Freedom, Now

Sermon, Shabbat HaChodesh, Shabbat Vayakhel 5785

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

Comedian George Carlin memorably said, “If crime fighters fight crime and fire fighters fight fire, what do freedom fighters fight? They never mention that part to us, do they?”  I’ve got freedom on my mind now, as we all should this time of year, and this year especially so .

I don’t know how many of you remember the Jewish Russian immigrant comedian, Yakov Smirnoff, who said, “My father described this tall lady who stands in the middle of the New York harbour, holding high a torch to welcome people seeking freedom in America. I instantly fell in love.”  I thought about that, and about Emma Lazarus’ famous poem inscribed on the base of that great statue, this past week.  Lazarus, of course, was a Sephardic Jew, who wrote

“A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame

Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name

Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand

Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command

The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.

"Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she

With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor,

Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,

The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.

Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,

I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"

When a French politician suggested the France might want the Statue of Liberty back, since America’s leadership seems to be deliberately throwing away its role as the land of the free, the home of exiles, and the defender of freedom in the world, it brought the question of just what we mean by freedom very much to mind.

You see, this Shabbat is Shabbat HaChodesh, the Sabbath when we bless the coming month of Nisan, the month of Passover.  It is a signal that we are getting closer to this pivotally important historic celebration.  As we begin to approach the central Jewish festival of freedom, Passover, which begins Saturday night, April 12, three weeks from tomorrow night, it’s valuable to explore just what we mean by that powerful word, freedom.

There are several different words for freedom in Hebrew.   The word used on the Liberty Bell in Philadelphia is taken from the passage in the Torah in Leviticus referring to the Jubilee; דְּרוֹר  in the Bible often refers to release or liberation, particularly in the context of the Jubilee year when all slaves were freed. It carries connotations of flowing freely without obstacles, like water flowing in a river.  A second word, חָפְשִׁי is an adjective meaning "free," and it's used in constructions to describe the state of being free. It often denotes being free from servitude or obligation.  In modern Hebrew a chofesh is a vacation or break from work or school.  A third word, שִׁחְרוּר is a term that means "release" or "liberation" and is often used in more concrete contexts like release from prison, from military service, or even from financial obligations.

Most significantly, and most commonly, the word for freedom that we use is חֵרוּת, a larger and more general term for freedom. It appears in the Bible and is used in modern Hebrew for political freedom, liberty, and independence. It's prominently featured in the Passover Haggadah when discussing the exodus from Egypt.

The distinctions reflect different aspects of freedom - from political independence to personal liberation from constraints. The concept of freedom in Hebrew thought is deeply connected to the historical experience of slavery in Egypt and subsequent liberation, giving these terms layers of spiritual and national significance beyond their literal meanings.

Passover, Pesach, which has many names, is above all the zman cheiruteinu, the season of freedom, remembering the liberation of our people from slavery in Egypt over three thousand years ago.  This story has been central to our experience as Jews ever since.  We constantly remember that we were originally slaves to Pharaoh in Egypt, we recall our experience of liberation not just in this pivotal spring festival but every single Sabbath during the Kiddush and at other moments, and we do so on all the other festivals, too.  It is the central story of Jewish history, and a constant reminder of the great value of freedom.

But what we Jews mean by freedom is not simply the absence of control, and certainly not the simple lack of responsibility that so many people seem to think it is.

It is notable that the words Moses was instructed by God to use before Pharaoh when he asked for freedom were Shalach ami v’ya’avduni, Let my people go to serve Me, God. Shalach ami—we remember that part easily enough, let my people go.  But the last word of that demand is v’ya’avduni, “that they may serve Me.”  Let my people go—that they may serve God.  That is, give us freedom from servitude and slavery to human masters, so that we may come to serve only God—so that we will become, as it were, ano avdo d’kudsho brich Hu, as the Zohar says—servants of the Holy, Blessed One. 

The Jewish definition of freedom is not simply an absence of compulsion or a lack of obligation.  Freedom is not just the ability to be freed from under the lash of a slavemaster, of out from under the thumb of a tyrant or dictactor or king or mullah or boss.  That is indeed the first requirement of freedom, but it is only a prerequisite to true freedom. 

You see, it is not enough to be out of chains, although that is a great blessing.  It is not sufficient merely to have no demands, no obligations placed upon us, to be, as it were, free as a bird.  That is not the Jewish understanding of freedom.  That is merely anarchy, the abdication of responsibility.  That leads not to goodness, but to chaos.  It is, in its own way, enslavement—slavery to our base impulses, slavery to our worst selves, slavery to the random vicissitudes of our nature and our world.  Freedom like that is, in the words of that old pop song, “just another word for nothing left to loose,” a negative freedom from choice—the freedom of the lost child, the freedom of the rootless, of the narcissitic spoiled brat, immature, damaging, compromising, even perverse.

True freedom, for our people, requires commitment.  It means that we are free to choose whom we will serve, rather than having it dictated to us by birth or armed force or government edict.  But it means making a choice to serve someone, or something—as Bob Dylan once put it, you got to serve someone.  More specifically: our Jewish choice is to serve the highest and holiest, to serve God and goodness.  Only when we make that choice, on our own, do we achieve true freedom.

That, in fact, is the heart of the Jewish understanding of freedom.  Free will is the ability to choose to serve God—or not.  It is the freedom of the educated, open mind, the freedom to make a moral decision between good and evil, between an ethical life based on principle and holiness, or of an empty life founded on nullity or blind obediance to a dicatator.  Our choice, our blessing, our freedom, is the choice of moving towards God and goodness, or away from God and towards evil.

That choice is still ours. In America, we sometimes forget the obligations of freedom, the requirement to choose to live to standards and holiness, to choose that which is good and comes from God.  We remember the freedom to choose, but abdicate the need to actually make such a choice with principle, authenticity and commitment.  We may even choose to follow dictators and autocrats, bullies and fools, amoral and immoral leaders rather than the principles of our people and our faith. 

In contrast, what Judaism truly represents—the freedom to choose to live as Jews, to pray and to study, to work to improve the world, to choose to be free as Jews understand true freedom to be—means to be devoted and dedicated, to our religion, to education, to God, to goodness, to fixing the wrongs and injustices of the world, not simply sailing by them without concern.

It is by making this dedication to the good, and to God, by making a conscious choice that we exercise our freedom in grown-up ways, that we can find ourselves newly inspired to live lives of holiness and meaning.  It is through this process that we work to remake the world, to complete Tikun Olam, to model the generosity and goodness that are the primary forces for positive change in our world.

As we approach this month of Nisan and the coming season of Passover, may we each come to understand, and to live, this dedication to living a moral life.  And may we all realize that bowing down to tyranny is never the right choice.

If we can find our own relationship to the coming zman cheiruteinu, we will discover that our lives become both more meaningful, and more fully free.

Argument, the Jewish Act

Sermon, Shabbat Ki Tisa 5785, Rabbi Samuel M. Cohon, Congregation Beit Simcha, Tucson, AZ

A Jewish rabbinic friend of mine was telling me about his experience working for an organization run by the Quakers.  It seems that the way that Quaker groups work is that each and every decision has to be made by consensus.  If anyone disagrees, the whole group must wait until everyone comes to complete agreement.  The only way around this is for the person who disagrees to publicly proclaim that he or she stands aside.  Then the group can go ahead and make a unanimous, consensus decision.  No wonder they call each other Friends!

You can imagine what a culture shock this was to a Jewish leader to encounter such a process.  Transpose this to a Jewish setting and try to envision all the Jews in a group agreeing on any issue, let alone every issue.  In Tevya’s words from Fiddler on the Roof: unheard of!  Unthinkable!  Absurd!

You know the stereotype: when you have two Jews you have three opinions, four synagogues, and five Jewish organizations.  It is clear we have a kind of national genius for disagreement.  Want to get into an argument in a Jewish setting?  It’s easy—voice an opinion, any opinion at all.  You are guaranteed someone will disagree with you.

In the classic film “My Favorite Year” the protagonist tells his non-Jewish date, “Katherine, Jews know two things: suffering, and where to find great Chinese food.”  But the truth is that even more than these staples of Jewish life, we also really know arguing.  And we have been engaged in that process for many, many years.  Our greatest sacred literary text, the Talmud, is essentially 63 huge volumes recording one very long argument about, more or less, everything.  It is unheard of for a prominent sage to raise an issue in the Talmud and not be immediately contradicted. 

The renowned scholar of Jewish life, Leo Rosten defined pilpul, the most elaborate argumentation in the Talmud, as "unproductive hair-splitting that is employed not so much to radiate clarity ... as to display one's own cleverness..."  And, always, to employ that technique in an argument.

This Jewish tendency to argue is so well known that traditionally in the just-past Purim season we Jews even make fun of our incredible predilection for disagreement by creating another venue for public conflict.  It is customary around college campuses for learned professors to engage in annual Latke vs Hamantaschen debates in which scholarly arguments are dredged up to demonstrate the culinary preferability of one unhealthy traditional food over the other.  Truly, argument for argument’s sake.

Why do you think there are so many Midrashim about people seeking harmony and good fellowship in their lives?  Because the very nature of Jewish community is, at least verbally, discord.  The injunctions to love our neighbor as ourselves or to be like the disciples of Aaron, loving peace and pursuing peace, are there not because we do this so well, but because we don’t do it well at all.  I mean, you don’t spend a lot of time instructing people to do what they are already doing.  The issue is that we Jews are, frankly, atrocious at getting along peaceably.

As one comedian, Bob Mankoff, put it, ‘When I was first dating my wife, who is not Jewish, we were having what I thought was an ordinary conversation and she said, "Why are you arguing with me?" I replied, "I'm not arguing, I'm Jewish." I thought that was clever. She didn't.’  And yet they married, no doubt continuing the argument for years to come.  How Jewish.

So, what is there in our very nature as Jews that makes us want to rebel?  Why is it that we instinctively, always, seek contrast and contradiction?  Why can’t we just… get along?

Perhaps there is a clue in this week’s Torah portion of Ki Tisa.  Things have been going too well for the Israelites of late.  After 400 years of slavery to Pharaoh in Egypt, in a short period of time they have been freed gloriously, had the sea parted for them, watched their enemies get washed away, had manna fall from heaven to eat and been welcomed into the covenant of God at Mt. Sinai by hearing God speak directly to them.  They have food and water and freedom and leadership and organization.  Their basic needs have been attended to.  They have leisure time for the very first time in their lives. 

So naturally the first thing they do is start trouble.  They’ve already been complaining: the food was better in Egypt, they tell Moses, and the portions, no doubt, larger.  They complain about the water quality in the Sinai.  When the Ten Commandments are given, the most dramatic and complete communication between God and humanity ever offered, the people hear God speak and ask Moses to lower the volume—it’s too loud, they say, turn it down… also very Jewish.

Kvetching is normal, for Jews, and relatively benign.  And argument is in our nature, as we have seen.  But if it is left unchecked, both can lead to something worse.

Because all of that kvetching and argument it turns out was a mere prelude to the dramatic rebellion offered in this week’s parshah of Ki Tisa.  While Moses is up on Mt. Sinai communing with God, leaving his brother Aaron in charge, the people break the first commandment of the original ten that can be broken.  You see, the first commandment is more of a statement, “I am the Lord your God who brought you out of Egypt and slavery.”  Nothing to break there.  So naturally, the Israelites decide to break the next commandment, the first one they actually can break, the prohibition on worshipping idols or graven images.  In Ki Tisa they demand that Aaron violate it on their behalf.  Being Jewish himself, Aaron figures out a loophole: he makes not a graven image, something carved, but a molten image, formed by pouring gold into a mold.  It’s a calf, and the people sacrifice to it and then whoop and holler and go into full-on party mode. 

In a way, this echoes the Garden of Eden scenario, where Adam and Eve were given just one commandment--don’t eat the fruit of that specific tree!-- and then immediately break it.  Here the Israelites, our ancestors, are given 10 Commandments and break the first one they can.  It’s a talent, really.

You know the rest of the story.  Moses comes down the mountain, sees the rebellion, smashes the first set of tablets carved by God, and punishes the rebels, suppressing the revolt.  Eventually he’ll go back up the mountain and a new set of commandments will be carved, this time by him.  But the enduring issue of that rebellious spirit remains with the Israelites, their leader Moses and their God.  In fact, it still remains with us contemporary Israelites, the Jews, and all of our leaders—and, of course, with our God.

Whether it was the result of our oppression in Egyptian slavery or the long centuries of persecution following the ultimate Exile in Roman times, we Jews have retained that argumentative, even rebellious spirit.  It’s not really debatable—although I’m sure someone will debate me on that, this being a Jewish congregation.  But the need to contradict seems so ingrained now that realistically we have to see what it means, rather than how we might change it.  Because, let’s face it, we ain’t gonna to stop arguing.

And perhaps we shouldn’t.  That Jewish preference for argument and contrariness, that turbulent spirit, has served us well many times, and created great good in the world.  It allowed Jews to question accepted orthodoxies, like Newtonian physics, and produce an Albert Einstein.  It provided the spirit that motivated Sigmund Freud to uncover the unconscious mind, influenced Karl Marx to reinvent the concept of labor, spurred every labor organizer from Samuel Gomperts to Emma Goldman to work for the rights of the worker.  It is that argumentative, rebellious spirit that led some of my own ancestors to rebel against the Czar in the 19th century, led Zionists across oceans and continents to create a new country in an ancient land.  It is what motivated Jews to invent entirely new industries, like motion pictures and comic books.  And it is the need we have to see things differently that helped create so many great Jewish economists, that pushes Jewish medical researchers to topple incorrect theories and probe new areas of healing, that drives Jewish internet entrepreneurs to create Facebook and Google and all those successful Israeli start-ups like Waze.  It is what drives Jews to become writers in fresh, new ways and styles, and to win Nobel Prizes and Oscars. 

And in a moral sense, the need to question has long goaded Jews to fight injustice in every society in which we have lived, from the Jews of the Civil Rights movement to the Jews who brought case after case to the Supreme Court, and some to sit on the Supreme Court.  And that contrary nature has created a viewpoint that makes it practically obligatory to be Jewish if you wish to make a living as a comedian, the ultimate contrarian profession.

So perhaps the need to argue, to kvetch, even to rebel is not quite the calamity it is presented as in Ki Tissa.  For after the Golden Calf affair, what ultimately results is a new covenant, and a greater understanding of just what the people really need, a Ten Commandments written not by the hand of God but by the hand of humans.  This turbulent Jewish nation will not keep on track solely because of the grand spectacle of divine redemption, not remain good because of witnessing miracles or hearing loud proclamations.  We need the steadying hand of a practical code for life, the spiritually reassuring presence of regular ritual to keep us together.

The best statement on arguing comes, as it so often does, from Pirkei Avot, the Ethics of our Ancestors: every controversy for the sake of heaven will bring reward, we are told. Every machloket l’sheim Shamayim, every difference that is motivated for ethical and moral reasons, for the purpose of serving God, will help make the world a better place.  Of course, it adds, every argument, every machloket that is not for the sake of heaven, that is, that is for the sake of ego or self-aggrandizement, will damage the world.

Not that I have to tell you this, but I guess the moral is: keep arguing.  It’s Jewish, and it means we seek the highest level of truth attainable, that we push, always, for greater honesty, transparency and justice in society. 

But do it not to impress others with your intellectual brilliance or your ability to disagree.  Argue instead for the purpose of truly improving the world, of improving justice, in order to make things better. 

That is, go ahead, argue: but make it for heaven’s sake.

A New Thing

Sermon on Shabbat Tetzaveh/Zachor

by Rabbi Samuel M. Cohon

Last night I participated in the annual Celebration of Prayer put on by the Northwest T ucson Multi-Faith Fellowship.  Since we were out of the country when this service was planned and I wasn’t there for the meetings that planned it, I admit that when I saw the theme chosen for that service, I was a little surprised, even taken aback.  It was “A New Thing.”  A new thing.  Hmmm.  Now, often our Multi-Faith services for this wonderful, supportive group of clergy and congregants have focused on topics one might expect: Thanksgiving, Gratitude, Peace, Creation, and so on.  Those are, relatively speaking, easy topics for a rabbi to reflect upon, to pray, to sing.  But just what kind of theme was “A New Thing” supposed to represent?  New things can be good, of course, even wonderful.  But new things can also be, well, bad, damaging, harmful, can’t they?  What are they besides new? 

I began by looking at the passage quoted in our service flier and used to speak to the theme, taken from the great prophet Second Isaiah in the Tanakh, the Hebrew Bible, and I looked at the context of that quotation.  In Chapter 43 of Isaiah, Yeshayahu, it reads:

הִנְנִ֨י עֹשֶׂ֤ה חֲדָשָׁה֙ עַתָּ֣ה תִצְמָ֔ח הֲל֖וֹא תֵּדָע֑וּהָ אַ֣ף אָשִׂ֤ים בַּמִּדְבָּר֙ דֶּ֔רֶךְ בִּישִׁמ֖וֹן נְהָרֽוֹת׃

I am about to do something new;
Even now it shall come to pass,
Suddenly you shall perceive it:
I will make a road through the wilderness
And rivers in the desert.

תְּכַבְּדֵ֙נִי֙ חַיַּ֣ת הַשָּׂדֶ֔ה תַּנִּ֖ים וּבְנ֣וֹת יַעֲנָ֑ה כִּֽי־נָתַ֨תִּי בַמִּדְבָּ֜ר מַ֗יִם נְהָרוֹת֙ בִּֽישִׁימֹ֔ן לְהַשְׁק֖וֹת עַמִּ֥י בְחִירִֽי׃

The wild beasts shall honor Me,
Jackals and ostriches,
For I provide water in the wilderness,
Rivers in the desert,
To give drink to My chosen people,

Naturally, I immediately looked at the weather report for in Tucson and discovered that indeed, after the driest winter on record in Pima County rain was coming today!  Clearly, that indeed, after all this dry weather and drought, seems like a very new thing.  “Water in the wilderness, Rivers in the desert, To give drink to My chosen people.”  Lovely!

What also came to mind shortly after that was two beautiful passages from the Psalms that we sing Friday night in our Kabbalat Shabbat, the Psalms that that welcome the coming of the Sabbath.  First, from Psalm 96:

שִׁ֣ירוּ לַ֭יהֹוָה שִׁ֣יר חָדָ֑שׁ שִׁ֥ירוּ לַ֝יהֹוָ֗ה כׇּל־הָאָֽרֶץ׃

Sing to the LORD a new song,
sing to the LORD, all the earth.

שִׁ֣ירוּ לַ֭יהֹוָה בָּרְכ֣וּ שְׁמ֑וֹ בַּשְּׂר֥וּ מִיּֽוֹם־לְ֝י֗וֹם יְשׁוּעָתֽוֹ׃

Sing to the LORD, bless His name,
proclaim His victory day after day.

סַפְּר֣וּ בַגּוֹיִ֣ם כְּבוֹד֑וֹ בְּכׇל־הָ֝עַמִּ֗ים נִפְלְאוֹתָֽיו׃

Tell of His glory among the nations,
His wondrous deeds, among all peoples.

And then, from Psalm 98, also part of our liturgy, our prayers on Friday night:

מִזְמ֡וֹר שִׁ֤ירוּ לַיהֹוָ֨ה ׀ שִׁ֣יר חָ֭דָשׁ כִּֽי־נִפְלָא֣וֹת עָשָׂ֑ה הוֹשִׁיעָה־לּ֥וֹ יְ֝מִינ֗וֹ וּזְר֥וֹעַ קׇדְשֽׁוֹ׃

A psalm.  Sing to the LORD a new song,
for He has worked wonders;
His right hand, His holy arm,
has won Him victory.

הוֹדִ֣יעַ יְ֭הֹוָה יְשׁוּעָת֑וֹ לְעֵינֵ֥י הַ֝גּוֹיִ֗ם גִּלָּ֥ה צִדְקָתֽוֹ׃

The LORD has manifested His victory,
has displayed His triumph in the sight of the nations.

זָ֘כַ֤ר חַסְדּ֨וֹ ׀ וֶ֥אֱֽמוּנָתוֹ֮ לְבֵ֢ית יִשְׂרָ֫אֵ֥ל רָא֥וּ כׇל־אַפְסֵי־אָ֑רֶץ אֵ֝֗ת יְשׁוּעַ֥ת אֱלֹהֵֽינוּ׃

He was mindful of His steadfast love and faithfulness toward the house of Israel;
all the ends of the earth beheld the victory of our God.

הָרִ֣יעוּ לַ֭יהֹוָה כׇּל־הָאָ֑רֶץ פִּצְח֖וּ וְרַנְּנ֣וּ וְזַמֵּֽרוּ׃

Raise a shout to the LORD, all the earth,
break into joyous songs of praise!

Clearly, a song to praise God in all God’s glory and majesty, in the beauty of God’s holiness, in the splendor of God’s unshakeable love for us.  But what exactly is really new about this?  After all, these passages come from a book that is, at least, 2300 years old, and most people think the Psalms go back much further than that.  So these passages were new when the earth was a lot younger, right?  What precisely can we claim represents true novelty, something new, in these wonderful sentiments?

