Halloween and Monotheism

Sermon Shabbat Lech Lecha 5786

Rabbi Sam Cohon, Congregation Beit Simcha, Tucson, AZ

I have to relate a funny incident we experienced at our daughter’s preschool early childhood education center last year at this time of year.  It’s at a Jewish institution, and more or less a Jewish preschool, even though many of the kids and teachers are not Jewish.  As October progressed, we received a few notices that Halloween wasn’t celebrated at our preschool, and that we weren’t to send our children in costumes nor would there be any type of encouragement of jack-o’-lanterns or pumpkin carving or that sort of thing.  Halloween is not a Jewish holiday, the notices said, and there are plenty of Jewish holidays to celebrate in the fall, of course.

Now, I’m comfortable with all of that, although I don’t have any strong objections to Halloween as it’s celebrated in America.  As kids, the children of a cantor and the grandchildren of a rabbi, we carved pumpkins and dressed up in costumes and trick or treated in our old neighborhood, and gave out candy, just like everyone else.  We even decorated the house a bit.  When my older children were little, we would have costumes and trick or treat, unless October 31st fell on a Friday night, and then we would go to services first and then trick or treat with them, or perhaps the other way round, depending on the timing of Shabbat services.  I don’t really have the strong negative reactions that some rabbis do to what is really a pretty innocuous festival, even if it has had terrible results for American teeth.  I mean, free candy!  How can you convince kids it’s not a good idea?

In any case, our preschool forbade any kind of Halloween celebrations, which was fine with me, since we have just finished a long run of Jewish fall festivals from Rosh HaShanah through Simchat Torah.  Good, let’s emphasize the Judaism, right?  Sounds good to me.

And then, just before Halloween, we received a note in our kid’s cubby that we should figure out what we wanted them to bring to put on the Dia de los Muertos altar in the hallway for Day of the Dead. 

Um… wow.  So Halloween, based on All Hallows’ Eve but basically a night to dress up and get candy and hear “Monster Mash” on the radio, is not OK in a Jewish setting.  But altars—altars!—dedicated to dead relatives for a Mexican Day of the Dead ritual, a kind of combined Christian and pagan “celebration” that includes giving people sugar candy skeleton heads is not only acceptable but encouraged?  Exactly how does that fit in a Jewish preschool?

And why was that pagan/Christian/ghoulish ritual allowed, while Halloween was identifiably not acceptable?

All of which brings me to comment a bit about assimilation, the gradual subsuming of Jewish identity into the American melting pot. 

Look, it’s pretty easy to disappear as a Jew in America.  Just stop going to synagogue, don’t join the shul, don’t wear a yarmulkeh, don’t celebrate Jewish holidays, don’t observe Shabbat, don’t study Jewish texts or subjects, and don’t worry too much about Israel or antisemitism.  Most Americans are a mix of ethnicities, and lots of them don’t have a strong sense of religious or ethnic identity.  In general, Jews can pass in America, particularly if they don’t do anything Jewish.  If you are at services tonight, or attending online—and, obviously, you are—you are already doing more to demonstrate your Judaism than lots of American Jews do regularly. 

Now I know that we don’t have altars dedicated to the souls of dead relatives; instead, we have living Judaism, energetic, active, and warm.  We do have goodies to eat after services—no Butterfingers, and no sugar candy skulls either, but tasty stuff still…

Which brings me to the remarkable Torah portion we chant this Shabbat, Lech Lecha. 

I’ve often wondered about the human experience of this call that Avram hears.  God tells him to leave his homeland, his birthplace, his father’s house, and go the land that God will show him, asher areka.  It’s certainly life-changing, but also super-ambiguous.  I can just visualize him going home to Sarai, his wife, and telling her the plan.  That conversation could not have gone well.

Avram tells Sarai: “God told us to leave here, right now, pack up and take everything.”

Sarai asks, “God told you?  Which God?” 

And Avram says “A God you have never heard of and can’t see.” 

So, Sarai answers, “Uh huh.  And where are we going?”

And Avram says, “I don’t know.”

That must have been a fun home life for a while, no?

Now, mind you, this command to leave everything behind a head out to a place he had never been was only the second craziest idea that had washed over Abram, Avram.  The craziest was the entire idea of monotheism.

To understand the drama of Abraham’s initial choice requires a bit of background, which begins with a simple question. What percentage of the world’s population believes in one God?  That is, what proportion of the 7.2 billion people on the globe today, in 2025, believe that there is one and only one God?

When I ask classes or other groups that question the answers range hugely.  Some people are sure that 90 or 100% of the world believes in one God—surely, everyone believes in one God, right?  Some people think it’s no more than 5 or 10%—almost no one believes in one God, right? 

The answer lies somewhere in between.  The word for belief in one God is monotheism, and when you start to survey world religions and how many official adherents they have it quickly gets interesting. 

Let’s start by looking at the major religions of the world and the number of people who belong to them.  While it’s hard to be exact, most studies agree that there are around one billion Hindus, the majority religion of India and a significant minority in Indonesia, and elsewhere.  Hindus believe in many gods, of course, so that means that 15% of the world’s population is not monotheistic.  Buddhists don’t have a god-concept at all, and therefore are definitely not monotheists, and they comprise somewhere around 500 million people—another 7%--which raises the non-believers in one god to 22%.  Atheists, those folks who religiously believe that God does not exist, total about 15-16%, raising the non-one-Godders to 38%.  A variety of African, Chinese, Southeast Asian, and Pacific Island tribal religions—the worship of fetishes, idols, local gods, cargo cults, folk heroes, and such—add in another 400 million people or so, an additional 5% or 16% who have multiple gods, raising our non-believers in one God to about 45%.

So who does believe in one God today? 

Well, certainly Moslems do.  Islam is a pristine form of monotheism that attracts the adherence of perhaps one and a half billion people, roughly 23% of the world’s population.  Whatever else people may say about Muslims, they surely believe in one God.  And of course, there are the Jews—after all, we invented monotheism—but we compose about 15 million people, just one fifth of one percent.  That makes, oh, on a good day, 23% who believe in one God.

What about Christianity, you say?   There are over 2 billion Christians in the world, and they believe in one God, right? 

Well, yes—and perhaps no.  The concept of the trinity is problematic if you are a monotheist.  One god in three parts, or three divine entities, including a human, walking manifestation of god, plus one in heaven, and one that is all spirit.  And that’s without accounting for the Virgin Mary or the many saints, which are so central to Roman Catholicism and Greek, Russian, and other forms of  Orthodox Christianity… 

To elide the controversy a bit, let’s just assume that Christians are believers in one God, Trinitarian or otherwise.  That still means that at most half the people in the world today believe in one God—and all of those folks are from what are sometimes called the Abrahamic faiths, spiritual descendants of our ancestor Abraham, the subject of this week’s great Torah portion. 

Now if today about half of the world believes in one God, 3800 years ago, when Abraham came along, no one believed in one God.  The very idea, in a world populated by gods for each town and city, gods for every mountain and river and sea, gods that represented every animal in the forest, gods for every natural process—wind, lightning, thunder, rain, volcano, and earthquake—in a world filled with gods, the idea that there was only one God in the universe was spectacularly revolutionary.  It was outlandish, crazy, beyond consideration.

One creator of goodness?  One source for justice?  One source for right and wrong?  No one except Abraham believed it then. And over half the world still doesn’t.

But without that great leap of Abraham’s there would be no way to develop a concept of universal morality, no way to have a single understanding that some acts are simply wrong, and that some responsibilities are universal.  Abraham’s brilliant, radical understanding of the oneness of God and the uniqueness of the divine underlies all morality, and all of western civilization. 

It is thanks to Abraham, and this week’s Torah portion of Lech Lecha, that we are able to live lives of holiness and purpose, and to seek justice and morality.  And it is belief in one God, no matter how marginally popular it is, that makes it all possible—today, just as it did nearly four millennia ago, in Abraham’s time.

No altars or sugar candy skulls.  Just one God.  One Source for morality and meaning.  A Jewish path to holiness, goodness, and meaning.

Basic Decency, the First Covenant

Shabbat No’ach, Rabbi Sam Cohon, Congregation Beit Simcha, Tucson, AZ

This week we chant No’ach, of course, one of the most famous of all Torah portions and the original great sea story of a truly ancient mariner.  At the end of the mabul, the flood, when Noah gets to leave the ark and go out on dry land, God gives a promise, the very first berit, the first covenant or contract that in Jewish tradition God makes with humanity.  The Creator vows never again to destroy the earth by water—we are able to do so, by the way, through, say, global warming, but not God—and we human beings are entered into a compact with seven specific rules. 

This Noahide covenant, the prime rainbow connection, has seven specific rules in it.  Mind you, these are not rules for Jews, or in the formal sense of the term mitzvot: they are the basic rules for civilized societies of any kind, of any religion or nation or peoplehood, the foundational laws that define whether a system, a culture, is good or evil.

While it can be a bit complex looking just at the literal text to discern where there seven rules are commanded, there is general agreement among rabbis and scholars that these are what God has Noah, on behalf of all humanity—after all, we may all be descended from Adam but we are also, according to the Tanakh, the Bible, also all descended from Noah—there is general agreement on the seven.  They are:

1.   Do not murder.

2.   Do not steal.

3.   Do not commit acts of forcible sexual violation.

4.   Do not cut the limbs off of a living animal, let alone a living human.

5.   Do not blaspheme.

6.   No idolatry.

7.   Have courts of justice.

These, it seems to me, are basic rules that define whether people are ethical or unethical, moral or amoral, good or bad.  Please note, again, this has nothing to do with whether people are worshipping the right god, or keeping a Sabbath, or even whether they are giving to charity.  They simply are there to teach us how to know who is essentially good and who just flat out is not.

Because in the Torah there is never an assumption that we will live in some bland, universally observant society or civilization.  There is always provision made for interacting with people and groups and nations and civilizations that think differently than we do.  And some of those will be good and deserving of respect and understanding.  Unfortunately, some will not.

Most of these rules seem so basic and essential, and we can scarcely argue about them: don’t murder, steal, rape, abuse animals; some are perhaps less obvious—do not attack the foundations of this code by claiming it has no moral source, that would be blasphemy; do not worship idolatrous gods that undercut the basic morality of this code, such as pretending that you, yourself, are above moral codes and laws.  And one of these Noahide rules, establish courts of justice, is there to make certain that the other six are maintained.

It is this B’nai No’ach covenant, this contract with God that we are glad to observe in the larger world, and that we should expect of any society or group with which we interact.

And yet—and yet, some societies fail to manage even this basic code.  We know that the Palestinian terrorists of Hamas intentionally, repeatedly and viciously violated the first four of these commandments two years ago, and now in a period of cease fire they are continuing to do so without Israeli intervention.  We know that there has never been a judicial system worthy of the name in the 20 years Hamas controlled Gaza, nor in the 29 years that the Palestinian Authority mostly controlled the West Bank. 

I want to go back to the least referable of these Noahide laws for a moment.  It’s easy to understand the commandment against committing murder, of course, and the laws against theft and rape and torturing animals.  It’s harder to relate to a law against blasphemy, isn’t it? 

I wonder if we should understand blasphemy a little differently than our ancestors did.  Because in our own contemporary world, restraints on the use of language in public forums—particularly on social media, on the internet, on the air, but really, in nearly every form of public expression—the use of language has been untethered from any restraint.  People attack their opponents in the harshest and often most vicious ways, using insults that used to be consigned to the lowest aspects of human interaction at all levels of society.  That kind of degradation of speech, it seems to me, is a new form of blasphemy.  It is a way of causing the divisions in our society to become chasms, of using language to destroy others and to humiliate and damage.  Isn’t that blasphemous by any reasonable definition? 

You see, the goal of these Noahide laws has always been to allow people of different belief systems, different ethnicities and cultures, different backgrounds and hopes and dreams to nonetheless live together in peace.  They allow diverse societies to reach across the boundaries of their differences to work towards a common goal.  The mishpetai b’nai Noach, the laws of the children of Noah—that is, the laws that apply to all of us human beings—are designed not to divide us, but to allow us to unite on the grounds of common decency.  It means that the real and even meaningful differentiations do not prevent us from achieving good in our civilizations when called upon to do so.

That principal is something that our US Congress apparently needs to learn… as does the entire governmental structure these days.

On this Shabbat No’ach, may we reinforce the lessons we have learned from this dramatic portion, and from our traumatic present, and grow to accept and understand others for their underlying goodness.  May we celebrate these differences, but base our larger actions on our foundational, covenantal similarity.

We are all human.  We all can seek to create goodness in our society and in our world.

Beginning Again, Once More

We are now officially through the mother of all Jewish holiday seasons, our fall fiesta of festivals, which ran from Selichot in mid-September through Simchat Torah Tuesday night, with full festivities and great joy, enlivened especially by the recent return of the 20 Israeli hostages to freedom on the 2nd Anniversary of October 7th, 2023.  This holiday season was a very good one, but as wonderful as each and every Jewish holiday is in its own right, it remains something of a relief for rabbis and cantors and we few, proud hybrid-types—non-plug-in variety—that the long lingering line of celebrations is finally over. 

Of course, that also means that we now have to begin to catch up on all the other work we neglected in the run-up to the holidays and the Selichot, Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, Sukkot, Shemini Atzeret and Simchat Torah observances themselves.  And for that we have the new month of Cheshvan, which begins this coming week.  This Jewish calendar month is nicknamed Marcheshvan, literally “the bitter month” because it is the only one in the entire Jewish year during which we have no actual Jewish holidays; but following close on the heels of the festival frenzy of the Jewish month of Tishrei, that’s really not such a bad thing.

But before we leave the festival season in our rear-view mirror, I have one last Simchat Torah story.

This tale took place when I was a student at Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati, and I arrived there just before Simchat Torah evening services.  I was hired to be the cantor in the Chapel at HUC, but before assuming that role I had just conducted High Holy Days services in Vancouver, British Columbia.  New to Cincinnati and that campus of Hebrew Union College, I wanted to watch how things worked before leading any services myself.  To be honest, it was a pretty disappointing experience.  I sat through the first few Hakafot, the parades with the Torah, listening to the dull, boring songs they were doing and watching stiff, dutiful, lifeless processions around the sanctuary.  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 Simchas Torah by singing and dancing with great enthusiasm and energy—a nearly wanton celebration, like ours here at Beit Simcha last Tuesday night.  Dean Erlich explained to me that when he first came to Hebrew Union College the Torah hakafot for Simchat Torah were done in a slow, stately procession, accompanied by plodding organ music.  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..." And apparently some of that heritage remained years later when I arrived in Cincinnati.

I guess marching is how Germans dance.

Anyway, speaking of Torah, now that the the final fall festival has passed we can return to concentrating on the Torah portions that begin our new cycle of readings.  These parshiyot are so remarkably rich and diverse that they invite investigation, probing and questioning.  Plus, they are genuinely fun to explore.

And this week, we begin with the very beginning, an exceptionally good place to start.

There is something exciting and new about starting over with Breisheet this Shabbat, rediscovering the tabula rasa, the Creation ex nihilo that commences our greatest textual creation as a people.  Genesis, at its inception, is all about the incredible promise and potential inherent in our universe.  It is a blank slate, a fresh page, a first kiss, the exciting start to a trip we will take together on a fresh, open road around an unturned corner.  It is discovering the world anew.

Poet Stanly Barkan puts it well in his verse, “As Yet Unborn”:

Oh to be Adam

Again

With all his ribs

Yearning for a woman

As yet unborn,

Mouth free

Of the taste of apples,

Ears without the hiss of snakes,

Mindless of nakedness and shame,

In the garden of gentle creatures

Waiting for a name.

Most of us have read this text of Genesis before, and we know that this creation epic doesn’t end as well as it begins.  Humans will be created, we will immediately make mistakes and transform this perfect creation into something much more recognizably flawed.  But still, there is something remarkably exciting, even thrilling, about the start of Breisheet, something extroardinarily energizing.  From nothing, something amazing is about to happen.  And that inherent, untapped potential makes this a narrative that has almost limitless ability to interest, inspire, confuse and tantalize the reader.

Take, for example, the first lines of Genesis, which describe the creation of light with God’s first words in the Torah, Yehi Or, Be, light!  We think of that as the great initial moment of singularity, the expansion of divine energy into a void that leads ultimately to the evolution of the universe we now know.  And it is that—but it is also an incredibly beautiful description of the holiness of beginning from one single, solitary point and moment.

It took a long time for contemporary cosmology to come to some level of agreement with Genesis on the conception of creation.  Only in the mid-20th century did physics produce the Big Bang theory—the scientific concept, not the TV show—and today it is among the most widely accepted ways to understand the creation of the universe.  In recent years the development of the Large Hadron Supercollider brought the possiblity of looking back to that moment ever closer, allowing us to see what happened just after the singularity, the moment creation took place, to observe the Big Bang, to voyeuristically gaze at Breisheet itself.  In recent years, the Webb super telescope sent back amazing, colorful images from almost the very beginning of time.

We are all interested, at least a little bit, in the beginning of everything, aren’t we? The dawn of creation.  The first single event in our universe’s history.  The instant of conception, or inception.  An amazing, holy moment.

The black zero of beginning.

From that inception point, in one singular event, everything starts.  According to physics, a great flash of energy expanded outwards.  One holy instant.  “Breisheet Bara Elohim… yehi or, at the beginning of God’s creating… there was energy.”

The power of that initial unity, what physicists call a “singularity,” is woven all through Judaism.  One beginning from God.  One source of morality and truth.  Oneness first, with rich diversity evolving from that initial Divine creative burst, born out of it to populate this gorgeous, complex world.

