Memory

Rosh HaShanah Morning 5782

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

There was a wonderful piece published in Sports Illustrated, a magazine which still comes out in the glossy hard-copy format I remember from youth.  The article was written by David Simon, and features a kind of t’shuvah, a repentance he feels he must make because of an incident from childhood.  When David Simon was a boy growing up in the Washington, DC suburbs he was a huge fan of the baseball team then known as the Washington Senators.  The original Senators notoriously had not won much—their last pennant was in 1933—and had moved to Minnesota, and the expansion Senators who replaced them weren’t any better.  The old slogan about Washington was true: “First in war, first in peace, and last in the American League.” 

 But Simon was a Jewish kid growing up in the area, and for a couple of years the Senators actually were pretty good.  Their powerful offense was led by slugger Frank Howard and a first baseman named Mike Epstein, whose nickname was—I am not making this up—“SuperJew.”  In Simon’s recollection, it’s Opening Day, and Mike Epstein is batting against Oakland A’s pitcher Vida Blue, and he writes of his childhood fandom for Epstein, “Is there a hero more tailored to my existence?  Is it possible to overstate the sociocultural and psychological import of a power-hitting Hebrew playing first base for the Washington Senators, the hometown team of a slap-hitting Jewish runt from Silver Spring, Maryland?  Surely Mike Epstein, standing astride my childhood like a colossus for all the Chosen, is a personalized gift from the God of my fathers.

“To whom I now pray: ‘Dear God… if you let Mike Epstein hit a home run right now I will never, ever skip Hebrew school again.’”

It is Opening Day of baseball season, and what could be more fitting than a Jewish home run to start a new year filled with promise?

Simon continues, “Whereupon the very next pitch is launched into the rightfield upper deck of Robert F. Kennedy Stadium… The Opening Day crowd cheered wildly because maybe, just maybe, this is the year… to begin the great Exodus from Egypt and [baseball] bondage.

“And here, now, comes the worst and most frightening image in this sequence of memory: the vision of that mop-headed boychild, arms above him cheering wildly, looking at his own image [in the mirror] as his moment of delirious joy evaporates into near Biblical loathing and terror. 

“What did I just promise God?

“Oh.

“No.”

Simon continues:

“Within three weeks I was again cutting Hebrew school… hanging with friends, creeping down… to play basketball at Rock Creek Park…and a little more than a month after that thrilling Opening Day, Mike Epstein, my favorite player, was traded to the Athletics.  And by the following season my entire hometown baseball franchise, the Senators, was shipped to Texas.

Simon goes on to talk beautifully, and Jewishly, about his efforts to somehow exorcise the demons created by his long ago boyhood sin, attributing his team’s failures to succeed to that vow taken so cavalierly and broken so soon by his 10 year-old self, and blackening not only his memory but the fate of his favorite franchise forever.

So finally, a few years ago, Simon calls up Mike Epstein, long-retired ballplayer and now also a retired businessman, and tells him the story.

And Epstein says, “Never happened… No way.”

Simon says, “What?”

And Epstein adds, “I never hit a home run off of Vida Blue, and I never hit a home run on Opening Day.  You got it wrong.”

 Simon says, “But I remember it.”

“Never happened,” Epstein repeats.

 And when you look it up, as you can these days on the Baseball Reference website, you see that’s actually, factually true.  This incident that tormented him for half a century never occurred.  But by God, for David Simon it was such a clear memory!  It really happened!  It influenced his life and, just a little bit, his faith.

Only it didn’t.  It really never happened.

 Eventually, against all odds, after several long conversations, Simon somehow convinces Mike Epstein to join him in Washington, DC to be honored at a Nationals’ ballgame—only the game gets rained out.  God clearly has a sense of humor.  And then two days later, on Yom Kippur, Simon and Mike Epstein go to shul together in suburban DC and whatever atonement Simon has to make for that long ago vow, he makes.  Strangely, a few years later, after a 95-year drought of World Championships in DC baseball, the Washington Nationals win the World Series, albeit without a single Jewish player.

 It’s quite a story.  I mean, this well-regarded national sportswriter had a vivid memory for half a century that is flat out wrong.

 So what’s the deal with memories?  Are our memories actually unreliable?

 My friends, Rosh HaShanah has four names: Rosh HaShanah, of course, the head of the year; HaYom Harat Olam, the birthday of the world; Yom Teruah, the day of the shofar blasts; and Yom HaZikaron, the Day of Remembrance.  Memory Day, if you please.

 Each of these names has symbolic and ritual significance, and each is enshrined in our prayers with beautiful settings in words and music.  Every aspect of Rosh HaShanah is important.  Surely, then the Day of Remembrance, Memory Day, Yom HaZikaron matters a great deal indeed.  After all, on Rosh HaShanah, Yom HaZikaron, we are commanded to remember our deeds in the past year and to repent and atone for the things we have done wrong.

 But what if our memories aren’t actually true?  What if things we remember aren’t real and didn’t happen the way we remember them?

Just what the heck is memory good for if it’s unreliable?

We have been discussing memory in my house of late, and I’ve learned a lot about it from my wife, Sophie, the psychologist; I think I remember most of it...

Our perception of memories is that they are like papers we stick in cardboard Pendaflex files, hard copies of things that happened to us or experiences we had, stored away in big cabinets in our brains, to be called up out of the storeroom when we need to reference them.  That is, we have paper files in our brains somewhere labeled “grade school graduation” or “first kiss” or “Where I was on 9/11” or “that time I ate a habanero pepper” or “my son’s bris” or even “My bar mitzvah suit.”  And when we want to remember that moment, we open up the file and pull it out and, poof, there it is, vivid and unchanged from when it happened. 

As we shift from those old paper files to a fully digital age of cloud storage, the funny thing is that the icons we use to indicate the places we store things mimic the old obsolete file folders and cabinets.  From the Xerox Star system to the Macintosh desktop to Microsoft Windows to your Google Drive or icloud storage, you can still see all your information in “files” that open up just like the old file folders in the metal drawers did.

Memories are just like that, right?  Stored away ready to be recalled at any time.

Only it turns out that in recent years cognitive scientists have discovered when they studied the brain that that’s not true.  The way memory works is much more interesting than that, and infinitely more subjective.  When we first form a memory, new connections are created in our brains.  Still, every time we try to remember something our brains must actually re-create that memory nearly from scratch.  In order to have a “memory” that is close to the original, the most complex organ in our bodies has to gather a bunch of data from different parts of its internal structure.  There are packets of information stored all across neural networks in our brains that are retrieved and brought together to recreate the memory afresh.  It a little like the phrase in our morning service, b’chol yom tamid oseh ma’sei v’reisheet, every single day God continually creates the work of creation; similarly, we have to continually create our own memories.

That’s perhaps why certain stimuli—a scent or a phrase of music or the taste of a particular flavor—will trigger a sudden recollection.  Only that recollection has to be remade in your brain, and often it’s not quite the same as the events it recalls.  Our memories are colored by later experiences, influenced by things we have heard or seen, changed by other people’s stories about the same event.