But then I thought of a favorite passage on newness from perhaps the most challenging of all the prophets of the Hebrew Bible, Ezekiel, truly a wild man of God.  He predicts that God will say:

Ezekiel 36:24-28

וְלָקַחְתִּ֤י אֶתְכֶם֙ מִן־הַגּוֹיִ֔ם וְקִבַּצְתִּ֥י אֶתְכֶ֖ם מִכׇּל־הָאֲרָצ֑וֹת וְהֵבֵאתִ֥י אֶתְכֶ֖ם אֶל־אַדְמַתְכֶֽם׃

I will take you from among the nations and gather you from all the countries, and I will bring you back to your own land.

וְזָרַקְתִּ֧י עֲלֵיכֶ֛ם מַ֥יִם טְהוֹרִ֖ים וּטְהַרְתֶּ֑ם מִכֹּ֧ל טֻמְאוֹתֵיכֶ֛ם וּמִכׇּל־גִּלּ֥וּלֵיכֶ֖ם אֲטַהֵ֥ר אֶתְכֶֽם׃

I will sprinkle pure water upon you, and you shall be purified: I will purify you from all your defilement [and from all your fetishes.]

וְנָתַתִּ֤י לָכֶם֙ לֵ֣ב חָדָ֔שׁ וְר֥וּחַ חֲדָשָׁ֖ה אֶתֵּ֣ן בְּקִרְבְּכֶ֑ם וַהֲסִ֨רֹתִ֜י אֶת־לֵ֤ב הָאֶ֙בֶן֙ מִבְּשַׂרְכֶ֔ם וְנָתַתִּ֥י לָכֶ֖ם לֵ֥ב בָּשָֽׂר׃

And I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit into you: I will remove the heart of stone from your body and give you a heart of flesh;

וְאֶת־רוּחִ֖י אֶתֵּ֣ן בְּקִרְבְּכֶ֑ם וְעָשִׂ֗יתִי אֵ֤ת אֲשֶׁר־בְּחֻקַּי֙ תֵּלֵ֔כוּ וּמִשְׁפָּטַ֥י תִּשְׁמְר֖וּ וַעֲשִׂיתֶֽם׃

and I will put My spirit into you. Thus I will cause you to follow My laws and faithfully to observe My rules.

וִישַׁבְתֶּ֣ם בָּאָ֔רֶץ אֲשֶׁ֥ר נָתַ֖תִּי לַאֲבֹֽתֵיכֶ֑ם וִהְיִ֤יתֶם לִי֙ לְעָ֔ם וְאָ֣נֹכִ֔י אֶהְיֶ֥ה לָכֶ֖ם לֵאלֹהִֽים׃

Then you shall dwell in the land that I gave to your ancestors, and you shall be My people and I will be your God.

Now that might just be a message we need to hear today, and to hear it anew.  Ezekiel was prophesying almost 2600 years ago in Babylonia, in today’s Iraq, telling the Jews in their exile that things would change in a new way—but first, that they would have to change, and become, in a way, new people.

It was a terrible time then, after the Destruction of the First Temple and our forcible exile by the waters of Babylon.  There was great distress, and mourning, and loss, and there must have been great anger and resentment, too.  It would have been easy in that time of depression and enormous hostility, of chaos and rampant distrust, to give up, to surrender, to give in to hatred in their hearts.  Yet Ezekiel, wild, crazy Ezekiel, insisted instead that the Israelites, the Jews, must find ways to open their hearts anew, to renew their spirits.  That newness, that novelty, that fresh gift of heart and spirit would allow them to rebuild their lives, to overcome oppression and distress and rise to rebuild their temple and their homeland, to renew their land and nation and their lives in ways that were good, virtuous, moral, true, and positive.

Perhaps that can be a lesson for all of us now: that we must renew our hearts and our own spirits, rise to the challenge of our own time, and overcome anger and hate with commitment and dedication to what is right and good and true, and what we know to be right and good and true and honest and positive.

I think this lesson is especially important on Shabbat Zachor, the Sabbath of remembrance before Purim.  On this Shabbat we remember the teaching of our tradition: that evil aggressors cannot be pacified by appeasement.  That unprovoked attackers must be punished.  That the purveyors of wickedness, of lies and dishonest dealings need to be stopped with all force necessary, and as quickly as humanly possible.  And that standing up for the right is a Jewish requirement of faith.

In a time of confusion and chaos, faith matters—but so, too, does commitment to work for what is good and valuable, to face challenges to our way of life and our beliefs with courage and fortitude, with honesty and decency and profound dedication and commitment.  Ken Yehi Ratson: May this prove to be our will; for if we can do this, then God will surely bless us with what is not only new but also very urgently needed now.

How to Truly Live

Rabbi Samuel M. Cohon’s Sermon on Terumah 5785 

What is the true purpose of a temple? 

Asu li mikdash v’shachanti b’tocham, “Make Me a sanctuary and I will dwell among them,” God commands in this week’s Torah portion of Terumah, and the sanctuary ordained here is for the purpose of ritual animal sacrifice. Defunct in Jewish tradition for over 1900 years, since the destruction of the Second Temple in the year 70 CE, just what the heck can ritual sacrifice still have to teach us in the year 2025 CE?

First, we must note that one of the central teachings of Judaism, one of our great and most influential revelations, is that God does not require human sacrifice of us.  From the time of the binding of Isaac, the Akeidah we read on Rosh Hashanah, through the creation of the Tabernacle in the Wilderness of Sinai that is the heart of our Torah portion of Terumah this week, Judaism repeatedly affirmed that children are not bred to be sacrificed to an angry or vengeful God. Instead, sacrifice is ritualized to animals, and used to supplant the dangerous pagan tendency to sacrifice human beings.

Described in loving detail in this week’s sedrah, at the heart of Biblical Judaism is the altar for the sacrifice of small animals, cakes of grain, and incense, rather than humans.  It is never to be used as other religions might have, for the real or surrogate sacrifice of even a single human being. 

This may seem obvious, but I think for most of us today it is not.  You see, the mizbei’ach in the mishkan, the altar of sacrifice of the Tabernacle in the Wilderness was a means to an end.  It served as a way for our Israelite ancestors to sublimate the apparent human need for sacrificial ritual and rite, and gave them an understanding of the value of human life.  Our High Priests, indeed all kohanim, were taught to be ohev shalom v’rodef shalom, lovers and pursuers of peace.  They did not engage in punishing human beings, or even participate in warfare or policing. They were trained solely in ritual, including ritual sacrifice.  The very idea that they could be subverted for hostile actions against other human beings was alien to their office and their training.

To our post-modern eyes the sacrifice of an animal may seem barbaric—and to the vegetarians among us perhaps it should.  But Biblically it was used to demonstrate that God loved and valued human life in this world, and did not desire its destruction. The mitzvot, the commandments, are ordained for the purpose of life—v’chai bahem, we are commanded, live by them, not die for them.  

It is important to note that human sacrifice was ubiquitous in the ancient world.  That strange need to kill one human to help others connect to the gods was common among many peoples, all around the world, and was an important component of religions in places as diverse as Canaan, Babylonia, India, and China, but also among the people of what is today Germany, France, Spain, Britain, Mexico and Hawaii.  In the Old World, one can make the case that Christianity was a way of reaffirming the ancient practice of human sacrifice, ritualizing in a highly graphic and disturbing way a literal human sacrifice, the killing of God’s own son.  It soon became a way of asserting the primacy of the world-to-come over life in this world, future possible super-human life in place of real world, current, actual human life.

While giving full respect to the ethical basis of Christianity and its sincerity of belief, Judaism has continued down a different path that insists that the giving of human life is no great metziah, no desirable end, that this life is all we are guaranteed and it is our responsibility to make the most of it.  While we mourn and remember our many martyrs, we celebrate their lives and their courage, not the brutal way they ended.  For Jews, the true passion is for life, not death.  The purpose of religious expression, of Avodah, of worship, is to reach towards that passion, to affirm God’s connection to us in a direct and holy way, during life, while we ourselves are alive.

So human sacrifice was never the purpose of the rituals described here in Terumah.  Still, many animals were sacrificed on altars over the thousand years or so that a Temple stood in Jerusalem.  Yet, by the time that the Bayit Sheini, the 2nd Temple was destroyed by the Romans in the year 70, the synagogue had already evolved into a new kind of religious and spiritual center, one devoide of animal sacrifice—indeed, of any kind of sacrifice at all.  In our tradition, after the great destruction of the 2nd Temple nearly 2000 years ago, prayer and tzedakah fully replaced ritual sacrifice, tefilah bimkom korban.  It is not blood that God seeks now, but our own passionate devotion: to holiness, to personal and professional morality, to social justice, to honesty, to creating and affirming the good that we can bring in this world.

Poet Ruth Brin writes about the process of sacrifice as conducted by the High Priest then, and by us today:

The garments of the high priest were of such beauty,

The jewels so radiant, they dazzled the people.

Daily in the sanctuary he made sacrifices to the Lord,

Of the lamb and bull

The dove and the little cakes

To the shepherds and farmers

Who brought the sacrifices

These were the means of life.

Thus they proclaimed their willingness

To give life itself to their God.

In all ages, at all times,

People have traded value for value…

But for those who love God the only sufficient gift

Is the symbol of life.

Teach us, God, the spirit of sacrifice;

Will You accept as sufficient

Our prayers and our attempts to pray

As You once accepted the lambs and grain

Of our ancestors?

Will You accept our struggling efforts

To return love for hostility

And justice for partiality?

Will You find our study acceptable?

Teach us God the spirit of sacrifice:

How to devote out lives to our highest ideals.

That is, may our tradition teach us how to truly live in this world, and work to shape this complex and troubled nation and planet, so that we can more fully serve God with our words and our actions. 

In this week of Parshat Terumah, may our own religious direction, our prayers, actions and spirits, be nurtured by our connection with Jewish holiness and blessing. May we continually affirm life, and live lives of meaning and purpose, of vitality and commitment, of love and giving, as Judaism and our God require.

Then our sanctuary will fully become a mikdash, and God will continually dwell among us.

Rules Even in War

Shabbat Mishpatim Sermon 5785 

Back in cowboy days, a westbound wagon train is lost and low on food. No other humans have been seen for days when they see a Jewish peddler sitting under a tree. 
The leader rushes up to him and says, "We're lost and running out of food. Is there someplace ahead where we can get food?" 


"Vell," the Jewish peddler says, "I vouldn't go up dat hill dere.  Somevun told me you'll run into a big bacon tree." 


"A bacon tree?" asks the wagon train leader.  “We’re starving!” 


"Yoh, ah bacon tree,” says the Jew.  “Trust me. For nuttin vud I lie." 


The wagon train leader goes back and tells his people that if nothing else, they might be able to find food on the other side of the next ridge.

"So why did he say not to go there?" some pioneers ask. 


"Oh, you know those Jews don't eat bacon." 


So, the wagon train goes up the hill. Suddenly, Indians attack and massacre everyone except the leader, who manages to escape back to the old Jew.

The near-dead man starts shouting. "You fool!  You sent us to our deaths! 
We followed your instructions, but there was no bacon tree. Just hundreds of Indians, who killed everyone." 


The Jewish peddler holds up his hand and says "Oy, vait a minute, vait a minute…  Gevalt, I made myself ah big mistake.  It vuz not a bacon tree. It vuz a ham bush!"   Sorry.

While sometimes here in the southwest we can get a little testy about the stereotypes of deserts and cowboys, of cactus and overgrown cowtowns we tend to have foisted upon us, occasionally we actually seek out and embrace those stereotypes.  And this is one of those times. 

In fact, the last act of the famous shootout at the OK Corral took place right here in the Tucson railyards when legendary OK Corral gunslinger, lawman Wyatt Earp gunned down the last member of the gang that killed his brother. 

Wyatt Earp’s common-law wife—his last one—was a Jewish woman named Josephine Marcus, whom he met in Tombstone.  And although you might not immediately associate Jews and cowboys, there were a number of prominent Jews in the old west. There were peddlers and merchants, but there were Jewish mayors of Tucson and Jewish sheriffs and even Jewish outlaws.  If you aren’t sure of that, go and visit Boot Hill’s Jewish cemetery in Tombstone itself; it’s not far from the main Boot Hill in Tombstone, where the victims of the OK Corral shootout are theoretically buried among other outlaws, and it has its own unique Jewish character and has both prominent Tombstone Jewish citizens and some clearly Jewish outlaws buried there, too.  

And of course, in addition to the west’s more colorful characters, there were Jewish merchants, including some of my own ancestors, the Reinharts, who had a store in the Gold Country near Auburn, California.  They sold various items including dungaree trousers there, especially the newly invented ones produced by a German Jewish entrepreneur named Levi Strauss.  I’m pretty sure some people still wear that brand.

In any case, I hope you are all enjoying this Rodeo Shabbat celebration of our superficial western-ness.  To me, Rodeo is a sign that spring has sprung here in Tucson, that we are ready to embrace a season of pleasant warmth and natural growth. 

It reminds me of our first Rodeo Shabbat as a congregation at Beit Simcha when we had our Rodeo Shabbat horseback ride and service, as we did for a couple of years.  It actually snowed the day before, and we had a magnificent panorama of white spread out around us as we rode along.  That made the Fireball Cinnamon whiskey at the kiddush after the Mincha service and ride all the more pleasurable…

Now, I must address a much more serious topic tonight, even during a somewhat silly celebration of our western heritage, and on a Shabbat when we rejoice in a great simcha, Josh’s Adult Bar Mitzvah.  But tonight we simply must address what occurred last week in Gaza and Israel. 

The complete moral depravity of the Hamas Palestinian terrorists was on full display last Wednesday as the coffins carrying the remains of four Israelis kidnapped and murdered by Hamas were returned home.  The murdered bodies of Ariel Bibas, age 4, and Kfir Bibas, age 9 months, and Oded Lifshitz, age 84, were finally returned to Israel by the Hamas Palestinian terrorists who murdered them.  A body purporting to be Shiri Bibas, 32 years old, the mother of the two little children, was returned at the same time, but after Israeli forensic analysis it proved not to be her, nor any of the known hostages.  We still don’t know what happened to her, or who the last body belonged to.

For many Israelis, the horror of the day was compounded when Hamas handed over the coffins following a macabre ceremony where the terror group paraded the black-draped coffins, each adorned with photographs of the deceased, in front of a giant poster depicting Binyamin Netanyahu as a vampire and accusing the Israeli prime minister and his “Nazi army” of allegedly killing the four in an airstrike. There remains no doubt Hamas is fully responsible for their murder and ghoulishly held their bodies as a form of psychological torture to their families and the entire nation of Israel.  Until last week Israel and Jews everywhere held out hope that this young family had survived its brutal ordeal at the hands of these terrorists.  Not so.

After the utterly evil public show, Hamas transferred the coffins of the dead hostages to the Red Cross. The coffins were locked, and the accompanying keys didn’t work.  Just when you think they have reached the bottom, it turns out that there is no level of horror to which the Palestinian terrorists will not crawl lower.  It is no surprise that they created a terror tunnel network underground: it is emblematic of their moral level.

Israelis were, of course, outraged. The callous murder of infants and young children and mothers and the elderly are all calling cards of these Hamas Palestinian terrorists, but the public display of their coffins in an enthusiastic public rally demonstrated again to the world that Hamas cannot be allowed to continue in power in Gaza, or anywhere.

Most Israelis parceled out blame for the deaths and the horrors of Hamas’ display, in part, to the Israeli government which has failed to bring them home, and which has refused to accept the obvious responsibility for failing to prevent October 7, 2023 in the first place.

The murder of infants, children, mothers and the elderly is not an accident, nor is it the fault of Netanyahu, with all his many failings.  It is the direct result of a mindset that insists that any act is justifiable if it leads to the destruction and genocide of Jews.  This is not about liberating Palestinians, or an attempt to build another Arab state in a region filled with them. It is about cultivating evil, viciousness and horror.  There is never any justification for what Hamas’ Palestinian terrorists continue to perpetrate, the brutal murder of infants, children, mothers and the elderly.  Keeping in mind how terrible this is morally, and for Israel and Jews everywhere in the world, we also must ask “How does this possibly help the Palestinian cause?”  If the net result for Palestinians in Gaza of the October 7th atrocities is, as Hamas claims, the death of nearly 50,000 people in Gaza and the destruction of much of its housing, infrastructure and businesses, what has been gained for anyone?

Even in warfare, conduct matters.  All is not fair in love and war. 

Which brings us to this week’s Torah portion, Mishpatim.  In many ways, following a sequence of spectacular weekly portions, Mishpatim is highly anticlimactic.  We began reading the book of Exodus six weeks ago in Shemot with the birth of Moses, his baby journey in a basket in the bullrushes, his call from God at the Burning Bush; we continued with Moses and Aaron representing God dueling with Pharaoh in the plagues narrative in Va’eira; we had the great drama of the first Passover, the Exodus from Egypt, freedom from the long slavery in the land of oppression in the portion of Bo; we crossed the Sea of Reeds in B’Shalach, saw the walls of water open and then wash away our enemies, sang the great song of Moses at the Sea in B’shalach on Shabbat Shirah; and then last week we read of our people standing at the foot of Mt. Sinai hearing the great Aseret HaDibrot, the Ten Commandments given in God’s own voice, the most powerful direct revelation in our people’s entire history, and perhaps any people’s entire history, in Yitro.  One amazing Torah portion after another…

Only to land this week on the portion of Mishpatim, a series of specific laws that govern human conduct.  How a slave must be freed, or retained, under very specific rules.  What differentiates manslaughter from murder, and the various punishments accorded to each.  What inflicting damage on a person obligates the damager to pay in restitution, including in the event of a woman having a miscarriage.  The legal responsibility for the owner of an animal that hurts people has, and how that is to be enforced.  The legal tort responsibility for leaving an open hole in the ground.  The penalty for stealing something—restitution at 4 or 5 times the value of what you steal—and your responsibility in a case of negligent use of fire to burn off trash. If you borrow something, how you must return it, and pay if you don’t.  Rules, laws, details, restrictions, etc. etc.  On and on.  Dozens and dozens of, frankly, boring laws that we human beings must follow in order to live with one another. 

That is, torts and talionises, rules and regulations, penalties and punishments.  If you like reading lawbooks for recreation, Mishpatim is for you.  But, frankly, what a deflating come down: after the brisk exhilaration of liberation from slavery, the miraculous salvation at the shores of the sea and the spiritual heights of Mt. Sinai we crash down into a long series of detailed rules about lending money, marriage contracts, gossip and slander.

Isn’t religion supposed to inspire us towards spiritual growth?  How do rules about lost animals or torn clothing do that?

And yet, Judaism is a unique sort of religion.  While we are given great, high moral principles and inspiring stories of miraculous redemption, we are never just given those.  If we are commanded, as we were in last week’s Torah portion, to be “kingdom of priests and a holy people,” the Torah always follows up by telling us how we are to do just that, often in great detail, as in Mishpatim.  If we are commanded to be a unique nation, an am segulah, that idea is always explained in terms of what this requires us to do in order to be considered special. 

So it is with Mishpatim.  It is not sufficient to say, “treat the immigrant and the stranger among you with generosity and respect, because you were strangers in the land of Egypt”, Mishpatim also explains that we must make certain the immigrant and the stranger have enough to eat, that they are housed, that they are treated under the law with the same consideration as the born Israelite—you know, the birthright citizen.  When we are told that poor and rich alike must be treated equally under the law, that no one is above the law, Mishpatim becomes extremely specific: do not favor the poor in your decisions, nor shall you favor the rich or powerful.  The law must be followed in order to have a good society and to please God.  No one, including the leaders of the people, are to be treated as though these laws apply only to others; they are always universal. The rule of the law is the only way for justice to prevail, the highest principle in all of Judaism.

It is in Mishpatim that we see one of the fascinating rules that has application today, during this same Gaza War.  “If you see the donkey of someone you hate lying under its burden, and you refrain from helping him—help, you must certainly help him.” (Exodus 23:5) That is, not just the animal of a strangers, or someone you don’t have a relationship with: you must help with the animal of someone you actually hate or despise. 

Certainly, there is hatred enough to go around after October 7th, 2023.  Israelis, and most Jews, feel genuine hatred towards Hamas for the deliberate and horrifying cruelties they inflicted that day, and for the subsequent horrors Palestinian terrorists perpetrated on the hostages they captured and tortured.  Just as surely, hatred motivated the Hamas Palestinian terrorists to perform these bestial acts, and hatred for Israel is widespread in Gaza as this brutal war continues in its 17th month. 

In keeping with the laws established here in Mishpatim, obligating us to lift up our enemy’s animal, Israel has provided electricity, water, food supplies and medical supplies to Gaza civilians, and allowed aid agencies to do so throughout this war.  The widespread famine that we were told was sure to come to Gaza over a year ago has not arrived, because Israel has continued to protect civilians in Gaza as well as it is able.

Similarly, the Israeli Army holds to a quite specific Tohorat HaNeshek, a doctrine of the purity of arms.  In war, soldiers cross the line at times.  It is noteworthy that Israeli soldiers have been put on trial and convicted for mistreating prisoners during this Gaza War, and are now themselves imprisoned.  It is not most Israeli soldiers; it is not, in fact, many who act in this way.  But those who do are punished for doing so by their own army.

We saw something quite different from the Hamas Palestinians last week.  Our distress at witnessing such deliberate cruelty is real.  This is the kind of act that can only be called a war crime, and which serves no military purpose, but instead is part of a malign desire to inflict senseless pain. 