At the risk of overstating things, I also think of Breisheet, that moment of creation, when considering our young congregation, Beit Simcha.  We began almost exactly seven years ago, although since we began in October 2018 with the Torah portion of Lech Lecha, which is coming up in two more weeks, technically this is only our sixth Breisheet Shabbat.  That makes this our sixth Shabbat of creation, if you will, which seems a most appropriate time to give thanks for what we have: the opportunity and the reality of having created a community of love, joy, warmth and support, a shul that nurtures Jewish life and seeks to have it truly flourish.  While we don’t pretend to have created Gan Eiden just yet, a Garden of Eden, Beit Simcha’s course has already proven to be a wonderful journey, filled with growth, creativity and generative events and moments. 

The congregation we’ve been creating over these short years has proven to be many wonderful things, including resilient and resourceful.  I would hope that God approves of us and our work, and says about it in Genesis’ immortal lines, “It is good.”   And that our next chapter leads us to a permanent home filled with the same spirit of joy that we have nurtured here. 

In this week of beginning the Torah again, we celebrate with gratitude the many people we have welcomed here into our congregation and invite anyone who wishes to begin the joyous journey of membership as well. May we each find the wholeness, and holiness, that is an underlying truth present everywhere in the universe that God began to create in our Torah portion.  And may we seek, and find, good new beginnings in this post-holiday 5786 year, and great joy and creativity in the variegated patterns of our own lives.

Free at Last

Sermon Shabbat Sukkot 5786, Rabbi Samuel M. Cohon

Congregation Beit Simcha, Tucson, AZ

You know, sometimes the news of the day moves faster than we can even assimilate directly as intelligent individuals.  For Jews, this is one of those moments.

As you surely have heard, this week an agreement was reached between Israel and the remnants of Hamas that remain after two terrible years of war.  Almost exactly two years after the war-crimes attack by Palestinian terrorists of Hamas on civilians in Southern Israel, including murder, rape, torture, and the kidnapping of 251 hostages into Gaza, Israel and Hamas have agreed on a US-brokered ceasefire plan that will allow for the release of all remaining hostages in Gaza, Israeli withdrawal to an agreed boundary area within Gaza, and the release of Palestinian terrorist prisoners held by Israel.

The ceasefire in Gaza unofficially took effect several days before the Israeli government’s approval of the deal on Thursday, brought about by President Trump pressuring Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu to do so as an indication of Israeli intentions to agree to end the war.

President Trump says the hostages are likely to be released on Monday or Tuesday, exactly two years on the Jewish calendar, on Simchat Torah, after they were brutally kidnapped by Palestinian terrorists.

The plan met with celebration in Israel and Gaza, though residents in both places expressed caution about whether the initial agreement would lead to a comprehensive peace deal.  It should be celebrated all around the world, by everyone.

No matter what follows, the release of the remaining Israeli hostages, held brutally by the Palestinian terrorists of Hamas for more than two years, is a powerful and great result. 

In exchange for the 20 or so living Israeli hostages and the bodies of about 30 murdered hostages, 250 Palestinian terrorist security prisoners serving life sentences in Israel for murder will be released, along with 1,700 Gazans who were arrested since the October 7, 2023 attack but who were not involved in it. They will be exiled abroad or sent to Gaza. Some 22 minors who did not participate in the October 7 attack will be set free.

In addition, some 360 bodies of Palestinian terrorists will be handed over to Hamas.

President Trump thanked the leaders of Qatar, Egypt, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Indonesia for their help in securing the Gaza deal.  This deal would not have taken place without the pressure exerted on Hamas by its former Arab patrons.  It would also not have happened without the general destruction of Hamas that the IDF has effected.

During a visit to the Gaza Strip IDF Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Eyal Zamir told Israeli troops that the ceasefire deal with Hamas to free all the hostages, was thanks to the “achievements of the ground maneuver” in the Gaza Strip.

“The signing of the agreement to return the hostages this morning is a ray of light for all of us and further evidence of the achievements of the ground maneuver. Thanks to significant military pressure and a powerful, high-quality ground maneuver, you, the troops, created the conditions for the hostages to be returned home,” General Zamir said.  “The military action brought about a political achievement; the achievement is first and foremost yours.”

That’s somewhat accurate.  I guess, in the form of instant analysis, Hamas agreed to release the remaining hostages in exchange for, at least for the time being, remaining in Gaza with some sort of authority.  Generally speaking, Hamas’ military capacity has been completely destroyed.  It has the ability to coordinate small guerilla cells in the territory, but its leadership has all been killed by the IDF during this war, and its command structure, underground tunnel facilities and armaments have been decimated.  It came to the realization, under intense pressure from Arab states like Egypt and Saudi Arabia, that it had to return the hostages and come to an agreement or face total extinction.

Israel conceded on some points as well, including allowing Hamas to remain in Gaza and not fully disarm. Israel is releasing convicted murderers in the exchange for its remaining hostages, terrorists who have murdered Israelis.  It is not a wildly disproportionate exchange, as Israel has done in the past in hostage situations.  Remember, 14 years ago Israel exchanged over 1000 Palestinian terrorists to gain the release of one kidnapped Israeli soldier, Gilad Shalit.  Among the terrorists released in 2011 was Yahya Sinwar, the terrorist who masterminded the Simchat Torah war-crimes atrocities of October 7, 2023; there is a price to pay in these exchanges.    

Still, this end to the Gaza War and the liberation of the Israeli hostages is a great moment, long awaited and prayed for.  We will always remember the 1200 Israelis murdered on October 7th, 2023, and the many hostages who suffered brutality at the hands of Palestinian terrorists.  But we must celebrate the end of a war that went on much longer than anyone anticipated, and which caused severe damage to Israel’s reputation internationally, and to the position of Jews in so many locations as well.

No one really knows what the future of Gaza will be.  But it will be much better off with Hamas defanged, and virtually any new order there will be an improvement for the Palestinians, for the Israelis, and for the world.

We pray fervently that the remaining hostages are returned to Israel, and the bodies of the murdered are returned to their families for burial as well.

Israel has won the war on the battlefield.  It is time for a peace that creates a better, safer Middle East, one which we can celebrate and give thanks for on this festival of gratitude. 

Life Before Death

Yizkor 5786, Yom Kippur 5786

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

A woman was describing her discussion with her elderly mother about dying, and how comfortable her mom was at the thought of passing away.  She was a cheery person, generally, the mother, and was excited about seeing all the people she had loved but lost after she died.  In her mind, heaven looked a lot like a beautiful Italian villa, with the chance to spend time enjoying seeing her late husband, her parents, cousins, and friends.  But then she stopped short, as a thought occurred to her: “Oh, dear; what if they don’t make it!”

What if they don’t make it…

Now, in truth, we have no real idea what happens when we die.  We not only don’t know if our loved ones are going to “make it” to The Good Place afterlife.  We don’t know if we are going to make it there ourselves.  Not only that: we don’t even know if it exists.  But I love the confidence of that elderly woman’s exclamation: “Oh, dear!  What if they don’t make it?” Indeed.

My friends, I am often asked about the Jewish view of life after death.  I generally answer, “Judaism cares much more about life before death than life after death, to be honest.”  And that is surely true.  But one of religion’s great responsibilities is to explain things we can’t explain otherwise, to speak to questions that have no straightforward answers, to help us understand the most challenging problems and offer valuable insights that address our need for resolution and comfort.

And one of the most difficult of all these great questions is, “What happens to me after I die?”

Unlike most other religious traditions, Judaism has a lot of different ideas about this, and none of them are exactly canonical, or even required, even in Orthodox belief.  As some of you know, from time to time I teach a class called “Life After Death in Jewish Belief,” which surveys the development of our people’s understandings about what happens after we die.  It is a fascinating class, and one of my favorite courses to teach, mostly because no one can prove that I’m wrong about anything I say in that class.  For one thing, no one wants to do the research. 

Now, there are many interesting and surprising aspects to our Jewish understandings about the afterlife.  First, there is no record of any Jewish belief in life after death in our most authoritative text, the Torah, at all.  Only when we reach the books of the Prophets, and more specifically the last part of the Hebrew Bible, the Tanakh, the Writings, the Ketuvim do we see a real theology of life after death. 

The two central ideas of what happens after we die probably didn’t even originate from us.  The first was the concept of the resurrection of the dead, the idea that after we die and are buried, at some point in the future we will be revivified, have flesh restored to our bones, and be brought back to life as human beings.  That idea likely came into Judaism from the Babylonians, who had various traditions and myths about resurrection.  The second major idea was the notion that each of us has an eternal soul, an aspect of us that is unique, and which is indestructible.  After we die, it remains behind, or goes to some general repository for souls.  That idea was likely brought into Judaism from the Persians, during the Persian Empire period.  Both ideas may have originated farther east still, in India, and worked their way west somewhere between 2700 and 2500 years ago.

By the time of the Book of Daniel, perhaps 2200 years ago—a long time, of course, but remember, at that point Judaism had been around for about 1500 years—the two ideas merged into one theology of life after death.  In Daniel, the understanding became that after we die and are buried, sometime in the future, a great, disastrous world war will take place, followed by a Judgement Day.  An anointed human being, the Messiah, will herald it, and at that point our bodies will be resurrected, restored to full human form, our souls will be reimplanted within our bodies, we will be judged for actions when we were alive, and some will go to eternal reward and others to eternal punishment. 

Now, mind you, there isn’t much more in the Bible about what either of those options means, and even the Talmud, composed hundreds of years after the Book of Daniel, doesn’t get too specific about heaven or hell, or even the structure of Judgement Day.  That version of life after death, or at least what the end of days, the acharit hayamim will look like, became the typical Jewish understanding of afterlife.  But interestingly, it never turned into the focal point of Judaism.  That is, we had a general concept of life after death, and it fit that model, but no one spent much time thinking about it or talking or preaching about it. 

I could go on about the various Jewish views of life after death; they range pretty broadly through history, and there remain many different ideas about what happens after we go.  A friend and past scholar in residence and guest on Too Jewish, Rabbi Rami Shapiro, was asked in a lecture he gave for me once, “Where do we go when we die?”  He said, “We don’t go anywhere.  We are part of the time-space fabric, and we simply move to a different part of it.  We are all part of everything.”

You see, unlike so many other religions, the afterlife was never the point of being Jewish.  You don’t live your life here in order to get to heaven, or to avoid hell.  You are supposed to live your life according to the mitzvot in order to be a good, ethical, moral Jew, to improve the world we live in, not to get rewards afterwards or to avoid eternal punishment. 

That’s likely why the Jewish views of heaven and hell are so underwhelming.  I mean, other religions devote great energy to their depictions of heaven and hell.  In Islam, heaven is vividly described, filled with fountains and iced fruits, a place of infinite bliss and, for men, 72 virgins, according to a Hadith.  In Christianity, hell is even more vividly delineated, with tortures and punishments for the wicked—“abandon hope all you who enter here” Dante has it labelled, while Hieronymous Bosch paints the torments of the sinners in hell with unparalleled vicious detail. 

In Judaism?  Not a whole lot of info on either place.  This is perhaps best illustrated with a story.

A righteous Tzadik, a great rabbi, dies and goes to heaven.  He meets God at the entrance and God welcomes him warmly, asking if he’s hungry from the long trip to heaven.  “Well,” says the Tzadik, “I could eat.”

So he is presented with a plate of rye bread and pickled herring. 

The next morning he wakes up from his comfortable bed, and is presented with his breakfast: rye bread and pickled herring.  For lunch, it’s the same thing, rye bread and pickled herring.  At dinner, once again, rye bread and pickled herring.

The rabbi hesitantly asks, “I’m sorry to trouble you, Ribono shel Olam, but this is heaven.  I’m thrilled to be here, but tell me: why is every meal rye bread and pickled herring?”

And God answers, “For two, it doesn’t pay to cook.”

Rather a limited view of the afterlife, no?   

Perhaps that’s because, for Jews, what really matters is not what happens after we die, but before we die.  It is how we live on earth that we control, the quality of our relationships, the love we create and share.

There is a remarkable play you likely haven’t heard of called The Makropolous Case.  It is by the Czech playwright Carel Kapek.  The premise is that a woman is given 300 extra years to live.  As the play begins, she is now 342 years old, and has seen everyone she loved originally, as well as all her children and grandchildren live their lives, grow old and die.  She’s done every job and profession you can think of, and pursued every hobby there is.  After all, she had 300 extra years.  Now in the play she’s offered 300 more years.

The central issue of the play is to determine what she will do: will she choose to continue to live?  Or will she voluntarily choose not to continue?   

In the end, she declines. 

The lesson is clear.  Life is so valuable in part because it’s time-limited.  And because it is limited, it is up to us to make it meaningful in the time that we have.

There is a beautiful quote, from write Maria Popova in a review of a book by James Baldwin.  She wrote, “The longer I live, the more deeply I learn that love - whether we call it friendship or family or romance - is the work of mirroring and magnifying each other's light. Gentle work. Steadfast work. Life-saving work in those moments when life and shame and sorrow occlude our own light from our view, but there is still a clear-eyed loving person to beam it back. In our best moments, we are that person for another.”

We have arrived at the time for remembering people who are gone.  For recalling the love they gave us, the light they shone in our lives. 

We don’t know where they are now.  But we do have the ability to preserve their love, and their light, during our own brief time on earth.  By making their memories sacred we memorialize something precious: life itself.  And our holy relationship with those people we love and have lost.  Wherever they are now, they are with us during this time.

Let’s Talk About Israel

Rabbi Samuel M. Cohon, Congregation Beit Simcha, Yom Kippur 5786

So, my friends, let’s talk about Israel.  It’s Yom Kippur, which means it’s not only acceptable to talk about difficult and controversial concepts, we are required to do so. 

There is an Israeli comedian named Yohay Sponder I have been addicted to this past year.  Perhaps his best routine is a discussion of colonialism, a sensitive subject for Israelis, but one that is poorly understood in general.  Edward Said’s book Orientalism way back in the 1970s began a long trend, in academia but also in public policy, that saw a colonial bias against Arabs and Muslims in the conduct of all western powers.  It helped create a deep sentiment of anti-colonialism that saw such western ideas as representative democracy, a secular justice system and a free press as colonial impositions on the Islamic Middle East, on Africa and on much of the world. Unsurprisingly, although a Protestant Christian, Said himself said that he was a Palestinian with many personal resentments against Israel and Jews, the target of most of the anti-colonial energy was soon directed at Israelis and Israel, although also at the United States as the most powerful Western nation.  Still, the vast majority of the focus of this colonial-settler hostility was aimed at Israel and Israelis, who came to be viewed as Western white people oppressing darker skinned native Middle Eastern Arabs.

It's worth noting that the idea that Israelis are all white-skinned European and American settlers is pretty amusing if you have ever actually been in Israel, where the majority of the population is Sephardic or Eydot HaMizrach, whose skin color is often darker than that of the Israeli Arabs and Palestinians among whom they live. 

In any case, on this subject of colonialism, Comedian Yohay Sponder pulls no punches, and humorously addresses the “colonial” label head on.  I cannot imitate his accent.  But the bit runs like this: “The whole world is colonizers,” he says, “Even the Muslims themselves.  You think 56 countries just boom, became Muslim?  No, they were muslimified.  So we have to decide if we want colonialism or indigenous-ism.  [Colonialism is] Not just Israel, it’s everywhere.  So we need to choose as people of the planet, pick one.  Either you want the colonialists who came to the place, or the indigenous people who were there.  Either everyone comes back to where they were from, or the new people stay.

“Now what I love about this method, it doesn’t matter; for Jews, we were here then, and we are here now.  We are colonialists of our own indigenism.  We were here then, we were there, and we are here now.  It doesn’t matter which side we pick of this worm hole…  [either way, we are indigenous AND colonial.]”  And then he adds, as a stinger, “And if you talk badly about us, we are going to buy your business.”  

These are simply facts, not emotional opinions.  So first, let’s stop pretending that Israelis are some sort of western colonial outpost in the indigenous Arab Muslim Middle East.  The Middle East, and of course Israel, has been colonized many times throughout history.  There were Canaanite pagans there before there were Jews, there were Jews there before there were Christians, there were Christians there before there were Muslims, then there were Christian Crusaders, then Muslims again, then Turks, then the British, and there were many other native peoples there—Canaanites, Israelites, Phoenicians, Hittites, Philistines, Assyrians, Babylonians, Romans, Edomites, Elamites, Moabites, Ammonites, Arameans—long before there were any Arabs living in Israel.  The history of the region is filled with human migrations and immigrations, conquests and expulsions and resettlements and then more of the same.

Jerusalem, the holy “city of peace,” has been conquered 17 different times in its checkered history, destroyed by a variety of different victorious armies, and then resettled and rebuilt by a new ethnic and national group.  We Jews were there for about 1500 years, we were mostly elsewhere for 1800 years, and we have been back for about 150 years or so now. 

So, let’s just drop the settler-colonial fiction completely.  It’s a constructed fantasy, a deliberate falsehood, a boldfaced lie that does far more harm than good.  Instead, let’s look at the realities that exist now, in the Middle East, in Israel, in Gaza, and in the West Bank.

We must note the obvious: this has been quite a year for Israel, perhaps the most complex and one of the more challenging ones in recent memory. There are three ways to look at Israel’s standing now.  One is its military and geostrategic position.  The second is its diplomatic, public relations, and reputational position.  The third is Israel’s moral and internal political position.  The three are related, of course, but they are distinctly different in many important ways. 

First, let’s explore Israel’s stragetic position now, as opposed to where it was not just one year ago, but nearly two years ago, in the wake of October 7, 2023.

