Hope

Rodeo Shabbat Sermon, Parshat Terumah 5783

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

While sometimes here in the southwest we can get a little testy about the stereotypes of deserts and cowboys, of cactus and overgrown cowtowns we tend to have foisted upon us, occasionally we actually seek out and embrace those stereotypes.  And this is one of those times.  How do you say Yipee ki yay in Yiddish?  Yipee oy vey?

Look, when you live in the heart of the west, not far from Tombstone in what was Apache country not much over a century ago, rodeo weekend is still, at least superficially, a pretty big deal.

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

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

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

Levi Strauss, a Jewish immigrant from Bavaria first came to the gold country in 1850.  He didn’t succeed in prospecting for gold, but he did succeed in co-inventing the denims that sat on all those saddles that blazed through the Wild West.  He and his partner, another Jewish tailor named Jacob Davis, who patented the rivets that hold on the pockets, made Levi’s the preferred pants of cowboy set.

In any case, I hope you are all enjoying this Rodeo Shabbat celebration of our superficial western-ness.  To me, Rodeo is a sign that spring has sprung here in Tucson, that we are ready to embrace a season of pleasant warmth and natural growth.  And I have to note that this year, while Southern California is experiencing blizzards—including some in San Diego—I’ll bet you never expected to hear that sentence—we are going to enjoy our usual excellent spring weather.

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

Spring is, of course, the time when life seems new, fresh, dreamlike; in short, washed in the pastel shades of hope.  Now, while Rodeo is one signal of the arrival of hope-filled spring, there was another crucial one this very day.  Baseball spring training has officially begun, and with spring training comes the eternal rebirth of hope that is always associated with that blessed arrival. 

Baseball spring training camps are filled with 21 year old lefthanders dreaming of the big time and 40 year old relievers coming off arm surgery and hoping for one more shot.  Spring is the time when, for a few brief shining weeks, every youngster is a prospect, and every veteran is a star.  They say the marriage is the triumph of hope over experience, but I think it’s really spring training baseball that matches that description.

Now I suppose we could speak of the NCAA basketball tournament as the ultimate season of hope, but perhaps this year it’s better to ignore that subject altogether... except to say that every team in the 64 1/2 school field has some hope of at least going a couple of rounds deep into the tournament, maybe even of reaching the Promised Land of the Final Four.  But the winnowing out is so rapid in college basketball—within two days half the teams are gone.  No, it’s the slow-paced month of spring training that is the real tangible representation of hope in our society.

At the beginning of spring everyone is healthy and happy and poised to flourish.  And of course, every team has an excellent chance to win the World Series.  We know that over the long course of the season some of these predictions will vanish in the heat of summer, but hope springs eternal in the human being in this season, and that’s something we all need.  And baseball’s spring training is hope wrapped up in sunshine and flowers.

And we need hope.  We live, in a way, for hope: the hope and promise of joyous occasions, of simchas like the birth of new babies, like the pleasant notion that life will get only better, that things are improving.  Hope gets us through days of trial and pain, makes us accept that here in our own world there is the promise of blessing and goodness even when they are invisible.

But pringtime hope is more than just the dreams and prayers of well-paid and semi-amateur athletes.  On the subject of hope, I have to share a passage from this week’s Torah portion of Terumah.  It tells us that when God commanded Moses to construct the Tabernacle in the Wilderness, the original sanctuary for our people to worship, the very first temple, Moses put out a call for a building campaign.  The Israelites were asked to voluntarily donate gold and silver to create a magnificent new edifice that would become the center for prayer and assembly for our people, the first of its kind.  The word for such donations is Terumah, meaning voluntary gifts of the heart. 

And that original building campaign had a remarkable result: after a short while, there was too much gold and silver.  Moses had to tell the people to stop donating, because there was simply too much being given.

Now, you might take from this pivotal story the lesson that this had to be the only synagogue building campaign in all Jewish history to ever be oversubscribed… but there is a rather different lesson that we can take from it.  That is, that if we begin with hope, and if work and cherish that dream and not only preserve it but nurture it with love and support and care, well, we can in fact accomplish anything.    

What is that famous Kevin Costner movie phrase, set in Iowa, embodied in the baseball midsummer classic held each year now?  If you build it, He will come?  Well, it comes from this week’s Torah portion, really, and it’s a promise of hope.  Asu li mikdash v’shachanti b’tocham—we are told, build Me a sanctuary and I will dwell among you.

That’s truly hopeful, of course, not just a field of dreams, but a temple of them.  Remember, this wild west was once a wilderness, too.  And it was hope, and hard work, and dedication and commitment that transformed it into a place of growth and goodness where all flourish today.

On this springtime Shabbat of Rodeo and Terumah, may we all find ways to make the commitments that renew our own hopes, and bring about our dreams.