War is terrible.  But as Israel surely knows, the Mishpatim that are such a central part of Jewish tradition are designed to keep us, even in times of great trauma, within the boundaries of decency and goodness.  Even in war—perhaps especially so—we must act effectively but within the boundaries of humanity, within the Mishpatim.  We don’t do this for our enemies.  We do it for ourselves.  We do it so that we retain our own humanity, preserve the tzelem Elohim, the image of God, in which we are created.  We do it because it is right, and Jewish.

And, similarly, if we can do things like this in our own lives, observe the practical ways to build holiness in our world, we will retain our character and deserve to be a holy people, an am segulah.  If we take care of the poor, protect the stranger and the immigrant, open our hands to the needy, we have a chance to build a society of true justice, worthy of our God and our people.  

Kein Yehi Ratson; may this be God’s will, and more especially, ours.  

Truth and Its Sanctuary

Sermon Shabbat Yitro 5785

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

My wife Sophie, our daughter Ayelet and I just returned from a vacation in Asia, visiting and touring with close friends who moved to Bangkok, Thailand.  It was a great visit, and we thoroughly enjoyed Thailand, a fascinating and enjoyable country.  We were a little worried to be taking this trip with an almost 2-year-old—Ayelet turned two on our journey home, more about that in a moment—but it really was a wonderful experience.

First of all, if you want to gain a lot of attention in Malaysia, Thailand and Japan, travel with an extremely outgoing and friendly red-haired, blue-eyed toddler.  It seemed like everyone in Asia was eager to take photos of, and with, this unique child.  Red hair and blue eyes are not exactly common in the countries we visited—frankly on that entire continent—and people could not possibly have been warmer or more excited to post shots of themselves on their Instagram feeds and Facebook pages with our smiling and laughing little girl, who also loved the attention lavished on her everywhere.

The other interesting detail was that Ayelet’s birthday was last Friday, February 7th.  We were scheduled to travel home that day.  We began flying from Bangkok the day before, but had to connect through Kuala Lumpur.  That meant that we left Malaysia near midnight the day before her birthday, so the whole 7-hour flight to Japan it was Ayelet’s birthday.  Then we spent about 14 hours in Japan and toured around Tokyo, before heading back to the airport, and it was still her birthday.  Throughout a couple of hours of flight delays it was still her birthday.  We boarded our flight back to the US from Japan, about 10 hours, during all of which it remained Ayelet’s birthday—we crossed the international date line—and when we landed in Los Angeles it was still her birthday.  And then we flew home to Tucson, landed here at 10pm, and it was still our daughter’s birthday. 

She had, I believe, the longest birthday in human history.  Ayelet’s 2nd birthday was 39 hours long.  Now that’s amazing…  I think if you don’t want to get any older, you could just reverse this trip on your birthday, starting in, say, Tahiti and flying to Fiji.  You could begin around midnight and land the next day, an hour or so later, at midnight, completely missing your birthday and then claim to stay the same age, right?

So while in Thailand, we saw beautiful temples, impressive ruins, lovely scenery, a huge, complex modern city in Bangkok, and phenomenal traffic jams.  But my favorite site was a place called the Sanctuary of Truth, a huge all-wooden building intricately carved and set in a fantastic coastal location near Pattaya.

The Sanctuary of Truth is the somewhat eccentric creation of a very wealthy Thai businessman that serves a couple of important functions.  It memorializes his own complex philosophy and theology, which blends Buddhist, Hindu, animist, and other elements to emphasize the central truths of all existence, as he saw them, and our human resistance to acknowledging and understanding them.  And it also keeps vibrant and active the great Thai tradition of elaborate wood carving, since it has been under construction since 1981, isn’t quite finished, and will have to be continuously restored and rebuilt forever as wood doesn’t last forever in a location overlooking the sea in the Gulf of Thailand.  

The ideas incorporated into this remarkable building are fascinating.  The wood is carved in elaborate ways to illustrate a series of seven truths: “Who are we and where do we come from?  How do we survive?  The end of life.  Great teachings from civilizations past.  What is the purpose of life?  Society is a balance of positive and negative attitudes and actions.  And, finally, the family is the foundation of society.”  There is a certain progressive process to viewing the carvings, a mixture of spirituality and reality, an exploration of themes that shape our existence, influence our lives both daily and in a larger sense, and bring us to an awareness of what matters most. 

I loved the focus on truth in the entire physical structure, the ways in which it dramatized our own human ability to delude ourselves about what is and isn’t real, and our ultimate requirement that we face up to and accept truth.  It makes it clear that we cannot progress as human beings without a high level of honesty.

While the prevailing religious ethos of the carvings comes from Buddhist, Hindu, Confucian, Taoist, and even animist traditions, there are many aspects of this structure that reflect ideals and understandings we Jews share.  We are taught, after all, that God is emet v’emunah, true and faithful, that Adonai Eloheichem emet, God is the essence of truth, that we must live lives of honesty above all.  And our own central revelation, the Ten Commandments which we chant this Shabbat in Yitro, are also a mixture of the ideal and the pragmatic, all based in honesty: the oneness of God, but the injunction never to steal—theft, of course, is a profoundly dishonest act; the insistence on respecting our parents and ancestors, and the obligation to rest on Shabbat and grant rest to all our workers; the instruction to preclude jealousy and covetousness and the instruction never to commit adultery.     

The focus in this building on seeking to bring people, through a visual and physical experience, to come to terms with both the reality of their own lives and the higher truths present in our world, is laudable.  The focus is not on some kind of promise of future rewards for goodness in an afterlife, but on making our lives virtuous and valuable in this life.

That, it impresses me, is also a profound Jewish teaching.

Now you will hear people say that we live, today, is a post-truth world.  That is problematic in so many ways.  When we can’t agree on basic facts about ourselves and our world, we risk falling under the influence of demagogues and liars of every persuasion, and being persuaded to think and do things that are destructive and even evil.  Truth may eventually triumph, and facts come out, but it is no longer guaranteed in our society. 

The Sanctuary of Truth has a great deal to teach us, especially in our current social and political climate.

You know, there are always legitimate differences of opinion in a free society about events and policies, and these are naturally subject to interpretation. That is what vibrant, open debate is about in a democracy. But what we have increasingly seen in recent years is the deliberate dissemination of falsehoods and the intentional propagation of misinformation. The ensuing controversies are not about the right way to do things but about what is actually going on in the first place. And that weird ambiguity, the strange and disturbing sense that what used to be facts are now considered opinions, that what clearly appears to be happening is not generally accepted as real, is doing great damage.

I’m not saying America was an infinitely better place when we all believed

everything Walter Cronkite said on the CBS evening news, and I’m

certainly not saying that challenging accepted pieties is a bad thing. But I

am saying that something deeply wrong has taken place over the past

couple of decades that calls into question so many simple facts that we are

now very often unable to tell truth from lie. As Shakespeare has Falstaff

exclaim in King Henry IV Part 1, “Is not the truth the truth?”

Lest you think that this is all the result of some deliberate effort on one

political side, I must tell you that much of this began with an academic assault on the verities of accepted scholarship. It was a philosophical approach, from the left, that stated that truth was all relative: you believe about the world what you believe, while I believe what I believe, and who’s to say who’s right or what’s actually true? The critique held that truth is relative, and one’s approach to facts is culturally determined and subject to systemic bias. In this way of thinking, not only is beauty in the eye of the beholder but so is truth. There are many truths in the world, and they can conflict freely, because truth is just a matter of perspective, or opinion. Relativism is often associated with postmodernism and philosophers such as Michel Foucault and Richard Rorty. It is a contemporary school of thought that calls into question the very nature of truth. I have heard people argue many times—on the left side of the political spectrum—“Well, that may be your truth; but I have my own truth, and there is no such thing as objective truth.”

That approach—that facts are just a matter of opinion—was, in the past,

the province of conmen, shysters and quacks, snake-oil salesman and

hucksters. Later it became the stock-in-trade of professional political liars

like Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi propagandist who invented and popularized

the use of the Big Lie. In more recent years it moved into the realm of

postmodern philosophers and soft-thinking people with less malign

intentions, but damaging applications nonetheless.  And, of course, there were certain nations and cultures that always specialized in obfuscating, denying and revising the truth.

When I was younger, each year before the High Holy Days my father used

to take my brother and me to the garment district in Los Angeles to buy

new clothes for yontiff. The garment district in LA was, in those days, a

Jewish industry, and the particular store my father favored was staffed by a

Jewish immigrant from what was then the Soviet Union. One year, after I

started college, I didn’t go with my dad and brother on our annual

pilgrimage to purchase new Rosh HaShanah clothes for. The salesmen

noticed. Where, he asked my father, was the other son, die alter zun? My

dad answered, “He’s in university now, and he has exams and he has to

study.”

The Russian man asked, “So what’s he studying?”

Now, to a Jew who grew up in the Soviet Union, “What’s he studying?”

meant, “What’s he going to do for a living?”

My father answered, “He’s studying history.”

The Russian Jewish salesman frowned and shook his head.

“History? In this country, in America, no good. No work. But in Soviet

Union, study history? Very good. Lots of work. Every few years, change history!”

And that was true. Whenever Joseph Stalin changed his mind about someone or something, or the regime changed, or a new alliance was arranged or dissolved, the entire historical narrative was revised. It was called revisionist history. And then, of course, when the Berlin Wall came down and the Iron Curtain regimes collapsed an entirely new history had to be crafted. History, and facts, were always subject to authoritarian re-interpretation, and truth was a matter of policy, not reality.

This approach has now been adopted wholesale by the leaders of entire

nations, including those who pretend to represent conservative values

based on eternal verities and unshakeable truths. And because of this it

has become nearly impossible to find agreement in society on the most

basic facts. Truth has indeed ceased to be truth.

I am not just talking about politicians. You know the old joke: “How can you

tell when a politician is lying? His lips are moving.” But back in the days

when that joke was funny, we were talking about the promises politicians

made and never kept: “Read my lips, no new taxes.” Or, “I will keep our

boys out of the war.” Or even, “I did not have relations with that woman.”

Statements that weren’t worth the paper they weren’t written on.

Today it’s not the promises we can’t trust; it’s everything. It’s virtually every

single statement made by some leaders, in government, yes, but in business, the arts, you name it. It’s a cascade of shameless lies that pour out of some very powerful people.  And it’s the entire way our fragmented media reports these patent falsehoods.

We do, and should, value freedom of speech. We just shouldn’t value the

freedom to deny facts and wildly invent lies.

I want to talk about how differently Judaism understands the word truth, emet.

Truth is associated almost universally with God’s essential nature. In fact,

the Hebrew word “Emet,” truth, is considered to be an aspect of God. The

Talmud tells us that, “Truth is the seal of God.” And the Zohar teaches that,

“There is no faith without truth.” As Rabban Shimon ben Gamliel puts it in

Pirkei Avot, the Ethics of the Ancestors, “The world is sustained on three

things: by justice, by truth, and by peace.”

In a larger sense, God is actually composed of truth; that is, God is truth.

As we say at the end of the Shema, Adonai Eloheichem Emet—God, your

Lord, is truth. Rashi teaches that the Hebrew word for truth, emet, is

formed from the very first letter of the alphabet, alef, a middle letter, mem,

and the final letter, tav. That is, the whole alphabet of the Lashon Kodesh,

the holy language of Hebrew testifies to truth. In the Torah service there is

a magnificent meditation, taken from The Zohar, that says, “The Lord is the

God of truth, the Torah is truth, the prophets are truth.” The God of truth is

found wherever there is truth, and God’s absence is felt wherever there is

falsehood.

Truth in Judaism is profound, eternal and unchangeable. It is not relative.

It is not the result of some careful combination of bombast, advertising and

weak memories. It is not the result of persuasive opinions repeated

endlessly. It is not based on aggressively propounded invented stories

pretending to be fact. It is not—not—the denial of facts in the service of

dishonest motives. It is not a lie that pretends to be true to one person or

party’s devious advantage.

Truth is real, unmediated and honest. It is fact. It is hard, concrete,

unshaken. And truth is, in essence, what God represents.

If you are distressed by the damage to truth taking place in contemporary society, by the repetitions of the Big Lie and the attempts to fragment our

world along deeply misinformed ideological lines, then you owe it to yourself to tell the truth about your own life, without varnish or veneer. 

And if you can do that, then you can, and should, insist that those who

represent us, and who speak to the world about what is happening in the

world, do so based on facts, in truth.

And then every synagogue, and every house of worship, and every home, can become a sanctuary of truth. 

Fires

Sermon Shabbat Vayechi 5785, Rabbi Sam Cohon, Congregation Beit Simcha, Tucson, AZ

So let’s talk about fires…  As a native of Los Angeles, where I lived for the first 25 years of my life and where my parents lived until five years ago and I visited, and still visit, often, the catastrophic firestorms that hit my hometown have been shocking.  This is the single worst fire in terms of property loss in American history, and seeing images of neighborhoods and buildings I knew, completely annihilated, including Pasadena Jewish Center, a synagogue my dad served as cantor around 1950, and where I once sang in a concert, is terribly sad.  My friend, Cantor Chayim Frenkel, has been Hazzan at Kehillat Israel in Pacific Palisades, where both rabbis’ homes burned down as did many of their congregants’ homes.  We don’t yet know the full scope of the disaster, but it’s awful.  At least 15 people have died. 

It reminds me of two close calls I’ve had with fires, one just the summer before last on the island of Maui, where we missed being caught in the Lahaina fire by a couple of hours, and where Sophie and Ayelet—then just six months old—and I were marooned without power two miles from ground zero for several days.  The other memory is much older, and goes back to Santa Barbara, California, when I was cantor in the synagogue, Congregation B’nai B’rith, back in 1990.  That fire came within a mile or so of my condo, and it also swirled all around the temple and burned part of the outdoor chapel.  About 20 of our congregants lost their homes in the conflagration that destroyed over 400 homes.  To put it in proportion, the LA fires this week have destroyed over 10,000 homes.  So that Santa Barbara fire, while not nearly as devastating as the LA fires have been, was still no small event.

The situation in Santa Barbara then was eerily similar to what happened this week, if not as apocalyptic.  After a wet winter spurred the growth of heavy brush, unseasonably hot temperatures dried everything out.  Then a ferocious sundowner wind started to blow—and in that fire, an arsonist started things off deliberately.  The fire raced down from the mountains at terrific speed.  It's easy to remember the feelings of fear and concern as the conflagration approached our neighborhood—I had my cat and my photographs and whatever fit into my car ready to flee.  Then the wind shifted a little, and my home was spared, at my home.

Now the Santa Barbara temple building, in a lovely spot near San Marcos Pass, in the foothills overlooking a canyon with views of the mountains and out to the ocean, was going to be in the path of the fire and likely to burn.  I tried to get back to the synagogue to save the Torahs and other sacred items, but the road was closed.  Courageously, our Catholic caretaker and his wife, Marian and Wanda Grodel, loaded the Torahs into the temple van and drove through a literal wall of fire to safety.  Eventually, the fire turned again, and we were able to get back up to the synagogue building by the next morning.  Amid fears that the fire would return, a few of us elected to stay at the temple and climb up and hose down the roof to prevent flying embers from igniting the building.  Fortunately, firefighters got the blaze under control before it came back to finish the destruction.

In the end, the fire ravaged San Antonio Creek Road, the road that the synagogue was on.  Nearly all the lovely homes located there were gone, burned to the foundations.  There is no comparable experience to discovering that all of your possessions, save the clothes on your back, have just gone up in smoke.  Friends lost everything they owned, including pets and the tangible memories of their lives, family heirlooms, artworks and valuables.  One friend lost his nearly completed dissertation in those pre-cloud storage days; I don’t believe he ever completed his Ph.D. 

Besides their pets, what people really missed most turned out to be their photographs—their memories.  It’s fascinating how tragedy can clarify your priorities that way.

There was one great surprise amid all the destruction.  It was that while nearly all the homes on the temple’s road were totally burned, the four or five religious institutions on that same road were essentially undamaged: the synagogue, the Greek Orthodox Church, the other Christian churches.  All had been in the path of the fire, and all survived intact with almost no destruction. 

We concluded that perhaps the answer was simply that whatever you believed, you should keep on believing.

In this Los Angeles fire, of course, houses of worship have not been spared, including a temple, churches, and a mosque.  Our prayers and thoughts are with the residents who have lost their homes and businesses, their memories and their livelihood.  And we continue to be grateful to those who put their lives on the line to fight these fires, including the son-in-law one of our Beit Simcha families, who has been on the front lines since the fires began.

It should be clear to everyone by now that the impact of global warming, as predicted, is making all of these “natural disasters” far worse, increasing the severity of the wild weather swings that cause fires, floods, hurricanes, tornadoes and tsunamis to devastate more and more terribly.  We can only hope that our species is able to take the corrective action essential to mitigate the awful consequences of events like these terrible fires.

My friends, I encourage you to support the Jewish charities in particular that are working to help those who have lost so much in these terrible fires; you can find the links on your Shabbat leaflet, and in the email we sent out today.  We know that Los Angeles will rebuild, and the people impacted so destructively will come back from this awful tragedy.

Look, if there is one thing that we Jews know how to do, it is how to be resilient in the face of catastrophe, right?  Jewish history, or at least about 1900 years of it, can be viewed as a series of calamities followed by an eventual rise from the ashes.  In many ways, our experience has taught us that the best way to respond to destructive trauma is to begin again, drawing strength and courage from our own tradition.

The story of Joseph in Genesis, which we conclude this Shabbat, might be the first Jewish example of a person rising from the very depths to achieve his dreams, as he goes literally from slavery to prison to royal power.  Our paradigmatic Jewish story is that of the Exodus from Egypt, which we begin to read next Shabbat, of a slave people liberated and eventually brought to the Promised Land.  We have demonstrated again and again that we know how to emerge from destruction and rebuild. 

In fact, we are seeing it in Israel even now, in the midst of war. Over 85% of all Israelis displaced from the south of Israel by the Hamas atrocities and the Gaza War have returned to their homes, some of them rebuilding on the same destroyed sites.  It is likely that 70,000 Israelis displaced in the north of Israel will be able to return fairly soon; that is the goal.

Fire, of course, is not war.  But the lessons we can learn from the resiliency of our people can help us understand that people have an innate ability to return from disaster and rebuild their lives, and their homes again.

I can tell you that it took time in Santa Barbara, but the houses were eventually rebuilt—this time out of less flammable materials and with more fire-resistant shrubbery.  We each have the individual ability to come back from so much, if we have faith and work to do so.  And we have the collective ability to help those struggling to do so now.

We are taught in the Talmud Kol Yisrael Areivim zeh Bazeh, all Israel is responsible for one another.  In fact, all human beings share that responsibility.

Our prayer on this Shabbat is that the fires cease soon, so the long process of rebuilding can begin.  And that we understand the mutual responsibility we all have to help one another in that process.

Happy New Year?

Sermon Parshat Vayigash, Rabbi Samuel M. Cohon, Congregation Beit Simcha, Tucson

Tonight marks the first Shabbat of 2025, which means of course that last Wednesday was January 1st, New Year’s, a bright shining beginning to one of my 12 favorite months of the American calendar.  Actually, January is particularly high up there since it has the dubious merit of being the month when I celebrate my birthday… not that I particularly like to be reminded of the dubious progress of years any more.

All calendaring is quite artificial, in truth.  January 1st is no different in any intrinsic way from December 31st or January 2nd, so making January 1st into New Year’s instead of tomorrow or next Monday is simply an arbitrary choice.  But Happy Arbitrary New Year doesn’t have much of a ring to it, does it?

Besides the arbitrary quality of it, here’s another odd New Year’s fact: although we are not really sure Jesus was a historical figure at all, and even if he was a historical figure he very likely wasn’t really born on December 25th, since no one paid taxes in Jerusalem at this time of year.  Too cold.  But if Jesus had been born on December 25th, then January 1st would have been the date of his bris, his ritual circumcision.  An unusual way to think about New Year’s, no?  The date of the circumcision of the Jewish guy on whose life one of the main non-Jewish religions was based?  Perhaps we could wish each other “Happy Jesus Bris Day”…

Not the way we think about New Year’s.  In fact, the traditional American celebration of New Year’s is pretty odd, too: dress up, go out to an expensive dinner and perhaps a big party, stay up until midnight, drink a lot of booze, especially champagne, and then nurse your hangover the next morning by watching parades and college bowl games while you think about making new year’s resolutions—like not to drink as much as you did the night before.  Or stay home and watch other people drink and wait for a big ball to drop on Times Square.  A very strange way to start a new year.

Tragically, this year a radicalized Islamist who served in the US military murdered 15 people celebrating New Year’s at 3am in the French Quarter of New Orleans.  Awful, and sad.  And strange.

As we have established, though, New Year’s Day is an arbitrary date.  But even years are established in a similarly arbitrary way: this year is not actually 2025 years from any notable date at all, really, including the date it supposedly reflects, the year of Jesus’ birth.  According to scholars, based on the events listed in the New Testament itself, if Jesus was a historical figure he was likely born in the year 6 BC; that is, Jesus was born 6 years before himself…  Now that would be miraculous!  And by the way, there is no year zero in the way we calculate dates currently.  That is, we go from 1 BC to 1 AD with no zero year.  It would be like going from 1999 to 2001 without the intervening year 2000.  So 2025 is actually 2024 years from a non-existent point in time.  Or something like that.  Very odd indeed.