In the aftermath of the worst massacre of Jewish civilians since the end of the Holocaust, with 1200 murdered, as well as the brutal kidnapping and abduction of 250 Israeli citizens, some alive and some already murdered, Israel was forced into a war against the Palestinian terrorists of Hamas that it had avoided for some time.  Over the 20 years since Israel withdrew from Gaza and turned it over to the Palestinians, there had been several limited wars against Hamas in Gaza, all designed by Israel, more or less, to keep things status quo.  As Prime Minister Netanyahu was fond of saying, the Hamas Gaza wars were intended to “mow the grass”, and maintain an acceptable level of hostility.  The terrorists of Hamas and Muslim Brotherhood would shoot frequent rockets at civilians in Sderot and the south of Israel, the IDF would target a few Hamas rocket launchers and even some terrorists, but food and supplies flowed into Gaza without significant interruption.  All of that changed, terribly and suddenly, on Simchat Torah 5784.

At that moment, now nearly two years ago, the strategic situation for Israel was awful.  Its famed intelligence agencies, its vaunted military, and its civilian leadership had all failed catastrophically to prevent or contain the Palestinian atrocities.  On October 8th 2023, Simchat Torah 5784, Israel was essentially surrounded by extremely hostile terror regimes that openly sought its total destruction and dreamed of repeating the Holocaust. 

To the south there was Hamas in Gaza, which had just openly declared war and perpetrated the war crimes of rape, murder, arson, torture and abduction of civilians, as well as expanding its ongoing war crimes of firing rockets at civilian targets on a massive basis.  In the north, the much larger terror network of Hezbollah controlled southern Lebanon, regularly threatening and shooting at Israel, forcing the evacuation of an entire region.  To the east, Syria was an implacable foe under the Asad regime, dedicated officially for over 50 years to the destruction of Israel, allowing a steady flow of huge arms shipments to cross its territory from Iran to the Hezbollah terrorists, as well as allowing the placing of Iranian military units right on Israel’s border.  Farther East, Iran was financing all the terror groups with its oil revenue, and constantly threatening to destroy the Zionist entity, going so far as to have a huge Doomsday clock in Teheran calculating the destruction of Israel as its immediate goal.  Iran was also moving ever closer to possessing nuclear weapons and delivery systems, promising regularly to use those atomic weapons against Israeli civilians to wipe out the Jewish State.  Much further south, the Houthi terror regime in Yemen was lobbing ballistic missiles at Israel on a semi-regular basis from hundreds of miles away. 

And now?  Well, two full years later that strategic situation is completely upended.  Israel is in a vastly stronger position than it was.  Gaza remains a cataclysmic mess, but Hamas has been nearly destroyed, its leadership killed, its massive terrorist army mostly either dead or captured.  Hezbollah was beheaded by the Mossad and the IDF, its leaders are also dead, most of its armaments are destroyed, its position in Lebanon is now precarious.  The Assad regime in Syria has collapsed and the country lapsed into a civil war. Syrians are now intent on attacking each other and not Israel, the conduit to Hezbollah in Lebanon is broken, and Iran is viewed as an enemy by the new Syrian leadership.  Iran itself proved to be a paper tiger, swiftly defeated by Israel in a war that lasted less than two weeks, with some American help at the end.  The Houthis in far-off Yemen have seen their own leaders killed, their harbors bombed, their ability to do more than annoy Israel severely limited.

It’s a new era in the Middle East, in which even oil-rich funders of terror, like Qatar, can no longer provide safe haven to mass-murdering terrorists.

So that has been an extraordinarily positive development.  It’s strategically very important, it’s a dramatic change, and it will have impact for years to come.  Anti-Israel terrorism is far from dead, of course, and since this is the Middle East we cannot easily imagine what will happen next.  But it’s a stunning change from two years ago.  Israel is in a vastly better position now, militarily and strategically, than it could have imagined being in just two years ago.

On the other hand, the Israeli hostages who remain alive—there are now perhaps 15 to 20 of them—have suffered unimaginably for two years, and they are apparently no closer to being freed through this latest Gaza City offensive.  Most of the Israeli public believes that the current Netanyahu regime has not done nearly enough to free the hostages and fulfill the mitzvah of pidyon shevuyim.  I would agree.

Now, as far as the diplomatic and public relations situation for Israel, well, it looks terrible.  Now, mind you, you’d rather be alive and win a war than be loved and dead in a war that you lose—especially a war against terrorists intent on your total destruction and annihilation, entire organizations that promise to commit genocide on the Jews, something Israel is most decidedly not doing in Gaza. 

But that’s not how the rest of the world tends to see it.  Israelis, and Jews, have been attacked by antisemites the world over with phrases like “Free Palestine”, “globalize the intifada”, and “Israel = Genocide.”  It’s based in a foundational falsehood, in a number of falsehoods, but the public relations have been, and are, awful.  European, Latin American and Pacific rim countries are choosing to symbolically recognize a Palestinian State to punish Israel for its war in Gaza, and even Hollywood actors and writers are joining the anti-Israel effort to punish anyone who is Zionist or Israeli or proudly Jewish. 

While winning the shooting war, you’d certainly want to avoid having a number of nations, many of them your own allies, recognize your enemies as having a nation when in fact they don’t.  And you’d certainly prefer not to be ostracized, hatefully characterized and generally despised for doing what you were forced to do to for your nation and your people.  The public response to the Gaza war has been overwhelmingly negative all around the world, and that hurts Israel, and Jews everywhere. 

The past year has seen a flood of anti-Israel propaganda normalized.  We are fortunate that the current Administration refuses to play this game.  But world opinion—always fickle, never especially rational, typically not ethical—nonetheless now sees the Palestinians as innocent victims being attacked by the big, bad Israeli military.  You know, the evil Jews. The war in Gaza has normalized a form of Anti-Zionism that is the old-style Antisemitism reworked into Jew hatred. 

The truth is not that, and the facts don’t support the wild claims being made that demonize Israel and say that Israelis are perpetrating genocide.  War is terrible.  Innocent people, tragically including children, die in war.  The facts are that there are 2 million Palestinians still alive in Gaza, and there were that many there two years ago.  If this is genocide, it’s stunningly ineffective. 

In a brutal war against committed terrorists who have no regard for human life, including that of their Palestinian brothers and sisters and their children, it is statistically amazing that so few Palestinian civilians have been killed.  But of course, that’s not how it’s viewed in the press, online, on college campuses, at the UN, and in so many other places.

To be clear: the death of a single innocent civilian in war is a tragedy.  The death of 1200 Israelis, murdered deliberately by Palestinian terrorists, was a war-crime atrocity.  The deaths of many civilians in Gaza, whether killed in IDF bombing, by Islamic Jihad rockets misfiring, or by getting caught in the crossfire between Hamas terrorists and Israeli soldiers in an urban war, are all tragic and terrible.  It’s awful, and these deaths will only end when the war itself ends.   It is tragic that children are dying.  The only real end to this is an end to the war.

Has Israel acted morally during this war?  On balance, yes.  What other army in human history has ever warned its enemies of its upcoming attacks?  The IDF has done so throughout the Gaza War.  Have there been mistakes and deliberate attacks on civilians that should never have happened?  Very likely.  When Israeli soldiers have committed crimes against Palestinian civilians, or on Hamas prisoners, they have been brought up on charges and punished.  Is that how it works for Palestinians who committed the deliberate war crimes of October 7th?  Is that how it works for Russian soldiers?  Those fighting in any war going on now in Europe, Africa or Asia?  Is that how our Department of War intends things to work for American soldiers going forward?

Now, has this Israeli government stonewalled peace initiatives in order to maximize its gains in the war?  Perhaps.  Has Netanyahu chosen to keep fighting to avoid losing his Prime Ministerial post, and having to face corruption charges and perhaps go to jail?  Perhaps.  Bibi Netanyahu has failed to take any responsibility for the original catastrophe of October 7th, nor has anyone in the civilian side of government.  And he is certainly not above virtually any political manipulation to stay in power.

But it is notable that all the peace initiatives proposed now, by the US this week, but also by European and Arab leaders, begin with Hamas being removed from any position of influence and fully disarmed.  That’s new.  That wasn’t the way people were talking about ending the Gaza War even a year ago.  They are now.

Perhaps the worst issue in all of this mess has been the moral problem of potential starvation in Gaza.  There is no doubt that the Palestinian terrorists of Hamas have long weaponized food in the territory, hoarding it, controlling the aid supplies, profiting off it by charging usurious rates for stolen food, using food to reward allies and denying it to their Palestinian opponents.  But when Israel stepped in to try to create a less-terrorist controlled form of feeding the people of Gaza, the whole thing blew up in their faces, and it gave the awful impression that Jews were denying food to the hungry.  That simply can’t be allowed to happen.

In addition, the situation on the West Bank this year has flown mostly under the radar.  That shouldn’t be the case, but with all the high-profile wars going on it is.  And what Israeli settlers have been doing in the West Bank this year has not been good.  In fact, while Palestinian terrorists have murdered people in the West Bank—and recently Jerusalem—Jewish settlers have been aggressively attacking Palestinians with regularity.  It’s a bad situation on the ground, and more violence won’t improve things.  Are the settlers in the West Bank taking advantage of the situation in Gaza to attack their neighbors, often without provocation?  Yes.  Is it morally wrong?  Yes.  Should it stop?  Certainly.  Will Israel do so now?  No.  And because of the focus on Gaza, it’s unlikely that this situation will improve until the Gaza War ends.

Mind you, Israel is a free country with a vigorous opposition, free press, and lively culture of civil protest.  Most Israelis are not fans of the current government, or the Prime Minister.  And after this war ends—and God-willing it will do so soon!—it is obvious that a new government will be elected.  That is how it is supposed to work in democracies, and that is how it will be in Israel.  There will be accountability for October 7th, and there will be a changing of the guard.  Israel is justly famous for its ability to analyze its own failings and to seek to repair them.  It will do so, no matter what the outside world thinks or says.

It is worthwhile mentioning that how we understand the situation is framed, in large part, by which media we consume.  Matti Friedman, an outstanding Israeli journalist and author, a guest of mine on the Too Jewish Radio Show and Podcast several times, was a reporter and editor for the AP from 2006 through 2011.  He notes that, besides the completely disproportionate press attention paid to tiny, relatively unimportant Israel.  During [his] tenure at the AP, they had 40 reporters covering Israel, more reporters covering Israel than China; Israel has 10 million people, while China has 1.4 billion people.  They had more people covering Israel than India.  India has 1.5 billion people.  There were more AP journalists covering Israel than covering all of sub-Saharan Africa, which covers over 15% of the world’s surface.  Tiny Israel takes up 1/10th of 1 percent of the world’s surface. 

And of course, Israel’s situation is always framed as an Israeli-Palestinian conflict.  The issue is that, according to Friedman, there is not an Israeli-Palestinian conflict.  What exists is a regional conflict.  Israel has fought wars, unfortunately, against Syria, Lebanon, Egypt and Jordan, and now Iran, not an Arab country at all and predominantly Shia Muslims, a minority religion to the Sunni Islam that predominates throughout the Arab world.  Israel has been attacked by rockets in just the past two years by forces from Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Iran, and Yemen.  None of these are Palestinians.  This is a regional conflict, not an internal one.

The Arab world includes 300,000,000 people, mostly Arab Muslims, covering 5 million square miles of the planet.  The Islamic population of the world is perhaps 2 billion over a much larger range, about ¼ of the world’s population.  There are just 7 million Israeli Jews in one tiny corner of that world, fewer people than live in Cairo alone, for example.  If you take a larger regional conflict and reduce it to a simplistic view of powerful Israelis punishing weak Palestinians, you find it much easier to demonize Israel as a pariah nation. 

We hope and pray that this end-of-the-war peace offer from the United States is accepted by Hamas, as it has been accepted by Israel, the Arab states, and Europeans. It is certainly time for the hostages to be at long last released, and for this awful war to end.  The damage being done to Israel’s diplomatic and public relations can only begin to be remedied once the open wound of Gaza starts to heal.

We will continue to pray for the peace of Israel and to pray for peace throughout the region.  May this coming year prove to be a far less eventful one for Israel, and for Jews everywhere.  As the Psalm says,

שַׁ֭אֲלוּ שְׁלֹ֣ום יְרוּשָׁלִָ֑ם יִ֝שְׁלָ֗יוּ אֹהֲבָֽיִךְ׃

Pray for the peace of Jerusalem; may those who love you find contentment

יְהִי־שָׁל֥וֹם בְּחֵילֵ֑ךְ שַׁ֝לְוָ֗ה בְּאַרְמְנוֹתָֽיִךְ׃

May there be well-being within your ramparts,
peace in your citadels.”

לְ֭מַעַן אַחַ֣י וְרֵעָ֑י אֲדַבְּרָה־נָּ֖א שָׁל֣וֹם בָּֽךְ׃

For the sake of my kin and friends,
I pray for your peace;

לְ֭מַעַן בֵּית־יְהֹוָ֣ה אֱלֹהֵ֑ינוּ אֲבַקְשָׁ֖ה ט֣וֹב לָֽךְ׃ {פ}

for the sake of the house of the LORD our God,
I seek your good.

G’mar Chatimah Tovah

It’s All in Your Frame of Reference

It’s All In Your Frame of Reference

Kol Nidrei Eve, Yom Kippur 5786, Rabbi Samuel M. Cohon, Congregation Beit Simcha, Tucson, AZ

One of my favorite stories is about an old rabbi and his faithful student, Mendel, who are traveling from one shtetl to another in the Old Country.  It’s a long journey, so they stop for the night, say their evening prayers, eat their dinner, and bed down.  In the middle of the night the old rabbi wakes his student.

“Mendel, wake up.  Look up; what do you see?”

His student, bleary eyed, looks up and says, “Oy, rabbi, I see so many stars!”

His teacher says, “And what do we learn from that?”

Mendel answers, “That the Ribono Shel Olam has created an amazing universe, all according to God’s will!”

“That’s true,” says the rabbi.  “What else do we learn?”

“Oy, rebbe,” Mendel answers, “We learn that the Compassionate One has given us an infinite capacity for wonder, for appreciating the incredible workings of the heavens, and we should say a brocho!”

“That’s also true,” says the rabbi.  “What else do we learn, Mendel?”

The student answers, “By looking at the position of the moon and stars we can see that dawn is just a couple of hours away, and we will soon rise and say Shachris prayers, thanking der Aibishter for the great goodness we have received.”

The old rabbi is silent for a few moments, and then he says, “Mendel, you idiot.  Someone stole our tent.” 

You see, it’s a matter of perspective.

When I began working as a rabbi I was particularly enthusiastic about the importance of my work cultivating and encouraging Jewish life.  That excitement communicated itself to my congregation, no doubt, perhaps to a bit too extreme a degree.  One of my teenage students sent me a postcard while on a trip; it was a picture of the solar system, quite large, with a tiny arrow pointed at a very small point on the card.  The wording read: “This is the universe.  This is your job (tiny dot).”

The brilliant, Jewish astronomer, Carl Sagan, expanded greatly on this idea.  “What made me want to be an astronomer, and a scientist was a photograph.  We succeeded in taking that picture [from deep space] of earth, and, if you look at it, you see a dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever lived, lived out their lives.

“The aggregate of all our joys and sufferings, thousands of confident religions, ideologies and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilizations, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every hopeful child, every mother and father, every inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every superstar, every supreme leader, every saint and sinner in the history of our species, lived there on a mote of dust, suspended in a sunbeam.

“The earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and in triumph they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of the dot on scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner of the dot. How frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale light.

“Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity -- in all this vastness -- there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. It is up to us. It's been said that astronomy is a humbling, and I might add, a character-building experience. To my mind, there is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly and compassionately with one another and to preserve and cherish that pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known."

There is something so powerful about seeing that reality, getting things back into perspective.  It’s easy—much too easy—to believe that what is happening right now is all that matters.  It is easy—much too easy—to arrive at the conclusion that the latest stresses in our lives are overwhelming.  It is easy—much too easy—to think that our most recent accomplishments, our most recent failures, our medical problems, our issue with our children or grandchildren, our house problems and car problems and job problems, our newest purchase or upcoming travel—are centrally important to the fate of the universe as we see it.

Yom Kippur is here to remind us that’s simply not true.  It’s a day to shut off the outside world, to understand who we really are and what really matters.  Can we do that?  Well, it simply depends on each of us, on you, on me.  And on our ability to achieve perspective.

I remember when cellphones suddenly became smartphones, and everyone was connected all the time.  It was Rosh HaShanah, some years ago, and I was walking in from the back of the sanctuary chanting the Hineni prayer, as I did on Rosh HaShanah here and will do again tomorrow morning.  It is always a powerful moment spiritually, a statement of true humility by the leader of the service, praying for the lives of the congregation.

As I walked in, I noticed for the first time that most of the congregants—frankly, near all of them—were looking not at me, or at the Machzor, their prayerbooks, or even up at the bimah.  They were looking at their little screens.  Even though they had come to services on Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the year, the Day of Atonement, they were focused on their email, or texts, or the stock market, or their news feed, or God only knows what else.

I mentioned this the next week on Kol Nidrei Eve, got a laugh, and the next morning, on Yom Kippur, as I walked in for Hineni, I noticed—well, pretty much the same thing, only this time the people who were on their cellphones were mostly hiding them in their prayerbooks…

It’s hard to shut it all off, isn’t it?  Even on the great Sabbath of Sabbaths, Yom HaKippurim, the great day of Atonement and return.  It’s hard to change perspective.

But that’s truly what we are doing here tonight and tomorrow.  Changing our viewpoint.  Breaking the pattern.  Seeking a new way to see who and what we are and what we can become.

Which Sagan’s tiny dot can help with. 

Now, I will differ with Sagan, who wrote so magnificently and eloquently about our very existence, on one or two points.  The first is perhaps best demonstrated by a couple of jokes…

Comedian Jeff Allen says, “I believe teenagers are God’s revenge on humankind.  One day the good Lord was looking down on creation and said, “Let’s create someone in their image who denies their existence.”  