That sensitivity to sensory experience—say, the smell of parsley and hard-boiled eggs reminding you it’s Passover, or the smell of creosote after a rainstorm making you feel young again, or the taste of a Madeleine cookie dipped in tea reminding Marcelle Proust of his childhood country house and starting him writing “The Remembrance of Things Past”—these are not hard and fast memories written in stone or even on paper.  They are reinventions of the experience freshly formed between our synapses out of chemical and electrical impulses and arrangements of nuerons.  And it turns out that they are not particularly reliable.  What is it the Eagles sang, “Some dance to remember—some dance to forget”?  Memory is a kind of dance of neurons and neurotransmitters in order to remember.

The great psychologist Oliver Sacks tackled precisely that problem, exposing the remarkable mechanisms by which we fabricate our memories, involuntarily blurring the line between the experienced and the assimilated:

“It is startling to realize that some of our most cherished memories may never have happened — or may have happened to someone else. I suspect that many of my enthusiasms and impulses, which seem entirely my own, have arisen from others’ suggestions, which have powerfully influenced me, consciously or unconsciously, and then been forgotten.”

Zchor Yemot Olam, remember the days of old, the Torah tells us in Deuteronomy—but just how do we really remember, and how accurate are those quite literally recreated memories?

Sacks continues, “There is… no mechanism in the mind or the brain for ensuring the truth, or at least the veridical character, of our recollections. We have no direct access to historical truth, and what we feel or assert to be true… depends as much on our imagination as our senses. There is no way by which the events of the world can be directly transmitted or recorded in our brains; they are experienced and constructed in a highly subjective way, which is different in every individual to begin with, and differently reinterpreted or reexperienced whenever they are recollected… Frequently, our only truth is narrative truth, the stories we tell each other, and ourselves—the stories we continually recategorize and refine. Such subjectivity is built into the very nature of memory, and follows from its basis and mechanisms in the human brain. The wonder is that aberrations of a gross sort are relatively rare, and that, for the most part, our memories are relatively solid and reliable.”

Not always though.  Psychoanalyst Donald Spence makes a distinction between what he calls ‘historical truth’ and ‘narrative truth.’  Historical truth is what actually happened.  Narrative truth is the story we tell ourselves about the same event, and sometimes it’s not so accurate.  That’s why, as police and judges know well, eyewitness testimony is often inaccurate, shaped by preconceptions, later perceptions, popular media, emotions, adrenaline, and many other factors.  Two eyewitnesses to the same event often tell quite different stories.

And that’s the memories of people whose brains work functionally well, without substantial memory loss.  Oliver Zangwill, son of author Israel Zangwill, was a famous British neuropsychologist who investigated memory loss in brain-damaged patients.  He was also a showman, and he owned a large, fancy fountain pen of intricate design.  At the start of his first session with one new patient Zangwill showed him this unique pen.  At the end of the session, he showed the patient the pen again and asked whether he recognized it; but the brain-damaged man replied, "No, I've never seen it before."  Over the next 10 sessions psychologist Zangwill repeated this procedure, with the patient always denying that he had seen the pen before.  Finally, in desperation, the therapist asked whether the patient recognized him.  "Oh yes," said the patient, "Of course.  You're the man with all those fountain pens."

This marvelous anecdote is about a man suffering from the memory loss occasioned by significant brain damage.  Fortunately, we aren’t in that condition. 

Or are we, just a bit?  I wonder, at this time of year, if each of us can't tell a story of memory failure, from the past 12 months?  Haven't we all, at one time or another, suffered a major memory lapse?  Hasn't everyone here today shown a bit of significantly subjective memory over the year we have just completed?

We could be talking about any area of our lives.  Because I'm afraid that none of us has lived up to all the promises we made last High Holidays.  Anyone who pledged to live a life free of the faults exhibited in the previous twelve months—everyone who did that has failed, to one degree or another.  Did you vow to control your temper?  Undoubtedly you blew your stack sometimes.  Did you promise to focus on your family, reorient your priorities toward your husband and children, to spend more time with your wife or your parents?  Chances are it didn't quite work out the way you wanted it to last Yom Kippur.  Perhaps you vowed not to commit lashon hara, not to speak badly about another person, not to gossip or slander another human being.  But then you heard something juicy you just had to share, or someone did something rotten to you and you felt obliged to tell people all about it.  You kind of forgot all about that vow.

These are human limitations; we have infinite capacity to change and improve, but strangely enough, we also seem to have a similarly infinite capacity to fail to remember what we are trying to change, and to screw up yet again.  We are all human; we all fail; we all of us forget.

So how many people here made some kind of vow at last year's High Holidays?  How many of you forgot those vows within a few days after Yom Kippur?  How many made it a few weeks after Yom Kippur?  How many of you lasted all the way to Chanukah?  Yes, memory impaired, every blessed one of us.  Subjectively remembering only what we think we should.  Forgetful of what we committed ourselves to, and failing, yet again, to live up to the standard which we would like to establish.   

If memory is essentially subjective, we are all gifted in the area of forgetting,

Perhaps the true meaning of Yom HaZikaron, the Memory Day of Remembering, if you will, is that it calls us to accurately and honestly try to remember just what we actually did over this past year.  It pushes us to move from our subjective approach to something closer to historical memory.  What did we do right?  What did we do wrong?  How can we strive to create better memories in 5782?

There is some help to be found here in our tradition on that score.  For what we learn over these Ten Days of Return is that memory can actually be improved.  Experts tell us that one of the best ways to improve memory is to carefully look back at events, examine them anew—I mean, they are new, in a way, aren’t they, each time we call them back?—and see if we have changed our approach to them.  If we wish to change our behaviors, to truly transform our lives, we need to understand those memories as tools we can use to guide our future actions.

In fact, you can make a good case that this entire High Holy Day process is a way to cultivate that skill, to help us remember who we wish to be, and how we can become that person.  It is a way to refresh those synapses that help us remember that we wish to create memories of kindness, generosity, respect, love, closeness, goodness.  It is in this way that the famous dictum of the Ba’al Shem Tov can come true: Memory leads to redemption.

After a challenging year that many would like to forget, as we continue through the aseret yemai tshuvah, moving from this Yom haZikaron to a time of return, repair and renewal at Yom Kippur next week, may we each find ways to make our memories serve to inspire us to grow and change, and to make this a year of goodness.  And may we create in 5782 memories that will bring only blessing.

Experts All?

Rosh HaShanah Eve 5782, Rabbi Sam Cohon, Beit Simcha, Tucson, AZ

L’Shana Tovah—may it be a good year, and a better, healthier, safer year for all of us.  And may the strange restrictions we became so accustomed to, and then got used to not being accustomed to, and are now beginning to get reaccustomed to, not be required in this coming year.  God-willing.