But there is more oddity.  Speaking as a history buff, the people who lived in the first century, 2000 years ago, had no idea that they were living in the first century of anything.  In those days the calendar wherever you lived was usually dated from the beginning of the current royal house.  In Israel they dated the official years from the formal beginning of the Seleucid Empire around 250 BCE, which would make this coming year 2275, by the way, instead of 2025—or they used Roman dates, which were based on the Julian calendar, established arbitrarily, again, by Julius Caesar in the year 46 BCE, because January was named for Janus, the two faced Roman pagan god, and Caesar figured that a new year’s day should be two-faced as well—one looking backward and one looking forward.  At his orders on his Roman legal calendar the consuls changed office January 1st. That day became New Year’s for the government, which of course, then as now, everybody hated.  And so, for this weird reason, not the other weird reasons, we celebrate on January 1st today because the Roman consuls changed office more than two millennia ago.

Just to add to the peculiarity of New Year’s, supposedly Caesar celebrated that first January 1 New Year by ordering the violent routing of revolutionary Jewish forces in the Galilee.  Eyewitnesses say blood flowed in the streets.  In later years, Roman pagans observed the New Year by engaging in drunken orgies—a ritual they believed constituted a personal re-enacting of the chaotic world that existed before the cosmos was ordered by the gods.  I believe some New Year’s parties today try to echo those actions, sadly, if not for the same reasons.

There are other weird and negative New Year’s notes for Jews: the Israeli term for New Year’s night celebrations, “Sylvester,” was the name of the “Saint” and Roman Pope who reigned during the Council of Nicaea in the year 325 C.E.  The year before the Council of Nicaea convened, Pope Sylvester convinced the Emperor Constantine to prohibit Jews from living in Jerusalem.  At the Council of Nicaea itself, Pope Sylvester arranged for the passage of a host of viciously anti-Semitic legislation.  All Catholic “Saints” are awarded a day on which Christians celebrate and pay tribute to that Saint’s memory.  December 31 is Saint Sylvester Day - hence celebrations on the night of December 31 are dedicated to Sylvester’s memory, not a guy you would think Jews would ever celebrate… And yet Israelis call it Sylvester.  Stranger yet.

Now as to the randomness of the counting of years, frankly, we Jews aren’t any better.  Back in the first century we used a calendar that calculated the creation of the world as having taken place 3700 years before that first century—that’s why we are in the Jewish year 5785 now—which means we only missed the date of the actual creation of the world by about four and half billion years, give or take a hundred million years or so.

Perhaps we should be counting our years from the real beginning of everything, the true Breisheet moment of the creation of the universe some 14 billion years ago when God really began everything in that ultimate moment of singularity…  That would make this year 14 billion and, um, 25?  Not a fun date to put on a check or into an online form, right?

In any case, the ikkar, the essential meaning of all this is that this New Year isn’t really the beginning of anything unique, and we are counting 2025 years from nothing real at all.  But no matter how arbitrary or strange, what any New Year’s provides is an opportunity to gain some perspective, that most elusive and most important quality.  For in the dailiness of our lives we become enmeshed in the details of making our own years functional and livable.  And taking the opportunity to look backward and ahead, however artificial or even forced, is a very good thing.

So, on this secular just slightly post-New Year’s weekend, looking backward at 2025, we can perhaps note that it was far from the happiest year in recent memory.  As I noted last year, it was perhaps Israel’s most challenging year, yet it ended with Israel in a much stronger strategic position, and perhaps a weaker one diplomatically and in public opinion, that any in recent memory.  It was a year that saw an outpouring of antisemitism unlike anything we have seen for years.  It was a turbulent year in American politics, and a one in which the temperature of public discourse ranged from overheated to vicious.  It was a complicated year, 2024. 

It was difficult, challenging, turbulent.  I am reminded of the Rosh haShanah piyyut that we sang this year: let the old year and its curses end; let the new year and its blessings begin. 

And yet, it was only one year.  And the great gift that perspective can give us is to know that nothing, no matter how challenging, is permanent; that no situation, good or bad, is forever; that there is an arc, a path, a progression to life that goes well beyond the immediate changes and trends.  It is the gift of knowing that there are, no matter what the vicissitudes and vagaries of events and fashions, greater values and purposes than the hard things that happen.

It is knowing that we have, in our hands at any and every moment, the ability to make our lives more beautiful and more sacred, and that those efforts ultimately mean more than the events that gather all the attention.

Perhaps on this arbitrary New Year’s weekend we can all learn a bit from the Jewish way of observing New Year’s, as we did back in October on Rosh HaShanah.  That is, we can and probably should take the time to examine our past year, and look forward to finding ways to atone for our mistakes and to seek greater closeness with those we love and care about.  If we can do that, than this 2025 year, however artificial, can be a blessing to all of us.

May you be blessed with a pseudo-New Year’s of joy, family, and love.  And may you find in your hearts and in your homes shalom v’shalvah, peace and tranquility.

Israel: Last Hanukkah and Now

Sermon, Shabbat Mikets/Hanukkah 5785

Rabbi Sam Cohon, Congregation Beit Simcha, Tucson, AZ

In view of the dramatic events in the Middle East over the last few months, I’ve been thinking seriously about what Hanukkah was like a year ago, and what it’s like this 5785 year.  At a time of year when we read the story of Joseph, who was the best predictor of future events in the entire Bible, we do well to examine what we thought was happening a year ago, and where we are now.

First, the challenges: a year ago we were hopeful that the remaining Israeli hostages held by the brutal Palestinian terrorists of Hamas in Gaza would be released soon.  Most of us did not believe the war in Gaza could go on more than a few more months, in view of its impact on Israel’s society, economy and military.  Of course, a year later, nearly all of the 110 hostages not freed in the original deal with Hamas back in November of 2023 remain in Gaza.  At best, perhaps half of the 101 believed to be held there are still alive, missing another Hanukkah in terrible captivity.  And the Gaza War continues to grind on, with casualties among the IDF troops, and dislocation and destruction for the civilians in Gaza.  Hamas’ leadership has been destroyed, and its two top officials are dead, as are most of its terrorists.  But it is not fully eliminated, and it appears that this is unlikely to be possible for Israel, even after 14 months of warfare and nearly complete Israeli military control of the Gaza Strip.

12 months ago, at last Hanukkah, we were particularly concerned that Hezbollah would extend its desultory warfare with Israel in the north and open a fully engaged terror campaign or even a full-scale war.  Hezbollah was believed to possess the strongest non-state military in the world, with an enormous cache of rockets and missiles that could wreak havoc on Israel, from the north to the center of the country to the south.  We were also troubled that Iranian troops were located in Syria, virtually on the border with Israel, and there was firing from both Syrian and Iranian military positions into Israel.  And in the far south, the Houthis in Yemen were firing long-range missiles at Israel, yet another front in a seemingly endless series of problems for the Jewish state.

A year ago, the arch-enemy of civilization, the Islamic Republic of Iran looked poised to exploit Israel’s disastrous Gaza situation, ready to use not only its proxy terrorists in Lebanon, Syria, Gaza and Yemen, but perhaps wiling to directly attack Israel should the opportunity arise. 

And all around the world, after a super-brief period of solidarity with the victims of the October 7th atrocities, Israel was being pilloried and harshly condemned in a variety of antisemitic and certainly anti-Zionist attacks in the media, on campuses, by governments and in public rallies and of course online. 

Hanukkah is a time of hope and light, of the celebration of miracles.  But last Hanukkah, a short 12 months ago the signs were not pointing towards any miraculous deliverance.  In fact, it all looked pretty dark.  And when I visited Israel in late January and early February of this year it certainly was a time of challenge for the whole nation.  Some aspects of life felt normal—but there was a general grimness to the fabric of life that I had never experienced there before.  Clearly it was a very hard and dangerous time for our beloved homeland of the heart, Israel.

Now, no one has ever gone broke betting against positive change in the Middle East.  That is, pessimism is usually the operative formula for understanding this volatile region.  In spite of that, I must tell you that this Hanukkah looks very different indeed from a strategic perspective for Israel.  Things have changed dramatically and unexpectedly, and there is reason for optimism in a different way than there has been in a long time.

First, difficult urban warfare in Gaza neutralized the extensive Palestinian terrorist infrastructure there, and Israel succeeded in eliminating all the individual terrorists who planned October 7th, and most of those who perpetrated the atrocities.  Hamas is not gone.  But it is down to a tiny fraction of its former strength.

After Israel killed a Hamas leader in Teheran, Iran decided to directly attack Israel. It did so twice, sending rockets and missiles towards Israel; those attacks were almost entirely defeated by Israel and American military operations, with intelligence assistance from Saudi Arabia and Jordan.  Israel responded with restraint, but in a nonetheless devastating air attack that eliminated Iran’s air defense systems and most of its missile construction sites and depots, as well as other military targets.  Iran essentially lies open to air attack at any time by Israel now.

Then, this fall, in a shocking campaign of incredibly successful military intelligence, Israel hammered Hezbollah, killed its leader, destroyed most of its weaponry, and with few Israeli casualties forced it to beg for a cease-fire in a few short weeks.  And then, most unexpectedly of all, after the collapse of Hezbollah, Syria fell to its own rebels. After five decades of brutal oppression, exploitation, torture and genocidal massacres conducted by order of the Assad family, Islamist Syrian rebels overthrew the government of Bashar Al Assad in just 11 days. 

Assad and his wife fled to asylum in Russia, apparently the new home for deposed brutal dictators—his wife has now left him to seek asylum in England, by the way—while the Islamist rebels consolidated power with lightning speed, capturing and looting Assad’s presidential palace.  In response, Israel’s army moved to occupy the military posts the collapsing Syrian Army deserted near the Israeli border, and quickly wiped out a fair amount of Syria’s advanced weapons systems and missile capacity and navy. 

Just to put some perspective on all of this, remember, if you will, that Syria nearly fell to the ISIS Islamist terrorists back in 2014-2018, but Assad’s regime was saved by the intervention of Russian air power, and Iranian military support.  During that same war against the Islamist “Caliphate”, US forces as well as Turkish and Kurdish military units eventually annihilated the Islamist threat, at least in Syria and Iraq.  All of that served to keep Bashar al-Assad in power and allowed Syria to base Iranian military elements along the Israeli border, causing much trouble.  Iran’s Lebanese proxy, Hezbollah, was also employed supporting the murderous Assad regime, which used chemical weapons on its own citizens when they got too rebellious.  After ISIS was crippled back in 2018, it looked like Syria was going to stay under the evil domination of the Assads for another generation or two.  

But this is the Middle East, where strange and terrible things happen as a matter of course.  On October 7, 2023 Hamas Palestinian terrorists unleashed an atrocious war crime attack against Israeli civilians in the south of Israel.  In the north, Hezbollah provided some cover and support for Hamas by firing missiles and rockets into Israel’s northern communities.  The IDF attacked Hamas, and after nearly a year of hard fighting Israel essentially eliminated Hamas as a threat.  They then turned to Hezbollah in Lebanon, determined to end its shelling and rocket attacks and the murder of Israeli citizens in the north of the country.  This was the same Hezbollah that was helping Iran prop up the Assad regime in Syria.  In a series of lightning strikes that began by blowing up the pagers used by Hezbollah and included the elimination of the longtime Hezbollah terrorist leader Hassan Nasrallah, Israel whipped Hezbollah conclusively.  Hezbollah has, for the present, ceased to be a dangerous fighting force in the region, thanks to Israel. 

Iran, the sponsor of all these anti-Israel proxies, made the mistake of attacking Israel directly from the air during all this warfare.  Israel carefully retaliated by knocking out Iran’s air defense systems and much of its missile capacity, too. 

And of course, Russia, whose air force brutalized the Assad regime’s opponents, including ISIS, a few years ago, is otherwise occupied now in Ukraine.  They had no resources to spare to support their hapless, evil client state in Syria this time around.

That meant that in a short period of time, Assad’s terrible regime had lost the foreign and terrorist military aid that had kept it in power.  Hezbollah was on its heels and Iran was out of the fight, Russia was busy in Europe, and when the Islamists in the north and east of Syria figured out what the situation was, they simply attacked.  In less than two weeks Syria was overrun by these newly cleaned up and professionalized al Qaida disciples, and Assad was gone to his new accommodations in a dacha in Russia. 

In essence, the Palestinian terrorists, rapists, kidnappers and murderers of October 7th 2023, contributed materially to the wipeout of the leadership and most of the terrorist power of Hezbollah, and to the destruction of the Assad family’s power in Syria, not to mention the severe diminishment of Iran’s influence in the region.

We will see how the new reality in Syria plays out.  For now, the new regime there pledges to focus on cleaning up and rebuilding Syria, free of the horrible tortures and failures of the Assad era.  It professes to have no interest in cultivating an international caliphate or an anti-Israel military campaign.  It says it seeks peace.  We hope that remains true as we go forward.

Israel has already begun to turn its attention to the remaining terrorist regime, the Houthis way down in Yemen.  I suspect they will be losing their ability to attack Israel soon as well.

After a rough year overall, one thing is certainly clear: Israel is now in a much stronger position vis-à-vis its standing in the Middle East.  Hanukkah celebrates the military defeat of a Syrian dictator and his armed forces.  Isn’t it apt that this Hanukkah looks much better for Israel than last Hanukkah, in part because of a slightly similar situation?

This is the season of miracles.  Some of these geostrategic changes seem pretty miraculous, don’t they?

I must stress that no one has ever succeeded betting that Jewish history would go well, or that the Middle East would make sense.  The hostages remain in Gaza.  The tens of thousands of Israelis who were evacuated from their homes in the north, and the thousands more in the south, remain, for the most part, refugees in their own land.  Israel’s politics are still pretty toxic.  The Prime Minister still has not taken responsibility for the failures of October 7th.  War continues for the suffering civilians of the Middle East, and the IDF remains engaged in battles on several fronts, especially in Gaza.  Israel’s diplomatic situation is tenuous, at best, and antisemitic activity remains high around the world.

In spite of all that, this Hanukkah we should feel a profound sense of relief and gratitude.  On the regional basis, Israel has not been this secure in a long time.  The possibility for actual peace is clearly visible, if dimly so.  The potential for this to be a vastly better year, for Israel and the Jewish people, is evident.

And so, we say a modified version of the Hanukkah blessing for the candles: blessed are you, God, who creates miracles for our people at this season of the year, as you did so long ago for our ancestors.

Identity in Challenging Times

Identity in Challenging Times

Sermon Shabbat Vayeishev 5785
Rabbi Samuel M. Cohon, Congregation Beit Simcha, Tucson, AZ

My favorite plastic surgery joke goes like this: a woman, Rivkah, has a heart attack and is taken to the hospital. While on the operating table she has a near-death experience.  Seeing God, she asks, "Is my time up?"

But God says, "No, Rivkah you have another 36 years to go."



Upon recovery, Rivkah decides to stay in the hospital and embrace the life she has now been guaranteed. She gets a facelift, nose job, liposuction and a tummy tuck. She changes her hair color, re-does the style, everything. 

While in the hospital recovering, she does some thinking.  Since she has so much more time to live, she figures she might as well make the most of it.
She arranges to move to Malibu, to buy a convertible, to live a new life.

But as she's leaving the hospital to fly to go to the airport and fly to California, just outside the door in fact, she's struck and killed by an incoming ambulance.  Arriving in front of God, Rivkah demands, "I thought you said I had another 36 years? Why didn't you pull me out of the path of the ambulance?"



And God says, "Oy, Rivkah—is that you?  I didn't recognize you."

I’ve always liked that joke for its absurdity: who are we really?  If we change too much, thinking it’s for the better, what are we really doing? 

To put it another way, what does it mean to take pride in your own identity, who you really are?  And what would make you hide it, or try to change it until you become unrecognizable, not really you anymore?

It turns out that this is a time of year when we Jews address that question in many ways. This week, as occurs annually, we have a great Jewish linkage, the beginning of the tale of Joseph in our Torah portion of Vayeishev and the coming of the holiday of Hanukkah on Wednesday night.  Both are famous, powerful stories that have important religious and historical implications.  Both Joseph and the Maccabees had to affirm belief, and our heritage, at times of great trial and challenge.  Both of these narratives involve complex challenges relating to how we respond to internal dissent, familial and communal.  Both Joseph and the Maccabees had to demonstrate courage in the face of brutal persecution, and both rose from doubt and darkness to faith and light.  And both epic tales end with positive resolution, great achievement, reunification, dedication and tremendous hope for the future. 

But at heart, both the story of the Joseph and the story of Hanukkah are about what it means to change identity, and what is gained—and lost—by those choices.  And they are about what it means to be proud of being Jewish in places that don’t necessarily encourage that.  

Without belaboring the obvious, the Biblical story of Joseph that will fill the final four Torah portions in Genesis tells us how an arrogant half-orphan boy decides he has been selected by God to be the next leader of the young people of Israel.  Joseph’s father, Jacob, doesn’t help, giving him the famous coat of many colors as a sign of his preference for him.  When his brothers object to both this favoritism and young Joe spying on them, he will be, as you have heard, beaten up, thrown in a pit, threatened with murder and then sold into slavery in a foreign land.  There, after a brief upturn, things go from bad to worse: Joseph rises quickly to become the head of his master’s household only to experience attempted seduction by his master’s wife, which he resists—which leads to her claiming rape and having him tossed into prison. Once in prison in Egypt—even saying that phrase today can give you a chill down the spine—Joseph helps other prisoners but his aid is soon forgotten.  Vayeishev ends with light of hope just about out.

But in the next couple of week’s Torah portions—spoiler alert here—Joseph will suddenly be raised up from these physical and spiritual depths to become the ruler of the rich land of Egypt, powerful beyond imagining.  He will have a new name, an Egyptian one, new clothes and hair and make-up—the men wore makeup, too, in ancient Egypt—a new chariot and an entirely different identity from the Hebrew shepherd boy he was raised to be.  The Torah documents his emotional struggle to fully accept this transformation; who wouldn’t?  Where inside this beautified, perfumed, and lauded new courtier was the dreamy young lad he was not so long ago? 

As the story continues, Joseph is ultimately and fortuitously gifted with control of his older brothers’ very lives.  In the end he will graciously forgive them and bring them and his aged father down to live on his own estates, under his own leadership and control.  Joseph’s place in history is assured, and the Jewish people’s future is set in motion.

This story of Joseph is fantastically well-written, the first great modern novel, filled with literary techniques we still admire: foreshadowing, interlaced narratives, cliffhangers, unexpected plot turns, important minor characters.  You can see why it inspired a bad musical, and many fine works of art and literature.  It does seem like a wonderful contemporary novel—and yet it was composed at least 2500 years ago, and could be much older than that. 

This tale of an arrogant young teen who hits bottom and then is raised by his own genius, and nearly-miraculous events from the depths to the heights becomes the prototype for many such fictional heroes to come.  But a real-life Jewish historical tale turns out to mirror much of the Joseph narrative.

The Hanukkah story documents the rebellion of a small group of Jews, led by the Hasmonean family, against the Syrian-Greek oppressors, the Seleucid Empire.  There was tension for over a century between the Jews and their culturally Greek rulers, who exerted increasing pressure on the young people of Judea to abandon Judaism and embrace the lifestyle choices the Greeks saw as mandatory to being a young, cool, successful person: the gymnasium and the theater, the public bathhouse and the central agora, and most challenging of all, the worship of multiple gods and their statues.  Many, probably most Jews simply went along with these changes, adopting the style and practices of their oppressors, imitating the majority culture of the eastern Mediterranean of that day.  Some Jewish young men even reversed their circumcisions—ouch—so that they could be totally Greek and compete in the public athletic games.  It all seemed to be going along fine for the pagans, until the King, Antiochus IV Epiphanes, decided to take it to the next level: he declared himself a god, and insisted that the Jews worship him instead of their invisible one God.

Even that, for many Jews, did not prove to be a breaking point.  It was just one more Greek custom they could adopt, one more way they could change their identities a bit more.  Bow down to an idol, stop by the pagan temple and leave a little offering.  No big deal.

But for a few passionate, dedicated Jews that was a step too far.  The Jewish rebellion began in 167 BCE when Mattathias and his family, including his sons Judah and Jonathan, revolted against the first attempt in history to destroy our people’s right to worship as we desired.  It was a bitter, difficult, protracted fight that began as a guerilla war with many Jewish losses.  The armies of Antiochus IV Epiphanes were the most powerful in the world, and the king’s decrees they enforced included banning the study of Torah, making circumcision illegal, preventing the keeping of Shabbat and stopping the regular sacrifices of the Temple in Jerusalem.  The Temple itself was degraded through the placement of an idol of the king in its midst, the sacrifice of unclean animals like pigs and a deliberate effort to eradicate the Jewish character of the place.  Partially in response to the rebellion, all Jewish acts became criminal. 

There was a truly dark time, but after a very hard war the Maccabees miraculously prevailed over the larger, better-armed and better-trained army, increasing in strength through raid after raid until they could defeat the Seleucid forces in open battle.  They recaptured the city of Jerusalem, cleansed the Temple, and five nights from now, on the 25th of Kislev, we will celebrate the anniversary—the 2189th anniversary—of the day they rededicated the Temple anew and kindled once more the great menorah.  Light shined out again at the time of these shortest days of the year.