Unlike Sagan, I do think help is available to us.  No, not from alien beings or the supreme power of artificial intelligence, and not from divine intervention breaking the laws of the physical universe for our personal benefit.  I believe that knowing that there is a God, that God exists in whatever form we conceive of God, can give us moral and emotional strength to grow and change, to accept things as they are and to seek to change them to the way we believe they can and should be.

That sense of faith can give us courage to seek to right the many wrongs in our society.  The sense of the presence of God in our world, in the divine sparks that are within each of us, can give us the fortitude to ride out our own personal storms.  That belief that there is something beyond ourselves, that we are part of an incredible cosmos that is amazing in so many ways and testifies to an intelligence far beyond chance—that can allow us, if we put our hearts and minds to it, to accomplish so much.

And I firmly believe that science and religion are fully compatible.  The first chief rabbi of Israel, Rav Abraham Isaac Kook, certainly believed this.  A century ago he wrote, in his book Lights of Holiness (2:537),

“The doctrine of evolution, that is currently conquering the world, jives with the eternal secrets of Kabbalah to a larger degree than any other philosophical doctrine.

“Evolution, that goes in an ascending route, gives the optimistic foundation to the world, because how is it possible to despair when we see everything develop and ascend. When we pierce to the inside of the doctrine of ascending development we find in it the Divine matter shining with complete clearness.

“Evolution shines light on all of God’s ways in the world. The creation as a whole develops and ascends, just as this matter is noticeable in parts of it, the ascent is general as well as particular - it rises to the peak of the Absolute Good.”

Rav Kook is always inspirational, and what he is saying is simply that just as human aspiration should seek to rise to the level of holiness and goodness, so the universe created by God rises to that level by natural processes created by the Creator. 

Of course, that will be a matter of perspective.  Of understanding that by giving more of ourselves and our abilities and resources we actually can help create a better, kinder world.  That by treating our families, our friends, our acquaintances with greater empathy, with more understanding, with a deeper appreciation for our own small place in this great universe, we can help create the world we wish to live in.

On this Yom Kippur, this holiest Day of Atonement, may you find your own frame of reference, your own perspective, your own way to see your place in this great creation.  May your awareness of the presence of God, of the interconnectedness of everything and everyone, grow over this day.  And may all of that help you return to the best version of yourself, tonight, tomorrow and in this 5786 year.

Gmar Chatimah Tovah—may your Teshuvah be complete, as you return to those you love in honesty and peace.

Teshuvah and a Musical

Teshuvah and a Musical

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

Introduction to Kol Nidrei 5786

There is a lovely quotation, usually associated with a Hasidic rabbi named Simcha Bunem.  It goes, “God puts miracles everywhere in the world.  And we take our little hand and cover our little eyes and see nothing.”

I first saw the musical version of Les Miserables on Broadway nearly 40 years ago, in 1987.  At the time, I was on my way to Jerusalem to be installed in the Cantors Assembly as a Commissioned Hazzan—they didn’t call it ordination for cantors back in those days—and spent a few days doing New York things with friends before heading over to Israel.  Les Miserables was a remarkable show, amazing stagecraft and a fantastic cast, and I thoroughly enjoyed it, even up in the balcony with my legs jammed up close to my shoulders.  I liked the music, and over the years I’ve seen the show a number of times, enjoyed the film version, sung a fair number of the songs in performances, and even parodied it for Purim one year.  If memory serves, I read most of Victor Hugo’s novel—it is very long—upon which the show is based in Jr. High School.  So you could certainly say that I am quite familiar with Les Miserables, and am a fan of the whole experience.

If you aren’t a Broadway musical fan, or an afficionado of 19th century French historical novels, Les Miserables chronicles the life of a man named Jean Valjean who serves 19 years in a brutal prison for the minor crime of theft, gets released after serving his time, but then flees his parole and identity as an ex-con, reinventing himself as a successful factory owner and becoming the mayor of his town.  Unfortunately for him, he is pursued relentlessly through the years by a man named Javert, a law-and-order policeman of more or less brutal rectitude who sees any breach of the law as permanently unforgiveable.  Many extraordinary events ensue, including Valjean adopting the daughter of poor woman who was fired from his factory and later died, a failed revolution, a love story, many plot twists and lots of shocking revelations and redemptions. 

Naturally, when Broadway in Tucson announced they were adding Les Miserables as an extra show this season I bought tickets, and Sophie and I saw the show recently.  It was a terrific performance, especially for a touring company, and we had much better seats than I could acquire as a 26 year-old cantor back in 1987.  Besides Sophie having to remind me, often, not to mouth the words or pretend to conduct the orchestra, it was a great experience.  Now mind you, this must have been the seventh or eighth time I’ve seen the show, I know all the songs and the plot, and have known all of that for decades.  And as always, that wonderful line “To love another person it to see the face of God” stayed with me.  We are all created in God’s image, and love allows us to recognize that.  Pretty good, right, for a musical?

But then driving home from Centennial Hall I realized, for the very first time, that Les Miserables is completely about Teshuvah.  That is, the entire show—and before it, the very long book—is essentially one long meditation on the possibility and process of repentance. 

Without spending even more time on the details of the plot, or the character development, or sharing the fact that it was published during the American Civil War, was soon translated into English, and Confederate soldiers used to read it aloud around the campfire and called it “Lee’s Miserables,” I can promise you that this extremely Roman Catholic book is almost entirely occupied with people forced, out of desperation, into committing sins, paying a very high price for those transgressions, and then seeking repentance and redemption for the rest of their lives through selfless and noble acts, all spread over many chapters or, in this case, two all-music acts.  Sin, punishment—just or unjust—repentance and, ultimately, redemption. 

You know, what we Jews call Teshuvah. 

Now the amazing thing about this is not that Les Miserables is about Teshuvah.  For goodness sake, it is a super long, 160-year-old, very famous book about a convict who becomes a force for good but cannot entirely escape his past.  Of course it’s about repentance, teshuvah.  No, the amazing thing is that it took me nearly 40 years to realize that incredibly obvious fact.  And the only reason I realized it this time was that I was immersed in preparations for the High Holy Days, and teaching about return and repentance almost every day.  

Of course it’s about repentance, and finding ways to transform evil into good, to make officially “bad” people into righteous ones who receive forgiveness.  It's about transformation.  It's about everything we Jews associate with these holidays.

And I, bedazzled perhaps by the stagecraft and the effects and the music, took my little hand and covered by little eyes and saw nothing.

I wonder how often that happens to other people, an inability to see that repentance is right here, in front of our eyes, and all we need to do is look?  That we can each become better, more giving, more caring, more empathetic people, and help repair the world?  That teshuvah is always available to us, and we just have to do the simple things required to make it possible?  That turning from uncaring, evil ways is a matter of simple personal choice and the actions that come from that?

That is, in challenging circumstances or just because we are human, we screw up.  But we are always given the opportunity to atone for those aveirot, those crossings of the line. 

Yom Kippur is here to provide exactly that opportunity.  To give each of us the chance to become better men, better women, better people.  All we need to do is be aware of that possibility, and then act on it. 

Apologize to those we have hurt, yes.  But more than that: choose to see that we can certainly be better than we have been.  We can be more loving.  More caring.  More aware.

Over this great day, may you find that your awareness is enhanced—as mine finally was—and that you come to see that the miracle of repentance, of true return, of Teshuvah is here for you, now, and always.    

Courageous Repentance

Shabbat Shuvah—the Sabbath of Return 5786

By Rabbi Samuel M. Cohon, Congregation Beit Simcha

I have heard that in the old Eastern European synagogues the rabbi only preached a sermon twice a year.  I’m pretty certain some people would prefer that we return to this tradition… They were very long sermons, at least an hour each, but there were only two of them a year. 

Now, the first of these European rabbinic sermons was delivered at Shabbat HaGadol, the Great Sabbath that precedes Passover, when the rabbi would preach about chameits, adulteration, removing the leavening from the home and from your life.  And the other time was on this Sabbath and the subject, invariably was repentance.

The first Shabbat of the year is always Shabbat Shuvah, the Sabbath of Return, a time of reflection and self-examination.  Falling in the midst of the Ten Days of Repentance between Rosh HaShanah and Yom Kippur, it is a special time to concentrate on how we can improve ourselves and our lives in this shiny new year.  And we are given some guidance here on how this can best be accomplished.

We are taught in Jewish tradition “For sins against God the Day of Atonement (Yom Kippur) atones, but for sins against our fellow human beings the Day of Atonement does not atone.” (Mishna Yoma 8:9). That means we can and should pray for forgiveness for anything we have failed to do for ourselves or for God.  But if we have hurt another person—and all of us have, haven’t we, over the last 12 months?—we must apologize to that person directly.  That lesson is a profound one, and particularly important in Judaism.  God can help us on our spiritual paths, but when our issues are interpersonal it is up to us to work on resolving them.  

The most important lesson of this season is that this is the time to ask forgiveness from anyone we might have offended.  We must seek to repair our relationships with those people who are most important in our lives and we must do so sincerely and openly.    

The short Torah portion we will read tomorrow on Shabbat Shuvah is called VaYelech from the book of Deuteronomy, quite near the end of this last of the five books of the Torah.  The phrase Chazak v’amatz, meaning “be strong and courageous,” appears three times in two different forms in this portion.  The first is the collective, addressed to the people of Israel, “All of you be strong and courageous.”  The second and third time the phrase occurs Moses is addressing his successor, Joshua, directly: “Be strong and courageous in leading this people.”

Soldiers are sent into battle with the exhortation “Chazak v’amatz, be strong and courageous!” for the tasks they are forced to fulfill will undoubtedly take them into life-threatening danger.  In a larger sense, that phrase has become a kind of byword in Judaism for moral courage.  We tell people who are enduring great challenges chazak v’amatz, be strong and courageous, meaning hang in there, bear up under the strain, keep a stiff upper lip.  Rak chazak v’amatz Joshua is told—just be brave and courageous and everything will work out for the best.  Do your best to stand the strain, work hard against the forces of doubt or despair, and God will reinforce your strength and redouble your commitment.  

It’s good advice, not only for future leaders of the Jewish people like Joshua, but for everyone—even bar and bat mitzvah boys and girls.  Be brave and courageous.  Face your fears and your challenges openly.  Don’t pretend that hard tasks don’t await you but know that if you are resolute and committed you can accomplish them.  Chizku v’imtzu—chazak v’amatz.  Be strong and courageous and you will overcome.

Whenever I hear that phrase, chazak v’amatz, I think of my late mother, Claire S. Cohon, of blessed memory.  She frequently quoted that to her children, or at least to me, when we were going through challenging times.  And of course, we all go through challenging times.  Knowing that if you persevere, with God’s help you can not only survive but emerge into a new, better reality—that is a powerful thing indeed.  Be strong, have courage can also mean: have faith.

That phrase, chazak v’amatz, applies to our own teshuvah, our efforts at repentance, as well.  Are there those to whom you are uncomfortable apologizing for mistakes you made in the past?  Take courage, Vayelech teaches, and in this week of Shabbat Shuvah find the strength to ask them to forgive you.  Are there those you do not wish to forgive?  Be brave and let those resentments go, take the initiative and forgive those who have wronged you.  

Mind you, this doesn’t mean forgiving those who keep on wronging you.  Judaism does not council forgiving people who are actively hurting you.  That isn’t teshuvah; it is co-dependence.  But for anyone who hurt you in the past, who damaged you in some way but isn’t doing so now, being able to let it go is crucial to growing from it and moving on into that new, cleaner reality.  Ask forgiveness, and grant forgiveness.  Be bold about both, for only when you can do both of these can your teshuvah be complete.  Only then can you truly emerge whole.

If we can each be brave about our teshuvah, if we can do this now we will help heal our own damaged relationships, and mend the torn fabric of our community.  Perhaps we can then truly begin to heal this very damaged world of ours, and begin the new year in the right way.

May you each find your own teshuvah over this Shabbat and on Yom Kippur this coming week and help to begin 5786 with clean hands and a pure heart, boldly free of the mistakes and the pain of the past, courageously embracing the future with hope, energy and life.

Shabbat Shalom and G’mar Chatimah Tovah, may you be sealed in the book of life for a good year!

Apocalyptic Paradise - Rosh HaShanah Morning 5786

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

I don’t know how many of you grew up listening to the brilliant satirical songs of Tom Lehrer, but we sure did in my home.  Tom Lehrer was a brilliant Jewish guy from Manhattan who went to Harvard at age 15, stayed on for grad school in mathematics, became a professor, and had a flair even as an undergraduate for performing his own satirical songs.  As a teen he was  a camp counselor, where one of his campers was little Stephen Sondheim.  While teaching math at Harvard he performed at small nightclubs, and then recorded and self-produced an album of his own tunes.  He sold it by mail order only, and in a few record shops around Cambridge, Mass., and expected he’d make a few bucks on the side.  But surprisingly, he ended up successfully selling so many albums by mail order that he had to re-press the record a bunch of times and he sold those all out, too.  And then, after he did his US military service and worked doing secret things for the NSA, he eventually ended up on the nightclub circuit, and was signed to a record company.  He recorded a couple of more albums, wrote the songs for a popular TV show and then another one, and was a national sensation—but then suddenly retired from performing, went back to teaching college, and eventually moved to Santa Cruz where he taught a workshop in musical theater at UCSC.  As he said at one point, “political satire became obsolete when Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.”  His performing and recording careers were brief, if meteoric.

Ah, but those few, precious Tom Lehrer albums, with brilliantly constructed original songs like “Pollution”, “Poisoning Pigeons in the Park,” “The Masochism Tango” and “National Brotherhood Week”—and perhaps his most famous song, a parody of the Major General’s song from Gilbert and Sullivan elucidating all “The Elements”: Tom Lehrer’s songs were witty, brutally funny, so cleverly rhymed and arranged as to become a kind of soundtrack for my own misspent childhood—and perhaps testimony to my family’s unusual sense of humor.  And of course, he later wrote the ubiquitous “Hanukkah in Santa Monica”, to my knowledge his only contribution to Jewish music.

Well, when Tom Lehrer passed away in July of this year, I couldn’t help but remember that for a project at Emerson Jr. High in Westwood, California a friend and I created a slide show—very multi-media back in the day—set to Tom Lehrer’s “We Will All Go Together When We Go,” a kind of anthem about mutual nuclear destruction.  There were brilliant rhymes in the song, like “There will be no more misery when the world is our rotisserie” and “when the air becomes uranious we will all go simultaneous”, and it dealt with the then-prevalent sense that the world could go up in a big mushroom cloud at any moment.

As a kid who grew up learning how to duck and cover, Tom Lehrer provided welcome comic relief from the stress of thinking that it could really all end at once. 

But of course, the notion that everything will come to an end someday in disastrous fashion did not begin with Hiroshima and Nagasaki, nor is it even a modern notion.  It is, in fact, quite an old one.  The term Armageddon comes from the Tanakh, the Hebrew Bible, in which a slightly elevated city in Israel called Megiddo—that’s where the English of Armageddon is derived from, Har Megiddo, Mt. Megiddo—lies at the border of the Emek Yizrael, directly on the crossroads between the sea road and the road intersecting it coming in from the east in Israel.  It was the site of many cataclysmic battles in antiquity.  The great prophet Ezekiel chose to locate his idea of the final terrible battle of all time there, at Mt. Megiddo, Har Megiddo, between the forces of two equal and awful armies.  Thus, was born the term, and the idea, of Armageddon.

In any case, this old idea that the world is on the way to a terrible, sudden end has been in the minds of many people quite recently.  Perhaps not as it was in the aftermath of the Cuban Missile Crisis, back when we used to have atomic bomb drills regularly in grade school in which we ducked under wooden desks as though their pine and laminate surfaces would save us from nuclear annihilation.  But just this summer we saw Vladimir Putin threaten NATO with his arsenal of nuclear weapons if they intervene against his brutal assault on Ukraine; last spring the Islamist theocracy in Iran was close to acquiring nuclear weapons in order to threaten to commit genocide on Israel, before Israel with some US aid turned the clock back on their atomic aspirations.  North Korea, a nuclear power with ballistic missiles and ruled by its own insane dictator, continues to spout threatening rhetoric about nuclear annihilation to anyone who will listen.  Israel—well, I’ll talk about Israel on Yom Kippur.  That’s a whole different topic.

This end-of-the-world stuff is all a bit disturbing.  Now, mind you, some people always believe that we are on the sliding slope of self-destruction of our entire planet.  But whether or not there is any immediate likelihood of this, it is notable nowadays that a rather strange trend has emerged among super-rich tech moguls.  Sophie and I were introduced to this phenomenon on our wedding trip four years ago to the lovely island of Kaui in Hawaii. 

Near where we got married, on the north shore of Kauai not far from the town of Kilauea, one morning we saw a number of big construction vehicles lined up, ready to drive into a private building site of some kind.  We asked the locals what was being built.  “Oh, that’s Mark Zuckerberg’s compound,” they answered.  It turns out that it’s the biggest construction project on that part of the island, possibly on the entire island. 

So we looked it up, and the details of this Facebook and Meta centi-billionaire’s secretive Hawaiian retreat are somewhat available online.  Besides the usual luxuries you might expect in a super-rich person’s ultimate island retreat, Mr. Zuckerberg’s new home includes an entire, extensive underground level that will survive a nuclear attack.

I’m told that this is now standard for billionaire’s homes, a subterranean super-basement filled with whatever one might need to live luxuriously after the annihilation of all civilization and most of humanity.  Apparently, these tech plutocrats are now all building submerged retreats to survive (and remain entertained) through the next great human calamity. 

