoid such a possibility, of course, the Nazis moved first…

Nazi attacks against Jews often coincided with Jewish festivals, especially Purim.  On Purim 1942, ten Jews were hanged in Zduńska Wola to avenge the hanging of Haman's ten sons.  In a similar incident in 1943, the Nazis shot ten Jews from the Piotrków ghetto.  On Purim eve that same year, over 100 Jewish doctors and their families were shot by the Nazis in Czestochowa. The following day, Jewish doctors were taken from Radom and shot nearby in Szydlowiec, and again a conscious linkage was made with Purim by the Nazis.

Most ironically, just before he was hanged, Julius Streicher, that Nazi arch propagandist, called out "Purim Fest 1946!"  And in a speech by Hitler himself on January 30, 1944, he said that if the Nazis were defeated, the Jews could celebrate "a second Purim".  We don’t, but of course in the Purim story very few Jews were actually murdered by the descendants of Amalek.  On the other hand, no one thinks celebration has much to do with any commemoration of the Holocaust.  

There are many curious customs associated with this mitzvah, the very specific commandment issued in Deuteronomy to “obliterate Amalek.”  Some Jewish communities, on Purim, write the name “Amalek” on their shoes and then rub it off on the floor during the Megillah reading.  And a traditional sofer, a Torah scribe, will begin to write a new Torah by inscribing the name “Amalek” on a piece of parchment and then crossing it out.  And since Haman was an “Agagite,” descended from the king of the Amalekites, the whole custom of graggers and noisemaking to blot out Haman’s name comes from this same commandment.

All of this raises a very good question.  Amalek was a minor people, more a tribe than a nation.  As a distinct political or ethnic entity, it has long disappeared from the earth.  In fact, if we really want to obliterate Amalek’s name from under heaven, the easiest way would be for us Jews to stop talking about it.  No one else would ever mention it again.  Poof, Amalek is gone, blotted out!

And yet, instead, we read this passage twice a year in synagogues around the world, once in Deuteronomy during the regular Torah reading cycle and once just before Purim on this Shabbat Zachor.  Why the elaborate need to remember a truly ancient wrong done to us?

Psychologists could say that the profound emotional injury perpetrated on our people nearly at the very moment of redemption—we had just gotten out of Egypt after 400 years of slavery—was so painful that we Jews have never really gotten over it.  The catharsis of remembering and overcoming Amalek each and every year helps us move to a healthier, more holistically complete place.  We remember so that we can overcome.

Political scientists would look at this remembering differently.  They might suggest that the military and organizational weakness that allowed the straggling Amalek took advantage of must be remembered so that we avoid falling into that trap again.  Organization, preparation, a proper plan are all essential to being a real nation.

Others have seen this remembering as a motivation to action, a goad to prevent us from ever again allowing ourselves to fall under the power of hostile others.  As in the story of Amalek, and nearly so in the tale of Purim, Jewish weakness has allowed our enemies to attack, torture, and slaughter us throughout history.  Rabbi Yitz Greenberg has written movingly about the necessity for a contemporary, post-Holocaust ethic of Jewish power, the moral obligation for us to be prepared to have and utilize power to protect ourselves and our children in a world that has never respected our great Jewish religion or culture. 

And of course, when Iran—that is, today’s Persia—is in the news for its nuclear aspirations and vile hatred of Israel and all Jews, when US forces are massing in the Middle East perhaps to attack Iran, we do well to recall that we need the power to protect ourselves, and that in fact we Jews have a moral obligation to retain and, if necessary, use power for that purpose.  We pray that won’t be necessary ever again.  But we also know that we must retain that capacity or face the possibility of once again having the noose fitted over our necks.

This reminds me of the story that the Iranian president calls the US President and tells him, “I had a wonderful dream last night. I could see America, the whole beautiful country, and on each house I saw a banner.”

“What did it say on the banners?” the President asks.

The Iranian president replies, “The UNITED STATES OF IRAN.”

And the US President says, “You know, I’m really happy you called because, believe it or not, last night I had a similar dream. I could see all of Tehran, and it was more beautiful than ever, and on each house flew an enormous banner.”

“What did it say on the banners?” the Iranian president asks.

“I don’t know,” replies the President. “I can’t read Hebrew.”

So why else might we insist on remembering those we are simultaneously commanded to forcefully forget?  Moral experts, like those who learn and teach musar, might see this paradoxical need as a kind of davka experience: the commandment to exterminate actually forces us to remember our own failures, and thus our own failings.  If we recall Amalek, and Haman, and, I suppose, Antiochus and Titus and Hadrian and the Crusaders and Torquemada and Hitler and Nasser and Sinwar, and how close we often came to destruction, we can never become too confident of our own prowess or foresight and must remain humble. And then we will be able to personally improve. 

Or we can take this curious remembering in a different, sociological direction.  In order to rise, we must first bottom out.  You cannot realize your full potential unless you remember how far down you have been.  Only when we recall the near destruction we suffered at the hands of a small, hostile tribe, an attack that nearly derailed us before we got fairly started, can we rise to the spiritual greatness to which we aspire.

But we can also see this more simply.  Remembering might be the primary Jewish act of all.  We are commanded, using the same exact Hebrew word, zachor, to remember the Shabbat, an unalloyed good just as Amalek is considered an unadulterated evil.  Our existence as intelligent, informed, thoughtful people, as true Jews, is contingent on our ability to truly learn, to do Torah.  In order to do that well, we must exercise our memories vigorously and completely.  In remembering both the good and the bad we are achieving the highest level of serving b’tzelem Elohim, as imitators of God. 