The most interesting thing about all of this familiar history is that the really challenging choices that we Jews had to make then are not very different from the ones we American Jews have to make today.  For in the time of the Maccabees many Jews chose to just become Greek culturally, to fit in and go along with the larger, successful culture in which they found themselves.  Just as Joseph, the Hebrew shepherd boy raised to great power and authority in Egypt, became the most Egyptian of Egyptians.  Just as we can, without effort, find ourselves conducting Shabbat services in a room with “holiday decorations.”

The challenge is to realize that it is actually very, very easy here in America to lose our own identities as Jews, simply go along with the general culture, get absorbed in the social mores of our time and place. 

Yet, ultimately, the story of Joseph and the tale of Hanukkah remind us that in order to keep the light burning we actually must make a personal effort to remember and act on our own Jewish identities.  Joseph will come back to his brothers and father, embrace them, affirm his religion and his original name and heritage.  The Maccabees bring the entire nation back from the brink of cultural annihilation to a spiritual rejuvenation, to recommitment and reconsecration. 

We too, in our complex times, surrounded by a sea of commercial and other affirmations of another religious tradition, have the capacity to do the same.  Over this Shabbat of Vayeishev, and these coming 8 days of Hanukkah, may we do so with energy, integrity and dedication.      

Becoming Ourselves, Becoming Israel

Sermon Shabbat Vayishlach 5785

Rabbi Sam Cohon, Congregation Beit Simcha, Tucson, AZ

In our vibrant Torah Study on Saturday morning last Shabbat I was asked a difficult question: if the Biblical Jacob is such an ethically challenged and challenging person, why do we so revere him as a father of our people?  In fact, why is he given the honor in this Shabbat’s Torah portion of Vayishlach of being named Israel, and why are we all, technically speaking, b’nai Yisrael, children of Israel?  That is, Jacob’s kids?

In the Torah we have been following Jacob’s troubled life since Parshat Toldot, in which he first conned his brother Esau out of his birthright, and then deceived his own father Isaac and expropriated Esau’s blessing and had to flee his brother’s wrath. Truly he acted the part of the “heel” for which he was named.

Last week, in Parshat Vayetsei, we witnessed Jacob’s unkindness to his wives. The Torah actually describes Leah as “hated”! Jacob’s greater love for Rachel is understandable, but nonetheless, Leah is essentially an innocent victim of her father Laban’s treachery, undeserving of Jacob’s scorn.  The Etz Hayim commentary says, “Knowing what we know of human psychology, we can suspect that Jacob did indeed hate Leah because, by reminding him of the fraudulent circumstances of their wedding, she reminded him of his most shameful memory, the time he deceived his own father. We often hate people for confronting us with what we least like about ourselves.”  Leah is so neglected that she pathetically names her sons, serially, “maybe my husband will see me; maybe my husband will hear me; maybe my husband will connect with me.”

There is more negative material about Jacob in the Torah.  When Rachel cries out to him of her profound pain at being barren, he is incensed rather than sympathetic and answers her unfeelingly.  Even the Sages, who usually exalt Jacob at the expense of others, criticize him for his insensitivity.

But finally in this week’s Parsha, Vayishlach, we see that Jacob has changed in some important ways.  Twenty years before, when he left his home, after that dream of the ladder to heaven, he prayed to God as though he were engaged in a negotiation: if God would protect him, if God would supply his needs and if God would return him safely home, then he would acknowledge God as God and set aside a tithe for Him!  It was all “If… then” statements, followed by a stingy offer of tzedakah.  But now, here in Vayishlach, an older and perhaps wiser Jacob prays a more mature prayer – he knows he has nothing to offer God, and that he has already been granted a plethora of blessings: love, family, and wealth. Now he asks only for God’s protection so that he can be an instrument in fulfilling God’s plan.

We see, too, how his previous response to precarious situations was to lie and leave: he fled from Esau, and he snuck away and fled from Laban, too.   But now, here in Vayishlach, he outgrows his Jacob identity as the heel and trickster and becomes Israel, the one who wrestles with, who contends with God and people instead of avoiding and manipulating them.  Even though at the end of the nocturnal struggle Jacob is wounded and limping, he is later described as shalem or whole (Breisheet 33:18). The word shalem is, of course, connected with shalom – peace. He is envisioned as being at peace with himself.  Perhaps, after all that wrestling, he now has an integrity, a wholeness, that he didn’t have before.

As a people, we are named not after Abraham, nor Isaac, but Jacob. Rabbi Ed Feld says, “Abraham is a mythic figure — we have almost no clue to his inner life. Both at the beginning of his story and at the end, we see him following God’s command with absolute faith… his life appears charmed, and God protects him… There is a paucity of information regarding Isaac, his son, the second of the patriarchs. Essentially, we see him in two scenes, in both of which he is a passive player…

“But the Jacob narrative is different…Jacob’s emotional life is apparent. We are told when he is fearful; we are told when he is in love.  His messy domestic life is carefully examined, and his troubles and feelings are in full view.  The trajectory of his life is not simply uphill. His relationship with his family is constantly troubled.

“We suspect that the love relationship with Rachel has gone aground; their dialogue certainly seems less than loving. His eldest son, Reuben, disrespects him. His disagreements with Laban almost put his life in danger. Fear and disappointment never leave him. In old age, reflecting on it all, he will complain to Pharoah, “Few and hard have been the years of my life,” (Breisheet 47:9).

“Of all the patriarchs, then, Jacob is the most human, suffering ups and downs, living through successful accomplishment and suffering tragedy. He is the most human, the most like us. And we are called the People Israel because his are precisely the most human of tasks with which we are to engage: How to live with one another, how to love, how to raise families, how to create community. That is the stuff of truly Jewish life… the path which we are to create in order to build a life that aims toward God, goodness, and even holiness.”

Rabbi Schneur Zalman of Liadi, the founder of the cult of Chabad Hasidism, begins his classic work, the Tanya, by discussing the beinoni, the person who is neither fully righteous nor evil.  This is surprising, for most Hasidic masters concentrated on the development of the tsaddik, the saintly person.  Yet the Ba’al HaTanya, the creator of this sect, suggested that in the end even those who seek a life of extreme piety are simply middling people, made up of flesh and blood, tossed about by circumstances, subject to mixed motives, trying to work through relationships and be decent husbands, wives, brothers, sisters, fathers, mothers, siblings, children.  Each person must come to grips with their own fears, loves, self-concern, and the wish to make a difference.

Like Jacob, the Alter Rebbe says, we always meet the Other who is not what we expect, who is filled with his or her own ambitions, fears, inclinations, and desires.  Ultimately, we meet a succession of Others with whom we wrestle, with whom we must come to grips, if you will.

Jacob shows us the way: he goes to sleep in a field, dreams, and awakens only to discover what he didn’t comprehend or imagine, “Truly there is God in this place, and I didn’t know it.” We, too, can enter into our world, the world of everyday busyness, the place of ambition and concern, of love that strives to be realized and motive that is misunderstood, but as we struggle to create a measure of holiness out of the ordinary, something special out of the everyday, we truly become living participants in the story of the People Israel. We, too, might be able to echo our eponymous ancestor and amid the striving, the wrestling, discover that this is where we find God: in the revelation that the everyday may contain holiness.

Janet Sternfield Davis says, “Many of us have had Jacob moments, but luckily not a Jacob life. We’ve had to leave home in order to get on track. Sometimes home is not safe, or it’s too safe to do the hard work of creating a life worth living. What is a life worth living? What is the hard work required to become who we were meant to or could be?”

Jacob’s life is indeed difficult and painful. He has been both manipulator and manipulated, deceiver and deceived. Our lives may or may not be as dramatic as Jacob’s life. The question is do we have the courage psychically to commit ourselves to live with integrity? What do we make of our lives if we don’t fulfill our own personal pledge to act responsibly?  And… can we return “home” as the different people we became due to our “getting out of town”?

This can be as daunting as the original leave-taking because we fear we will regress to the old us and lose all the hard-fought changes we have made. The stories of our ancestors are full of promises made to and by human and recognizable people. They are flawed individuals who accomplished great things. Our responsibility is to fulfill our promise to live a life worth living, and so make our own contribution to the legacy of our people.

Jacob’s night of wrestling is a moment of reckoning. His struggle clearly transformed him. His name was changed to Israel and through him we became known as B’nei Israel– the Children of Israel, a people who must wrestle with God and ourselves to determine our blessing, to experience the essence of our covenant, to accept our collective mission as a people.

Like Jacob, we face moments in life that command our self-reflection and willingness to struggle. We too must confront our inner selves – the good and the bad. We confront our own angel; we confront God; we confront ourselves. And, we wrestle with questions: Who are we? What have we done? How can we change and grow from within the depths of accepting our frailties? What does God really want from us?”

Even after transformative moments, like Jacob’s here in Vayishlach, we remain ourselves.  Who we were, we still are.  But the glory of human growth is that we too, like our ancient ancestor, need not accept our shortcomings as defining.  Instead, we can struggle with our own angels and wrestle with the demons we retain from our youth.  While we will never obliterate the Jacob within, it is within our power to transcend him.  We, too, can grow to become Israel.  And so live with integrity, purpose and meaning in our own lives.

Ordinary Miracles

Post-Thanksgiving 2024, Shabbat Toldot

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

Thank you all for being here on this Shabbat.  I'd like to thank Hsin-Chih Chang for playing so beautifully tonight.  I’d like to thank Niles King for playing percussion wonderfully almost every week, even though he is away this Shabbat.  I’d like to thank Dr. Sophia Cohon for her fine drash, and Chuck Panza for reading it tonight.  I’d like to thank Barbara Wilder for setting up our Oneg Shabbat, and Sandie Bolze for helping set up the Oneg. I’d like to thank my dad, Rabbi Baruch Cohon, for passing out siddurim and programs most weeks, and Darrell Pritchard for covering for him tonight.  I’d like to thank Anastasha Lynn for greeting everyone tonight.  I’d like to thank Dr. Sloan King for being the president of our congregation.  I'd like to thank each and every one of you who are present here.  I’m grateful to be on the bimah tonight, and I am most grateful to be the rabbi of this congregation.  I can't tell you what it means to me to be here.  You are too kind to listen to me offer this sermon.  By golly, thanks!  No really, thanks a lot.  Is there anyone I've forgotten to thank?  Wouldn't want to do that.  Oh, and I'd like to thank my parents, for without them I wouldn't be here at all.  And I'd like to thank the Academy for this great honor...

My friends, in our society we are supposed to say thank you all the time, and by now you've probably figured out that any kind of thanking eventually becomes pretty routine.  Get a gift?  Write a thank-you note or send a quick thank you email or Facebook message or a thank-you text.  A waitress brings your meal, or fills your water glass, or gets a napkin, you say thank you.  A guy moves his chair for you, or says "Gesundheit" when you sneeze, or tells you where the bathroom is, you say "thanks".  It is frequent and ordinary and banal.  Gratitude is just good form.  It means about as much as answering "fine" when someone asks, "How are you?"  

For most of us, saying "thanks" is a reflex, an automatic, autonomic social response, a smile that never reaches our eyes.

And yesterday there was that word, Thanksgiving. The term “Thanksgiving” sounds like a legal day off, an excuse to eat turkey and watch football, an ordinary part of life.  We no longer hear the word "thanksgiving" with any real sense that it means more than a four-day weekend with family in the house—and not always the family we particularly want to have around...  It's not "thanks" combined with "giving", it's just one untranslated word, Thanksgiving, a holiday right there between Halloween and Chanukah or whatever that other late December holiday is...  Kwanzaa. Thanksgiving is a pleasant, overfed American routine. Eat turkey and stuffing, watch football, wash dishes, go shopping or see a movie.

But there's something troubling about that routine, for giving thanks is far from an ordinary or natural process.  One of the important things that separates human beings from other animal species is our ability to say thanks, even for the basic necessities of life.  Animals may feel grateful for their next meal, but they are too busy devouring it to pause and pay homage to whatever brought it to mouth.  But humans have both the capacity to eat and to express thanks for the fact.  I’ve been told that many Native American peoples have a remarkable practice when they go hunting: they offer thanks to the spirit of the animals they will eat, gratitude for the sustenance these fellow creatures will provide to them.  A peculiar and beautiful idea.

Our purpose in saying grace before meals in the Jewish, Christian and Muslim faiths is a little different, but similarly motivated.  It is based on a passage in Deuteronomy 5, v’achalta v’savata uveirachta "you shall eat and be satisfied and bless your God." In other words, for the good, basic sustenance you are getting, offer thanks to the One who created it, and Who created you.  The rabbis of the Talmud believed this taught a great deal more: the most basic biological act, eating food, something we do three times a day—some of us more often than that—needed to be raised to the level of sanctification and holiness.  According to Jewish tradition the tables on which we eat are spiritually transformed into altars for worshipping God by saying blessings of thanks before and after every meal.  We are to make every meal a time of deep gratitude to the One who supplies our needs.

Back when these prayers were written, when this idea of a dining table as a holy place of gratitude developed, there was real doubt about whether there would be enough on that table for our ancestors to eat and actually feel satisfied.  When you don’t know where your next meal is coming from you really do feel grateful for what you have.  Nowadays, our ability to find sufficient caloric intake is rarely in doubt. Certainly not during this week of gustatory excess, when sideboards groan with turkey and pie and everything good to eat before, after, and in between.  Having enough to eat was not the issue; most of us are struggling with the opposite problem.

Nor is this food gratitude problem restricted to Thanksgiving.  How many of us really sit down at the table with a sense of the holiness of the meals we eat?  How many of us feel a glowing, transcendent sense of wonder before plowing into our food?  Now dessert may be a different matter...  for most of us the ritualized expression of gratitude before we eat, if we even do the motzi, is just a quick bow to convention.  And that's assuming we say any kind of blessing before we eat.  A little survey—although no hands are necessary.  How many of you say Hamotzi or some other blessing of gratitude before every meal?  

Beyond the food issue there is another problem.  The idea that giving thanks is easy is simply inaccurate.  Saying thank you in a meaningful way—either to God or to another person—can be difficult and confusing.  

There is a classic joke about gratitude that captures the spirit of thanksgiving as usually expressed. A Jewish mother gives her son two neckties for his birthday, one red and one blue.  To please her, that night he wears his new red tie to dinner.  She looks at him carefully, cocks her head to one side, and asks "Nu, so what's wrong with the blue tie?"  Are any of you like that?  Do any of you have mothers like that?  People who can't quite accept a simple thank you? 

Many times, we try to thank someone in a way that will matter, only to find our thanksgiving offering has missed its target.  Other times we feel profoundly grateful, but allow ourselves to be so busy that we just don't get around to showing it.  For some of us it's difficult even to say "thank you" for what people do for us; it means accepting we are worthy of someone else's kindness and generosity and deserve to be taken care of or loved. A casual thank you is easy, but meaningless.  Effective thanksgiving, and thanks receiving, requires thought and care.

And let's talk a bit about what it means to give our thanks directly to God.

Do you ever thank God?  If so, when do you most feel like offering Psalms of praise or gratitude to God?  I feel it when I experience the spectacular beauty of nature: during a great sunset in the mountains, or sunrise along the sand of a misty beach. It is a time when my heart seems to open up, when I am exalted by a deep and profound sense of connection to the Source of all life and beauty. It’s like King David's words from Psalm 103, "Bless the Lord, my soul, all my being blesses and thanks God's holy name!"  Or the words in our morning service, a poem from the Talmud that reminds us what spectacular spiritual heights gratitude can reach:

         If our mouths were filled with song as water fills the sea,

         And our tongues rang with Your praise tirelessly as the roaring waves;

         If our lips offered adoration as boundless as the sky,

         And our eyes shone in reverence as brightly as the sun;

         If our hands were spread in prayer as wide as eagle's wings,

         And our feet ran to serve You as swiftly as deer,

         We would still be unable to thank You enough for the smallest part

         of the numberless favors

         You gave to our ancestors and to us.

What soaring imagery!  What reverent humility, dedicated to expressing the passionate gratitude that is at the heart of religious living, of making our lives speak of God's grace.  What a gorgeous statement of the depth of the thanksgiving that we owe to God! 

Wonderful words for those incredible, transformative moments.  But also, an impossible standard.  Because most of the time, we just don't feel that way, not when stuck in holiday traffic, or when we get our tax bill, or when our phones or computers crash, or when our spouse or children or parents or bosses or employees make yet another impossible demand on our time and patience, or when the latest news provokes irritation and anger. We are not our ancient ancestors, singing God's praise at the slightest provocation.  We live in a post-modern world.  Very little around us provokes a sense of wonder or miracle.  We deal with the reality of deadlines and bottom lines, with the pedestrian detail of keeping homes and businesses and cars and relationships in working order. We don't have time or inclination to sing songs of thanks for everyday blessings. If one of those perfect moments of boundless gratitude pops up--dandy, we'll give thanks.  But let's not pretend that everyday life in Tucson, Arizona is a seamless series of spiritual perfections.     

So let's break the mold, and look at gratitude through a different eye.  The poet Michael Leunig, who wrote a prayer column for the Sunday paper in Melbourne, Australia, has an odd way of giving thanks for the most mundane, ordinary things, in a refreshing, relevant way.  It can help us see the world as it truly is: not its surface ordinariness, but its wonderful, paradoxical innate mystery and holiness.  As a singer, I share this prayer/poem of his with you:

         We give thanks for singers, all types of singers. 

         Popular, concert singers, and tuneless singers in the shower

         Whistlers, hummers, and those who sing while they work.

         Singers of lullabies, singers of nonsense and small scraps of melody.

Singers on branches and rooftops.
Morning yodellers and evening warblers.
Singers in seedy nightclubs, singers in the street;

         Singers in cathedrals, school hallways, grandstands, backyards,

         paddocks, bedrooms, corridors, stairwells,

         and places of echo and resonance.

         We give praise to all those who give some small voice

         To the everyday joy of the soul.  Amen.

Or this one:

We give thanks for the invention of the handle.
Without it there would be many things we couldn’t hold on to.
As for the things we can’t hold on to anyway, let us gracefully accept their ungraspable nature and celebrate all things elusive, fleeting, and intangible. They mystify us and make us receptive to truth and beauty. We celebrate and give thanks.  Amen.

You see, there is something ordinary about the process of giving thanks.  But most of us have it simply backwards.  It is not the process of thanksgiving that is ordinary; it is the things we need to feel grateful for that appear, on the surface, to be ordinary.  Our thanksgiving is an incredible way of linking us through simple, practical ways to a Divine network of life-creating gratitude.  God's gifts are right here, and we need to learn to see them.    

So what is the secret of being able to remain grateful, of staying in tune with our thanksgiving?  Only this: becoming aware of all that we have in our lives, and starting to really give thanks for it all.   Regularly.

There's a final, human part to this gratitude problem, too.  It is the natural, overwhelmingly tendency to take a good thing for granted.  Often we just don't manage to thank the people who mean the most to us.  Usually, the ones we care about the most are especially likely to be slighted. 

How do you learn to thank the people you care about most?  It’s easier to do so on holidays and birthdays, at anniversaries and times of accomplishment, like graduations and promotions.  But it’s even more important to do so each and every day.  To thank those you love for being themselves, for being with you, for making your life better.  In a daily way.

There is a beautiful passage in the liturgy, the Modim, the prayer of thanksgiving.  It is offered three times a day in the traditional Amidah, and it reads, in part, “Thank you God for the ordinary miracles you perform for us evening, morning and afternoon.”  The ordinary miracles.  The beautiful and simple things that keep us going and preserve us and allow us to be here to give thanks.  To God.  To those we love.  To our friends.  To our congregation, even.

On this Shabbat of Thanksgiving weekend, we thank God, then, not for great gifts, or waterfalls, or financial windfalls, or promotions, or even new births. We express gratitude for the simple blessings that keep us alive and sustain us, and allow us to experience this miraculous world in all its precious, sacred beauty—in particular, for friends and for family.  All these ordinary miracles do is keep us going—and my friends, that is miracle enough.

Rabbi Levi Yitzchak of Berditchev, a great Jewish sage and mystic, once said "God fills the world with miracles, but man takes his little hand and covers his little eyes and sees nothing."  Thanksgiving is about opening our eyes, to the small miracles, the ordinary miracles in the world all around us.  Open your eyes now to the very real beauty and holiness in the ordinary people, ordinary town, and ordinary lives you lead.  If you only make the effort to look, you will see sacredness everywhere. 

And that is a reason to truly give thanks.

The Resilience of Abraham

Sermon Shabbat Chayei Sarah 5785

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

This has been quite a hectic couple of weeks in the life of our always busy Beit Simcha congregation, even for us.  Tonight, of course, is Membership Shabbat, when we welcome those members who have recently joined, and invite those who haven’t yet joined to become part of our wonderful community.  It is also, of course, Birthday Shabbat, plus the night we blessed our Torah Cycle riders before we embark on our 102 mile El Tour de Tucson ride tomorrow.  Last week included two weddings and a funeral, which sounds like an old movie but was just reality, along with Community Shabbat at the JCC, schlepping all of our stuff there and back.  The weekend before that included our Shabbat afternoon hike and service at Catalina State Park, as well as the full roster of Shabbat services and classes. 