Comedian Stephen Wright may have summed up the last few months perfectly when he said, “If everything seems to be going well, you have obviously overlooked something.”  Or as they said in the movie Jaws long ago, “Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the ocean…”

Another great quote for these High Holy Days also comes from comedian Steven Wright.  It’s this: “I intend to live forever - so far, so good.” 

In a year in which the liturgy of the Unetaneh Tokef’s High Holy Days has never seemed more fitting--“Who by fire, who by water?  Who by plague?”—it’s good to be back here in shul, with people in the seats, alive and celebrating the arrival of the New Year 5782.  We certainly pray that it proves to be a better year, healthier, and certainly less apocalyptic than 5781.

We learned a lot this past year, and a much of it was in areas we never really wanted to learn about, wasn’t it?

I’ve been thinking about the idea of expertise, including the way it is addressed in Judaism.  There is a term, in Talmudic language, mumcheh, which means expert.  A mumcheh is a kind human super-authority on a subject. A mumcheh is a person who has so much knowledge on a subject that his or her opinion can almost literally take on the quality of divine authority.

And this year, there have been so many mumchehs among us!  I mean, since our phones provide us with instantaneous access to the entirety of human knowledge, and we get fed a steady stream of news releases and urgent electronic alerts, haven’t we all of us kind of become automatic mumchehs on a wide variety of topics? 

For example, who here has become an expert on virology in the last year?  A mumcheh on infectious diseases?  A true authority on vaccination technology and antibodies?

Now, in truth, I don’t actually believe that any one of us here tonight, or even on Facebook Live! is an actual authority.  We don’t even play one on TV.  But do we think we are authorities?  Ah, we like to pretend, don’t we?

Abhijit Naskar and Mucize Insan write in their book When The World is Family, “Having the data is not the same as having the expertise to look through the data - if it were, everybody with a smartphone would be a doctor or a scientist.”  It reminds me of that line in the movie “A Fish Called Wanda”—“Gorillas can read Nietzsche; they just can’t understand him.”  We can all read the articles, but that doesn’t mean we understand them.

Even in Jewish tradition, which has so many sources of legitimate authority, the way that someone becomes an expert is rather vague.  I quote an important Orthodox scholar with the improbable name of Rabbi Gil Student on this subject:  “The way a mumcheh, an expert authorized to issue halakhic decisions, attains his position remains obscure.”  He goes on to say that one of the qualifications appears to be popular acceptance—but that there is always an underlying assumption of Jewish piety and knowledge.  Still, it’s a little puzzling: our own Jewish experts are chosen by a process that borders on the mystical. We think they know more than we do about a subject, and so we trust them to be right.

But of course, often they are not.  And if experts, mumchim, can be wrong, what about the rest of us?

So, I ask you: in the past year, how often were you wrong?  You know, how often did you think something would happen, particularly with regard to COVID-19, and were proven to be totally incorrect?

I’ll start the confessional, if that’s OK.  Based on my deep knowledge of the science of pandemics, because I got a 4 on the AP Biology test after my last hard science class in high school a very long time ago, I can assure that I confidently predicted—way back last year, in the Jewish year 5780—the last year that actually included months where no one knew what it was like to put on a mask at all—way back then I predicted we would be able to celebrate Passover 5780 in person a month late, as Pesach Sheini, without the fear of Coronavirus hanging over our heads.  I was a little off: by 18 months so far, and still counting.

 And Sophie and I planned a wonderful honeymoon after our wedding in June of this year, 2021, out in East Asia—only to have every part of it cancelled by COVID-19 outbreaks, definitely a first-world problem we were able to re-reroute to other, recently opened destinations at in July.  Still, I sure was wrong on that one.

And on many other things, of course.  The great prophet Amos said, lo navi v’lo ben navi—I’m not a prophet nor am I the son of a prophet.  And he actually was a prophet.  I’m clearly not.

So, OK: How many of you thought this Coronavirus pandemic stuff would be over by now?  On the other hand, how many of you thought it would be much worse than it has been?  How many of you think that COVID-19 has been too politicized, based on your intimate knowledge of scientific data?  And how many of you think that the protections against this dread virus have been too little observed?

The one thing I can guarantee is that we all have thought we are experts: and we all have been proven wrong, in one way or another.

Perhaps the best way to begin Rosh HaShanah is to start by finding our own humility, by realizing just how little we really do know.

Ok, so let’s talk my friends: Just how many of you out there feel that you predicted the way that this past year would go accurately? Me neither. 

People say, "Why weren't we able to predict a disaster as big as the Coronavirus?"  And the answer is: not everyone has 2020 vision.  You know, because Coronavirus happened in 2020…  I predict that you can now add that joke to the many things I need to atone for over these High Holy Days.

It has always been my contention that the best professions in the world are meteorologist and economist, who spend their careers predicting the future—neither is ever right, and yet both keep their jobs.  Talk about job security.

In Judaism of course we are all reminded at this time of year just how little power we have to predict the future, or to control it.  Over the past 5781 year we have certainly had it impressed upon us again and again that, like weathermen and economists, we truly have no idea what is coming next. 

And this past year of Coronavirus ups and downs has been, to say the least, challenging for all of us.  A story will illustrate it.

This coming Sunday my dad, my wife Sophie and I will fly to Los Angeles to celebrate the wedding of my oldest friend’s daughter, Danielle.  It will be an elaborate affair, with hundreds of guests—who all have to have vaccination cards, of course—and lots of food, drink and simcha.  When I say that we are celebrating her wedding, I mean that there will be a full Jewish wedding ceremony, including Ketubah signing and a bedeken and bridesmaids and groomsmen and toasts and dancing and a cake and everything you’d expect in a fahrputst Los Angeles Jewish wedding. 

But I also mean that Danielle and her husband Andrew have actually been married for over a year.  You see, the wedding was originally planned for Memorial Day 2020, and then rescheduled for October 2020, and finally re-re-scheduled for this September—inconveniently timed right between Rosh HaShanah and Yom Kippur, thank you very much—and with all that waiting the couple just finally went with their parents and got married in a safe ceremony at the courthouse.  But they still wanted to have the full-on Jewish wedding, plus they had already paid for the full-on Jewish wedding, or at least my friend Ed had, so that’s going to happen, God-willing, with the current precautions in place this coming Sunday night.  Strange days indeed.

What is that old Chinese curse?  May you live in interesting times? 

Look, those of us who plan for the future—which is nearly every Jew I’ve ever met—all think that we have a good idea of what’s coming next in life.  But of course we don’t.  As the Torah portion of Nitzavim, which we read last Shabbat, says, Hanistarot LAdonai Eloheinu v’haniglot lanu ul’vaneinu ad olam: the hidden things belong to God, but the revealed things belong to us and our children forever.  Meaning, what we see and understand, well, that’s ours; but a whole lot is hidden from our view, the exclusive purview of the Ribono shel Olam, the Creator of the world, and God isn’t sharing that clear vision of the future any time soon with the likes of us…

As the old Yiddish aphorism goes, mensch tracht und Gott lacht, we plan and God laughs.  Man proposes and God disposes.  When it comes to preparation and planning we spend most of our energy and effort and lives on the practical stuff and neglect our souls and our character. But the truth is that we have very little control over the former and a lot of control over the latter.