By remembering we can learn. And in doing so, we can learn how to act now, and in the future, and for the future. 

Or maybe there is something else here.  The clue comes in another paradox, this one presented in an ancient commentary.

A Midrash comments on the fact that the same exact word is used in the commandment to remember Amalek and to remember Shabbat, that word “Zachor.”  In Pirkei d’Rabbi Eliezer it says, "Remember what Amalek did to you." How can one do that? The Torah says, "Remember the day of Shabbat." We can't remember both!

Ah, but perhaps we can.  For in order to observe a Shabbat of true rest, we must first remember.  And only after that memory has been served will be able to truly rest.

In all of this remembering we are obligating ourselves to understand that first we must recall, and then we may relax.

This is Shabbat Zachor, and Sunday and Monday we will celebrate the great victory of Purim.  May this be a Sabbath when we can relax, knowing our people not only will survive but thrive, and we can enjoy true spiritual rest.

Mishpatim and Freedom

Sermon, Rabbi Samuel M. Cohon, Congregation Beit Simcha of Tucson

The great 1960’s comedian, Alan Sherman, most famous for his song “Hello Muddah Hello Faddah”, once wrote a book about restrictions on human behavior. In it, he decided to invent a new religion, which would have only one commandment: “Thou shalt not stuff 37 tennis balls down the toilet.” In great excitement he went to a sign painter to create the tablet of this new covenant and asked him to make up a huge sign with that commandment on it. But the sign painter refused.

“Friend,” he said, “I’m going to do you a big favor. I’m not going to paint your sign. Because if I paint it, the day after the sign goes up, there will be a run on sporting goods stores. Tennis balls will sell like hotcakes, and plumbers will be working round the clock. The virtuous among us will only stuff 36 tennis balls down their toilets. Normal sinners will stuff 37 tennis balls down their toilets. And the truly wicked will stuff 38 tennis balls down their toilets. Friend, we human beings are many things; but we all of us are perverse.”

As we approach this week’s Torah portion of Mishpatim, we do well to remember that. The last few weeks we have seen magnificent Torah portion after magnificent Torah portion. Now, after B'shalach's great song of freedom, after the majesty of the Ten Commandments at Sinai, after the greatest events in the history of the Jewish people, we thump down to earth with a Torah portion full of laws, restrictions, norms and standards. In short, rules; and we American Jews just don't like rules.

We do like the unabridged freedom of the Exodus story. Americans believe in freedom of thought, freedom of conscience, freedom of choice, freedom of and in every particular of our decision-making. We choose our own course in life and vigorously resist anyone who tries to curtail our liberties. Nobody tells us what to think, or how to act. This is the land of the free! Antique laws decreed by an ancient autocratic god? Al achat kama v'chama, how much less will we like those! We refuse to be tied up by rules, because they bind us in like the tefillin we don't wear.  The idea that we are bound in leather straps to God, that we are supposed to say, as we wrap them around our arm and hand the prophet’s words, “I bind you to Me forever, I bind you to Me in justice and law and kindness and mercy, I bind you to Me in faith so that you will know that I am God”—this is far too constricting for us.

And perhaps we have good reason to dislike rules. As contemporary Jews, we do not believe we are marionettes controlled by a heavenly puppeteer; we do believe that we are free actors in the magnificent improvisation of life. Religion can encourage social action, but it has no right to control social interactions.

So what do we make of Mishpatim? The first part of our portion is called the “Book of the Covenant”, a listing of the laws that the people were supposed to observe. These are not chukim, religious laws describing our relationship with God, but person-to-person laws, mishpatlm, that affect our everyday, human interactions. According to some authoritative rabbis, like Maimonides,  these are so basic that they would exist even without the Torah.  What we have are a bunch of rules, and the bottom line is, most people don't like rules.

But, as Alan Sherman’s sign-painter didn't say, the fact is that whether or not we like rules, we need rules none the less. In our own lives we abide by all kinds of rules.  We drive our cars according to the Mishpatim of the motor vehicle department. We pay taxes at the command of the IRS tax code. We use forks, spoons and knives at the behest of Emily Post. We listen to music from the Torah of Spotify or Apple Music, buy books and watch movies according to the recommendations of Netlix and Amazon Prime, and have our social conduct governed by laws as intricate as any Jewish legal Halachic framework—send a thank-you note, call your parent or child, visit an ill friend, dress respectfully to services, more or less. Our cherished illusion of no norms, of unbounded freedom in our daily lives, is really just that—an illusion.

But when it comes to religion it's a different matter. Or, rather, it's a different choice: you see, in our spiritual lives we are free, but it is the freedom to choose for ourselves whom we will serve and which laws, rules, and ideas are boundaries for our lives.

It's no accident that our sedra, the Torah portion of Mishpatim begins with the laws of servitude, the Hebrew indentured servant, the eved ivri. For the Israelites, "freedom" didn't mean the absence of control; it meant a free-will choice between serving God and serving Pharaoh. In Bob Dylan’s immortal words, "you got to serve somebody”; we exist in a context. Our choice is whether to blindly accept society's norms, or choose our own, Jewish path. Do we adopt the cultural code of conduct, or do we engage our tradition actively—including those unattractive rules, these mishpatim?

There is an intriguing parallel here to game theory: you can't play a game if you don't accept that game's basic rules. You can't play baseball without foul lines; you can't play the Super Bowl without downs; you can't play chess if pawns can jump. As progressive Jews each of us has the personal power to decide what the rules are going to be for this crucial game of Judaism.