And on the building front, two weeks ago we found out that the property we have been negotiating to purchase for three months was not actually available, and never had been; that was deeply disappointing, but then a few days later we suddenly discovered another, better property was available and we have been negotiating to buy that for the past ten days, while all the other things were also going on.  It has been a bit of a whirlwind, to be honest.

Now, perhaps the strongest feature of Beit Simcha through our six years of history has always been that we are remarkably resilient.  One of our many landlords said that we are “scrappy”, which is a way of saying that no matter what happened—including being forced to relocate to four different places, surviving the COVID pandemic shut-down, having important leaders move out of town, and so on—we always stayed focused on what really matters to a congregation and community, and we have managed to grow and thrive through it all.

Which brought to mind a talk I heard a few years ago from a speaker named Dr. Robert Brooks, a prominent psychologist, author, and speaker.  It turns out that Bob Brooks grew up in Brooklyn, went to CCNY, and is a very down-to-earth Jewish guy.  He is also an expert on the concept of resilience, the ways in which we are able to bounce back from set-backs in life and are able to surmount challenges and ultimately succeed. 

Trained originally in abnormal psychology, as everyone was in those days, when the focus was on what patients were doing wrong, Dr. Brooks came to believe that discovering the positive elements in individual and group psychology was at least as important as diagnosing their problems and treating them.  He began to study what it was that differentiated those who came from equally challenging circumstances and yet achieved very different results in life, and he sought to find ways to reinforce those positive tendencies and abilities. 

Brooks began in child psychology, and came to realize that there were several crucial factors involved in whether kids overcame early challenges and flourished or did not overcome them and continued to struggle.  The resilience of children depended, it turned out, upon one crucial factor: whether they had an adult who believed in them and conveyed that to them.  That adult didn’t have to be a parent or teacher; in one memorable example he gave, it was the child’s school bus driver who gave her confidence and courage.  But the existence in a child’s life of what one psychologist has called a “Charismatic individual from whom they drew strength” made all the difference in the world.  Two children who both grew up in equally troubled conditions would have extraordinarily different results if one of them had such a charismatic adult who gave them strength, and the other did not.

The second factor, and it was often derived in part from the first, was the mindset of the individual.  Mindset essentially means what we believe is possible.  If our mindset is that something cannot be done, that it’s impossible, that things will never change or that things won’t work out, well, that is often self-fulfilling.  If we instead believe that challenges exist to be overcome, that we can solve problems, and that ultimately, we will succeed, that too is pretty self-fulfilling, provided it is matched with hard work.

Much of this is somewhat obvious.  If you believe you are beaten before you try, you generally won’t try as hard.  And if you think that things can’t change they usually don’t.

But what Dr. Robert Brooks adds to this is the understanding that this is true of both individuals and organizations.  If we believe in ourselves, and in our mission, we will find that we have the capacity to succeed.  If we don’t, we will discover that we lack that capacity.

Of course, everyone experiences challenges in life.  All of us suffer reverses, have incidents of loss, are wounded and damaged at times.  But whether we rise from those events or not testifies to our resiliency.  Resilience is what allows some of us to keep on bouncing back, while others continually stumble.

I thought about these ideas of resilience in reading this week’s Torah portion of Chayei Sarah.  At the beginning of the portion Abraham has just lost his wife, Sarah, his companion through adulthood and his partner in creating the religion that will one day be known as Judaism.  According to the midrash, Abraham and Sarah jointly brought believers in the one God under the wings of the Shechinah, the divine Presence, and so created the first monotheistic community in human history.  Now, suddenly, Sarah, his partner, is gone and Abraham must face old age without his wife.  And as a nomad he even lacks a proper place to bury her.

But there is more tzoris here.  Abraham, under God’s orders, has just brought his beloved son Isaac up Mt. Moriah for the famous encounter called the Akeidat Yitzchak, the binding and near-sacrifice of Isaac.  While in the early parts of the story the Torah tells us they walked together, Vayeilchu shneihem yachdav, now they have become estranged, understandably.  Abraham is distanced from his son, the future leader of the people.

Worse, that son has not married and has no children.  If this Judaism thing is going to work, there have to be children born to Isaac.  And Isaac is showing no inclination to act in that direction.  Abraham’s older boy, Ishmael, has married badly, and if he was ever inclined to follow Abraham’s faith he clearly no longer is.  It is up to Isaac, but Isaac does not appear to be up to the task.

Here, Abraham’s mindset comes into play.  Faced with these challenges, will he simply say, “God will provide?”  Will he trust that things will change on their own?  He is himself an old man—the Torah tells us this specifically in Chayei Sarah, v’Avraham zakein, bah bayamim.  “Abraham was old and had reached the completion of his days.”  Shouldn’t he simply sit back and go gentle into that good night?

Abraham’s mindset, however, is not oriented that way.  He is a kind of Jewish model for straightforward action to solve immediate challenges.  Faced with Sarah’s death and Isaac’s bachelorhood, he addresses each problem in order, and expeditiously.  First, he purchases land to bury his dead near Hebron, the Cave of Machpeilah.  Next, he commissions his trusted servant to go back to the Old Country to bring back a suitable wife for Isaac.  Then he instructs the servant carefully on how to determine her character: she, too, will need to be like Abraham, a solver of problems, a person who acts quickly and decisively for the right reasons. 

The servant’s mission succeeds, and he brings back Rebecca, who becomes the most important member of the next generation of Hebrews.  Soon Isaac and Rebecca will have twins, and the future of the people, and of Judaism, is assured.

We are even told that Abraham marries again and lives many more years in contentment.

You know, there are many other examples in earlier Torah portions of Abraham’s resilience in the face of challenges, and his extraordinary ability to take on new problems and overcome them.  In fact, in almost every instance we have read in the last couple of Torah portions, Abraham ends up in a stronger position after the trouble comes than he was before it occurred.  He survives migration, battle, rough encounters with powerful kings, family conflict, and much more, and somehow each time emerges stronger and more secure.  In each case he quickly develops a plan, and then just as quickly acts on it.

We can learn from Abraham’s resilience in the face of adversity, his ability to propose and implement solutions to serious problems rapidly and effectively.  We can learn from our great patriarch that a Jewish mindset is not a defeatist one, but a productive one.  And we can learn as well that we, his Jewish descendants, have a similar opportunity in our own lives.

When we are faced with problems, and sooner or later we always are, our ability to rebound and resolve those challenges is the result of our own positive mindset.  It is our capacity to believe in ourselves, and the desire to seek solutions, that direct our course towards overcoming these setbacks.

That is not to diminish the severity of anyone’s challenges in this world.  But it is very much to say that we, each of us, have the same capacity to solve our problems and, with God’s help, achieve what Abraham did.  And it is to recognize that Abraham’s commitment to act to overcome adversity embodied a famous phrase of the Lubavitcher Rebbe’s: anything worth doing is worth doing now.

In surmounting our own challenges, we can demonstrate the resilience, the mindset, and the character that Abraham showed, which have allowed our people to survive and thrive for 3800 years since then.  For us, perhaps the first step will prove to be knowing that we have the ability to solve our problems.  And like those children who were sustained and strengthened by the belief of a charismatic presence, we can be sustained and strengthened as Abraham was, perhaps simply by having faith in a God who believes in us.

In Chayei Sarah Abraham fulfills his mission of assuring the future of the Jewish people.  From Abraham may we learn how to continue to overcome our own challenges, find success in our own lives, and to further his mission on behalf of our people as well.

And who knows?  Perhaps soon our peripatetic congregation of Wandering Jews will reach our own Promised Land.

The Anthropocene: Our Epoch

Sermon, Rabbi Sam Cohon, Shabbat No’ach 5785

It has finally cooled down here in the Sonoran Desert, which is certainly welcome.  We set a record this year for days over 100 degrees, 112 days in 2024; that’s not a record we welcome or take pride in.  While it’s hotter in Phoenix—5 to 7 degrees hotter—and it also doesn’t cool down as much at night, and it’s hotter in Yuma than in Phoenix, and it’s probably hotter in hell than either place, 112 days over 100 degrees is still pretty darned unpleasant, even for us long-term desert dwellers.  Which makes it clear that perhaps we human beings aren’t doing things quite the way we ought to be.

As we all know by now, things are getting hotter on our planet.  Besides the obvious discomfort this implies for those of us living in warm places like Tucson, this has also led to extreme weather conditions becoming, well, more extreme than ever before in recorded history.  Floods that used to occur once a century are now happening every ten years—or sometimes, every year; there was a terrible one in Florida and the Carolinas last month; there is a disastrous one in Spain right now.  Forest fires have become more intense and destructive.  Tsunamis and tidal waves occur more frequently.  As sea levels rise, island nations are losing their fresh water supplies, and some are simply disappearing.  Coastal areas, including places in Florida, South Carolina and Louisiana, are losing the battle against encroaching oceans.

We have long been used to natural disasters occurring naturally—or perhaps, at God’s behest.  As our Torah portion of No’ach makes it clear, floods have washed away human civilizations as far back as our species can remember.  But what’s happening now is qualitatively different for a unique reason. 

There’s a complicated idea that has been circulating over recent decades that says that the geologic epoch we are in should be called the Anthropocene, which means the human-impacted epoch.  While the origins of this notion go back to the 1930s, and “Anthropocene” was a phrase used by Soviet Union scientists even in the 1960s, the term was first popularized in the west by American biologist Eugene Stoermer in the late 1980s, and became much more prominent after the work of the Dutch chemist and Nobel Prize Winner Paul Crutzen brought it to our attention in the early 2000s.  Unlike the Jurassic or the Cretaceous epoch or any of the other Geologic divisions of time, this one, the unofficial Anthropocene, is the first period in our earth’s 5 billion years or so when a living species has permanently changed the state of the planet.  That species, of course, is homo sapiens sapiens, us.

Geologists haven’t officially named our current period the Anthropocene because they can’t agree on whether it started at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, or perhaps when the atomic age began with the detonations of the 1940s, or with the later ubiquitous circulation of microplastics, or perhaps with the extreme speed of the extinction of many animal and plant species in recent decades and centuries.  They don’t agree when the Anthropocen started; but there is a general understanding in the scientific world that our earth has been so impacted by human civilization in recent decades that this is a unique time in our planet’s life.  And the understanding is that something profound is happening to the world, and it’s not pleasant or positive.  Or rather, a number of important and destructive things are happening to the earth that are all pretty bad, and we are the reason.

The evidence of human-created changes that are cited by scientists include the dramatic rise in greenhouse gases and the general warming trend in climate and ocean temperatures all over the earth, climate change, global warming, leading to the dramatic increase in the number and severity of major storms and natural disasters; the industrial production of a tremendous number of products that do not biodegrade, and consequently transform the land and sea with their waste, such as the great Pacific Ocean garbage patch and the great North Atlantic garbage patch, and microplastics more generally—microplastics have invaded our own biology at an alarming pace; they have discovered microplastics in human breast milk at a very high rate in America, Europe, and around the world, for example—as well as the presence in our environment of destructive forever chemicals that never go away; the extinction of a large number of species of animals and plants at a faster rate than almost any that has ever been observed before; massive deforestation and rainforest destruction; and the presence of nuclear fallout from hydrogen bomb tests in the actual rocks formed in sediment in lake beds, and elsewhere.

The impact of humans on the world is pretty undeniable.  We have done this to the earth.  The question of how we best seek to restore some balance between our own species and the only planet we can live on is a crucial one. 

I am somewhat baffled by the fact that this issue has barely surfaced in the current election season: while deluded people still believe that we will somehow revive the massively polluting coal industry and should further expand the use of greenhouse gasses, others simply ignore the fact that we are losing an important race to stabilize our earth.  This planet, according to the Jewish understanding, is a gift from God.  It is our duty to serve as stewards of our world, to protect it from destruction and to help it flourish.  It is, according to Jewish belief, a sin to destroy nature—bal tashchit is a foundational Jewish ethic. 

The past year has been one in which we Jews have been focusing on the Iranian, Palestinian and Lebanese terrorist war against Israel, on fighting antisemitism here and abroad, and on security and safety for synagogues and Jews everywhere.  The truth is that there remains a larger issue here: if we do not find a way to protect our planet from the destruction we are allowing to take place every day, we won’t have much left to protect. 

The record of our Anthropocene epoch cannot simply be about how we have squandered the magnificent world we have been gifted by the Creator.  It must reflect our understanding of our responsibility to preserve and protect the natural world.  And it is something we all need to act on, in order to repair the damage we have already permitted to occur.

At the conclusion of the flood narrative in our weekly portion of No’ach, humanity is given a second chance.  Just as Adam and Eve were put on the earth to tend and to till, to be good stewards of the garden, now No’ach is given a berit, a covenantal opportunity to start life anew on fresh ground. The world he knew is destroyed, but God promises, using the symbol of the rainbow to affirm it, that never again will God destroy civilization and humanity by flood.  It is a powerful promise, a pledge of non-destruction.

Ah, but God never says that we human beings won’t someday have the capacity to destroy civilization, or even the planet, by our own actions.  We are reaching that point, not only through the overwhelming power of the weapons we have made, but because of the cavalier and callous way we have treated our own environment.  Only if we can manage to respect the incredible creation of nature that God has given us, only if we can restrain our destructive actions and institutions, will we be able to live long on the land that the Lord our God has promised to us.

May we come to show respect and reverence for the land, water and air we have inherited from our Creator.  And may we demonstrate by our own choices that we can be good stewards of the earth, and deserve to leave a good legacy for our own descendants.

Creation and Creativity

Breisheet Sermon 5785, Rabbi Sam Cohon, Congregation Beit Simcha, Tucson, AZ

This Shabbat Breisheet celebrates creation, describing as the Torah does the origin of the universe.  It is a fantastic portion, and one that has fascinated readers—which is nearly everyone in Western Civilization—since the Torah was itself created.  But the truth is, trying to understand or even fathom the origin of the universe has been a human obsession long before Judaism emerged, in fact, more or less forever.  It is one of the enduring human preoccupations. 

The essence of the issue is that we really do want to know where we come from, where everything comes from, because if we can comprehend that perhaps we can grasp the meaning of our existence.  In discovering our origin, we may find our true purpose.  And so we probe the origins of everything, and seek to understand how we came to be here, and how the world and the entirety of the cosmos were created.

But understanding creation is a complicated matter.  After all, we weren’t there when it all happened, so everything we deduce about creation is based on our ability to understand what already exists and, well, work backwards from there.  Whether we are scientists or theologians or just plain folks, we look around, see what exists now, and make educated or even uneducated guesses about how it came to be.

One of the prevailing theories of the origin of the universe is called the Big Bang Theory—the physics theory, not the TV show—and while that name was originally given derisively by those who disagreed with its premises, it has become perhaps the most persuasive of all the ideas of how things began.  The key concept in the Big Bang Theory is that it all existence started from a singularity, one moment of origin—you know, creation.  There was a great explosion of energy into a void, the Big Bang itself, and with that emanation of photons or particles or some combination of light energy matter began.  Everything that followed was the result of that initial moment of creative energy expansion, an explosion that resulted in all existence eventually coming into being.

It’s a beautiful theory; my friend Danny Matt’s book God and the Big Bang poetically evokes the physics in a mystical setting that harmonized it with Kabbalah, Jewish mysticism.  After all, in Genesis the first thing that God creates is light, or, which is pretty much what the initial burst of explosive energy in the Big Bang Theory must have been.  Photons, which are both particle and wave and maybe bosons, too, are light energy, and very likely the original source of everything in the universe.

OK, so the Big Bang Theory explains a good deal about how our universe came into being.  And it fits with our own Genesis description of creation quite nicely.  But naturally, as soon as the theory was articulated, one of the first questions that people asked was, “OK, there was a Big Bang, great moment of singularity, an initial point of beginning.  But what happened before that?”

In other words, what existed before the beginning? 

This is not an empty question, or just a ‘how many angels can dance on the head of a pin’ kind of irritating klutzkasheh that is asked by precociously annoying students.  It is genuinely difficult question to answer, and it matters.  If everything began with one incredibly powerful process, who or why or what initiated that process?  It doesn’t seem likely that it was all just chance, does it?  So what existed before existence?

Judaism, which begins its own creation epic with this profound first chapter of Genesis, sees God creating everything at the beginning in one moment of singularity as well.  You know, Breisheet bara Elohim, at the beginning God created, or when God began to create the heavens and the earth.  It says that God existed before the universe, was the origin of the entirety of everything we know and conceive of.  As the Adon Olam hymn at the end of Shabbat morning services says, “Hu hayah v’Hu hoveh v’Hu yihyeh”, God is, was and will be, forever, always.  God pre-existed Creation and will exist long after we are all gone.

Still, that doesn’t exactly explain how, or most importantly for us, why creation took place.  Why did God decide to create at all?

There are some beautiful Jewish midrashim about what motivated God to create human beings.  God wanted to see if a being in God’s own image could learn to choose to be good.  God was, perhaps, lonely and sought the company of thinking, reasoning, caring beings.  God saw that the universe as created was indeed good but needed beings who could appreciate its goodness.  And so on.

But why did God choose to create at all?  If God is perfect and complete, what motivated God to make this work of creation, this phenomenal universe of extraordinary beauty?

Many brilliant minds have tried to understand this motivation to create, God’s initial desire to make the universe.  Thomas Carlyle kind of gave up when he said, “Creation is great, and cannot be understood.”  George Bernard Shaw said that “Imagination is the beginning of creation. You imagine what you desire, you will what you imagine and at last you create what you will.”  

Perhaps the best way to seek to understand the divine will to create is to follow a pattern that we have used in trying to comprehend the universe in general, that same ability to look at what exists now and extrapolate where it all came from.  Maybe the way to grasp why God creates is to explore why we choose to create.

In other words, if we want to know why God created the universe, and us, we need to examine just why we create and are, essentially, creative beings.

When I was in Jr. High School long ago, they showed us a movie called, “Why Man Creates”; today it would be called “Why We Create,” in gender-neutral format.  It explored the various reasons people choose to create artistically, why we seek to discover more about our world, why increased knowledge and understanding motivate us to probe as far as we can into every aspect of existence.  In a variety of formats, this clever film explored the motivations people have for seeking to express themselves creatively.  So many years later I can still remember it well.  Why do we write, or compose music, or paint, or sculpt, or dance, or act, or bake, or cook, or design, or build, or seek to uncover the secrets of the natural world?  Why do we often see these creative impulses as the most important aspects of our own personas, our essential qualities?

Perhaps the secret, if there is one that we can discover, lies here in Genesis.  At its heart, creation is a unique aspect of human existence.  And in that creativity, we most closely imitate God, and God’s original moments of creativity here in Breisheet.

At the end of the first creation narrative in Chapter One of Genesis we are told that God saw all God had created, and it was all very good, tov me’od.  When we open our minds and hearts to the process of creation that we have been given the opportunity to fulfill, we, too, have the capacity to create what is good indeed: beautiful and elevating and even inspirational.

On this Shabbat Breisheet, may we each seek to emulate God through our own creativity, in the areas of our lives in which we are gifted, and so renew within ourselves the spark with which all creation began.

Finding Gratitude

Sermon Shabbat Sukkot 5785, Rabbi Sam Cohon

Congregation Beit Simcha, Tucson, AZ

Shabbat Shalom and Chag Sameiach!  Sukkot is our great holiday of thanksgiving and the week when we offer our prayers of gratitude to God.  But that’s not always such a Jewish way to approach the world.

You might remember the classic Jewish joke about a Jewish bubbie walking on the seashore with her grandson.  Suddenly a huge wave comes in and sweeps him out to sea.

“Please God, bring him back,” she cries, “I’ll do anything, pray three times a day, keep strictly kosher, give 10% of what I have to tzedakah, I’ll be nice to my son-in-law, anything, just bring him back!”

At that moment another wave crashes in to shore, depositing the boy, unharmed, at her feet. 

The bubbie looks up at heaven and says, sternly, “He had a hat.”

As the joke demonstrates, it’s easier to find chutzpah than gratitude in Jewish life—probably, in all life.  And so, to aid us in the process of finding our way towards gratitude, autumn is the season designated for thanksgiving in our society.  All three major thanksgiving festivals from October to December—Sukkot, American Thanksgiving, and Chanukah—are based on the original commandment establishing this holiday of gratitude, the “Feast of Tabernacles”, in the Torah.  But thanksgiving is much more than a holiday.  It is at the very core of what it means to be human.

Gratitude is the essential religious emotion.  When we give thanks for what we have, and for what we receive, we convey a profound message of connection, interdependence, and even holiness.  Saying “thank you” can be no more than an automatic gesture, but it can also be the key to unlocking our hearts and opening them to other human beings.  When we say “thank you” with all of our souls, we create a quality in ourselves that allows for real communication with others, for building respect and honor between people. 

That’s also true for the process of thanking God.  Traditionally we are to begin each day in Jewish tradition with the prayer Modeh Ani lefanecha, “I give thanks before You, my God”, thanking God for giving us life, a pure soul, and a new opportunity to begin each day.  Each Amidah in every service includes the beautiful prayer Modim anachnu lach, offering gratitude to God for the ordinary miracles that God does for us morning, noon, and night.  Opening that stream of gratitude is one of the keys to creating a life, and even a world, of mutual respect and goodness.