I have to tell you one thing we have been taught by the COVID-19 pandemic is exactly that: we can plan as much as we like, but in the end we really have to just have faith that God has some idea what it is going on, because we, surely, don’t seem to know...

And in that realization comes a great gift.

Because the truth is that when we admit our own ignorance of the future, when we realize the daily details of our lives truly are trivial in the grand sweep of events, when we give up trying to fight the greater world by railing against it, well then we do have the capacity to examine our own lives and change for the better.  When we come to understand that we are not really experts at all, not truly mumchim about everything, it becomes so much easier to look at those things about which we are experts—our work, our family, our friends, our congregation and community—and repair those relationships. 

When we let go of our own expert authority over everything it becomes possible to see just what is we can fix—perhaps not the viruses in the air, but the virus of anger in our own hearts.  Not the pandemic afoot in the world, but the irrational hostility that separate us from others.  Not the destructiveness of distant wars but the arrogance that insists we know the only right way to be.  Not even the theoretical starvation on another continent but the selfishness that prevents us from helping the hungry in our own midst.

 We can be experts on ourselves, on how we can change and grow and heal.

Over these High Holy Days may we each become experts in our own souls.  And may God give us the ability to find, first, our own humility—and then, the strength to become better, more loving, and more caring in this brand-new 5782.

Ken Yehi Ratson; may this be God’s will, and ours. L’Shana Tova!

Being There

Sermon Parshat Nitzavim 5781

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

Do any of you remember a film from long ago called "Being There"?  It starred Peter Sellers and Melvyn Douglas—who were both Jewish, by the way—and was based on a novel by controversial Holocaust survivor Jerzy Kosinski, also Jewish, of course.  “Being There” was about a mentally challenged middle aged man trained as a gardener who finds himself, completely accidentally, suddenly enshrined through happenstance as the economic and social guru of the president of the United States, and who then becomes a global media icon.  His simple statements about gardening are taken for pithy wisdom with earth-shaking impact.  It's about being in the right place at a particular time, you know, being there.  You could say that two other films, Woody Allen's Zelig and the classic Forrest Gump were more or less modeled on Being There, fine examples of how sometimes just showing up is all that matters.

We see many examples of this phenomenon in our own lives: people who seem to succeed just by being in the right place at the right time.  It's certainly not true that most of us are just taking up space in this world, for everyone is created in the image of God, b’tzelem Elohim, but there are times when you do wonder a little bit about whether some folks have achieved great heights simply by just showing up.

But perhaps this isn't the right approach to the question of what it means to simply be there.  Without venturing too far into Zen Buddhism—or, as we say on my Too Jewish Radio Show, Zen Judaism—perhaps we should explore what simply being present, truly present, can mean in our world.

For example, God's own greatest name in Judaism, the four-letter Tetragrammaton, the holiest name for the Holy One, is Yud Hay Vav Hay—a name made up of the past, present, and future tense of the Hebrew verb “to be;” God is the ultimate example of “being there,” then, now and going forward.  As the hymn Adon Olam puts it, hu hayah, hu hoveh, v'hu yihyeh—God is, God was, God will be.  Thus, the essential quality of God, the holiest description of the Creator of the universe, is existence—that is, presence.  

God is, and while that might not be enough of a tangible depiction for some, it is a central element of God's identity.  Ehyeh asher ehyeh, God tells Moses: I will be what I will be, I am what I am.  If being, existing, is God's primary nature, being there must be pretty important.

This weekend we are celebrating the final Shabbat of the year, which means that our Torah portion is one of the great sections of the entire year, Nitzavim: you stand here today, all of you, the oldest to the youngest, from the wealthiest to the poorest, the most famous to the humblest, the leaders of your community and the strangers visiting with you.  You are all part of the covenant with the Lord your God.  You, and every other generation to come who will be descended from you.  This great berit, this covenant affirms that you will be God's people, and God will be your Lord.

 This universal covenant affirms that we are part of a profound and eternal tradition, a connection to our ancestors that will be carried forward to our descendants.  Each of us present tonight, every one of us who will join together on Monday and Tuesday for the new year of Rosh Hashanah, all of us are part of this remarkable compact.  It is an extraordinarily democratic and egalitarian agreement with God, a berit shared with everyone regardless of gender or age: children and women stand with men, not always the case at the time of the Torah, or even today.

 So it's a very special covenant.  But what is the content of the mitzvah that we are now to observe?  That is, besides just being there, or here, what are we actually supposed to do?

At the climax of our Torah portion we are told ki hamitzvah hazot asher anochi m'tzav'cha hayom, lo nifleit hi mimcha—Look, this mitzvah that I command you today is not too awesome for you, and it's not beyond your reach.  It's not in the heavens that you should say "Who among us can go up to the heavens and take it for us and teach it to us so that we may do it?"  It's not across the sea that you should say "Who among us can cross over the sea and bring it back to us so that we may do it."  No, it's very close to you, already in your mouth and in your heart to do it.

As Rabbi Lawrence Kushner says, "So the Torah is not somewhere else.  It's already in us.  We're made of it…  Torah is already coded into our protoplasm, our DNA.  And that's why it feels so good to live by the Torah, the way of all being: we're just doing what we've been designed for from the very beginning."

Perhaps the mitzvah that Nitzavim speaks about is no more than becoming aware of the presence of Torah in our midst—or, more precisely, of the presence of God in the here and now.  In this season we prepare for our Teshuvah, our return and repentance.  But if God is here right now, then Teshuva is a way of becoming aware that Torah is in our mouths and hearts.  And perhaps teshuvah simply means God saying, "Return to Me, again become aware of Me always being present in your life."

My Christian clergy friends speak of something called the "Ministry of presence".  It's the way in which we bring consolation to those who are terribly ill, or severely wounded by life, at a time when words fail.  We help solely by being present.  By being there.  For when we are there for them, we are truly living out the notion of being created b'tzelem Elohim, in the image of God.  Our presence reminds them of God's presence in their lives.  Just as we are there, God is there.

Even when we are not in crisis, we still need those reminders.

And so, in this season of teshuvah, we seek to be reminded of God's presence in our lives.  Ruth Brin has a beautiful poem entitled "A sense of Your presence." We read in our Selichot service last Saturday night:

Among our many appetites
There is a craving after God.

Among our many attributes
There is a talent for worshipping God.

Jews who wandered in the deserts beneath the stars
Knew their hearts were hungry for God.

Jews who studied in candle-lit ghetto rooms
Thirsted longingly after God.

In tent or hut or slum
Jewish women prayed to God.

But we who are smothered with comfort
Sometimes forget to listen.

Help us, O God, to recognize our need,
To hear the yearning whisper of our hearts.

Help us to seek the silence of the desert
And the thoughtfulness of the house of study.

Bless us, like our ancestors in ancient days
With that most precious gift: a sense of Your presence.