That is, we non-Orthodox Jews have the ability to decide what our own Judaism will be. So how exactly do we make decisions about our moral life? What mishpatim will we choose to observe, and why?

5Orthodoxy has always held up a model from our very own Torah portion:

na 'aseh v'nishma, we will do the commandments and then we will hear them. Reform Judaism in the past has said "nishma—we will hear; and then we’ll see."  Some of us engage the tradition actively, with knowledge, insight, and the commitment of kabbalat ol malchut shama yim b'ahavah, receiving the yoke of the kingdom of heaven in love. But many of us think we are being good Jews when we choose lo nishma v'lo na'aseh, we will neither learn nor act, a sub-minimalist version of Judaism that jumps completely off the game board.

Our own ability to engage it, to work at our Jewish identity, is what defines whether we will be Jews who make a difference, who carry on our faith for our children, or Jews who allow it to slip away.

My grandfather, Rabbi Samuel S. Cohon, was one of the great ideologues of classical Reform Judaism. The Foundation named for him and his wife will give an award next week to those who work for the good of the entire people of Israel, klal Yisrael.  Over sixty-five years ago he wrote: "a religion that does not seek to lead and to correct, that asks for nothing, that is soft and yielding, that is all things to all people, is in reality nothing to anybody in particular and of doubtful value to mankind." To paraphrase Hillel, if we have no standards, what are we?

So where do we find those standards? The great ideas of the Ten Commandments in last week’s portion are not enough, and the Torah sees this immediately. That's why we have these mishpatim, these norms. It's not sufficient to say, "you shall not steal"; we must also say "don't keep Your neighbor's ox."  Today, we need to say, “you shall not defraud others online” and “don’t engage in a Ponzi Scheme” and “you shall not do insider trading" and, "You shall not defraud a big company on a contract" and “You shall not cheat or stiff your subcontractors.”  It's not enough to say, "You shall have no other Gods before Me"; we must say "if you wish to be Jewish, or for your children to be Jewish, you must make your house an active, religious Jewish home" and “You must support your synagogue materially so it can be a home and source for real Judaism.”

Progressive Judaism is flexible, but flexibility is not fluidity; to be flexible you must first have shape. It is our individual job to define that shape, and the way we use these mishpatim will guide us.  But we must use them.

This has been a cold winter in most of the country, and in Israel, too, with snow in Jerusalem.  Images of Jerusalem with snow always reminds me of an experience I had in Yerushalayim on New Year's Eve 1992, now more than 30 years ago. That night the greatest snowfall in recorded history drifted gently but steadily down onto streets, roofs and treetops. Those magnificent Jerusalem pine trees, all those great trees in Israel that we paid the Jewish National Fund to plant through those blue and white pushkes—all those now magnificent pine trees had never been pruned, and they had grown and spread out over most of the city. As we watched from our mirpeset, our balcony, the soft snow accumulated, and then the pine branches began to snap loudly and collapse onto the power lines below, severing the lines. Within hours all electricity was gone, and a dark, frozen Jerusalem returned to the 19th century.

Those beautiful JNF trees, which bordered our paths, which gave us shade in the summer and shelter in the winter, which gave our lives beauty and fragrance and comfort—if only they had been pruned! Now they would be cut down and removed completely.

Halacha, Jewish law, is often compared to a living tree, an etz chayim, and over time it grew luxuriantly, even out of control. In the 19th and 20th centuries Reform Judaism pruned that tree back, so that we might have the light of modernity. We know that trees grow higher, straighter and truer when they are carefully pruned, and that the best fruit grows on the new branches. But to grow new branches, to nourish new shoots, we still need the roots of that tree. And those roots are in the mishpatim, the norms and rules of human interaction and religious commitment.

In Hebrew, the word for root is ikkar, which also means essence. Our job as Jews today is to find the ikkar, to see that the tree we nourish grows from essential Jewish tradition. Our inner lives flourish and grow only if we are firmly planted in the soil of that tradition, if we fertilize and weed and trim and care for the flowering of our own and our family's religion and morality. A regular, practical examination of what we do for our Judaism, how we incorporate it into our daily lives, how we choose to support it, a voluntary binding of our own lives to rules that have meaning and a basis in tradition—that is what will determine the ultimate quality of our existence, that is what will make our lives, and our Judaism, flourish.

We must begin to put together our own Jewish world, and we can only do it one practical little law, one mishpat at a time. Paradoxically, perhaps, that is where we will find our true freedom. To quote poet Adrienne Rich:

"These atoms filmed by ordinary dust

that common life…

Freedom.

It isn't once to walk out under the Milky Way,

feeling the rivers of light, the fields of dark—

freedom is daily, prose-bound, routine remembering.

Putting together, inch by inch

the starry worlds

from all the lost collections."

It is ultimately through these simple Mishpatim that we will come, freely, to reach God, and to know God; and to be bound to God in intimacy, forever. And then, inch-by-inch, this world may truly come to be a vision of justice, of peace, and of God's presence.  So may it be, bimheira v'yameinu, speedily in our day; kein yehi ratson.