The Dalai Lama has said “Every day, think as you wake up, today I am fortunate to be alive, I have a precious human life, I am not going to waste it.”  And Sukkot is here to remind us to express that gratitude in meaningful, positive ways.

The rabbis thought this was certainly a very important holiday indeed.  In Biblical and Mishnaic times Sukkot—also called Succos—was referred to as HeChag, “The Holiday,” as though it were the only Jewish holiday—imagine that!—and likely it was the most observed of all the festivals ordained in the Torah. 

The reason Sukkot was the most observed of all ancient Jewish festivals was likely because it came at the right time of year.  While the Torah specifies three separate pilgrimage festivals in which the ancient Israelites were to travel to Jerusalem to make offerings to God, Passover in the spring, Shavu’ot, the feast of weeks, in the early summer, and Sukkot in the autumn, there must have been major challenges to farmers inherent on walking to Jerusalem for the first two of these.  Springtime, when Passover occurs, is a time of planting, weeding, fertilizing, and doing all the hard work that eventually results in a good crop.  Early summer, when Shavu’ot falls, is the time of the first fruits and the early barley crop, which must be harvested, but there are many other crops still growing that need to be tended in the diverse Mediterranean agriculture of Israel.  But Sukkot comes in the fall, when all the crop yields are complete, and the harvest is in.  It is a time of plenty and was an easier time to take a week to travel to the capital and celebrate.

Sukkot must have been when the greatest crowds arrived in Jerusalem, bringing their agricultural bounty, making sacrificial offerings but enjoying feasts each night of the festival.  The temporary huts they erected, the Sukkot they built, would have been much like the huts that they used when they stayed in the fields near the crops they were harvesting.  It was a time of great joy and celebration, of food and drink and conviviality.  Our ancestors feasted every night, and celebrated special days, extra holidays, that we don’t even really observe today, including something called Simcha Beit HaSho’eivah, a water festival of some kind that included parades, music and dancing in the streets.

Today, Sukkot is called zman simchateinu, the time of our joy, and it is filled with food, friends, and music as well as rituals that pay tribute to our reliance upon God for the many good things in our lives.  After the serious self-examination of the High Holy Days, it is time to rejoice.

Now, back to that idea of finding your own gratitude.  In Jewish tradition we are not supposed to offer thanks only on Sukkot.  In fact, if possible, we are ideally supposed to say 100 separate blessings every day—that is, we are to offer thanks pretty much constantly for all that we are, and have.

So won’t you take a few moments tonight to thank someone you would not normally thank, and to offer gratitude to God for what you have?  It can change your life—and surely, also the lives of the people all around you.

Now, from Sukkot this week, and its concluding festival of Shemini Atzeret on Thursday morning, we go immediately to Simchat Torah, which we celebrate Thursday night this week, the final holiday in this long fall cycle.  Simchat Torah is the great, fun festival when we complete the reading of the Torah and then, immediately, begin reading it all over again.  We sing and dance in 7 great hakafot, parading around the temple—and spilling out into the street—as we celebrate our greatest document, the Torah, the heart of all Jewish learning and ethics.

Simchat Torah always reminds me of when I started as a student at Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati, and they asked me to lead Simchat Torah services.  I sat through the first few Hakafot, the parades with the Torah, just listening to the dull, plodding songs they were doing there.  Finally I turned to the Dean of the College, Rabbi Ken Erlich, and asked him what was going on.  Like me, he is mostly descended from Eastern European Jews who do their Simchas Torah singing and dancing with great enthusiasm and energy--it's almost a wanton celebration, to be honest.  Ken explained that when he first came to the college the Torah hakafot for Simchat Torah were done in a slow, stately procession, accompanied by plodding organ music, and he himself had turned to a professor and asked "it's Simchas Torah—how come they are marching not dancing?"  And the professor answered "They are German Jews—they are dancing..."

No, we are not supposed to march, either on Sukkot or Simchat Torah: we are supposed to rejoice, fully, in this whole season.  And the best way to do this is to begin from gratitude, by thanking those people who make our lives good.  And by thanking our God, who gives us the strength to celebrate.

These z’man simchateinu, this time of our joy, has a greeting that captures the wonderful elements of both Sukkot and Simchat Torah: you say, mo’adim l’simcha, festivals of joy; and the other person answers, chagim u’zmanim l’sason holidays and times of celebration.

May you be blessed with festivals of joy and holidays of celebration; but even more, may you find your way to the feelings of gratitude and thanksgiving that make these days truly filled with simcha.

The Shadow of a Flying Bird

Yizkor Sermon 5785, Rabbi Sam Cohon, Congregation Beit Simcha, Tucson, AZ

In the Deuteronomy Project class in our Adult Education Academy we are nearing the very end of the Torah.  When we finish in a week or two or three we will begin a close reading of the next book of the Tanakh, Joshua—hence, The Joshua Project will be our next new class offering.  But first we must finish the Torah.

So, too, in our Torah reading cycle we are now just at the end of Devarim, final book of the Torah, and on Simchat Torah we will complete that reading with Zot HaBrachah, the final portion that concludes the greatest text of our tradition.  The Torah ends with the death of Moses, who climbs Mt. Nebo, just outside the border of the Promised Land, and dies at the symbolically powerful age of 120. 

In Deuteronomy, God emphatically tells Moses that he cannot enter Canaan, the Promised Land, soon to become Israel, because he has transgressed against God’s direct order in the events at the waters of the Rock of Meribah.  In that traumatic incident, Moses was ordered to speak to the rock to cause water to emerge and quench the Israelites’ thirst; but, frustrated and angry and, to be honest, well past his prime, Moses instead struck the rock and harshed on the fractious Israelites, calling them “rebels.”  And so, after 40 years of devoted and talented leadership, in this concluding section of the Torah, Moses dies, just short of his ultimate objective.  He has led the people of Israel to the Promised Land but will not be allowed to enter it.

Our Deuteronomy Project Class is a wonderful and quite vocal group, and several members of the class, especially the estimable Phillis Gold, rather vehemently objected to what they perceive to be this unjust punishment of Moses.  After all that Moses has done to bring the Israelites to liberation, to help them become a covenant people and a true nation, his bringing down the Ten Commandments and establishing the foundations of Biblical law, after organizing them into a competent nation, after creating the structure for the worship of the One God, after Moses’ remarkable leadership brought them through trial and tribulation through forty years in the wilderness, now, just at the point of ultimate success, he must relinquish his position and his life and pass from the scene.

There is plenty of pathos in the Torah about this tragic end of our greatest leader.  Moses complains frequently, in Deuteronomy and in the Book of Numbers, about not being allowed to enter the Promised Land, of ending his days on the wrong side of the Jordan River.  But Midrashim, rabbinic interpretive legends, amplify this story considerably.  Perhaps the most moving version of the midrash on the death of Moses comes from the Jews of Kurdistan.

In the Midrashic version of this ancient tale, the 120-year-old Moses, told by God that the time has come for him to die across the Jordan without entering the Promised Land, begs for a reprieve. So mighty are his prayers that God orders the gates of heaven shut against them; so desperate is Moses to remain alive and come into the land that will be Israel that he pleads with God to be allowed to do so as an animal or even a bird; according to the Yalkut Shimoni, Moses, begs God again to let him enter: “If You will not allow me to enter the Land, allow me to [enter] as a bird that flies in the air to all four corners of the earth to collect its feed, and in the evening returns to its nest—let my soul be as one of those!”  But still God refuses.

Moses is so unwilling to take no for an answer that he enlists the earth, the mountains, the sea, even the sun and stars to intercede for him — all to no avail, for each confesses that they, too, will eventually disappear. God is adamant. God has given word Moses must die, and God intends to keep it.

Finally, Moses gives in and accepts his fate. Now, however, God finds that there is another problem, because none of the angels summoned to take Moses’ soul is willing to do it. Even Samael, the angel of death, is so frightened by Moses’ awesome presence that at first he trembles with fright; then, plucking up his courage, he draws his sword and advances, only to have Moses strike it from his hands and blind him with a single radiant look. “I beg you,” Moses says, turning to God, “do not hand me over to the angel of death!”

God answers, “Fear not, Moses, I will do it myself.” And in William Braude’s translation of Chaim Nachman Bialik and Yehoshua Ravnitzky’s classic Sefer ha-Aggadah, The Book of Legends, based on Deuteronomy Rabbah, it says:

“Then, from the highest heaven of heavens, the Holy One came down to take the soul of Moses, and with God the three ministering angels, Michael, Gabriel, and Zagzagel. Michael laid out his bier, Gabriel spread a fine linen cloth at his head, while Zagzagel spread it at his feet. Michael stood at one side and Gabriel at the other. Then the Holy One said to Moses, ‘Moses, close your eyes,’ and he closed his eyes. ‘Put your arms over your breast,’ and he put his arms over his breast. ‘Bring your legs together,’ and he brought his legs together. Then the Holy One summoned Moses’ soul, saying, ‘I had fixed the time of your sojourn in the body of Moses at 120 years. Now your time has come to depart. Delay not!’

“But Moses soul replied, ‘Master of the Universe, I know that You are God of all spirits and of all souls. You created me and placed me in the body of Moses 120 years ago. Is there a body in the world more pure than the body of Moses? I love him, and I do not wish to depart from him.’

“The Holy One exclaimed, ‘Depart, and I will take you up to the highest heaven of heavens, and will set you under the throne of glory, next to the cherubim and seraphim.’

“In that instant, the Holy One kissed Moses and took his soul with that kiss.”  This is “death by a kiss,” mitat neshika.

But now, according to the Midrash, God also wept, saying "Who will oppose evildoers? Who will speak for me and love me as Moses did? And whom will I love as well?'" Then the angels and souls in heaven comforted God, asserting that "in death as in life, Moses is yours.'"

The Kurdistani version of this beautiful legend says that Moses soul departed his body like “the shadow of a flying bird”; it soared high, high up above, until it disappeared, reaching into the heavenly sphere, the olam elyon, and then ascending to unite with the Divine Shechinah.

And so, finally, Moses soul departs his body, at the ripe old age of 120.  With all of our medical and technological advances, we know of no one who has lived much longer than that on this earth, to this day.  That is why our blessing is always, “biz a hundert un tzvantzik, ad mei’ah v’esrim, may you live and be well to the age of 120.”  For we wish to live like Moses did, although perhaps with less tzoris from those we try to lead…

But this image of his death also remains with us: Moses’ soul, liberated with a Divine kiss, soaring off to heaven like the shadow of a flying bird.  It is a beautiful vision; if there is such a thing as a good death, surely this is it. 

My friends, I don’t know who you personally mourn today, in our Yizkor service.  For many it is a father or mother, a sister or brother, a wife or a husband; for many it is a grandparent, a zaidie or a bubbie, an uncle or aunt or cousin.  For some, tragically, it is a child or grandchild, taken before their time.  For others, a close, beloved friend or teacher.  This year, we all mourn those murdered in Israel, and who have died in the war those murders created.

We mourn, and in our El Malei Rachamim prayer we ask that their souls be filled with eternal life.  We do know that when we die, our souls depart our bodies.

Ah, but my friends, we don’t truly know how our souls leave our bodies.  We don’t know if God takes them with a kiss, if they fly on wings of the breath of being to the heights of heaven.  We don’t know if they have the appearance of the shadow of a flying bird.  But we do feel that something continues, forever, of the lives they lived, the love they gave and received, the memories and the goodness they brought to our own souls.

In this Yizkor service, may we each be comforted, as the prayer has it, under the wind of the wings of the Shechinah, with this image of their souls flying free, unfettered, untroubled by pain or conflict or struggle.  May we find comfort in these images; and may their memories bring only blessing.

Community

Yom Kippur Morning 5785, Rabbi Sam Cohon, Congregation Beit Simcha, Tucson, AZ

Mr. Schwartz is sitting in his room, wearing only a top hat, when Steinberg strolls in.
“Why are you sitting here naked?” asks Steinberg.
“It’s all right,” says Schwartz. “Nobody comes to visit.”a
“So why the hat?” asks Steinberg.
And Schwartz answers, “Maybe somebody will come.”

“Maybe somebody will come.”  I admit that I was struggling a bit after Rosh HaShanah, which went superbly, as far as services go.  Our musicians and soloist were universally wonderful, the Torah reading and Haftarah went beautifully, the shofar choir did fabulously, the set-up went quickly and easily, the Rosh HaShanah treats were delicious and elegantly and efficiently distributed, the front door was well coordinated, the sound system worked flawlessly, our security was thorough throughout, even the air conditioning worked great, and everyone helped break it all down afterwards.  And yet… I was troubled.

I was wondering about those Jews who choose not to go to Rosh HaShanah services, who don’t come to hear the shofar or the music we spend so much time preparing or the sermons some of us spend much thought and effort writing.  It used to be, back when I began serving as a cantor and then a rabbi, that plenty of Jews didn’t come to services except on the High Holy Days.  On a regular Shabbat seats were always easy to find.  But on Rosh HaShanah and Yom Kippur you needed a ticket to get in, the seats were full, and there were overflow services held in other locations just to accommodate all the worshippers.  In other words, most of the year a synagogue looked like a partially or even mostly empty hall; suddenly on Rosh HaShanah it was standing-room only.  On the Yamim Nora’im, on the Days of Awe, every shul suddenly turned into a megachurch.  The two-or-three-day-a-year Jews always came out in force for Yomtov.

That began to change about twenty years ago.  It wasn’t instantaneous or anything, but gradually it became less of a priority for congregants to come to temple on Rosh HaShanah or even Yom Kippur.  The two services we had to conduct on Kol Nidrei Eve to meet the demand became one service; the full hall on Yom Kippur became a partially full shul.  I’m not sure what it was that prompted this slow erosion, but rabbinic colleagues throughout the country confirmed that it accorded with their own experience.  While attendance was certainly higher on the High Holy Days than during a regular Shabbat or on other festivals, it apparently had become a matter of personal preference whether you attended or not.  And plenty of people chose, well, not to attend.

I’m not saying I don’t appreciate everyone who participates in services, and attends, and prays here; I certainly do.  And it has always been part of our Beit Simcha approach that we provide the finest services we can no matter who is present, or absent.  We always wear a hat.

But even after 20 years of conditioning in lower attendance expectations, knowing that this is a national trend pretty much everywhere, it’s still a little surprising to me that for many Jews today—not you guys, of course; this is definitely preaching to the choir—attending services even on the holiest days of the year is now an optional sort of thing.

I was kvetching about this when my wife, Sophie, reminded me that I often say that being Jewish today takes many different forms; that I teach that Jewish identity is forged from a variety of sources, and expressed in myriad ways.  So some people don’t come on Rosh HaShanah—but they may take Adult Education Academy classes, send their kids to Religious School, attend Seder or Hanukkah or Purim events, bake for an Oneg Shabbat instead of coming to the service itself; some stand up for Israel, donate for Religious School scholarships or the capital campaign or High Holy Day Appeal, or help build the Sukkah, or buy Jim Click tickets or ride in El Tour de Tucson for the shul.  Aren’t these all ways to meaningfully express Jewish identity? 

Isn’t all of that part of being a Jewish community?  Yes, I admitted.  That was all true.

So, then, just what is it that creates a true community of people?  What brings people together into a meaningful kehillah, a congregation?

In one sense, community is about shared experiences: we go to temple together, our kids attend the same school and we see each other at drop off or pick up, we volunteer at the same food kitchen or Habitat House once a month.  We sing in the same choir, are in a writing group together, or work with them preparing food for Oneg Shabbat or Kiddush.  Maybe we live on the same block, or play on their softball team, or go to the same exercise class, or bicycle or run with them; we are in Rotary Club or Chamber of Commerce together, or maybe we just always invite the same people for holiday dinners each year.  Perhaps we work on a community issue on a committee or board or a political campaign.  Or maybe it’s just that we see the same folks all the time and they become a kind of habit…

These are the soft ways community is formed, in which we get to know others and see who we like and enjoy or who we wish to hang out with, or whom we end up grouped with the most.

Now sometimes these connections of community are based on shared belief and ideology, or shared religion; sometimes not.  But even among similarly-minded people—other Jews, if we are Jewish; or hiking enthusiasts, or dancers, or Wildcat basketball fans, or Swifties, or whatever the connection is—just how those ties of community are built can seem a bit mystical.  Is it shared experiences?  Respect?  Shared responsibility? Liking the same stuff?  Disliking the same stuff?  Doing things the same way?  What is it that ties us to other human beings we aren’t related to, and binds us into a genuine community?

The Hebrew word for community is Kehillah, which is pretty much just an assembly of folks.  Hakheil et haAm, the Torah instructs Moses: gather the people together.  The larger term for a synagogue is Kehillah Kedoshah, a sacred community or community of holiness.  So, does that mean the whole group of people who happen to belong to a congregation at any one moment?  I mean, a congregation is an ever-changing thing; people join a congregation, new people are born, people die, people move away, people switch congregations, get mad at the rabbi or another congregant, and so on.  Does the current membership of a synagogue—or a church or a mosque—really form a true community?  

And how are we to think of today’s virtual online “communities,” the hundreds of “friends” on Facebook, the Instagram broadcasters, the millions of people following influencers on TikTok and YouTube, the Reddit subthreads, and so on?  If everyone is watching the same thing, passively, does that make them into a community?

This question of community is not exactly a new challenge for a congregational rabbi.  After all, if you are growing a synagogue, something I have been focused on in three different congregations over my career, you seek, always, to build community.  At its best, it should be a community dedicated to the same vision, a temple, synagogue or congregation where people care about and respect one another, that seeks to offer the finest religious services, the best and most caring Jewish education for children, inspirational learning and service for adults, social action work, Jewish music, cultural and intellectual experiences, fun, and relationship-building opportunities.

But how does that equate with what really happens? 

These High Holy Days are an interesting time to explore this.  In some ways, they are a wonderful time to see our Jewish community active and involved.  In another sense, they are an exception to what our communities really are.

I remember doing a sermon on Rosh Hashanah back at the beginning of the reality TV craze, over 20 years ago—you know, back when everyone seemed to attend—in which I compared the Jewish Days of Awe, Rosh HaShanah and Yom Kippur, to a reality TV show; the Yamim Nora’im, the High Holy Days, like “Survivor” or, God-forbid, “The Apprentice.”  Here were a few days a year when the entire congregation suddenly appeared, as if out of nowhere, all dressed up in fancy duds, in order to pray, sing, read together out loud in English, and chat with people we hadn’t seen in 12 months, ever since the end of the previous Yom Kippur.  On the Day of Atonement we even fasted, going without food and water, some of us, anyway, for one whole day. 

And we all acted like this was the norm for our synagogue community, on this High Holy Days’ Island in which we had to survive until Ne’ilah, from Kol Nidrei until the closing blast of the shofar ending Yom Kippur—when, released from the reality experience, we could go back to our normal lives and do none of the things we had just spent those special days doing.

That is, after surviving long services and fancy clothes and elaborate music and sermons and pleas for social action and tzedakah for the congregation and for Israel, everyone got to leave the island, not to return for 12 months.

Ah, but while we were at temple on the Days of Awe we acted as though we all were present like this all the time and would be there for the whole year like that.  Like this was real.

Now, we know that reality TV is anything but real; imagine pretending you are living a normal life while film crews tape your every conversation, and an editor assembles it all into something quite different than what you just lived.  Not real.  Just as we know that TikToks and Instragram posts and Facebook minis and YouTube shorts are fabricated ways to make it seem like community exists between people who have no real relationships.  It’s ersatz, imitation community.

Not real.

But you know what is real?

An actual congregational community in which we support each other, care about each other, and pray and work together.  A synagogue community in which we come together not once or twice a year on the High Holy Days—I mean, we do need that, of course—but in which we work together all the time to make a difference in our lives and in the world.  A community in which we study and learn together, celebrate together, grieve together, cook and eat together, help each other and those in our larger world who need assistance.  An actual intentional experience of sharing joys and sorrows, of seeking meaning and understanding, of repairing the damage we see around us.

That’s what community is and can be.  That’s what Jewish community should be, based around the congregation.  Not limited to services—although surely it would be nice to attend—nor even to studying together.  But a true community of connection and commitment.

We have much of that right now at Beit Simcha.  This is a congregation that can always be called on to help, to roll up its sleeves, to move tables and chairs and prayerbooks.  We are a genuinely generous community, willingly assisting those who are struggling, giving without needing applause.  We demonstrate care about each other, and enjoy just sitting and talking and, of course, eating.

Sorry to mention that on Yom Kippur… 

But there is always room for great growth here, always the possibility for deeper and more vital community.  There are already so many opportunities to join together in prayer, study, social action, and joy at Beit Simcha.  And there are at least as many chances to help, to give of time and resources to help shape who we are and who we will become.  I can tell you something powerful about the process of giving in this way: the more you give, in a true community, the more you will receive. 

There is one more important element, highly appropriate on Yom Kippur, that I believe we can improve upon.  Community is made up of human beings.  That means we make mistakes, all of us; it means we will, on occasion, cause offense, unintentionally.  It means we must have tolerance for our foibles and follies, our errors and accidental insults.  Because a perfect community, which always says or does the right thing for all its members, has never yet existed, and likely never will; lo hayah v’lo yihyeh.  But a truly good, generous, loving, supportive community?  That exists right here, and can only be enhanced by a generous helping of forgiveness.  Be kind to each other; everyone is a volunteer, and does what they do out of the goodness of their hearts.