Brush us with the wind of the wings of Your being.
Fill us with the awe of Your holiness.
We, too, will praise, glorify, and exalt Your name. 

May we come to understand what being there really means, in these coming days of Awe.  And may we be blessed with the awareness of God's permanent presence in our own lives, and our own share in creating holiness.

The Missing Center?

Sermon Parshat Ki Tavo 5781

What are the central elements in Judaism?

When we carry the Torah around the sanctuary during a hakafah we often sing Al Shloshah Devarim, the passage from Pirkei Avot in the Mishnah: Al Shlosha Devarim Ha’olam omeid; al hatorah v’al ha’avodah v’al gemilut chasadim; on three things the world stands.  On Torah, on work, and on acts of kindness.  In this formula, Torah is listed first, making it the most important part of our tradition. 

You may be familiar with the great Labor Zionist Achad Ha’Am’s related concept that Judaism is made up of three great elements: God, Torah, and Israel.  Torah, for Jews, is at the very center of life.  And when I teach Introductory Judaism I teach that the greatest ideas of Judaism are God, Torah and Israel.  These are the primary concepts of Jewish ideology, the centerpoints of our existence for thousands of years.

So what are we to make of a central Jewish text that completely omits Torah?

This week we read the portion of Ki Tavo in Deuteronomy, which begins with an unusual declaration: when we come into the land that the Lord our God will give us as an inheritance we are to take the first fruits of our produce, and bring them to the priest who is in the land at that time, and say this formula: “Arami oveid avi, my father was a wandering Aramean, and he came to Egypt few in number, and became a great nation there; the Egyptians dealt harshly with us, and enslaved us; but God brought us out with a great hand and an oustretched arm… and brought us to this place, flowing with milk and honey.”  In addition to its central role in an important Biblical ritual, this passage was quoted often in rabbinic literature, most famously in the Pesach Haggadah.

But this formula for what we are supposed to say when we bring our offering to the Tabernacle is surprising.  In its mini-history of our ancient people it includes two of the enormous elements in our people’s history, Yetziat Mitzrayim, the Exodus from Egypt, and the entry into and settlement of Eretz Yisrael, the home Land of Israel.  But it curiously omits all mention of a third equally crucial event: the giving of Torah at Sinai. 

It’s a fascinating, even a shocking, omission.  If the three most important elements of Jewish identity are God, Torah, and Israel, omitting Torah means having an incomplete form of Judaism.  Ironically, here in the Torah itself what is missing is, well, Torah. 

The explanation for this omission teaches us much about how religion evolves, and what an organic and remarkable creation Judaism is. 

In Biblical times our people constituted an agricultural nation, living on and with the land.  The most important religious experiences were farming-related: planting crops, harvesting, dividing the produce, offering it, and eating it.  The connection to the land itself, and the labor needed to produce food from it, was absolutely central to our identity. Erets Yisrael was truly the holy land of Israel, and our intimate and permanent relationship to that land was forged over centuries of daily labor and life. When Zionism reconnected Jews to our land in the 19th century in a real, tangible, practical way, it revived the whole experience of loving and serving God by creating food from the very earth, hamotzi lechem min ha’arets.  The land of Israel was at the heart of our people then, and it is also at the heart of Ki Tavo, as we hope it is at the heart of every Jew in the world today.  Wherever we fall on the political spectrum, we are all deeply connected to Israel.

Like Erets Yisrael, God, too, was central to Jewish life in the times of the Bible, as it is today.  In Ki Tavo we are commanded to bring this offering to God in the Tabernacle (and later, the Temple) and to thank God for all that we have.  And we are to remember the great gift of freedom that God conferred upon us by miraculously redeeming us from Egyptian slavery.  Everything comes from God, a good lesson today as in the time of Deuteronomy.

So we have God and Israel here—but not Torah.  Clearly, the third leg of this stool of Jewish identity, Torah, was far less crucial to our Deuteronomic ancestors than the other two. Again, why? 

As farmers in our own land the need to study Torah, in whatever form it existed, must have seemed less urgent.  We had an immediate relationship with the land, and we needed God for the basics that make agriculture possible: rain, sun, soil.  The importance of Torah was diminished when we lived on the land itself.

It is a little like the experience you may have had when you went on a trip, say, a pilgrimage journey to Israel.  It was a great trip, you had fun, you learned a lot, you laughed you cried, you took a ton of photos.  And when you got home you went through all of your photos, and you selected the best of them.  And you posted them on your Facebook page with captions: With my son praying at the Kotel!  My wife and I floating in the Dead Sea!  The beach in Tel Aviv at sunset!  The view from the Caro synagogue in Tzefat!  On a wrecked Syrian tank on the Golan Heights!  Rafting the Jordan River!  Wine tasting in the Galilee!  An Ethiopian cultural center in Beit She’an!  At the Knesset!  And everyone of those places was the highlight of your fabulous pilgrimage to Israel!

Now, this being the digital age, there were lots of other photos too; a cactus in the Negev, or a small dumpy house located right on the Green Line between Israel proper and the West Bank, or yet another archeological ruin whose name escapes you where you can’t remember why you took the photo, and of course that smelly camel on the Mt. of Olives.  Those pictures are still in your DropBox, but you don’t post those on your Facebook page, and you quickly forget them.

And then one day you are listening to the news—whichever denomination of news you prefer—and you hear the amazing, improbable news that Israel and the Palestinians have just signed a peace treaty—and they did so in some small house on the Green Line between the West Bank and Israel proper.  And you think—wait a minute!  I swear I saw that little house when I was in Israel.

And you dig through your Google Drive or DropBox or hunt up the memory stick with your original Israel photos, or search your hard drive or cloud file, or, God forbid, pull out an old box of photos from a closet or garage and suddenly, there it is!  The photo of a dumpy little house in a sensitive spot that somehow has now become the center of Jewish and Palestinian and Middle Eastern history.

And you immediately post it on your Facebook page and send everyone you know in the entire world a message that you were in that house!  And that it was the highlight of your entire trip to Israel! 

Well, you see, that’s kind of what the great treasure trove, the storehouse of Jewish experience and knowledge is like.  When we were in our own land, 2000 years ago, that land, Israel, and our relationship to God were central.  Torah didn’t matter so much.

But when we were sent into Exile in the Diaspora, and forcibly torn from our own land, we needed Torah.  In fact, without the study of Torah, Judaism would have disappeared, and the people of Israel faded into the dust of history.  Only Torah preserved us—gave us the moral foundation, and the religious identity, to not only survive from thrive.

 When we read in Ki Tavo—in the Torah, of course—that we are to give a tenth of all that we have earned to charity, to the poor and the homeless and the widow and the orphan, we acknowledge that we have been blessed.  We are following an ancient agricultural practice, more than 3000 years old, designed for an ancient people in a land of long ago.

But we are also using this remarkable text, Torah, to teach us how to live today.  And therein lies the true genius of Judaism.