Being Commanded for Reform Jews

Parshat Yitro Sermon 5786, Rabbi Samuel M. Cohon, Congregation Beit Simcha, Tucson, AZ

This Sunday is an American religious holiday. It’s called Super Bowl Sunday, and besides being the day on which 10% of the avocados eaten all year in the United States are consumed in guacamole—that’s true, by the way—it’s certainly the biggest day for football, commercials and betting pools.  It’s quite impossible to schedule anything else for that time, as even non-football fans—you know you who are—end up watching some or all of the televised event.  According to AI, which is always true and accurate, about three quarters of Americans watch the Super Bowl, or at least part of it.  These days you can’t get 75% of Americans to agree on anything, but that many of us agree to watch the same football game in February.   Even the half-time show—the half-time show!  When most of us who actually are football fans always plan to take an essential break—the half-time show is considered so important that it becomes a national news story for weeks beforehand, or at least it did this year.

In any case, Super Bowl Sunday is clearly the only Sunday of the year which has its own name for all Americans.  It’s very likely the single most observed US holiday of the year, or at least tied with Thanksgiving.  I’m pretty sure more Americans observe Super Bowl Sunday than the 4th of July, New Year’s Eve, or Valentine’s Day.

Well, if you were to rank Torah portions, this week’s Parshah of Yitro would certainly be in the discussion for the Super Bowl Sunday of all Torah portions.  In fact, since we are about to enter Oscar season too, Yitro would undoubtedly also be nominated for the Oscar for Best Torah Portion of the Entire Year, whether there were 5 nominees, as in the old days, or ten nominees, like we have now.  Because this week’s parshah includes the Ten Commandments, the Aseret HaDibrot, greatest direct communication that ever took place between God and human beings.  It is a portion of drama and power and, most of all, commandment.

For Orthodox Jews the notion of commandment is very clear.  God commands, and we obey—God is the m’tzaveh, the Great Commander, and we are the m’tzuveh, the commanded.  It all starts with this portion of Yitro, at Mt. Sinai: God literally commands us aloud to observe these 10 Statements, and then gives Moses the rest of the Torah and the Bible and the Talmud, which we then are equally obligated to follow faithfully.  Many more commandments, more mitzvot to observe, all directly commanded buy God. And since all of Judaism was what today we would call Orthodox Judaism until about the year 1800, what was good enough for Moses was also good enough for Moses Maimonides, and Moses Mendelsohn, and your great-great-grandfather Moses in the shtetl, too.  In fact, for Orthodox Jews, there were and are not 10 Commandments, but 613 commandments, the Taryag Mitzvot, the totality of the commandments given to us according to the rabbis. Our personal goal should be to successfully observe as many of them as possible, or at least all the ones we can do in the nearly 2000 years since the Temple in Jerusalem was destroyed.

One Commander, God, commanding us what to do and what not to do.

But the concept of commandedness, for Reform Jews, presents a real problem. 

What exactly does it mean to be commanded when you aren’t so sure that the revelation at Mt. Sinai really happened as they say it did in the Torah, or if all those mitzvot weren’t necessarily all given directly by God—or if any of them perhaps weren’t given in the midst of a cloud of smoke and fire, with earthquakes and shofars blasting?

You can view this whole issue of mitzvah, of just what constitutes a commandment and just who is commanding us, as the central question that Reform Judaism, and Reform Jews need to address. 

Orthodoxy has always followed words from our very own Torah portion, the phrase the Israelites say to Moses and God before the Ten Commandments are even given: na 'aseh v'nishma, we will do the commandments and then we will hear them. Reform Judaism broke with that concept 200 years ago, by saying, "nishma-- we will hear and understand those commandments; and then we’ll see which ones we will do."  It insisted that Reform Jews study Judaism deeply and personally decide what kind of Jews they were going to be.

Now, some Reform Jews do indeed engage in our tradition actively, with knowledge, insight, and commitment, and make choices for themselves and their families based on their personal ethics and identity. But, if we are honest, many of us Reform Jews think we are being good Jews when we choose lo nishma v'lo na'aseh, we will neither learn nor act Jewishly.  Because if all those commandments don’t come directly from God, why should we even learn them or think about doing them?  Aren’t we just as smart and important as the people who thought up all these “commandments”?

My friends, you will hear it often said that being a good Jew means being a good person. This confuses a 3500-year-old tradition with the Boy Scouts of America.  Judaism is a particular, magnificently moral religious tradition. Our own ability to engage it, to work at our Jewish identity, is what defines whether we will be Jews who make a difference, who carry on our faith for our children, who preserve and evolve this amazing ethical and communal culture and civilization, or semi-Jews who allow it all to slip away.

My grandfather, Rabbi Samuel S. Cohon, was one of the great ideologues of classical Reform Judaism. Seventy years ago, he said: "a religion that does not seek to lead and to correct, that asks for nothing, that is soft and yielding, that is all things to all people, is in reality nothing to anybody in particular and of doubtful value to mankind."  To paraphrase Hillel, if we have no standards, what are we?

The authority for the Ten Commandments is in this simple statement: God exists, acts, and commands.  It is why they are not called the Ten Suggestions.  Or the Ten Recommendations.  Or the Ten Nice Ideas if You Can Manage Them.

It is only when we accept the existence of God, when we diminish our own elaborate sense of self, that we are able to partner with God to create a moral world.  Only when we engage with the Commander, however defined, do we find the Commandments.  

Rabbi Eric Yoffie, the former head of the Union for Reform Judaism, made this point repeatedly over the years of his presidency.  Reform Judaism obligates us to study and then choose to observe both moral and ritual practices.  We are not commanded to follow everything in our tradition: but neither are we free to choose nothing and claim that we do so “because we are Reform.”  Quite the contrary.