My friends, on this Day of Atonement, of teshuvah, of return and repentance, may you seek and find true community, both give and receive the love and support that we all need.  And may you receive a g’mar chatimah tovah, be sealed for a good year of life, of health, of communal dedication and blessing.

Ideas Not Images

Rabbi Sam Cohon, Kol Nidrei Eve Yom Kippur 5785 

About three hundred years ago a new scientific characteristic of our natural world was discovered.  A professor named Johann Schulze from the town of Coblenz in the Duchy of Magdeburg in what is now Germany demonstrated that light, not heat, darkened silver nitrate and produced images on a surface.  The images created by this process were at the time only temporary, an intriguing but useless phenomenon.  It wasn’t until 1822, over a century later, that a French inventor named Joseph Niépce [“nyeps”] applied this idea in a new way.  He created the oldest surviving photograph, taken in 1826, almost two hundred years ago.

Niépce’s [“nyeps”] process used a camera obscura, an upside-down reflected image, to capture images exposed onto coated pewter plates. Exposures took hours due to the limited light-sensitivity of available materials, but they were permanent, if faint.  A few years later, in 1829, another inventor and artist, Louis Daguerre, partnered with Niépce to improve what was then called the photography process. After Niepce’s death, Daguerre continued his work, and the process evolved into the daguerreotype, shown publicly for the first time in 1839, which quickly became a sensation.  That same year a man named Robert Cornelius took the first self-portrait, and studios using daguerreotypes became immediately popular.

Now, it shouldn’t come as any surprise that some of the first photos ever taken were self-portraits.  It seems clear that the ultimate invention of the selfie, and the selfie stick, was perhaps inevitable…  At first, these 1840s era daguerreotypes were nearly as expensive as having a portrait painted, the old way of immortalizing yourself, something only aristocrats and other rich people could afford.  But the process got faster, and prices came down quickly.  Soon, it cost just $5 to get one made, equal to roughly $200 today.  Not exactly free, but within the reach of middle-class customers.

By the start of the Civil War, in 1861, photographs were much less expensive and easier to produce. New technologies brought the price of the new glass-backed and tintype emulsion plates down to 25 cents in the Union states; it was more in the Confederacy, but still, the average Civil War soldier, who was paid $11 a month, could afford his own personal photograph, and nearly everyone had one made and sent it home.  The portraits of most soldiers were small—about three inches squarish—and often it was the only photo these men ever had taken of themselves.  Many thousands of these photos survive today in museums and in some homes.  They are often the sole record of their subjects, whose names we often don’t even know, and some of whom never made it back alive from war.  But their images remain.

Keeping a record of your existence became a standard feature of life by the late 19th and 20th century.  Especially in Old Country Jewish families in the Pale of Settlement, where most people lived in shtetlach lacking a professional photo studio, it was common to have family photos made by an itinerant photographer, and these durable black-and-white images still decorate many an American Jewish hallway today. These were often large families—eight, ten, even twelve children were common—of multiple generations, the Zaidies and Bubbies in traditional garb, the teens in the most contemporary clothing, everyone staring stiffly at the slow-moving lens. 

The cost of photos kept going down; in the 20th century new processes and cheap cameras like the Brownie made it possible for people to take a new form of photo, the snapshot.  The development of the Polaroid instant photo, and of inexpensive consumer cameras and film eventually put color images in everyone’s hands—after you dropped your roll of film for developing and printing at the local photo shop or drive-through Fotomat kiosk.  It wasn’t so easy to take photos of yourself back then; you needed to own and carry a tripod to do it.  Of course, you could always inveigle a passerby to shoot a quick pic of you and your significant other, and hope that your eyes were actually open in the final print when you got around to having it developed.

The first hand-held digital camera was invented by a man named Steven Sasson, an engineer at Kodak, in 1975; it weighed 8 pounds, was the size of a toaster, and took black and white images in a mere 26 seconds for each shot. Sasson had to invent a technology to look at the photos, too.  Of course, over the next four decades digital technology improved so dramatically that it has taken over the production of images.  As Sasson says, “I have been very fortunate… to know that I was dealing with something important to people, which is their memories, which are precious to all.”

The very first phones that contained cameras date from the year 2000, just 24 years ago.  Those cameras were more a novelty than a useful device.  But within four years, by 2004, half the mobile phones sold had cameras, with Sprint leading the way.  Soon smartphones all had cameras, which got better with each new generation of phone.

Fast forward to today, and you will not be surprised to learn that more photos have been taken in the last few years, the years of digital photography on cellphones, than in the entire 200-year history of photography that preceded it.  Last year it is estimated that 1.8 trillion pictures were taken: that is 5 billion pictures each and every day, approximately 225 photos annually for every human being, man, woman and child, on the planet. 

In the interests of full disclosure, I admit that I have contributed many photos of our toddler daughter, Ayelet, to that 1.8 trillion photo number…

It makes you wonder: who has time to look through all of those millions, billions, and yes, trillions of photos, when everyone is so busy taking more?

Since you no longer require a tripod to take your selfie—just long arms or a selfie stick—the number of self-portraits has undoubtedly exploded. We do not know exactly how many of those 1.8 trillion photos were taken of the photographers themselves, but some estimates are that only about 5% of all photos taken are selfies; some estimates, however, say that 58% of all photos are selfies!  That’s a crazy range.  Taking the lowest number, that means that a mere 92 million selfies are taken every single day.  Wow.

In essence, a selfie is just a vastly more ubiquitous form of a very popular form of art, the self-portrait, something painters have been doing for a long time.  It is an attempt to memorialize how we are at that very moment, or at least how we wish to be seen.  Some truly great pictures take the form of self-portraiture: from Leonardo da Vinci to Raphael to Velazquez to Rembrandt to Van Gogh to Frieda Kahlo, great painters have rarely resisted the impulse to paint themselves.  Some of them painted themselves many times.

Still, the explosion in the taking of selfies is a little daunting.  My favorite statistic is that millennials are projected to take, on average, 25,000 selfies over their lifetimes; that is, 25,000 pictures of… themselves.  Put simply, we love taking pictures of ourselves, and then sharing them with the world.  Nowadays, every moment is a Kodak moment.

Wow.  We all seem to be incredibly busy taking our own pictures.  But what exactly are we seeing there?  

Or perhaps the right question is a different one: how are all those images we experience—not just the selfies—this constant parade of visual distraction we all experience, how are these images affecting us?

Exactly 40 years ago, in October 1984, a Jewish academic and author named Neil Postman gave the keynote address at a conference on George Orwell’s famous futuristic book, 1984, which had given that year existential importance.  As I recall, we read 1984 in Jr. High School, along with Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, two contrasting, dark views of the future.

While this 1984 conference was supposed to be about the book 1984, Postman declared that it wasn’t the important reference point for people even then.  Western liberal countries did not live under the shadow of Big Brother, as those in the Communist world did.  No, the book that mattered more was the other book, Brave New World.  Robert Zaretsky wrote about Postman recently in the Forward.

In Huxley’s novel, Brave New World, people were constantly exposed to televised images, nonstop entertainment, and lived under the influence of “Soma,” a mind-numbing pleasure drug.  While George Orwell feared a world that banned books, Huxley feared a world where no one bothered to read books. In Orwell’s world, pain was used to terrify the populace; in Huxley’s world, pleasures were used to sedate it — both worlds shaped a citizenry that, either too deadened or too distracted, complied with the powers that be.

Forty years later we have some perspective to evaluate Postman’s insights. His 1984 address was turned into a book, Amusing Ourselves to Death, published the next year. It rocked both academic and popular culture.

Postman, who died in 2003, was born into a Jewish family on the Lower East Side, and in many ways he was a product of the deep Jewish love of text, from the Torah to today.  Postman’s book was written to explore what the television screen had done to the world.  Mind you, he was writing long before the advent of the Internet, iPhones, social media, and influencers.

In Amusing Ourselves to Death, Postman agonized over the rupture in human history between the written word and the televised image.

During what Postman calls the Age of Typography, the medium of the printed word cultivated the skills required to manage knowledge. There was nothing inevitable or natural about our direction towards the written word and reading. Reading entails the hard but essential work of staying still and focused while we draw meaning from markings on a page. Reading trains us to follow a line of reasoning and know when that line has been crossed, to distinguish between false and true propositions and to identify holes in logic before we trip and fall into them. 

While Postman took this development from the beginning of movable type in the 1400s, he could have traced it back much further in Jewish experience—he did attend Hebrew school as a kid—since we Jews have been focused on the written word since the creation of the Torah, at least 2500 years.  Reading has shaped our thinking throughout our entire history.

You see, the decoding of the markings on a page, drawing meaning from words sentences, and paragraphs, forms our perception of the world. But this particular form of understanding changed, perhaps forever, with the spread of the screen. The problem with television, Postman argued, is not that it is entertaining but that “it has made entertainment itself the natural format for all representation of experience.” 

Think about the consequences of this dizzying pivot in human history. Serious activities like news reporting and long analyses, political debate and topical discussion — all essential for a healthy democracy — have been undone and made unserious by the nature of the medium of television. For Postman, the two most terrifying words uttered in this medium are “Now…this.” This phrase, uttered by talking heads on the evening news, marks the shift from one subject, even the most despairing, to another subject, even the most delightful. 

This rupture in logical and ethical reasoning has widened with new forms of content providers like TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram. Coming of age in this fragmented world of images cascading non-stop across personal screens and disconnected from what precedes and what follows, many people today have given up reading entire books. And all of us struggle to make sense of the explosion of disconnected events unfolding across our various screens.

At Beit Simcha, every year we ask our Religious School students if they can name the 10 Commandments.  They usually get just a few of them initially, and with some prompting they eventually can guess most of them.  But one commandment nearly always escapes them. 

But you know which commandment truly stymies both groups? 

You might expect that they wouldn’t remember “Don’t covet your neighbor’s wife” or “Don’t take God’s name in vain.”  Some of them are definitely challenged by “Honor your mother and your father.”  But after a few hints, they always get all of the Ten Commandments. Except one.

That is the Second Commandment: You shall have no other gods before me, nor make any image of any of those gods, in the form of any depiction or reproduction.  This prohibition, repeated many times in the Torah, and perhaps even more often in the various books of the prophets, simply doesn’t make sense to students today.  Why can’t we have images?  Why can’t we create visual icons—& emojis, and videos—for that matter?

Lance Strate, a professor at Fordham, made a nuanced case for the Judaic worldview of Neil Postman, his late teacher and friend. He highlighted an early passage in Amusing Ourselves to Death, where Postman references the Second Commandment. Postman writes, “I’ve always been perplexed that God would insert a prohibition against the making of graven images in what otherwise is a series of ethical laws.” Perhaps, he suggests, “God knew that to accept an abstract and universal deity, the Israelites first needed to break the habit of drawing pictures or making statues. If the God of the Jews was to exist in the word and through the word, iconography had to become a ‘blasphemy.’”

Whether the images are graven or pixelated Neil Postman taught us forty years ago, through the printed word, to grasp just how blasphemous these images have become. 

Because life is not about surfaces and superficiality, not about photos and images and video clips of us.  Life is about who we are fully, completely.

The High Holy Days arrive each year to teach us, yet again, that we are more than the sum of our many photographs or videos.  We are in reality—not reality TV, but you know, actual real reality—we are the sum of our actions, the depth of our emotions, the grandeur of our ideas, the beauty of our creativity, the courage of our convictions.  We are something much better and holier than any selfie can capture, or any Facebook short or TikTok or Instagram feed can reflect.

We are each fallible human beings, but we are also each created in God’s own image.  Partially we are the ego-centered, self-serving creatures we appear to be in our posts and webpages.  But we are also sacrifice and love, sacredness and service, loyalty and dedication.  We are true accomplishment and noble failure.  We are holiness and happiness, mourning and remembrance.  We are the first cry of a baby and the last sigh of a dying man.  We are, each of us, much, much more than electrons displayed on video screens.

And Yom Kippur comes every year to remind us of that fact.

For twenty-four hours we are commanded to look inward, to compare our lives with our dreams, to measure our actions against our ideals.  We are compelled to look hard at who we are and who we wish to be, our successes and our failures, our bullseyes and our missed targets.

On Yom Kippur we are all, in a way, taking a selfie. But it is not the posed, artificial image we create with a phone.  The image we seek to capture is deeper and more complex than that—it is the whole person, the reality of each of our lives, the person we each meet in the private sphere of the soul.  That is who we each seek to find tonight and tomorrow.

The very real you. 

What God wants to see tonight and tomorrow is not the selfie—it’s the self.  It’s not the constructed, posed, photoshopped version of you.  It’s just you.  Without makeup. Without pretense.  Without shtick.  Without Instagram or TikTok.  Just you.

You know, the real you.  The one who has to apologize directly to the human beings you hurt in the past year.  The one who didn’t pray enough, study enough, breathe enough, give enough, care enough.  That one.  The one who was selfish and thoughtless and narcissistic.  The one who didn’t really work hard, just pretended to, who overcommitted and underperformed, who wishes he or she was a better person but didn’t make the effort to actually become that better person.  The one who was often passive aggressive, who engaged in gossip, who let anger get the best of him.  The one who let helping herself get in the way of helping others.  The one who let himself be too busy to help his wife.  The one who ignored her husband.  The one who spent more time shopping than visiting the sick, more time on sports than supporting friends.  The one who gave more money to Amazon than to tzedakah, who pretended he couldn’t afford to help when he just didn’t want to, even though it was the right thing.

That you.  The one in the mirror each morning.

Over this Day of Atonement may we each come to know that person well, and help that person grow in teshuvah and holiness.  May we drop our obsession with self-presentation and focus instead on self-awareness.  May we shed our preference for self-absorption and remember how to reach out to those we love, to reconnect with them, to help them find their best selves, too.

If we can do that, tonight and tomorrow, if we can find our truest self and resolve to repair it, if we can honestly evaluate our lives and put our moral houses in order, if we can search our souls and seek the spark of divine sanctity implanted within, then we will need no selfies to remember the moment.  We will need no posts to prove our moral merit.  We will require no tweets to tell our tales.  

Instead, we will find God, who takes no selfies at all.  And in that finding we will discover goodness and holiness, comfort and redemption.   

May this be our resolve on this Yom Kippur, and may our wills unite with God’s own will to make this a day of authentic and very real teshuvah.

Gmar chatimah tovah—may you be sealed in the Book of Life for a good year.

The Jazz Singer and Kol Nidrei

Opening Kol Nidrei Eve 5785

Rabbi Sam Cohon, Congregation Beit Simcha, Tucson, AZ

“Dear God, so far today, I haven’t gossiped, haven’t lost my temper, haven’t been greedy, grumpy, nasty, selfish, or over-indulgent.

“Thank you, God, for lending me the strength to do that.

“But in a few minutes, God, I’m going to need a lot more help, because I’m getting out of bed…”

Ah, the challenge of teshuvah, the difficulty we each face trying to change.  Returning to being the best person that you can be isn’t as easy as you would like.  Once we interact with other people, it’s infinitely more difficult to maintain our repentance, isn’t it?  Perhaps you have discovered that fact already in the nine days of this 5785 year. 

But Kol Nidrei is here to help.  And here’s a story about that.

On October 6, 1927, 97 years ago this week, on the day before Yom Kippur, a magical film premier took place in New York. “The Jazz Singer” starring Al Jolson electrified the audience as the first feature-length film to contain a sound score, sound effects – and actual dialogue.  Mind you, the dialogue amounted to less than three minutes of on-screen “talking”; the rest was shown on the usual silent film caption cards. But six songs were sung aloud.  5 jazz tunes, and… Kol Nidrei.

If you don’t already know, the movie “The Jazz Singer” dealt with Jewish assimilation and culminated on Yom Kippur. 

On April 25, 1917, Samson Raphaelson, who was from New York City's Lower East Side and was a student at the University of Illinois, attended the musical “Robinson Crusoe, Jr.” which starred Al Jolson, a Russian-born Jew.  Samson Raphaelson said he only experienced this level of emotional intensity among synagogue cantors.

Five years later, Raphaelson wrote a short story called “The Day of Atonement” based on Al Jolson’s life. He adapted it into a stage play called “The Jazz Singer” that premiered in 1925 starring Georgie Jessel. It was a hit, and Warner Brothers bought the film rights. As a result of contract issues—including how much money he wanted to be in the picture—Jessel did not star in the movie. The studio offered the role to Eddie Cantor, who turned it down, and then finally to Al Jolson—ironically, who the story was originally written about. Jolson was at the height of his huge popularity, but he hadn’t yet made a film. Jolson took the part, signing a $75,000 deal (about a million dollars today) in 1927.

This was the era of silent films.  In the Jazz Singer the audience, for the first time, could both see and hear Jolson. And what they heard was his rich voice, shuffling feet, and the sobs punctuating his high notes that reverberated with a fervor never before imagined on screen. The effect was thrilling.

The audience was mesmerized in a way that forever changed filmmaking. Even Jolson was so overcome at the premiere he couldn’t say his signature line: “Wait a minute, wait a minute, you ain’t heard nothin’ yet!”  The Jazz Singer was responsible for ending silent films, and beginning the era of talkies.

But there was much more to it. The story, which reaches its climax during Yom Kippur services, took on the issue of assimilation in America. The timing of the premier was intentional. Yom Kippur, of course, is our holiest day of the year, when we ask God for atonement from our sins. It demands introspection. At the film’s core lies the dilemma of maintaining Jewish identity in a changing world. Jolson’s character, Jakie Rabinowitz, son of a cantor, descended from generations of cantors, wrestles with honoring the traditions of his ancestors or grabbling hold of modern American life as a jazz singer, the rockstars of the day. The plot reflected the views and experiences of the four Jewish Warner brothers and its Jewish star, Al Jolson—born Asa Yoelson.

“The Jazz Singer” tells the story Jakie, the youngest Rabinowitz, American born, groomed from birth by his Orthodox father to devote his life to carrying on Judaism and the spirit and music of his ancestors.  Jakie’s passion, however, beats to the rhythm of American jazz. Instead of learning chazzones, his chants, he’s in cafes singing jazz tunes.

His heartsick father finds out and on Yom Kippur, Cantor Rabinowitz mournfully says, "My son was to stand at my side and sing tonight – but now I have no son." Jakie leaves home and forges a successful career with his jazz singing, taking on the name Jack Robins.

The dramatic climax occurs years later on Yom Kippur Eve. His cantor father is dying and calls his son to come back to shul the same night Jakie is supposed to make a critical appearance in a new Broadway show. His mother Sara wants him to take his father’s place at Kol Nidrei Eve services, to sing Kol Nidrei. His girlfriend warns Jakie that failing to appear opening night will ruin his career.

At first Jakie refuses his mother. But then, unable to deny what’s in his heart, he rushes to his father.  Jakie kneels at his father's bedside and the two finally talk with passion and affection. His father says: "My son–I love you." What will he do? Sacrifice his American music career or his responsibility to his father and Judaism?

Jakie sings Kol Nidre in his father's place and the Broadway opening is delayed. His father listens from his deathbed and speaks his last, forgiving words: "Mama, we have our son again." His girlfriend is there, too, and sees how Jack has reconciled the division in his soul: "A jazz singer – singing to his God."

The risk taken on by the Warner Brothers was rewarded. “The Jazz Singer” was a hit. The film that cost the studio $422,000, a fortune back then, made a huge profit, and won its producer an Honorary Academy Award at the very first Oscars.

Now the date this pioneering film debuted was not an accident.  Its premier was October 6, 1927, 97 years ago.  That year, Kol Nidrei Eve was October 7, 1927.  October 7th, a date we know for other reasons now.  Warner Brothers premiered the first talking—and singing—motion picture the night before Yom Kippur began, with the singing of Kol Nidrei included.  No doubt they wanted to attract the Jewish audience, although the film soon became an international sensation, drawing people of all ethnicities and nationalities. Being Jewish—at least ethnically so—the Warner Brothers, like Al Jolson, certainly knew when Yom Kippur was. What could be more of a tug at the heart than to have the prodigal son, as it were, come back and chant Kol Nidrei on Yom Kippur Eve while his dying cantor father listens?  And to do it the day before the real Yom Kippur Eve?  The Jazz Singer isn’t called “The Kol Nidrei Chanter”; it’s about American assimilation, yes, but with a Jewish soul still very much in evidence.

I don’t know if tonight’s chantings of Kol Nidrei will bring you back to that Jewish soul within you, that pintele Yid, that yiddisheh neshomah, as they say in Yiddish.  But I do know that it has that power.

My friends, there is something about this melody that has always tugged at Jewish hearts.  It’s called, in Jewish musicology, a miSinai tune, unchanged since Moses climbed down from Mount Sinai.  That’s not literally true; the text itself first appears in machzors around the sixth century, the melody perhaps appears in the Middle Ages.  But hearing it chanted three times, as Jewish legal formulas are required to be, brings the power and beauty of this melody a unique prominence in Jewish music.  It’s remarkable combination of sweetness, depth, and power can wash over you in ways that no other composition can.  Kol Nidrei is designed to capture your soul.

Only one night a year can you hear Kol Nidrei.  Tonight.  Here.  Now.