For wherever we are in the world it is the Torah that binds us together and makes possible our unity as a people.  It is the Torah that reminds us to worship God, and of our connection to the holy land of Israel.  It is the Torah that teaches us that tzedakah must be part and parcel of our very being.  It is our remarkable ability to evolve our knowledge and understanding of Torah that have allowed us to reshape our fantastic religion to fit every era and every place on the whole of the globe.

That is why Jews are always at the center of the movements to welcome the stranger and the immigrant, to work to end homelessness and hunger, to make health care available to all, to promote justice in an unjust world.

As the Haftarah for tomorrow’s service says, in 2nd Isaiah’s great words, “your people shall be righteous, all, and inherit the land forever, the seedling I have planted, the work of My hands to glorify Me.”

 Paradoxically, even when the Torah seems to be absent, as it appears to be in Ki Tavo, it is not only implicitly present, but actually central, in our religion and in our lives.  May it always be so for each of us.

As we approach these last two Shabbatot of the year 5781, with Selichot tomorrow night, may we each find our way back to engaging with Torah, discover how to embrace the learning and living of life with this remarkable text of our tradition in our hearts and in our minds and in our souls.  For if we do this, we will find that we will work to make this a world in which God’s influence is present for us, for all Israel, and for all the world.

War & Peace

War and Peace in Judaism

Sermon Shabbat Ki Teitzei 5781

Last week we were gifted with the view of the rainbow behind me at the start of Shabbat services right here at Beit Simcha.  We posted some of your photos of that glorious image on our Facebook page, and it couldn’t help but remind us of the covenant, the great berit that God made with Noah in the Torah in Genesis, an image that is so often used to symbolize peace.

But then this week we have been horrified by video and photos and accounts of the fall of Kabul to the Taliban, the re-taking of Afghanistan after 20 years by violent Islamist fanatics.  The US military fought half the world away for 20 years, we ask, and for what exactly?  It is clear that the Taliban’s conduct in war has been brutal, and that when they complete their reconquest of Afghanistan we can expect further inhumanity.   

That bring us, naturally, to this week’s Torah portion, Ki Teitzei, which begins with an exploration of the laws of warfare.  How are we supposed to act in wartime?  This portion’s subject raises the whole issue of war and peace in religious thought. 

Of course, we all prefer to think of our religious doctrines as being dedicated to creating peace, not war.  Much of Jewish liturgy, and general religious language, is focused on peace.  Yet here we have a Torah section beginning with an assumption we will engage in war.  That’s true even in the wording of the first phrase: Ki Teitzei lamilchama al oyvecha—when you go out to war against your enemy, not if you go out to war.

Nothing turns someone off to religion more quickly than hearing about religious wars, and I have had many people tell me that they think the greatest cause of war in human history is religion; you know, the Crusades, and jihads, and so on.  While that’s certainly not factually true—World War I and World War II, the greatest, most extensive and most terrible wars in all human history, which resulted in the deaths of more people than all previous wars combined, were not religious wars at all, and human beings have slaughtered one another over territory and political systems and racial and cultural difference for millennia without needing to worry about religion in order to kill others. 

Still, many people have been slaughtered in the name of God over time, and Jewish people at a higher rate than others.  It certainly strikes an ugly, discordant note to hear about warfare and religion blended together. 

Since 9/11, the concept of jihad and Islamic warfare and terrorism have become distressingly familiar to us in America, and 20 years after 9/11 we have finally extracted ourselves from the longest conflicts in American history in Iraq and Afghanistan—and the net results of both wars are disheartening.  Both wars were provoked by acts taken in the name of religion, and both were filled with perverse, ugly forms of religious fanaticism.  While ISIS was beaten back in Syria and Iraq, the current state of that region is terrible.  And Afghanistan certainly doesn’t look like it will end any better.

Many people see the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as a religious war between Islam and Judaism, and there are areas of religious terrorism and warfare in nearly every part of the world right now.  Thinking about this combination of war and religion is both distressingly common and kind of depressing.   

No one who respects the positive role religion plays in our world likes to think about a linkage between the kind of wholesale slaughter that war entails and the pious belief in God.  And yet there it is.

Lest you think this tendency is restricted to Western religions like Judaism, Christianity and Islam, you might recall the violent Buddhist monks who encouraged brutal attacks and expulsions of Muslims in Myanmar (Burma) and Sri Lanka.  It seems to me that this is very much the antithesis of how we expect religious leaders to behave, but especially so Buddhists.  Buddhism has the reputation of being a religion dedicated to enlightenment and non-violence.  If Buddhist monks encourage religious terrorism what’s next?  Peace symbols used as nunchuks?  Switzerland declaring war on Sweden?  Genocidal tyrants quoting Gandhi to justify slaughter?  

 And so, when our Jewish Scripture, the Torah, teaches us about warfare the tendency is to want to wash our hands of the whole mess.  How can we advocate for peace and claim our God is “oseh HaShalom” the Maker of Peace, how can we pray the Shalom Rav prayer requesting of God great peace in the world, while at the same time calmly discussing how we are to go about slaughtering other people in God’s name?  Isn’t it the duty of religion to advocate for peace and to denounce all war?

In general, this is true.  But the sad fact of human civilization is that a war is almost always going on somewhere, and sometimes everywhere, in the world, and that the number of years in which this planet has been free of war is very few.  One calculation I found says that of the 3400 years of recorded human history only 250 years have been free of a documented war—that is, once every 15 years or so we have a year without a war.  To be honest, that seems wildly optimistic.  In my lifetime I cannot recall a single year in which warfare has not been waged somewhere on the globe.

 Which makes the agenda of the opening section of our Torah reading sadly and strangely appropriate at any time.  For it does not begin “If you go out to war against your enemy” but “when you go out to war against your enemy.”  Pragmatically, the Torah treats war as the tragic but inevitable result of human conflict.  We hate war; we seek to avoid war at all costs; we know that war is destructive to much of what we believe in and pray for.  But we also know that there simply are times when it cannot be avoided, when in our fallible human ways we will fall into war.  Perhaps the best translation here is “When you have to go out to war…”

The great theorist of warfare, Karl von Clausewitz, wrote that, “War is the continuation of politics by other means.”  It is, but of course the “other means” are brutal and terrible.  But Clausewitz also wrote, “A conqueror is always a lover of peace.”  Meaning that war is not something anyone, even a great conqueror, can really grow to like.  Yet it remains a depressing inevitability of human existence.

If that is so, and we are destined to end up at war, does it mean that we can engage in any kind of conduct to further our military aims?

There is an old platitude, “All’s fair in love and war.”  But the Torah, right here in Ki Teitzei, informs us that all is not fair in war, and that we need to restrain ourselves both in our military conduct and in the ways in which we re-enter society.  That restraint is essential to our moral claim to serve God through our own actions, to “fight for the right.”  We are obligated to act in ways that sustain and reinforce holiness, even under the exigencies of military necessity.