At the very least we must seek, in these Ten Commandments and in our lives, to find a moral center for our lives, a way towards commandment that confirms the ethical nature of our very existence.

Perhaps the greatest of all the Jewish questions was asked in the Torah portion of Ekev in the Book of Deuteronomy.  It reads:

V’atah, Yisrael, mah Adonai sho’eil mei’imach?

Which means, “And now, Israel, what does God ask of you?”

The passage then answers, “That you have awe of the Lord your God, and walk in all of God’s ways and love God, and serve the Lord your God will all your heart and all your soul.”

It’s a clear and powerful list: fear God; walk in God’s ways; love God; serve God; follow the commandments.

Five hundred years later Isaiah distilled even these terse commands into a more concise version: Cease to do evil, learn to do good, he begins.  And then he lists: seek justice; relieve the oppressed; uphold the orphan’s rights; take up the widow’s cause.

A century later the prophet Micah refined the formula again: he asked, “What does the Lord your God seek of you? Only to do justice, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God.”

Finally, Hillel, four hundred years later, over 2000 years ago, said it most concisely.  “Do not do to others what is hateful to yourself.  All the rest is commentary.  Now, go and learn.”

I recommend that you personally adopt one of these magnificent formulas, and make it your own set of commandments.  Whichever one you choose, it will be a high standard for how to live life—but it’s one you, or I, or anyone can achieve, if we choose to do so.

After all, it’s what God wants… and so should we.

That is what it means to be “commanded” for a Reform Jew.

On this Shabbat, may we seek, and find, our own ethical center, and our own moral code.  And may those commandments bring you to honesty, holiness, and blessing.

Is It Time To Leave Now?

Is It Time To Leave Now?

Sermon Parshat Bo 5786

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

This week, as Anastasha has told us, we read in Parshat Bo about how our ancestors packed their bags in haste and fled Egypt, after living there for over 400 years.  It was the first of so many Jewish exoduses in history, in which our people fled oppression in the land of our residence and headed for freedom in new and often distant lands.  Most of the ancestors of our congregants here at Beit Simcha fled Europe to come to America; others left other lands, seeking freedom of religion and success here.  This pattern has been repeated many times throughout Jewish history.  Today we seem to be facing, or at least beginning to explore, a relevant question.  Is it time to think  about moving on again?

There is an ancient Chinese curse with which you might be familiar; it goes like this: “May you live in interesting times.”  Well, my friends, we apparently live in interesting times.  Or, to put it another way, this is one of the stranger periods for American Jewish life that I can recall.  After over half a century of a golden age for Jews here in the United States, during which we reached heights of success and acceptance never before achieved in our long history outside of Israel, the US Jewish community is now experiencing rising Antisemitism on the left and the right, a dramatic increase in anti-Jewish violence, and a level of insecurity that we haven’t known in decades.  For the first time in my life, I have heard Jews saying, “We need figure out where we are going to go next.”

Now, this is an extraordinary turn of events.  America has proven over the past 250 years to be a true refuge for Jews from all over the world.  Nearly unique among nations, the US has given Jews full civil rights, and has never had any national anti-Jewish legislation, in part because we have to a large degree preserved the separation of church and state.  While antisemitism was prevalent in many parts of the country well into the 1960s, both obvious and subtle, it did not ultimately prevent Jews from rising in nearly every field of endeavor, and from inventing entire industries—like Broadway, Hollywood, the music industry, the comic book world, fashion, and lot of the high-tech industry—out of whole cloth.  It took some time, but Jews are well-represented in Congress, in the Judiciary and in the Executive branch, and have risen to the top of many name-brand companies.  Jewish creativity has long fueled much of America’s dynamic contributions to the arts, and in fields as diverse as medicine, sports, the military, and the environment Jews are leaders and innovators at the highest level. 

In our own Jewish institutions, too, we American Jews have developed an incredible religious and cultural infrastructure in the US that is without parallel in our 3800 years of history.  There are thousands of excellent synagogues in America serving the 6 million or so Jews who live here, of every denomination, as well as a wide array of Jewish Community Centers, Jewish Federations, Jewish day schools and supplementary schools, Yeshivot, Jewish preschools and early childhood centers, college and university Hillel Foundations, Jewish camps, Jewish retreat centers, Jewish museums, Chabad synagogues and centers, and Jewish universities and colleges.  There are rabbinical and cantorial seminaries preparing rabbis, cantors and educators for the next generations of religious leadership.  There are Jewish publishing houses as well as major Jewish research libraries.  You can find Jewish community campuses in a variety of urban centers all around the US, and Jewish institutions that provide charitable and communal support for Jews in need and for Jewish institutional development in every region and in every major metropolitan area.  A veritable fountain of Jewish books, Jewish music, Jewish films and Jewish art and Judaica pour forth every year to supply the needs and desires of this exceptional American Jewish world, and the curiosity of our neighbors and friends.

This is all an amazing accomplishment for a tiny minority population in our giant nation.  It is essentially without parallel in Jewish history; there have been great Jewish communities throughout the ages, including a huge, vibrant, and deep Jewish world in Europe that lasted for centuries until it was annihilated by the Nazis.  But what we have here in America is even more impressive, and is in fact, spectacular, and our level of acceptance has seemed always to be on a rising arc for decades.