Whether it’s space, the ocean’s darkest depths or everlasting life, uberwealthy tech leaders are infamous for grandiose visions of where their deep pockets might take them. Among these is the dream of getting away from taxes, governments and even the apocalypse by escaping to some remote place — such as their underground bunkers on islands in the Pacific.

In addition to Hawaii—Larry Ellison of Oracle, also Jewish, has an underground complex under his developments on the island of Lanai, of which he owns 96%—there is New Zealand, which researchers say is the best place to live out the apocalypse, a destination of choice for billionaires and their bunkers. One organization, backed by PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel, has set out to build “startup communities that float on the ocean with any measure of political autonomy,” including a project in French Polynesia.

Recently, crypto enthusiasts have started transforming an island purchased from the government of Vanuatu — a Pacific nation made up of more than 80 islands — into what they call a “blockchain based democracy.”

“Satoshi Island is not a separatist, libertarian or survivalist movement trying to escape from government oversight or possible zombie apocalypse,” a spokesperson for its developers said, likening it to “a private membership club or private golf course,” provided you want to play golf after nearly everyone on earth is dead.  One would assume that tee times will be easier to obtain.

Many of the multi-billionaire tech-bros, from Bill Gates to Mark Zuckerberg to Peter Thiel to Larry Ellison, have constructed these underground bunkers with elaborate living facilities, all designed to withstand nuclear attack and to allow for years of subterranean life after the great final war.  These shelters incorporate advanced features like renewable energy systems, air and water filtration, and, of course, many luxury amenities. Companies that specialize in building these luxury survivalist billionaire bunkers have names like Atlas Survival Shelters and Survival Condo.  These are now the true status symbols of the super-rich, who are planning to survive the end of the world as we know it in these elaborate underground lairs. 

I’m not sure when it became the goal of the billionaire class to not only separate themselves from ordinary humanity—super rich people have always done that—but to believe in the end of that same humanity and plan on being the only ones left alive on the island when the reactive dust settles, or after global warming drowns the planet.  It sure seems to be what they think is going to happen. 

And lest we forget, there are also the Elon Musks and Jeff Bezos’s who are planning on colonizing Mars to start everything over when our Earth-bound human society fails.

As media theorist Douglas Rushkoff puts it, the survivalist billionaires' mindset comes down to this essential question: "How much money and technology do I need to insulate myself from the reality I'm creating by earning money and using technology in this way?"

OK, so super-rich people are always weird, and have always been incredibly odd throughout history.  The number of them, like Warren Buffet, who preserve some grasp on normalcy is pretty tiny.  If you doubt that non-tech super rich people are peculiar, watch “The Crown” TV series, or, really, any show about super-wealthy folks set in any period of history, from ancient Rome to the Gilded Age to the Kardashians and Vanderpumps.  Mind you, it’s not as though the US Robber Barons of the 1890s were exactly normal folks with happy family lives—hi, there, John D. Rockefeller—nor were the Medicis much fun to hang around with, nor the Borgias.  We are talking about some twisted people.

I guess that if absolute power corrupts absolutely, absolute wealth apparently does much the same but perhaps in even weirder ways. 

Still, this obsession with the apocalypse is disturbing.  It demonstrates that instead of seeking to improve the world or even prevent its destruction, the wealthiest people on the planet are in fact planning ways to escape it all, survive what they view as the incipient annihilation, and take no responsibility for trying to save it. 

This desire to escape the world’s coming disasters is not new, of course.  There is a famous, apocryphal story about a millionaire in the 1930s—back when a million dollars was a whole lot of money—who decided to escape the coming cataclysmic annihilation he saw coming.  After all, in the mid-1930s the Depression was everywhere in the world, fascism was on the rapid rise in Italy, Germany, Japan, and Spain, there were major wars in Africa and Asia, and the world really looked like it was headed for disaster and going to hell in a handbasket, as they said back then.  This prominent millionaire decided to move to the most remote place he could find, way off in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, buy land, set up a compound, and escape all the horrors that were coming.  He had enough money to do so, and he did.

The name of the remote island he chose for his escapist paradise?  It was called Iwo Jima…

Now a particularly odd, and much more factual, source for this idea of fleeing to a Pacific Island paradise to escape Armageddon comes out of an obscure U.S. government law called the Guano Islands Act of 1865, which allows any American who finds large amounts of bird fertilizer on an unclaimed island to designate it a U.S. territory.  Which goes to show that this notion of creating paradise away from the corruption of civilization is, at least in part, full of guano.

So, a few words on the Jewish understanding of the end of things, the acharit hayamim, the end of days.  While we Jews may have invented the idea of an ultimate judgment day, and a messianic age, we always—always—have seen it as a distant, mythical concept, arriving only when God deems it to be the right time, which it never is.  In the meantime, the foundational Jewish belief is that we all have a responsibility to seek to improve the world, to perform a form of Tikun Olam, to heal the planet of the injustice, warfare, and ecological damage our species has inflicted upon each other and on God’s creation.

As Jews, our role is to work to improve the world as it is and seek to turn our society into what we wish it would become in the most positive way.  It is never to withdraw from it and bunker down in safe, secure comfort, playing video games while it all goes up in smoke.   

We aren’t supposed to fiddle while the planet burns… or drowns.

Now it is, of course, possible for humanity to destroy the earth nowadays.  I don’t personally think we are so much closer to that than we used to be—the Cuban Missile Crisis certainly brought us to the brink a long time ago—and I believe that as a species we have the capacity to overcome the many challenges we face now.  But in order to do so we simply cannot hide from the responsibility that we all have to prevent apocalypse, and to heal our planet.

We have more super-rich people now than we have had since the 1890s, and they have the ability to actually perform Tikun Olam, to heal the world, instead of preparing to run and hide from its destruction.  May they learn this speedily and soon.  But one thing more.

Unless you are one of these tech-bro billionaires—and if you are, I certainly hope you contribute to our Beit Simcha Capital Campaign before you leave for your bunker in the South Pacific—but unless you are one of them, we have something important to discuss today.

Because Judaism insists that our responsibility is always to one another.  That we have a moral imperative to try to prevent disasters, to help and aid our fellow human beings.  We don’t believe in survivalist bunkers in which a chosen wealthy few can avoid the destruction of our species.  We don’t even believe in monasteries or convents, in withdrawing from the world to discover our spirituality in isolation.  We believe firmly that our role, always, lies in community. 

Al tifrosh min haTzibur, the Ethics of the Ancestors in the Mishna insists: don’t separate yourself from the community.  Instead, work to improve it, to make it better, more respectful, more giving, more empathetic, more just, more honest, more caring. 

Now, I’m not saying that you shouldn’t build yourself a multi-million dollar underground lair to wait out the coming storm.  I’m saying no one should build them, no one should be wasting resources that could help human beings right now. 

What we learn on Rosh HaShanah and Yom Kippur, what we always learn in Judaism, is that we are each responsible for one another, Kol Yisrael areivim zeh bazeh, and all of us have a collective responsibility to our society.  If we are allowing our society to go down the drain, to drown in a global warming flood, to explode in an avoidable nuclear war, to lose its values, moral principles and legal protections, well then, we have to get out of our bunkers, our siloes, even our La-Y-Boy recliners and get to work fixing things.

As Pirkei Avot also says, lo alecha hamlacha ligmor, v’lo ata ben chorin l’hibateil mimenah, you may not have the capacity to finish the work, but you are not free to neglect it.  And the work, at this season of return and throughout the year, is to engage, to participate in community, to try hard to fix the many wrongs in our world.

We may not, individually, have the financial resources these super-rich bunker builders have.  But we do have an amazing Jewish tradition based in justice and compassion, and the knowledge that we can, if we set our minds, hearts, and resources to it, bring healing to a damaged world.   

It’s not so much to try to do in this new 5786 year: engage.  Work for the good.  Eschew evil.  Know that you have the ability to build trust and community, to be a strong part of your own congregation, to care about other people.

It’s what Judaism requires.  And what we can each do, in our own special way, right now.

L’Shana Tova Tikateivu v’Teichateimu.  May you be blessed with a good, healthy, and sweet year.

Mt. Sinai and Us - Rosh HaShanah Eve

Rosh HaShanah Eve 5786, Rabbi Samuel M. Cohon, Congregation Beit Simcha

Mt. Sinai, where according to the Torah our people received the Ten Commandments over 3200 years ago, is a unique place.  When I traveled around the world ten years ago visiting all the holiest places on earth, it was an important goal of mine to hike up that remote peak and experience it on the Sabbath when we chant the Ten Commandments in synagogue, Shabbat Yitro, and see what that extraordinary experience would be like.

The way it worked back then, you took a tour bus that was supposed to drop you off at the foot of the mountain around midnight, you hiked up for a few hours, and then you awaited dawn on that dramatic peak, recreating in a way the events in the Book of Exodus that we will sing about during the shofar service, when God appeared at dawn and pronounced the great Ten Statements to the assembled Israelites.

Now, nobody really knows if Jebel Musa, “Moses’ Mountain,” is the actual site of Mt. Sinai, or if the revelation at Mt. Sinai really happened the way the Torah describes it, but there is a monastery at the base that has been holding the fort there for close to 1,500 years, and we Jews have built an entire ethical and ritual history on the events that are supposed to have taken place at Sinai over 3200 years ago.  And the place we traveled to that memorable night a decade ago is as close to an agreed-upon spot as any. 

Now for many, many years—actually for many, many centuries, even for several millennia—Mt. Sinai has been one of the most remote of all sacred sites in the entire world, located in the midst of a barren and forbidding desert wilderness, its base area accessible only by a rough road through a desolate landscape.  At that time virtually the only facilities in the entire region were located in the ancient monastery, St. Catherine’s, that sits at the beginning of the steep hike up to the mountaintop.  The monastery, still used by Greek Orthodox monks, was designated officially as a holy place in the 4th century by the Roman Emperor Constantine I’s mother, was built like a fortress, and has been protected from incursions for more than 1500 years by the warlike local Jebeleya Bedouin, known in Arabic as “The Guardians of St. Catherine’s.” It is the oldest continually occupied Christian monastery in the world.      

When I went there, in 2015, just getting to Mt. Sinai was an ordeal in and of itself.  Mt. Sinai has been under Egyptian control since Israel returned the entire Sinai Desert to Egypt following the Camp David Accords, eventually turning it all over in 1982.  The way you traveled to Mt. Sinai when I went was complicated.  First, you flew into Sharm El Sheikh, a diving and beach resort at the southwestern tip of the Sinai Peninsula.  Then you boarded a small tourist bus that bounced along the uneven Sinai roads, in convoy with other buses and Egyptian military vehicles providing protection from terrorist attacks.  It is about 220 km, roughly 135 miles, from Sharm el Sheikh to Jebel Musa, the Arabic name for Mt. Sinai, literally, “Moses Mountain.”  Going very slowly on the rough roads, and with very frequent stops for security checks and driver breaks, it took us 7 mortal hours to drive there.

The hike up the mountain—in the dark, on a rough, rocky path, shared with jostling camels—was memorably difficult, climbing 3,000 feet in altitude, the last of which was on 3,750 uneven stone and rock stairs.  There were many adventures that night—nowhere near enough drinking water was provided or available, for example—but eventually we reached the top of the climb, called Siket Sayidna Musa, the stairs of penitence, which sounds like something out of an Indiana Jones movie.  In fact, it felt like something out an Indiana Jones movie.  We caught our breath atop the mountain, rested briefly and prepared for the powerful, weird, amazing experience of dawn at the top of what might be Mt. Sinai.  When dawn broke, dramatic and gorgeous in the desert light, gently coloring the stark peaks that surrounded us with pastel shades, I quietly chanted the Ten Commandments, the Aseret HaDibrot, from the text on my cellphone, amidst people chanting Koran verses and Christian hymns.  It was surreal, incredibly beautiful, powerful.

The hike down from Mt. Sinai, in daylight, was less mysterious or dangerous, and we rested for a bit in St. Catherine’s monastery.  The monastery, in addition to boasting a very ancient icon of Jesus, also has what is claimed to be the original Burning Bush, whose roots go under the church building itself.   I cannot vouch for this being the original sneh bo’eir ba’eish, the bush enflamed with fire in Exodus, but I can tell you that at least when I was there that bush was not yet consumed.  A great memory of a place the seemed destined never to change.

And then last week a headline caught my eye: One of the world's most sacred places is being turned into a luxury mega-resort it shouted, with a photo of St. Catherine’s Monastery at Mt. Sinai.  I clicked on it, and sure enough, the site in question was indeed Jebel Musa, Mt. Sinai in the southern part of the Sinai Peninsula.  Apparently, the Egyptian government is currently constructing an entire complex of hotels, shops, a visitors’ center, parking lots, and infrastructure to accommodate a large influx of tourists they hope to bring to Mt. Sinai.  After contentious negotiations with the resident monks and the Greek government—the Greeks see the Egyptian government as, essentially, stealing their land and monastery, but the Egyptian courts disagree—the government of Egypt is permitting the 1500-year-old monastery and its monks to stay, at least for now.  But the published photos of the still incomplete construction lead one to believe that Jebel Musa will soon be a very different place, with extensive development dropped onto the barren wastes that surround this mystical place.  The Egyptians are even building a cable car to whisk guests up to the top of Mt. Sinai… a cable car.  No more brutal hikes up a rocky path in the dark on an uneven staircase to reach the summit.  Just pay for a ticket in the air-conditioned cable car and up you go, whisked effortlessly up to stand where Moses once stood....

You see, even in the realm of religion, of sacred places and holy heights, things can change, and can do so dramatically.   

If you have ever traveled abroad and gone to visit older Jewish religious sites, you may be able to guess what I’m about to say.  Often, the magnificent ancient or medieval synagogue you are trying to see has been repurposed into a museum, or, quite often, a church or a mosque.  In Spain, this happened wholesale after the Expulsion of the Jews in 1492; hundreds of temples were turned into churches, and I’ve personally seen elaborate churches that used to be Sephardic synagogues in Toledo and Cordoba and Seville.  When I was in Lisbon, Portugal a couple of years ago, the wall of one of the many Catholic churches there contained what was clearly the remains of a synagogue wall, including a carved menorah and Hebrew inscriptions.  Similarly, when Muslims have conquered an area with substantial Jewish population, if the Jews left, the synagogues not infrequently were converted into mosques. Repurposing formerly Jewish spaces into sacred sites of other religions has been a common occurrence throughout history.

My favorite example comes from eastern Turkey, a town called Sanliurfa, near the Syrian border.  It is quite close to the ancient city of Haran, where in the Book of Genesis Abram was called by God to go to the Promised Land.  In Sanliurfa there is a holy place called “Abraham’s cave” that is supposed to be where our ancestor was weaned, or at least that’s how local tradition has it.  Next to this cave is a medium-sized mosque, Dergah Camii, and on the outside wall of this mosque is a plaque.  It reads, in English and Arabic, “This building was once a pagan temple.  It then became a Jewish synagogue.  Then it was turned into a Christian church.  Now, it is a mosque.”

It happens frequently; you could even say that it’s a common thing, this turning of a former temple into a church, in particular taking a Jewish sacred building and changing it into a Catholic building. 

Well, I am here to tell you that apparently it can also work the other way. 

Now most of you know that Congregation Beit Simcha is in escrow right now on a permanent home for our congregation.  After being wandering Jews for seven years in the desert—the Sonoran Desert, not the Sinai Desert, but still—we have finally found our Promised Land.  After 7 years—a Biblical-sounding length of time, right?—now at last we will be home.  And to do so, we are purchasing an amazing building that has been a sacred place for Christians.

To amplify this, for the past 60 years this impressive building has been a Catholic High School, including a chapel and auditorium, and now it will all become Congregation Beit Simcha.  Frankly, there is something special about this.  Instead of a synagogue fading away, its Jews dispersed to other places, a community declining or even disappearing, we are going the opposite way—the good way.  We at Beit Simcha are affirming the vitality of our growing congregation and creating a true center of Jewish life in Oro Valley and the western foothills for generations to come.

It's an incredibly exciting time, a time of remarkable opportunity for us and for the entire Jewish community of Tucson.  It is our plan to continue to develop this seven-acre site, on Magee Road just east of Oracle, with beautiful views in every direction, into a dynamic, vital place of active Judaism for everyone.

And it will happen soon.  We anticipate being in the building by the end of 2025.  We have been treated with great love by our hosts here at Church of the Apostles, and we will be grateful to them forever.  They have been, and remain, good friends to us and our entire congregation.

But it is time we had our own home.

In our new, repurposed building, we are creating within the existing structure a beautiful sanctuary and social hall on the first floor that will bring together our congregation, friends and guests in an embracing, elegant environment filled with Jewish meaning and joy.  There will be appropriate entry areas that include a garden celebrating Israel, and art that captures the spirit of Jewish life. Our renewed sanctuary will be the place we celebrate the High Holy Days of 5787 together, just 12 short Hebrew Calendar months from now.  There is a commercial kitchen next to the social hall that we will utilize fully to produce the delicious meals we are already known for, and perhaps someday host a kosher restaurant; Tucson certainly needs one! 

The 2nd floor is where our administrative and clergy offices will be, and where we are planning a Judaic gift shop, café, a chapel and choir and music room, meeting rooms, and of course permanent classrooms for our Religious School and Adult Education Academy.  There is a perfect location behind the sanctuary building which will serve as an outdoor chapel and assembly space where we can hold services in the cooler months, with an incredible view that reaches to Picacho Peak, with the Catalina Mountains as a dramatic backdrop.          

We are working actively with partners in the Jewish community to share space on the extensive 2nd floor, and we are looking forward to bringing at least two important Jewish community programs into our new Beit Simcha building.  While we are finishing our sanctuary redesign, we plan on using the magnificent library on the third floor for services and classes—it has great city views, too—and beginning next fall we anticipate leasing that third floor to enrichment or charter school programs, providing a revenue stream while we continue to grow our congregation. 