Our section of Deuteronomy scrupulously outlines the ways in which we must restrain ourselves when forced to engage in warfare.  We are not to destroy the productive capacity of the land of our enemies.  We are not to exploit captives, women especially, as though they were subhuman.  We are to have a cleansing process after battle before we are to reengage in civilian society.

This code contrasts with, for example, the torture used at American prisons like Abu Ghraib during the Iraq conflict, or at Guantanamo.  It contradicts the massacres of non-combatants perpetrated by the Assad regime in Syria, and throughout the long, terrible civil war in Iraq by ISIS, or by the Taliban long ago and again, right now, in Afghanistan.  None of these would have been accepted in ancient Israel 3,000 years ago.  Even in warfare there must be limits, and it is painful to recognize that in some ways we are more primitive than our ancestors were three millennia ago.

The contemporary Israeli Army, the IDF, has its own code of conduct, the “Tohorat Neshek, the purity of arms.” It is a serious effort to interpret the concept of “fighting only the right way” into practical terms.  And when Israeli soldiers fail that test, they are held accountable, put through a review process, tried, and sometimes jailed.  While the IDF’s rules and laws today are certainly not the same as those of Ki Teitzei, the concepts remain valid.  Even while engaged in the violence of warfare, the dehumanizing experience of seeking to fight, suppress, and kill others, we must try to maintain our humanity, restrain ourselves within limits based on principles.   

 But perhaps the greatest lesson, for those of us fortunate enough not to be engaged in military conflict or trying to negotiate Israeli/Palestinian peace, is that if rules can be applied to the harshest form of human interaction, to warfare itself, they can certainly be applied to the lesser friction and human interaction tzoris that we experience in our own lives.  If our ancestors managed to avoid the worst excesses of warfare, we too can learn to avoid the worst excesses that our society presents to us—the conflicts and arguments and disputes that damage us, those around us, and our world.

 I mean, if we can control ourselves during war, when people are quite literally trying to kill us all the time, can’t we control our verbal responses to those we disagree with politically?  Can’t we learn to live in harmony even when we have philosophical differences with our neighbors?

 And if can learn from Ki Teitzei to moderate our responses and our behavior, and to structure our organizations and our lives to avoid that kind of reactivity, free of these excesses of conflict, then perhaps we can resume our real task in life: creating a world of holiness and blessing, perhaps even one that lives up to both the symbolism of the rainbow, and our many prayers of peace.  Ken Yehi Ratson.  May this be God’s will.  And ours.

Justice & Making the Ideal Real

Rabbi Samuel M. Cohon’s Sermon, Shabbat Shoftim 5781 

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—actually, we’ve done quite a lot of that the last year and a half, haven’t we?—or choose not to check our news feed or our email or Facebook notifications.  It is a matter of personal choice how we make Shabbat special, different, more peaceful and therefore holy.

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

Maybe that’s why Jews of every denomination are so good at law—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—and the current Attorney General is Jewish and was almost on the Supreme Court himself.  The Supreme Court, of course, is all about applying rules to complex situations to make things work out.  It requires a kind of intellectual flexibility that seeks to keep in mind and heart the highest principles, while making it possible for people to function in society without losing integrity.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Choices, Choices, Choices

Choices, Choices, Choices

Sermon on Parshat Re’ei 5781, August 6, 2021

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

Our society is, by its nature, a place of infinite choice.  The consumerism of America offers a virtually unlimited number of items, objects, and services in every area of life.  Want to buy a car?  There are literally hundreds of models to choose from, and nearly as many ways of purchasing or leasing them.  Want to go shopping for some obscure object—say, a wedding ketubah—I don’t know why I was thinking about that object... Anyway, wou wouldn’t think there would be much to choose from—until you looked at the on-line listing of literally hundreds of ketubah websites offering tens of thousands of different ketubot, all with more choices about what kind of wording you wish to have.  Even during the pandemic, Comcast and Direct TV and Cox give us the power to choose to watch, well, anything we want on video; and if it’s not there, we could certainly find it on the internet.  Quite literally hundreds of channels of choices, and thousands of things to watch. 

Choice is everywhere…

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

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

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

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

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

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

Moses’ parental anxiety is felt in every line of the book. This is a book of urgency. He speaks to the young Israelites, this one last time, pleading at every moral level. He appeals to their powers of moral reasoning, and to their shared ideals and values. He reminds them of their past, the ordeals and dreams of ancestors, the covenant freely upheld by forefathers. He invokes the power of public reputation and exalts them as "God’s children" (Deuteronomy 14:1). And then, exhausting all other means of persuasion, he evokes primitive rewards and punishments: "See! This day I set before you blessing and curse: blessing if you obey the commandments of the Lord your God that I enjoy upon you this day; and curse if you do not obey."

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

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

“We know Moses’ anxiety. "You are about to cross the Jordan to enter and possess the land — take care to observe all the laws and rules I have set before you this day" (Deuteronomy 11:31-2).

“What shall we say to our kids at this moment? There are new, creative rituals penned for this occasion. But what the moment demands is deeply personal — sharing my own wisdom, my own feelings, my Deuteronomy. Then let the child go. I remember that I am commanded not to let my fears inhibit his freedom to explore and experience the universe and to trust in the character and soul I’ve had these 18 years to nurture.

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

 Some of us remember our own beginnings of independence, the thrill of freedom, the wide-open world of possibility that extended everywhere.  But if we are honest, we also remember the doubts, the fears, the confusion.  Yes, we can choose anything.  What we can’t choose is how it will all come out.  And that is both empowering and slightly terrifying.

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

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

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

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

On this Shabbat, may we each choose life and blessing, choose to live in ways that follow ethical commandments and create goodness. 

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

So may this be; kein yehi ratson.  Shabbat Shalom.

Jews in Italy & Greece & Right Here

Sermon Shabbat Ekev 5782, Rabbi Sam Cohon

As you know, Sophie and I returned a week ago from a wonderful honeymoon in Italy and Greece, and we thoroughly enjoyed our travels, in spite of the complications of COVID-19 journeying.  Wherever and whenever I’ve traveled—and there hasn’t been much of that for the past 18 months prior to this journey, for obvious Coronavirus reasons—I always try to visit the Jewish communities in the places I go, to see the local Jewish museums and Holocaust monuments, attend Shabbat services where they are available, and connect with the local Jewish community. 

This is something I’ve had the privilege of doing on six of the seven continents—I never have been to Antarctica, yet, and I’m not sure if they have a regular minyan there among the penguins—but I’ve enjoyed the personal discovery of Jewish communities in a wide variety of settings in Europe, Asia, Australia, Africa and South America.  Traveling provides a wonderful opportunity to experience diverse Jewish traditions, to learn more about the history and heritage of the many places around the world in which our people have lived and thrived.

The original itinerary for this honeymoon was supposed to be several exotic spots in the Far East—Sri Lanka, the Maldive Islands, perhaps Mauritius and Bali.  But as things turned out, after carefully planning to visit those places just as they were all reopening, sadly there were severe Coronavirus spikes in nearly all those areas and it simply wasn’t feasible, or perhaps safe, to use our original plans and reservations.  Mind you, I’m not complaining: these are problems we are grateful to have in such complex and challenging times.  So, we pivoted to honeymooning in Italy—including Sicily—and Greece, which had just opened up for tourism, and which are wonderful places to go pretty much any time of year for any reason at all.