Now, there was a long time when “unofficial” quotas in America blocked Jewish students from entering Ivy League schools, when Jews weren’t allowed into country clubs and when prestigious neighborhoods prevented Jews from buying homes and entire professions and industries were blocked for Jews.  There were restricted hotels and resorts—that, Jews weren’t allowed to stay there—until the 1970s in many parts of the country, including here in Tucson in such places as the Arizona Inn and the Lodge on the Desert.  But over the past forty to fifty years nearly all of those restrictions disappeared completely.  For goodness sakes, there are more—and better--Jewish TV shows and films easily available now on mainstream media than there were for perhaps the first century of these American popular entertainment vehicles.  We have risen to the very top of society in so many areas and been widely accepted for quite a long time now.

Has all this suddenly changed?  Are we now an endangered Jewish community, and do we anticipate that in the near future we will see Antisemitism drive us from this Goldene medinah, this golden land of America, as we were driven from Israel, Germany, Russia, Spain, Portugal, Morocco, Iraq, Iran, Yemen, Argentina, Poland, Italy, and so many other centers of Jewish life throughout the world over the course of history?  Are we destined to see American Jews become Wandering Jews again, seeking a new homeland because of the terrible rise in Antisemitism and anti-Jewish hostility?

I guess, at this point, I don’t think so.  While the shocking atrocities of recent years—from the Tree of Life synagogue murders in Pittsburgh five years ago to the arson at the Jackson, Mississippi synagogue two weeks ago—are frightening and distressing, they do not, in my view, constitute a reason to start to figure out how to pull up stakes on this incredible American Jewish world.  The dramatic outpouring of vicious Antisemitism from the progressive world over the past couple of years has been traumatic, to be sure, and the harassment that Jews have experienced on college campuses since October 7th, 2023 is nearly without precedent.  The renewal of neo-Nazi style rhetoric and vitriol online, and by disgustingly popular ultra-right-wing bigots like Candace Owens and Tucker Carlson, is horrifying; so is the public validation by some of our leaders of scum like KanYe West and Nick Fuentes. 

I, personally, believe this all can and will be counteracted by some return to sanity here in America—our country is, well, a little bit insane right now, but we do always swing back to the center eventually—and through the kinds of actions being taken now, and being planned, by Jewish leaders and with the support of non-Jewish leaders and institutions, both fighting Antisemitism and in support of our vital American Jewish institutions.  

Being Jewish, I cannot say that I am unbridled optimist.  What is the old joke?  “The Jewish pessimist says, ‘It can’t get worse.’  And the Jewish optimist says, ‘Sure it can!’”  It can, and it might.  But I simply don’t think the eternal lesson of the history of Jewish persecution that teaches that we always have to be thinking about where we will need to go next applies here to America.  There is no better place for Jews in the world today, still, especially if you don’t speak Hebrew fluently.   And it is certainly debatable if it’s truly better in Israel now for Jews than it is here in America.

So don’t pack your bags just yet… don’t start baking matzah and filling up a sack, if you will.  We American Jews still have much to be grateful for as Jews in this nation, and we are by no means either powerless or under imminent threat of expulsion.  Sometimes the right thing to do is to double down on your commitments, to strengthen your dedication to your American Jewish identity and life.

This is the time to do that.  May the current madness pass, and may we remain committed to continuing to build our society, and our Jewish lives, for good.

Light the Lights

Sermon, Shabbat Mikets

Rabbi Samuel M. Cohon, Congregation Beit Simcha

Hanukkah is a time of celebration for Jews everywhere, commemorating the great victory of our ancestors over deadly religious persecution.  While not as theologically important as the High Holy Days or Pilgrimage festivals, historically it is the most important of all our holidays.  Without the victory of the Maccabees over the Seleucid Empire, Judaism would have disappeared 2200 years ago, and the belief in one God with it.  Without Hanukkah, Christianity would never have existed, and Islam would never have been created, since both religions emerged out of Judaism and incorporate many of our teachings, and our entire Bible, into their daughter faiths.

Hanukkah should be a time to rejoice, to bring light to a dark time of year, to celebrate the victory of faith over repression, belief over hypocrisy, good over evil.

This year the experience of Hanukkah has been severely damaged by the horrific Anti-Semitic Islamist attack at Bondi Beach in Sydney, Australia by radicalized Pakistani Muslims with connections to the Islamic State.  That attack was the worst antisemitic attack in Australian history, the culmination of a series of antisemitic attacks that the current government of Australia has been weak responding to.  On a personal note, I served as a rabbinic intern and cantor in Sydney for four months some years ago, not far from Bondi Beach, and the Australian Jewish community is quite wonderful.  This terrorist atrocity struck home.

The Bondi Beach attack took place at a Hanukkah event put on by Chabad.  The murderers took long guns and killed two rabbis, a Holocaust survivor, and a 10-year-old girl, among the 15 innocent people they deliberately shot to death.  This was pure anti-Semitic hatred, cold-blooded terrorist murder of Jews celebrating the holiday that guarantees religious freedom. 

This attack, like the murders in Manchester on Yom Kippur, and the attacks that take place all around the world, are supposedly a response to Israel’s war in Gaza.  That is a preposterous lie.  The entire world condemns Russia’s Putin-driven brutal invasion of Ukraine, yet no one deliberately murders Russians on the beach in Thailand or commits arson against Russian Orthodox churches. There are real genocides that have taken place all over the Muslim world, from Syria to Iraq to Iran, and genocidal mass murders are being perpetrated today by Muslims in Sudan and Nigeria, yet mosques are not routinely attacked or surrounded by protestors in London and Amsterdam and Toronto and Los Angeles and New York.  Christians are perpetrating genocide against Muslims now in the Central African Republic, but all churches don’t have full-time security forces to protect them from terrorism.  This has nothing to do with Israel or its military actions.  It is pure, unadulterated antisemitism, racism, terrorism.  Against people gathering to celebrate the festival of religious freedom from persecution. 