Speaking of growth, there is plenty of room to plant a Biblical garden—or gardens—and a 3,000 square foot outer building that will become a preschool in the future. 

This will be our permanent home, a place where we can celebrate Judaism, pray, learn, teach, sing, dance, make friends, discuss, argue, laugh, celebrate, mourn, eat—always eat—and engage in meaningful projects to better our community.  It is where we can grow and flourish and creatively explore the best way to be Jewish and share Judaism in dynamic and exciting ways.  It will be a place to seek God and truth, to create holiness and beauty, to truly build on the warm community of our Beit Simcha synagogue and to welcome many new friends.  It will be the place to celebrate Hanukkah, to enjoy Purim, to have a fabulous Seder, a place to truly belong.

Like our ancestors we have wandered through, and succeeded, in a series of temporary homes over our seven years.  We have surmounted many obstacles, overcome many vicissitudes—from COVID to October 7th, from urgent relocations to urgent schlepping—and we have survived many unsuccessful efforts to acquire a permanent Beit Simcha home.  It is, in Jewish terms, a true mechayeh to know we have this incredible opportunity to flourish in a real home for Beit Simcha. It is a great blessing of this exciting new year.

Now, I am not promising that our new home will be as important as Mt. Sinai, with or without the resort development going on now. 

But my friends, one of the enduring lessons of climbing Mt. Sinai, and experiencing the awe and strangeness of that holy place, was realizing that, in truth, we can stand at Sinai whenever we pray in a congregation with sincerity.  We stand at Sinai when a child matures into an adult at Bat and Bar Mitzvah.  We stand at Sinai when we celebrate a milestone birthday, when we bless a wedding couple or a new baby, when we mourn a beloved relative and friend together.  We stand at Sinai when we help people find healing and community.  We stand at Sinai when we feed, clothe and care for the needy. 

And in our new Beit Simcha home I promise, in these ways and more, we will indeed stand at Sinai. 

Your help is essential to making this home a triumphant success.  We want everyone to be able to contribute to our Capital Campaign, at whatever level they can, because we want everyone to know this is their spiritual home—their local version of Mt. Sinai.

Your support matters greatly to Beit Simcha—and your ongoing involvement will make this a truly great new year of 5786, for our congregation and community.

L’shana Tova Tikateivu v’Teichateimu: may you be written and sealed in the Book of Life for a good, healthy year of blessing.

If It Makes You Happy - Rosh HaShanah Opening 5786

Rabbi Sam Cohon, Congregation Beit Simcha, Tucson AZ

So, my friends, just how happy are you?

There is a study published annually called the World Happiness Report, put together by Gallup and researched by academics at Oxford University and other top institutions.  The World Happiness Report is created by using something called The Cantril Self-Anchoring Scale, a measuring device developed by pioneering social psychology researcher Dr. Hadley Cantril of Princeton University in the 1960s.  The Cantril Ladder, as it’s known, consists of the following:

• Please imagine a ladder with steps numbered from zero at the bottom to 10 at the top.

• The top of the ladder represents the best possible life for you and the bottom of the ladder represents the worst possible life for you.

• On which step of the ladder would you say you personally feel you stand at this time?

• On which step do you think you will stand about five years from now?

This single, carefully calibrated inquiry is how the World Happiness Report ranks every country in the world on professed happiness. Around 1,000 people from each country, across a spread of representative demographics, by phone or in person, contribute to the study each year. And lately, each year, there is the same result.

In 2025, while the U.S. slid to an all-time low of 24th out of all the world’s nations in life satisfaction, Finland again reigned supreme. Finland has held the top spot for the past eight years running. Finns were happier during the peak COVID years, even, than Americans have ever been.  Wow.

Mind you, there are many surprises to be found in this report, besides the fact that a country that is dark and very, very cold for six months of the year—or more—is the real live happiest place on earth.  For example, you would think that with everything Israelis have been going through since, well, forever, Israel would be an unhappy place.  Yet Israel ranked eighth happiest in the world—eighth!—this year, in the midst of a long war with Gaza, a brief war with Iran, terrorism, international censure, political and social division, and all kinds of well-reported tzoris.  In 2022 and 2023, before October 7th, Israel was fourth and fifth in the world in happiness, behind only Finland, Denmark, Iceland and then Sweden, wealthy Scandinavian countries with great social services and no wars at all.  That’s pretty stunning.

On the other hand, the US has been slowly sinking on the Global Happiness scale, from 11th fifteen years ago all the way down to 24th now.  That’s in spite of the fact that we are ranked 4th in GDP per capita, that is, how much money people make on average, and have been rising over the last few years. 

Apparently, happiness has a lot more to do with just how much we participate in community, how much we help others and are helped by them, whether we believe our society is equitable and fair, how supported we feel in our needs and how much trust we have in the future than it has to do with wealth or material possessions.  Frankly, we Americans aren’t doing so well for a country that prides itself on the pursuit of happiness.

So, Finland, a nation of just 5.6 million people and 168,000 lakes, where health care and education are free and excellent, and access to nature is everywhere, is a very happy place.  And we here in the United States, the richest, most powerful nation on earth?  Not so happy.  How can that be?

In Jewish tradition, at this sacred time of year, we are instructed to perform a Cheshbon haNefesh, an accounting of our souls, over these Aseret Yemei Teshuvah, these Ten Days of Return and Repentance. If you will, this is a sort of Cantril’s ladder about where we are in our own lives.  Now, we must note that in Judaism the principal goal is not happiness, or even satisfaction or contentment.  The purpose of life is to be good.  Happiness will likely follow, but the ideal is a good life, not simply a happy one. 

Now, interestingly, that World Happiness Index has discovered that what makes people happy, beyond meeting their basic needs for secure food, clothing, and shelter, is how much they participate in community, how much they give to others and how often they have helped strangers, along with how little corruption they feel there is in their society, and how fair and just they believe their nation is. 

In other words, what really makes people happy is the kinds of things that Judaism always insists matter the most: justice, equity, helping the poor, stranger and immigrant, and being integrally part of a giving community. Exactly what our tradition has always said are the most important things. 

What Rosh HaShanah and Yom Kippur offer is the chance to judge where you stand on that ladder of happiness—or, rather, where you stand on a slightly different ladder, what we might call Jacob’s ladder of goodness.  Not just how pleasant or diverting is your life right now, and do you expect it to be in five years. But instead, how good a person are you right now?  How much have you participated in community?  How much do you give to others? 

What we are beginning tonight is an evaluation and a challenge: can you, personally, find a way to ascend that ladder to a higher rung?  Can you, personally, become a more giving, more participating member of your congregation and community?  Can you grow in ways this year that increase your Goodness Index.

Because Judaism, and the World Happiness Index, teach the same lesson. If you can become a better person, you will also be a happier one.

May this be God’s will in this new year.  And may this be our will, too.

Imperfect and Eternal

Sermon, Parshat Nitzavim 5785

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

As a perfectionist I am always frustrated by the impermanent nature of most improvements.  Fix a broken water faucet and sooner or later it will start to drip again.  Get your car tires aligned and within a few thousand miles, or a few hundred, they are out of alignment.  Get a tooth filled and six months later you have another cavity somewhere else.  Hire someone for a job, get used to them, and then they leave. Life seems like a succession of lacuna, of ellipses, of fixing one thing only to see another break.  As poet Robert Browning puts it “on earth the broken orb, in heaven the round complete.” Nothing is eternal; everything changes. 

This is true in every aspect of life, and in every profession, with the possible exception of government work.  But there exists the possibility for something more.  Let’s look at law for a moment—any lawyers here?  Well, how would you like to write a contract that could never be broken, an agreement of such perfection that there exists absolutely no loopholes?  How would you like to be able to create a truly eternal contract?

This is the last Shabbat of the year, the final sermon of of 5785.  What a great Torah portion to send us off into the Yamim Nora’im!  The rabbis who arranged our current reading cycle had a pretty good idea of what they were about.  Our final parashah of the shanah, our last taste of Torah before the year changes, is a message of personal responsibility and commitment—and it includes a truly long-term contract. 

Atem nitzavim hayom, kulchem, it begins, each of you stand here today—every single Jew, every member of our community, men, women and children, immigrants and native born, wealthy and powerful and poor and humble.  You all, each of you, enter into a brit, a covenant with Adonai, your God.  You are God’s people, and the Lord is your God, and you agree to follow the mitzvot.  And this is not some ancient, hoary agreement, yellowing on old paper, not dry parchment flaking into dust—this is very much a living document, a contract made not only with the people of Israel standing today but with every generation of Jew to come, with unborn sons and daughters of Israel for time immemorial, all Jews who ever lived, all who live now, and all who will live for millenia still unexplored.

Think about the sort of deal, the kind of contract delineated here: an eternal brit that extends beyond the grave, beyond the century, beyond the millenium, beyond all boundaries of time.  A forever agreement that applies in all jurisdictions—from Sinai to Israel to Babylonia to Rome to Spain to Germany to Lithuania to Tel Aviv to New York to Tucson, Arizona.  What a remarkable idea!  This is the covenant that God establishes with us and our progeny, and it is, effectively, unbreakable.  Because our ancestors once stood—nitzavim—before God, we, too, become partners in this unending covenant.   

And what does this agreement consist of?  If we return, make teshuvah to God, we and our children will be rewarded with open hearts, and with the openness of God’s heart toward us.  Perhaps more importantly, we will be blessed with a Torah that is accessible to us all, a Torah that “is not too baffling or beyond reach,” a contract written not in legalistic language but in words that we can grasp and learn and teach to our own children and grandchildren.  This is not “God’s in His heaven, all’s right with the world” to quote Browning again—it is a teaching, an instruction in the way to live life that is not high up in heaven or far across the sea—it is close at hand, in our mouths and hearts.

So we are blessed with an unbreakable contract here, eternal, endless, right?  But then Nitzavim tells us something paradoxical, contradictory.  We are parties to this great and ancient and powerful brit, yet we are also free to abandon it.  God tells us “I set before you today life and goodness, death and evil—I call heaven and earth to witness that I offer you life and death today, blessing and curse—uvacharta chayim—choose life, that you and your descendants may truly live.”  In other words, we are all party to this unbreakable contract—but we have complete freedom to either observe it or ignore it.  What kind of perfect agreement is that?  How do you like that for a loophole?

Now the great rewards of doing the brit, living the commandments are spelled out, and so are the consequences of choosing to ignore mitzvot and living a rotten life.  But the choice remains ours.

Sigh.  Another disappointment for perfectionists.  For there can be no doubt that this is yet another time when we think we have things licked, when we believe that a great way to live has been effectively mandated, and we sadly learn that even God is unwilling to close the loopholes. 

Beyond the obvious comfort that God is not truly an attorney—although soon, on Rosh HaShanah, we will consistently use prayers that see God as a judge, the highest form of attorney, right?—we must be satisfied with a remarkable level of personal autonomy and an even greater degree of respect for the essential mystery of the interplay of free will and morality.  That is, we are taught here what is right, but it is always up to us to choose to act in those ways.

And perhaps that is the central message of this text.  For what this covenant actually covers is how it is that we may best live—ethically, ritually, Jewishly.  What it does not cover is whether we will choose to direct our own souls correctly, and come to live lives of blessing.  God wants us to choose the right path; God urges us to choose the right path; God just about begs us to choose the right path.  But it is always, always our own choice.

Perhaps that’s because if we were compelled to do the right thing at all times we would no longer be true creatures in God’s image, independent actors with the capacity to make our own decisions about how to live.  We would be no more than automatons, puppets, robots, acting out scripts written for us by God.  The goal is to have us make the right choices, to choose life and blessing and mitzvot, to accept that all other people on this earth are also created in God’s image and that our actions must reflect that. 

The true brit here is probably encapsulated in another verse of today’s portion: Hanistarot lAdonai Eloheinu, v’haniglot lanu ulvaneinu ad olam, la’asot et kol divrai haTorah hazot.  The hidden things belong to the Lord our God, but the revealed truths are ours and our children’s forever… to do the words of this Torah… to choose to do the things God asks, to act to make this world a better, kinder, more decent, more honest world, more reflective of the values we wish to represent, that Judaism stands for. 

The reason we are allowed choice may not always be clear; after all, if we didn’t have it the world could be made perfect very easily, right?  We just wouldn’t be human beings anymore or exist as images of a God who acts.  Either way, we possess this gift of choice, and must live in an imperfect world. And thus, perfection in our lives is not possible, but real virtue is.

May we come to discover our true course for the coming year, not as a process of personal or communal perfection, but simply as an acceptance of our role as representatives of a great and moral teaching, a continually evolving Torah of truth.  That is perfection enough, and it has allowed this sacred contract to become a truly eternal covenant for all time—and for our time.  May we, in this coming year, live to that standard. 

These Dreams

Sermon, Shabbat Ki Tavo, Rabbi Samuel M. Cohon

Congregation Beit Simcha, Tucson, Arizona

A question for you: do you have anything that you dream of doing?  Is there something you’ve always dreamt about but not yet had the opportunity to experience?  What are your dreams?

For example, my friends, when I was a child, I dreamed of becoming an astronaut. But sadly, my dad crushed those dreams years ago.

He'd always say, "For you, son, the sky's the limit!"

Sorry.  OK, seriously now: What dreams do you have for your life that you have not yet fulfilled?  And which of your dreams are you ignoring?

In our lives we function in pragmatic ways, deal with the problems and practicalities that take up most of our time.  But within each of us, even the most prosaic, there are dreams.  Over the course of our lives nothing may matter more than these.  Yet often we simply bury these dreams.

Dreams can take many forms.  Some are more fantasies than dreams: we can dream of being a rockstar or a ballerina, of winning the $1.7 billion lottery, or, if we are tech billionaires, of colonizing Mars. 

But alongside these fantasy dreams are other, more down-to-earth dreams: dreams of family reunification, of love, of children or grandchildren’s success, of travel to a new place, of learning a new language or skill, and perhaps most importantly, of making a positive difference in this world with our lives.  And it is of those dreams that I ask again: which of your dreams are you ignoring?  And what are the consequences of not living your dream?  And how can you change that?

The Hebrew word for dream is chalom, and in the simplest way dreams are the unconscious play of the mind while we are in REM sleep, the deepest form of sleep.  According to scientists, dreams are an involuntary flow of emotions, images, sensations, and ideas. 

We all have them, typically five to seven separate dreams a night, although lots of us don’t remember most of our dreams; some of us don’t remember any of them.  And despite an almost obsessive scientific interest in them, we still really don’t understand the purpose of dreams. 

From a scientific perspective, dream interpretation is still a mystery. “There’s no real consistent, scientifically proven theory linking specific content back to what a dream means,” says a noted behavioral sleep medicine expert.

In our Zohar class recently we explored the question of dreams, a complex and fascinating issue for mystics.  The goal of almost all mysticism is to enhance our awareness of the presence of God, however we conceive of God, everywhere in our lives.  The best way to do this is to create a greater level of intentionality in our thought, to become clearer and more conscious of what we are thinking about at all times.  The fundamental idea of all mystical work is to learn how to become more mindful of everything going on both inside of us and around us, to be increasingly attentive to both our inner and outer worlds.  Meditation seeks to help us harmonize those worlds, and contemplation tries to train us to focus on certain ideas or habits that improve our opportunity to sense God everywhere.

Mysticism pushes us to be intentional in our thoughts and perceptions, and so become cognizant of just how much holiness there is all around us, within us and within everyone and everything else.  As Jacob famously says in the story of the angels on the ladder, “Truly, God was in this place and I, I did not know it.”  Through mysticism we are trying to know it.

No matter how carefully we work to train our minds to experience the mystical presence of the divine, whether we call that presence God or Shechinah or Ribono Shel Olam or by another name, no matter how much time we spend focused on controlling or shaping our spiritual impulses, thoughts, and feelings, no matter what techniques we employ, when we go to sleep we lose all of that control.  Sleep is the great equalizer.  It’s simple, really: when we sleep we lose the ability to direct our thought processes.  We are helplessly subservient to the unconscious flow of images, ideas, and experiences that cascade through our sleeping brains.  In sleep, the best-trained mystic, the most advanced practitioner of the most sophisticated form of spirituality, the greatest Kabbalist or Guru or meditative monk has no more volition than a 2 year-old baby does.  Once we close our eyes and drift off to REM sleep, we are at the mercy of processes beyond our control.  And then, without any ability to channel or direct the process, we dream…

This is a profound problem for mystics.  The mind, the conscious self, is the whole enterprise for those who focus on the deeply spiritual. And yet this extraordinary vessel of divine connectivity simply shuts down every night, and we are blessed or cursed with all kinds of other forms of nocturnal communication that have nothing to do with the training and meditation and contemplation that mystical tradition believes to be essential.  It’s very subversive to mystical ideals: our brains, so carefully cultivated during waking hours, turn traitor on us as soon as we enter the realm of Morpheus, exactly at the time we close our eyes.

It is no wonder that those who follow Kabbalah decided to invent something called a Tikun Chatzot, a midnight awakening and meditation that interrupted this process of dreaming and sought to create a time for deeper mystical awareness and connection with God at just the time dream-sleep would be most intense.  In a way, this month of Elul is testament to the anti-sleep aspects of Jewish tradition.  In those Jewish movements most identified with Kabbalah, the Sephardim and the Chasidim, this period of the year, the last month of the Jewish year, Elul, is the time when we begin our Teshuvah, our repentance with Selichot, prayers of apology.  While we Ashkenazic Jews have Selichot prayers at midnight, we only do this the Saturday night prior to Rosh HaShanah.  And by the way, here in Tucson where midnight comes early, we have our Selichot service at 10:30 PM, tomorrow night.  It’s a beautiful, mystical, powerful experience, preceded by a Kabbalistic study session this year on change.