For goodness sake, Chabad adherents in Israel don’t even serve in the Israel Defense Forces.

Well, at Bondi Beach the Intifada has been “globalized,” as protestors of a concert in Amsterdam chanted on Hanukkah. “Intifada” means murdering innocent civilians living their lives, shooting them or blowing them up to cause chaotic destruction.  It is a hate-fueled effort to annihilate a people, we Jews, who constitute less than one quarter of one percent of the world’s population, homicidal actions taken by fanatics who seek to destroy civilization.   

It has nothing to do with protecting the Arabs of Gaza or improving their lives. 

We hoped the end of the Gaza War would bring sanity back to this planet.  But the end of the war wasn’t cheered by those who agonized about the Palestinian victims.  Strangely, the end of the danger to Palestinians brought no joy to those chanting for the destruction of Israel and Jews.  Because these protests were never about the suffering of Palestinians, or the evils of the Netanyahu government, which are real.  They were about destroying the only Jewish state on the planet and, along the way, all Jews.

After Bondi Beach, Jews in Australia were told not to hold public celebrations as a form of self-protection.  For a while all Jewish schools and synagogues were closed. 

That is the opposite of what Hanukkah represents.  It is a time to affirm our right to celebrate our heritage publicly and positively, to light bright lights on these darkest days. 

Antisemitism, oldest and most virulent form of racism in world history, is back now with a vengeance.  Which makes Hanukkah, and Jewish affirmation, ever more important: we must fight for our right to be Jews, and do so publicly, proudly and with great energy.  We must bring even more light into this dark time.

There have been some sparks of light in this challenging season.  I received a call yesterday from a non-Jewish Oro Valley resident who asked if it was OK to put a picture of a menorah in support of the Jewish community.  She was outraged at the attacks, and she is not alone.  We have many friends, and it is part our mission to continue to cultivate them.

So how does Judaism help us to hold on through life’s inevitable dark times?

In this week’s Torah portion of Mikets Joseph is in the depths of despair, forgotten, locked away in an Egyptian prison, then as now a terrible place.  He has fallen far and fast, betrayed by those he trusted most.  He has every reason to give up hope, to surrender to despair.

And yet he chooses not to.  Instead, the great dream interpreter tries to help his fellow prisoners, to stave off depression by caring.

In the darkness of a dungeon he lights a light.  It is the light of help and the light of hope.  And it banishes the darkness, truly.  That light will lead Joseph to save that country from famine, and then to save his own family from starvation, and finally catapult him nearly to the throne.  

During these shortest days of the year it is time that we rededicate ourselves to the real purpose of Chanukah. For the lights of Chanukah were meant to banish darkness from our world—our own human darkness, perhaps even the darkness of antisemitism.  With this light, we can emerge from these shadows and illuminate our world.

It is fascinating that the central prayer we say on Hanukkah, al hanisim, praises God for the miracles that were wrought for our ancestors in those days long ago.  In truth, those miracles were really a simple matter of a more deeply committed people fighting for their homes and their beliefs and culture against a larger, numerically stronger, better funded enemy.

Kind of what we are facing in many ways right now…

My friends, I can’t say that I enjoy talking about Antisemitism.  At one point in my rabbinate I believed that it had declined so much in popularity and virulence that I wouldn’t have to teach or preach about it for long.  I was wrong, of course.  When I interviewed Jonathan Greenblatt, the CEO of the Anti-Defamation League who will be on my Too Jewish Radio Show and Podcast this Sunday, he said that what he recommended for all Jews to do is to be more Jewish, more openly and publicly Jewish, to bring more light in these dark times.

I told him he sounded like a rabbi…

Because what we rabbis always say, correctly, is that the best response to antisemitic acts of violence and repression is to renew our own commitment to Judaism, and our own acts of Jewish observance. 

It’s what Joseph taught us; it’s what the Maccabees did.  Celebrate your Judaism, live it actively, and share it with your friends and neighbors.  Then you will be lighting these lights brightly when we most need them.

Chag Chanukah Samei'ach Amid Tragedy in Australia

As we celebrate the great festival of lights, we mourn with the Australian Jewish community over the murder of 15 people celebrating Hanukkah on Bondi Beach in Sydney.  At a time when we commemorate the ancient Hasmonean victory for religious freedom against brutal persecution, we know that there are those who seek to deprive us of the right to live our lives as Jews.  This terrible event in far-away Australia is not merely a tragedy: it is emblematic of the antisemitic efforts to attack and destroy Jews and Jewish life everywhere in the world.

Our hearts are torn by scenes from the perpetration of this crime: 15 dead, ranging in age from 10 to 87 years old, 42 people wounded, 27 of them hospitalized, simply because they had attended a Hanukkah event on the famous beach in midsummer Sydney.  Two Chabad rabbis, one the organizer of the event, were murdered, as was a Holocaust survivor, Alexander Kleytman, killed while shielding his wife.  At least four children were shot.

The murderers were Pakistani immigrants to Australia who were radicalized by Islamic State propaganda: an Islamic State flag was found in their car, as well as explosives.  One of the murderers was eventually stopped by a fruit shop owner named Ahmed al Ahmed, who tackled the killer and turned his own gun on him. Two police officers were critically injured.