But it’s not just a one night experience for many Jews.  Observant Sephardim and Chasidim hold an entire month of late night Selichot services, getting up from their beds in time to be at temple at midnight every weekday of Elul, interrupting their dreamtime to offer deeply personal prayers of repentance.  And the Selichot prayers, while filled with confessions and requests for forgiveness, are also intensely mystical.  In other words, they seek to stop the flow of dreams so that we can assert a level of control over the thoughts, and hopefully the actions, of each person. That way we can focus on teshuvah, repentance, which surely must be a conscious, waking process.

Now, when we sleep we are quite impotent to control or prevent dreams.  As Hamlet puts it, “For in that sleep of death what dreams may come”; What dreams may come, because indeed, bidden or not, they do come.  And that means that there is an entire realm of intellectual and spiritual experience over which we have no control, and never will.  It is beyond our spiritual discipline to manage this, mystically or otherwise.

There are many Jewish teachings that reflect this discomfort with dreams.  In fact, there is a certain fear, a sense that the loss of volition that occurs when we lose consciousness, the “prison of sleep” is too much like our final prison of death.  When we are asleep we don’t have any ability to act; we are, in a way, like a prisoner in jail.  This is why our morning prayers, our Birchot HaShachar, include a passage that says, “Blessed are You, God, Ruler of the universe, who frees the captive prisoner.”  It is not a blessing about redeeming soldiers captured in war, or about freeing hostages.  It is actually just a way of saying, “Thank you, Lord, for freeing me from the prison of lost control that is sleep.”

But in Zohar, the greatest work of Jewish mysticism, and in all Kabbalah more generally, dreams play a complex and ambivalent role.  Failing to dominate the world of sleep through mystical, intellectual, or spiritual training, the Kabbalists eventually give up, and explore just what dreams actually are, and what really happens when we fall asleep. 

They begin with a midrash about what happens to our souls when we fall fully asleep.  According to tradition, when we sleep deeply, just 1/60th of our souls remain in our bodies.  Almost every part of our individual souls journeys to Gan Eden, the Garden of Eden, where they commune directly with God, in a blissful experience of paradise.  That means that when we start to wake up, our souls must return to our bodies or we won’t wake up at all. The beautiful, poetic morning prayer Elohai Neshama, which thanks and praises God for restoring our pure souls to us and allowing us to live another day, is an almost practical statement of gratitude based on this remarkable teaching.

The Zohar then tells us that dreams are also 1/60th prophecy, that is, that when we dream we are receiving a form of communication directly from God.  The hard part is knowing how much of the dream is revelation and how much isn’t.  Or, to put it another way, which part of what we dream comes from God and which part comes from a weird movie we saw before drifting off, or from eating too much garlic at dinner.

1/60th part prophecy sounds both too important to ignore, and much too ambiguous to believe in.

And yet, in the Talmud Rav Hisda says, (Brachot 55a) “A dream uninterpreted is like an unopened letter.”  Quite a statement.  A letter from whom?  From God, of course, sent through the filter of your own unconscious. In other words, a Divine message told in the unique language of your own unique soul.

We should not ignore such powerful potential communication, whether fully divine or just unconscious in origin.  We may not invite dreams, we may even find them disturbing at some level, we may go so far as to try to prevent ourselves from having them, but once they come, according to Jewish teaching, they must be treated seriously. 

R. Hiya and R. Jose used to study with R. Simeon. R. Hiya once put to him the following question: ‘We have learnt that a dream uninterpreted is like a letter undeciphered. Does this mean that the dream comes true without the dreamer being conscious of it, or that it remains unfulfilled?’ R. Simeon answered: ‘The dream comes true, but without the dreamer being aware of it…”

So, if dreams are so important, what do you dream about?

I don’t know if any of you have ever kept a dream journal, a record of what you dreamt about each night, best recorded immediately after awakening. I’ve tried it, and found it interesting, if not always illuminating.  But I do know one thing: dreams can sure seem real when you have them, and even shortly after you wake up.  And they can open your mind to strange and sometimes beautiful possibilities.  They may or may not be a path to divine inspiration, or to various parts of our unconscious minds.  But they can indeed prove to be powerful.

The figure most closely associated with dreaming in Jewish tradition is our ancestor Joseph, the great dream interpreter of the Torah.  His brothers derisively call him “Ba’al hachalomot”, the master of dreams.  Joseph rises to great prominence because of his ability to interpret the Pharaoh’s bad dreams.  And his unique ability to leap to the top of the heap relies primarily on an extraordinary talent for understanding and explaining dreams.  So how does he do it?  What can Joseph teach us about dreams?

It is apparent in these sections of Genesis that Joseph is able to probe the unconscious imaginings of the minds around him—and of his own mind—and discern the parts that are truly divine prophecy from all the rest.  He has the uncanny ability to find the 1/60th part of true golden revelation in dreams and filter out the 59 out of 60 parts of dross that surround them.

I think Joseph is so successful in interpreting dreams because he is very good at putting aside what really doesn’t matter.  Joseph ignores the aspects of the dreams that aren’t important.  He finds the kernel inside the husk, filters out the chatter, hears the central melody within the noise.  In Talmudic terms, he goes straight to the ikkar, the root, the heart of the matter.  He understands the one thing that is really important, and focuses his attention on exactly that.  When people listen to Joseph and come to understand his emphasis on priorities, that ability to do what is most urgent first, they succeed beyond their own dreams.  When they can’t do that, when they are distracted by their own ego needs or busyness or resentments, they miss out.

Perhaps that is what dreams, or at least our Jewish approach to dreams, can teach us best: how to focus on which parts of our dreams really matter.  That is true of what we imagine when we are awake, also, what we more generally call our dreams, our goals in life.  These can be filled with images of fame and fortune, of beachfront relaxation or new homes or cars or children’s accomplishments or winning the lottery, even of sports teams winning championships.  But how many of these are not true dreams at all but just the 59 parts out of 60 that are just, well, stuff, and I don’t mean “the stuff that dreams are made of?”

Perhaps the greatest modern dreamer in Jewish history was Theodore Herzl, father of Zionism, who helped dream the State of Israel into existence.  His most famous quotation is, of course, im tirtzu ein zo aggadah; if you will it, it is no dream.  More than anyone, he was able to focus a disparate and divisive group of Jews into a movement that led to the modern miracle of a Jewish state. 

You might say that Congregation Beit Simcha, similarly, is a kind of dream.  Seven years ago we agreed to create a congregation, a synagogue committed to high Jewish standards and a true, loving community where everyone pitched in.  That dream, through much labor, has become something very real and very precious.  We are now close to achieving a part of that dream, a permanent home.  As a congregation we will continue to flourish so long as we remain true to our central dream of a shul committed to Jewish excellence, warmth, and creativity, and to demonstrating respect and kindness to all members and guests of our community.  This synagogue is a dream in the making.

So, my friends, on a personal level: what are your dreams for yourself?  Which of them are truly divinely inspired, and which are not? 

What can you do in this coming year to realize your essential dreams, the heart of your dreams for yourself?

In this month of Elul, and in this coming 5786 year, may we each commit ourselves to finding the worthy, divine dreams that lie within us, the truest of our own dreams.  And may we learn to filter out the others so that we can make those very real, holy dreams come true.

Lost and Found

Shabbat Ki Teitzei 5785 Rabbi Sam Cohon, Congregation Beit Simcha

Our Torah portion, Ki Teitzei, so filled with laws, includes the following rule:

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

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

That is, you must help find what has been lost.

The wonderful poet Samuel Menashe wrote:

“Always

When I was a boy

I lost things—

I am still

Forgetful—

Yet I daresay

All will be found

One day.”

As an oft-absentminded person, I certainly hope the poet is right.  If I don’t put my keys on a certain peg in the house, I inevitably lose them, and I live in constant fear of putting my phone down somewhere and spending precious minutes or hours searching for it.  And of course, I have often searched the whole building for sunglasses that were perched atop my own head the whole time.  I can lose anything and live in constant fear of that fact.

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

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

But if we look beyond the physical items that we might lose—eyeglasses, hats, purses, wallets, iphones—we can come to comprehend just what a large place loss plays in our lives.

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

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

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

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

The truth is that all of us have lost something important this past year. Some of us have lost faith in the future.  Some of us have lost hope in our children, or our parents, or our friends.  Some of us have lost trust in our spouses.  Some of us have lost our optimism in our society.  Some of us have lost the ability to believe in others. Some of us have lost confidence in ourselves.

Some of us have lost the ability to pray.  Some of us have lost the ability to care.  Some of us have lost touch with the most special parts of ourselves.

Some of us have lost our connection to God.  Some of us have lost our connection to our family or friends.

Some of us just feel lost…

What is it that you lost in the past year?  Or, perhaps, what is that you lost recently, or even years ago that you would like to recover?

What would you call out for if you came to that Stone of Losses in the courtyard of the great Temple in Jerusalem?

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

What is it that you have lost?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Well, no…” mumbles the poor clerk.

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

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

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

Indeed.

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

So, what have you lost in the past year?  And where did you go to look for it?

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

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

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

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

I search

for what I have not lost.

For you, of course.

I would stop

if I knew how.

I would stand

at the Stone of Losses

and proclaim,

shouting:

Forgive me.

I’ve troubled you for nothing.

All the identifying marks I gave you

…

were never mine.

I swear by my life,

by this stone in the heart of Jerusalem,

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

Be kind to me;

I didn’t mean to mock you.

I know there are people here

--wretched, ill-fated—

who have lost their worlds

in moments of truth.

And I search

for what I have not lost…

“At the Stone of Losses”, by T. Carmi

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

The good news, as Thoreau once said, is that “Not until we are lost do we begin to understand ourselves.”

What you have lost is not far away across the sea, not high up on a mountain, not deep inside a cave.  What you have lost is actually within you.  It is your best, truest self, the part of you that you wish you could be all the time.  That is what we seek to find in this season of return: that is the place we must look. 

As Carmi’s poem makes clear, what we have lost is not really lost.  It is close at hand, because it is within each of us.  It always was.  We just forgot how to find it. 

Now we know where to look.

God, our own Rock, Tzur Yisrael, our Stone of Losses, tonight we seek to find those things we have lost in the past year. 

Help us to recover our optimism about life.

Help us find our best selves.

Help us reclaim our childlike wonder.

Help us turn again to our spouses, our children, our parents, our siblings, our friends.

Help us reignite our idealism.

Help us rediscover what we once loved, and can love again.

Help us return to what we are at heart: good, caring, loving, creative, generous.

Help us find You.

This Shabbat we can begin by admitting what we have lost.  If we can do that, honestly and completely, then I promise that over the next month we will find it.  And our Stone of Losses will become a Stone of Finding.  And our teshuvah will be complete.

May you find what you have lost.  And may your prayers be answered this Shabbat, and in the days of return to come.

Making the Ideal Real

Rabbi Samuel M. Cohon’s Sermon, Shabbat Shoftim 5785

Congregation Beit Simcha, Tucson, Arizona

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Maybe that’s why Jews of every denomination are so good at law—two Jews are currently on the 9-member United States Supreme Court—not long ago it was 3, fully 1/3 of the highest court in the land when we are at most 2% of the population.  The Supreme Court, of course, is all about applying rules to complex situations to make things work out; well, it used to be, anyway, for the past 248 years or so.  That kind of thinking requires a kind of intellectual flexibility that seeks to keep in mind and heart the highest principles, while making it possible for people to function in society without losing integrity.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Chossing Blessing

Sermon Shabbat Re’ei 5785

Rabbi Samuel M. Cohon

Congregation Beit Simcha, Tucson, Arizona 

It’s hot outside, but summer is officially over here in Tucson.  Public school started three or even four weeks ago, our Beit Simcha Religious School begins this Sunday, and the High Holy Days are coming up in just over a month. We will bless the new month of Elul on this Shabbat because Rosh Chodesh Elul is Sunday, the beginning of the last month of the Jewish year 5785. It's the time of year for us to think about the state of our relationships, to prepare to do a cheshbon hanefesh, an accounting of the state of our souls, to reflect on where we've been, where we are in our lives, and where we are headed. 

We are beginning this yearly journey of getting ready for the chagim, the Jewish fall holidays, examining the choices we continually make and the way our choices have worked out for us in the past year.

The opening lines of this week's parsha, Re'ei, are about choice.  In that passage Moses says to us, the people of Israel,

Re'eh, anochi noten lifneichem hayom bracha u'klalla.
Et habracha asher tishm'u el-mitzvot Adonai Eloheichem asher anochi m'tzaveh etchem hayom.
V'haklallah im-lo tishm'u el-mitzvot Adonai Eloheichem…

See, I give you today a blessing and a curse.
The blessing, if you listen to the mitzvot of your God which I command you today.
And the curse if you don't obey or listen.

Re’ei goes on to talk about the danger of turning away from God and the mitzvot, and commands us, when we go into our land, to read this blessing and this curse on top of two different mountains there.  The directions are clear and dramatic: half of the Israelites stand on one mountain and shout out the blessings, and the other half stands on the neighboring mountain and shout out the curses.  And everyone says “Amen, Amen; we agree, we accept.”

On the surface, it seems like a simple, powerful, restatement of the central message repeated all through Devarim: if you do good, you will be blessed; if you do evil, you will be cursed, the Deuteronomic covenant that lies at the heart of the Torah’s understanding of ethics.

Now, Judaism is a religion that absolutely believes in personal choice: God gives us commandments, but it’s always up to us whether we choose to follow them.  There is nothing predetermined.  Everything comes down to what we decide to do.  On the continuum of religions, between free will and determinism, we Jews are radical free choice advocates, made clear here once again.

The idea that good choices lead to good results is a central aspect of the berit, the covenant established throughout the Torah and so vigorously emphasized here in Re’ei, and in Deuteronomy.  Blessing comes when you follow commandments; curses arrive when you do not.  Quid pro quo.

But commentator Nechama Liebowitz points out that it's not really the case that there are two parallel “ifs” here in Re’ei, “blessing IF you listen, curse IF you do not."

You see, the Torah uses two different words: it reads "et habracha ASHER tishm'u", "v'haklalla IM-lo tishm'u".  That is, the blessing comes because you listen, while the curse comes only if you do not.

In a footnote on Rashi the commentary Torat Chayim summarizes this loophole as K'tiv haklallah b'lashon tnai, v'habracha b'lashon vedai, "the curse is written in the conditional, and the blessing in the declarative."  That is, the blessing of God is definite; while the curse is only a possibility.

Nechama Liebowitz makes a key point out of this.  She says God actually gives us a line of credit, a mitzvah equity loan if you will, and we can borrow blessing on the speculation that we are likely to do mitzvot.  It seems like a good deal for us, although not necessarily a good one for God.  In this understanding, God leans towards us, favors us even before we act well.

This credit analogy is comforting; we get blessings from above loaned to us on the hope that we will do mitzvot.  God rewards us and then trusts—and maybe prays—that we Jews will act ethically.  God gives, we accept, and everyone hopes we do right and good. 

But what if we read this passage a little differently, as other commentators do who focus on a different part of the verse?  How about if we translate it,

"I'm setting before you now a blessing and a curse,
a blessing because you are with me today listening to the mitzvot of God your Lord that I am sharing with you,

the curse if you don't continue to listen and be linked in community with Me and with each other and instead turn off to a path that leads to you not knowing what is holy in your life."

This takes the phrase at the beginning of Re’ei, asher tishm'u, “if you listen” and reads it as "because you are already currently listening together with your community."  

Rabbi Meir of Rothenburg, the Maharam, a 13th-century German commentator, agrees with this.  He points to a connection between these lines in Re’ei and Psalm 133, when it says Ki sham tziva Adonai et habracha, chayim ad-ha-olam.  “Because there, [in the mountains of Zion] God commanded blessing, life eternal.”

The Maharam highlights that this passage in Re’ei is one in which our ancestors pronounced blessing and curse as they assembled at the mountains.  And if you look at the beginning of the Psalm you will find the famous text Hinei ma tov uma na’im shevet achim gam yachad—the one we sing so often at every Jewish event, “How good and lovely it is for us to be together.”

You know, “we are family,” and we must join together right now… in unity.  That begins the Psalm, and then a sentence later it adds, “Ki sham tziva Adonai et habracha, because there God commanded blessing, life eternal,” echoing Re’ei.  It means that when family and community come together, when shevet achim gam-yachad… sham, in that very coming together there, that’s when God makes a gift of blessings to us.

In other words, the sharing of mitzvot together is the bracha, the blessing that Re’ei is promising.  And that blessing of being together in community, in prayer, according to these texts and their commentaries, is life at its fullest.  When we join together, we discover and enjoy brachot, blessings given by God.

So perhaps we already get these blessings by doing the work as a community to get ready for the chagim, by spending this coming month of Elul looking at our past year and seeking to find new ways to improve our lives, our temple and our community.  By coming together to prepare for and celebrate the High Holy Days, to share joy, to remember that we are all anxious and humble together, that we all long to be blessed and inscribed together in the book of life, and that we are each vulnerable and each flawed, by doing this, Re’ei promises, we receive the blessing of life.  It is this, in itself, that is a blessing we definitely can have just for the asking—or rather, just by showing up and being present and helping.

In this interpretation of Re’ei, being together in Jewish community means being inscribed fully in the good book of our own lives.

Just as we are commanded to return and prepare our Teshuvah, our return in this coming month of Elul, so we return to that first point of Re’ei: blessing is offered first, while curse is only there in reserve.  It is a promise that God is predisposed to favor us, forgiveness and love are there for us in advance.  We only need to look at our own lives and make a sincere, honest effort to find, and be, our best selves.