Antisemitic acts, especially including violent ones, have been rising all around the world over the last several years.  This is not accidental, nor is it because of the actions the State of Israel has taken to defend itself from Islamists who seek to destroy it.  Jews have been physically attacked for being Jewish in New York, London, France, Los Angeles, Toronto, Melbourne, Manchester, Boulder, Switzerland, Harrisburg, Milan, and Athens, among other places.  Nearly every synagogue in the world now has armed security each Shabbat, as we do.

Tragically, Australia has seen a rising tide of antisemitic incidents over the past several years, and unfortunately its political leadership has consistently failed to aggressively counter the movements that are promoting them.  I had the privilege of serving as a rabbinic intern and cantor in Sydney, not far from Bondi Beach, for several months 30 years ago.  It is a lovely part of the world, and the Jewish community there is quite wonderful.  It is a wonderful place to live and work, and Jews have been part of Australian society since the First Fleet landed in the late 18th century.  And now that extraordinary Jewish community is attacked and endangered by the failure of the authorities to take seriously the rising danger of an ideological hatred of Jews that has taken root in society. 

Hanukkah celebrates the victory of the few over the many, the weak over the strong, the believers over the idolaters.  It is a holiday of true religious freedom, of the victory over the first documented religious persecution in human history, but of course not the last.  At this time of gathering darkness, we must affirm the glow of the light of courage and commitment, of dedication to our people, by proclaiming our devotion to our heritage, our values and our religion.

We mourn the latest victims of antisemitic violence.  Our most powerful response must be to more deeply affirm our Judaism at this Hanukkah season.

May it still be a Chag Urim Samei'ach, a festival of true light.

A Man in Full, Finally

Torah Talk on Vayishlach 5786, Rabbi Samuel M. Cohon, Congregation Beit Simcha, The Too Jewish Radio Show & Podcast

Recently in America we have been experiencing what can be most charitably described as a “reexamination” of what being an adult male should mean.  In some quarters, “true maleness” is defined by Barstool-Sports level crudity, rudeness and even violent behavior; in others, masculinity itself is demeaned as intrinsically destructive.  Meme-worthy ideas like “Real Men Do” or “Real Men Don’t” are pitted against concepts of “Toxic Masculinity” and “Hyper-Aggression and Dominance.”

So what truly marks a man as an adult?  How do we know when he moves from youthful immaturity to become a genuine grown-up, a man in full?

This week’s Torah portion of Vayishlach focuses on the man who is the true father of our nation, Jacob, and the way in which he becomes Israel. Throughout his colorful life Jacob has been less than a full man.  He is, in fact physically strong: he moves a giant rock off the mouth of a well by himself to impress the pretty Rachel.  He has been attractive to women—he has four wives by now.  He has been genetically prolific, having produced 12 children.  And he has acquired wealth: goats, sheep, cattle, livestock, real and valuable property.  He is a successful entrepreneur who has maximized his own return.

While he is a strong, able man, it is his brother Esau who has always been the athlete, the hunter, the toughest guy on the block.  Dad liked Esau best, and that wound remains for Jacob, even though clever Jacob conned gullible Esau out of both birthright and blessing.

Jacob has also long been a master manipulator, a trickster whose most important priority is always his own needs.  Jacob has never yet met a situation he will not try to turn to his own advantage, almost always at the expense of others, including his own immediate and extended family members.  Suddenly here in Vayishlach—admittedly in the face of threatened destruction—he realizes that it is more important to him to save others than it is to save himself. 

Jacob is returning to his homeland, Canaan, approaching the border, the Jordan River, when he is informed his estranged and wronged brother Esau is coming to meet him at the head of an army.  Forced to face Esau, he chooses to do perhaps the very first altruistic act of his entire life: he tries to save his family before he saves himself.  He divides his family into two camps, sets up a rich present—a bribe—for Esau.  And then he confronts his fears.

Jacob gets up in the middle of the night, terrified of the coming encounter with his well-armed and accompanied brother, and goes alone to an island in the river. 

We don’t know why he ends up in the most famous wrestling match, the cage-fighting-championship-of-Canaan, nor do we know against whom he is wrestling.  We only know that Jacob ultimately prevails, at the cost of serious physical injury, a limp that plagues him the rest of his life.  And we know that his name is changed to Israel, the name that becomes our name as a people, Am Yisrael, B’nai Yisrael, the People and Children of Israel, and the name of the land that will be ours, Erets Yisrael, the Land of Israel.

It is notable that Jacob, in this encounter, shows his physical prowess, as we are taught men must.  But it is perhaps most noteworthy that Jacob demonstrates his prowess over someone other than a human opponent, in “wrestling with God.”  For in Vayishlach Jacob overcomes his own Yetzer, his own nature, which has directed him towards selfishness and manipulation.   He becomes for the first time a man in full, understanding he must prioritize others before himself.  When he rises from this encounter to meet Esau, limping off to greet him, he does so with the deepest possible commitment to his children, his family, and the future of his people and his religion.

It is those commitments that mark how Jacob becomes an archetypal Jewish man, dedicated to the values that matter most.  And it is this moment, this transformative growth, that allows the brothers to surprisingly resolve their life-long differences and reunite.

It is that transformation of our own natures, the ways in which we grow from adolescence to maturity, that allow each of us to fulfill the commitments we make.  May we learn from Jacob’s struggles what it takes to truly be a man: caring about and acting for higher goals than our own narrow concerns: family, peoplehood, religion.  May we live for those great moral ideals, and so go from strength to strength as Israel’s descendants.