Perhaps this can be a model for our cheshbon hanefesh, the honest scrutiny required as we enter this holiest period of the year.  When we look at our lives, the Torah suggests we have a much kinder friend in God than we can often be to ourselves.  In fact, God’s advance affection for us is so practical that the Torah contains messages of forgiveness in advance, knowing that, being human, we will inevitably screw up and require more forgiveness.

Psalm 27 is traditionally said every day during Elul.  It includes the beautiful passage:  Horeini Adonai darkecha unecheini b’orach mishor

lulei he’emanti lirot betuv Adonai, b’eretz chayim

Teach me Your way, God, and lead me in a straight path

I believe that I will see the goodness of God in the land of the living.

On this Shabbat of Re’ei, and during the coming month of Elul, may we each make the choice to accept God’s offered blessings, in community—and may we also work, in goodness, to be worthy of them.  And then we need not worry about curses; because we will be able through our own shared actions to bring blessing.  Shabbat Shalom.

Bad Things, Good People and What We Can Do

Sermon Parshat Ekev 5785

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

I was asked by a bar mitzvah student what the difference is between commandment, mitzvah, and covenant, berit.  I explained that commanded mitzvot are ethical acts we are ordered to fulfill, while covenant, berit, is a kind of sacred contract, a deal we make with God: if we do this, then God will do that.  A covenant can include mitzvot, but essentially it is a deal, a quid pro quo.  It limits us to a course of action that is specified in the contract, the berit—and oddly, it also limits God, who is stuck doing whatever God promised us if we stuck to the rules.

I know that I believe in mitzvot, the moral and ritual ways we Jews structure our conduct.  But while I believe in berit, I wonder if it really works that way.

So if you do good things do you expect a reward?  When you act badly do you anticipate punishment?

If you answered yes to those questions our Torah portion this week is for you!

Ekev begins with the classic statement of the central covenant of Deuteronomy: v’hayah ekev tishm’un et hamishpatim ha’eileh, ushmartem va’asitem otam…  if you listen to and observe these laws and guard them and do them, the Lord your God will guard you, and the covenant and the kindness that God swore to your ancestors… God will love you and bless you and multiply you, and God will bless the fruit of your wombs and fruit of your lands… You shall be blessed above all other people… the Lord will protect you from all sickness and dread diseases…”  And so on. 

A bit later, the message is repeated in a different way: “Kol hamitzvah asher anochi m’tzavcha hayom tishm’run la’asot… All the commandments that I command you today you shall guard and observe to do them, that you will therefore live long and thrive and increase and inherit the land that I swore to your ancestors.”

In other words, the Deuteronomic Covenant of perfect, complete, purely conditional love.  If we do what God wants, we will be rewarded. If we don’t do what God wants, we will be punished.  This is, to paraphrase the title of a famous book on this subject, the theology of why good things happen to good people and why bad things happen to bad people. 

The opening word of our Torah portion, which gives it its title, is quite intriguing.  The word Ekev means “something that follows inevitably.”  It is derived from the word for heel, akav, and it is the source of the name of Jacob, Ya’akov, our great patriarchal ancestor and the true father of all Jews.  Its linguistic meaning is that what is described by the word Ekev is going to definitely occur, just as your heel follows your toes when you walk. 

The Book of Deuteronomy is very clear on this point: do good, follow mitzvot, and you will surely be rewarded.  Fail to do good, in fact do evil, and you will just as surely be punished.

This theology is at the heart not only of Deuteronomy but of a great deal of religious thinking in this world.  Of course, not everyone actually experiences this in our world, and so some religions move this covenant to the next world: do good in this life and you will get your reward in the Great Beyond, bye and bye, because you will go to heaven and enjoy bliss eternal.  Do badly and you will be punished in the fires of hell.  I’ve taught that in my Life After Death in Jewish Belief course in our Adult Education Academy.  But that idea comes much later in Judaism.   Devarim, and Ekev, don’t bother with afterlives at all.  This covenant is for the here-and-now.

We can summarize this good old Deuteronomic Deal in just eight words: Do good, get prizes; do bad, get zapped.

Some of you may, in fact, believe that life always works this way.  But for the rest of us the covenant as stated in Ekev causes some real problems.  For we know that in our own lives it is not only the good who flourish and not only the wicked who are punished.  In fact, the correlation between ethical action and reward often seems completely random, if not sometimes in inverse proportion.  We all know of good people who suffer or die too young.  And we all know of rotten people who seem to suffer not at all and flourish in spite of—or, occasionally, because of—their moral relativism. 

In fact, sometimes it seems that, as that fine Jewish songwriter Billy Joel once put it, only the good die young. 

Philosophy—and theology—have a word for the problem posed by this seeming paradox.  It’s called theodicy, the key issue for most religious traditions.  If I am supposed to be good, and goodness brings reward, why do bad things happen to good people?  And, of course, why do good things happen to bad people?

The examples we could cite are legion.  Without resorting to the eternal problem that the Holocaust poses to the Deuteronomic covenant, how can we explain the randomness of people who died from COVID-19?  And how can we ever rationalize the deaths of children, the suffering of innocents?  How can we see the triumph of unpunished evildoers or the failure of good, caring tzadiks and still believe?  Doesn’t this vitiate the whole notion of covenant?

What are we to make of this flat statement in the Torah that doing right makes for happiness, and that doing evil leads to destruction?

A friend and past guest on Too Jewish, the late Rabbi Harold Kushner, wrote a fine, useful book called “When Bad Things Happen to Good People.”  I recommend it often to those who have suffered unexpected loss.  It is a thoughtful, helpful, sincere, caring work.  The only problem with it is that, while it raises all the right questions, it provides very few answers.  Comfort, yes.  Insight even.  But answers?  No—because, as Rabbi Kushner always notes, it is not called “Why do bad things happen to good people?” but “When bad things happen to good people”, assuming the essential reality of tragedy and injustice in our world.

So what answers are there to provide?  Without resorting to the mild cheat of claiming that God will rectify all these injustices in the World to Come, how do we address this enormous challenge posed by theodicy, by the apparent falseness of our Torah portion of Ekev?

I believe that we do so by reframing the discussion. 

The truth is, of course, that there are many, many things in life we do not control.  Natural disasters, pandemics, unemployment, taxes, the stock market, terror attacks, hereditary illnesses, economic change, the weather and much, much more.  In fact, when you think about it, our own actions, for good or evil, are just about the only things we do control. 

We have the capacity to do mitzvot, to fulfill moral acts in a practical way.  When we choose to do so on a regular, daily basis we have the ability to make ourselves good.  When we choose to do otherwise, to lie, cheat, steal, and injure, or sometimes just ignore the needs of others in a selfish way, we cause damage to our own character.

In effect, what Ekev teaches us is that we have been given the power and strength to remake ourselves as moral beings.  We can become good by acting well.  We can create goodness, perhaps even holiness, by fulfilling commandment.  We cannot guarantee ourselves or those we love will be safe from disease.  We cannot prevent war.  We cannot protect against the painful vicissitudes of deep misfortune.  We cannot always protect our loyal friends from unemployment and economic disaster. 

But we can, and we should, seek to perfect ourselves and our actions, make our own conduct better and holier.  We should do everything we can to avoid injuring others, both their health and their well-being.  We can help the stranger, support the refugee and immigrant.  We can seek to help those who are unemployed, call those who are ill, comfort those who are bereaved.  If we can do these things, we will fulfill our end of the covenant, hold up our side of the berit, and in this way serve God and begin to redeem this world.

As the central message in Ekev frames the issue, “What does the Lord your God ask of you?  Only to revere the Lord your God, to walk in all God’s ways, to love God, serve the Lord your God with all your heart and all your soul, to keep the mitzvot, the commandments… befriend the stranger.”  To live a good life, to keep up our end of the berit, the covenant, to make ourselves and our lives good, whatever the circumstances that swirl around us.

By coming to understand that the question is not “why is this world unfair” but “what can I make of myself morally”, we learn that although we are only mortal, and limited, and unable to control our world even by mitzvot, we may nonetheless create great ethical beauty and supreme moments of moral holiness.

And that is, after all, the real point of both commandment, and covenant.  That is the true goal of life: to seek good with all of our abilities. 

May this be our will.  And God’s.

Listen

Sermon Parshat VaEtchanan/Nachamu 5785

Rabbi Samuel M. Cohon, Congregation Beit Simcha

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

If we were truly listening could we close our ears to the cries of Israeli hostages, starved and tormented for almost two full years?  Could we ignore starving children in Gaza?  Could we avoid the images of mass murder in Sudan?

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

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

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

Judaism begins with the commandment:

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

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

Hears, but does not really hear.

The person who walks amid the song of birds

And thinks only of what will be served for dinner

Hears, but does not really hear.

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

And does not catch the note of urgency:

Notice me, help me, care about me –

Hears, but does not really hear.

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

The person who stifles the sound of conscience and thinks:

I have done enough already –

Hears, but does not really hear.

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

Hears, but does not really hear.

The person who listens to the rabbi's sermon

And thinks that someone else is being addressed

Hears, but does not really hear.

On this Shabbat Nachamu, God

Sharpen our ability to hear.

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

May we hear the call for help of the lonely soul

And the sound of the breaking heart

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

May we hear within ourselves the yearnings struggling for expression

May we hear You, God.

For only if we hear You

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

Hear the words that we pray today, our God

And may we hear them too.                                  Shabbat Shalom.

A Vision of Peace, Out of War

A Vision of Peace, Out of War

Sermon Shabbat Hazon/Devarim 5785

Rabbi Samuel M. Cohon, Congregation Beit Simcha

Tomorrow night, at Tisha B’Av services, we will chant a powerful Megillah, the Scroll of Eycha, Lamentations from the last section of the Tanakh, the Hebrew Bible.  Eycha is a sad reminder of the terrible defeat and loss our people experienced in antiquity, the Churban Bayit Rishon, the destruction of the First Temple and the exile of our ancestors to the alien nation of Babylon.  On Tisha b’Av tomorrow we’ll remember also the destruction of the 2nd Temple, the fall of Beitar ending the Bar Cochba Revolt, our Expulsion from Spain, and many other tragedies that befell us in our long, often disastrous history on this fateful date.  And we know that a future potential calamity remains a possibility in a world in which far too many people simply don’t believe that we Jews have the right to our own country in our own homeland.

Tonight, however, we take inspiration from a different Megillah, also in the last section of the Tanakh.  Ecclesiastes, Kohelet, famously says, לַכֹּ֖ל זְמָ֑ן וְעֵ֥ת לְכׇל־חֵ֖פֶץ תַּ֥חַת הַשָּׁמָֽיִם׃ -  For everything there is a season, and a time for every experience under heaven.

עֵ֤ת לֶֽאֱהֹב֙        וְעֵ֣ת לִשְׂנֹ֔א        עֵ֥ת מִלְחָמָ֖ה        וְעֵ֥ת שָׁלֽוֹם׃        

A time to love and a time to hate;
A time for war and a time for peace.

After a long time of war, and much hatred, we have now reached a time for peace in Israel.  And that simply must be acted upon, and soon.

There is a subject that we need to address tonight, the elephant in the room among those of us who are devoted and committed supporters of Israel.  Our Congregation Beit Simcha, and I personally, have always been and remain proud and vocal Zionists.  In the last 22 months we have supported Israel and its citizens and its armed forces through the trauma, tragedy, and triumph of the war with the brutal Palestinian terrorists of Hamas, the Hezbollah terrorists of Lebanon, the Houthi terrorists of Yemen, the Islamist terrorist state of Iran, and the terrorists on both sides in the Syrian civil war.  I have gone to Israel during this time of war, raised funds for its humanitarian needs, spoken out here and in local media and on the Too Jewish Radio Show and Podcast repeatedly on Israel’s behalf, and publicized the Jewish State’s struggles to maintain humanity and preserve life during a brutal, mostly urban war in a region with an incredibly dense population. 

Many of us in the Jewish community in America have worked hard to counteract the well-funded propaganda of terrorist sympathizers and apologists, corrected the many lies spread about Israel, answered every challenge raised against its carefully structured responses that have turned the course of the war and brought Israel to a much stronger place than it has been in a long time.

There is no doubt Israel has had to fight a horrible war in Gaza that was forced on it by the war-criminals of Hamas, who slaughtered, tortured, raped and kidnapped civilians in order to create the disaster that has inevitably ensued for the Gaza Palestinians.  Hamas insists on prolonging this war as long as possible by refusing to release the 23 living Israeli hostages—possibly still alive after 664 days of horrible captivity—and Hamas also won’t release the bodies of the 30 or so Israelis and other foreign nationals it is ghoulishly holding onto. 

It is also completely true that Hamas has long used food as a weapon, has stolen the food sent into the territory by aid organizations and used it to extort Palestinians into working for it and even fighting for it, sold that food to Palestinians at black-market prices, and generally weaponized food to the profound detriment of all Palestinians in Gaza.  Israel provided or transported into the region the food that kept Gaza Palestinians alive throughout this war, even though it is quite literally fighting a war against the Hamas terrorists who hold sway there and who have stolen most of the food for their own use and purposes.

We also know that starvation in Gaza has been predicted or falsely proclaimed since January 2024, over 18 months ago, but strangely it hasn’t materialized until now.

We also know that Israel has tried to control Hamas’ interception of food by setting up its own humanitarian relief system. 

Unfortunately, this simply hasn’t worked.  The reasons it isn’t working are likely complex, among them that, undoubtedly, Hamas has tried to sabotage the program; the Israeli government and military simply don’t have the administrative ability to actually pull off feeding a hostile civilian population; there is a great desperation of the population trapped in Gaza by the closed border with Egypt, the ongoing war including destruction of homes and other structures, and so on.  Whatever the current cause, the net result is a humanitarian crisis, and a public relations disaster of the first order.

The perception that Israel is using food as a weapon against Palestinians may be false, but at this point that doesn’t matter.  Israel must find a way out of this quagmire, and fast.  Even if Hamas exploits a dramatic increase in food supplies flowing into Gaza—and it will—we cannot have the perception that Jews are denying food to civilians and that people are starving. 

I know, many of the widely circulated photos of starving children are of kids with underlying genetic problems, and some of them are actually taken in other countries.  But these images of starving-looking children remain in people’s minds, and the issue is getting more problematic by the day.

Israel has to resolve this, and allow more food into Gaza, and do so now.  It is not likely that allowing a greater humanitarian crisis to ensue, caused by Hamas, yes, but in the eyes of a hyper-critical world it is happening under the control of the powerful Israeli military will improve anything.  It will not save any of the hostages, nor end this war with a positive result.

In fact, the visuals and the reports of actual starvation are moving governments that have previously resisted the propaganda push to recognize a “State of Palestine” to arrange to do so next month.  France, the United Kingdom and Canada have never before recognized “Palestine”; they are offering or threatening to do so now, to try to resolve the current disastrous situation in Gaza.  Mahmoud Abbas, the head of the Palestinian Authority, has even agreed, supposedly, to hold elections, something he hasn’t done in over 20 years, two full decades, in order to secure such recognition.

Frankly, Israelis are more concerned with liberating the remaining hostages than they are with a further destruction of Gaza and its population, even including Hamas.  All the current surveys, and the large rallies against the government being held regularly now, demonstrate that the public in Israel wants the hostages back, and now.

Speaking as a rabbi, there is no positive result from widespread starvation in Gaza.  Starving your enemy may have been a typical way for armies to act throughout history.  It is not an option that the army representing the Jewish State, an army that emphasizes and teaches Tohar haNeshek, the purity of arms, can utilize, or permit.  That ethical code of conduct for the IDF prohibits harming non-combatants or prisoners of war and emphasizes avoiding harm to their lives, bodies, dignity, and property. 

In fact, throughout this Gaza War in a densely populated small area with nearly 2 million inhabitants, it has been maintained.  How else do you explain the fact that far from a so-called “genocide” taking place, the vast majority of the Gaza Strip’s civilian population remains alive and essentially healthy after nearly two years of warfare?  The death of civilians, like the 1200 murdered in Israel by Hamas and the 38 who died at the hands of Iranian missiles and rockets, is always tragic.  It is likely that 20-30,000 Palestinian civilians have died in Gaza over this war, some of whom were accidentally killed by Israeli munitions. That is sad and tragic, the consequence of a war that Israel never sought to fight.  The majority of the deaths in Gaza have, to this point, been Hamas and other Islamist terrorists, armed and shooting at Israeli soldiers and civilians.

The conduct of Israel through this war has been, almost always, in keeping with its own doctrine of purity of arms.  It is crucial to maintain that, and not use starvation as a weapon of war, intentionally or accidentally.  War has been forced on our people.  We must continue to conduct ourselves in this conflict with intelligence and care.

A final comment about the Gaza War.  As we have previously noted, on October 7th, 2023, 251 hostages were dragged into the horror tunnels of Gaza by the Palestinian terrorists of Hamas.  Of those who have somehow survived, 8 hostages have been freed by IDF action in the nearly two years since that terrible day.  8.  The other 140 hostages who were redeemed and returned to freedom were liberated through negotiations.

There is a time for war and a time to make peace.  We are now at a point where further war in Gaza is likely to produce only more death and destruction, including, of course, the deaths of more young Israeli soldiers.  It will now add starvation and further international opprobrium to the mix, and it is very unlikely to free the remaining hostages.  There is a time when the practical choice and the ethical choice coincide.  That is the time for peace.  That time has come.

We continue to support Israel fully, and to understand at this season in which we recall destruction and loss that its security is crucial for all Jews, everywhere, and for the future of the Middle East.  That security, now, is best guaranteed through saving the remaining hostages and finding a workable agreement for peace.  At this season of Tisha B’Av, on this Shabbat Hazon, the Sabbath of vision, may the vision of Israel’s leaders come to coincide with her best and most moral needs.