If you have been an avid listener to the Too Jewish Radio Show, you have undoubtedly heard me discuss previous visits to Rome and elsewhere in Italy and to the diverse and interesting Jewish communities located in both Italy and Greece.  Historically speaking, the very first synagogue in the world that we’ve identified is located on the Greek island of Delos and dates back nearly 2300 years, while the Roman Jewish community goes back to Maccabean times, with a recorded significant Romaniyot Jewish community from about 2200 years ago.  I hope you’ll indulge me tonight as I share some observations about the extraordinary history of the Jewish communities in these fascinating places, beginning with Rome, moving on to Sicily, and then sharing a bit about Greece. 

Sophie had never been to Rome before, so we had a quite spectacular tour of Jewish Rome from a kind of celebrity tour guide, Micaela Pavoncello, whose is descended from Romaniyot Jews and seems to know absolutely everyone in the Jewish ghetto area of Rome.  Micaela really made the community come alive, and highlighted aspects of the ghetto that I was unfamiliar with, although I have been to Rome a number of times in the past and once led Friday night Shabbat services for the Reform congregation there.  While the Roman Jewish community is not large by American standards—there are around 35,000 Jews in all of Italy, perhaps half of them in Rome, meaning there are about as many Jews in Tucson as in all of Italy—the community’s remarkable history and heritage make it uniquely important.  Micaela made it all come alive, from the original arrival of Jews during the Roman Republic in 150 BCE or so to the growth of the mercantile community in antiquity at the center of the Mediterranean world. 

Ironically, the tragic conclusion of the Jewish Great Revolt against Rome, which ended with the destruction of the 2nd Temple by Titus on Tisha B’Av and ended Jewish sovereignty for over 1800 years, vastly increased the Jewish population of Rome.  Many Jewish slaves were brought to Rome after the fall of Jerusalem, and some helped build the Colosseum, which was financed with the gold and silver stolen from the Temple treasury by the Romans.  The Jewish slaves eventually became free residents of Rome, and some became citizens, swelling the Jewish community of the most important city in the Western world in that era.

A powerful—and painful theme—in Rome was the constant pressure from the Middle Ages on, exerted by the Pope and the Catholic Church in its efforts to convert the Jews to Christianity, or at least to keep us in poverty and oppression as a sign of what happens if you don’t convert to Christianity.  In spite of the challenges imposed on the Jews of Rome, including eventually being forced into a walled Ghetto in a soggy and dilapidated area near the banks of the Tiber in the 16th century, the Jewish community continued as a vital place, producing scholars and artists and leaders.  The Jews of Rome were forced into the ghetto by edict of the Pope himself in 1555, and the Roman Ghetto was the last Jewish ghetto in Europe to be abolished, in 1870, after the founding of the modern state of Italy.  By that time things had changed in Italy, and the Jews of Rome were permitted to build a majestic and beautiful synagogue, the Great Synagogue of Rome, that still stands.

A portion of the Roman Jewish community survived the Nazis, and in the post-Shoah revival of Rome in recent decades the area around the ghetto mostly gentrified, becoming a desirable place to live and work.  The Rome Great Synagogue is magnificent, and I’ve attended Shabbat services there, during which the Romaniyot Jews preserve their unique musical and liturgical heritage.  And of course, while we were there we had to eat some carcioffi alla giudia, literally “Jewish artichokes,” fried in olive oil and incredibly delicious.    

The Roman Jewish community is special in that it retains its character as neither Ashkenazic nor Sephardic, since it predates the very existence of those terms.  I have a small, personal connection to Italy; ancestors of mine named del Banco was expelled from Spain in 1492—on Tisha B’Av, of course—went to Portugal, from which they were also expelled in 1496, and settled in Italy, possibly Rome.  The family later migrated away from the Papal States and the persecutions against Jews that were increasing in Italy at the time and moved on to Germany, the Rhine area.  There, one of them married into a Jewish family in the Rhine area named Rheinach; that family later immigrated to the United States, changing the name to Reinhart, but preserving relations with their cousins, the Del Bancos.  So it goes in the Jewish world over the generations.

Today’s Roman Jewish community is diverse, but it retains its connections to this remarkable past.  Just outside where the ghetto walls originally stood, we visited a fountain embellished with sculpted turtles designed by the great Italian sculptor Bernini, a beautiful fountain that provided fresh water to the Jews of the Ghetto for four centuries.  Somehow, in Italy, beauty takes precedence even in the most prosaic of objects.

We also toured the Jewish Museum of Rome, which includes a remarkable collection of magnificent fabric ark covers—parochets—and other Renaissance and Baroque textiles from the former synagogues of Rome and elsewhere in Italy, as well as a complete small Spanish synagogue, relocated from a complex of buildings that was torn down over a century ago.

While Rome has a small but very much living Jewish community, that is not nearly as true of Sicily, which once boasted a thriving Jewish life.  Sicily’s history is complex, as it was controlled by Greeks, Romans, Byzantines, Arabs, Normans, Germans, Spaniards, the French, pirates, Sicilians—it was an independent country at times—and finally Italians.  There are reminders of the Jewish presence there on streets and courtyards in Taormina, Siracusa, and Palermo, where you can find a Via del Ghetto or a Giudia located in most larger cities.  But since Spain controlled Sicily in the late 15th and 16th centuries, the expulsion decree of 1492 also expelled the Jews of Sicily, effectively ending the Jewish presence there, which remains in architecture and images, but doesn’t currently have a practicing synagogue.  There was an effort to restart the Jewish community of Palermo a few years ago that resulted in a lovely de-sanctified church being given to the Jewish community, and a rabbi began holding services—but he retired to Israel a couple of years ago, and there is no longer a regular Shabbat service or a functioning congregation. 

We also visited Crete on this trip, and the city of Thessaloniki, second city of Greece, which had a Jewish majority population for a good part of its history.  While Crete is lovely, it too, has no regular Jewish services.  Thessaloniki has an incredible Jewish history, and still has a functioning synagogue and a Jewish center of sorts.  You may know that the current head of Pfizer, who developed one of the major COVID-19 vaccines, Albert Bourla is a Thessaloniki Jew.  We had a wonderful tour of Jewish Thessaloniki, as it exists now but mostly with references to what it once was, prior to the Holocaust.  But again, what exists today is mostly a memory of greatness.

Which is a confirmation of something that I’ve been thinking about for some time now.  Throughout Jewish history we have always been wandering Jews, or more properly, migrating Jews.  We’ve lived on all of those continents, and in all of those cities, towns and villages among all those different cultures and peoples, for over 2500 years.  We established extraordinary communities in many of those places, and achieved great Jewish heights in many of them: the Talmud was created in Iraq; Rashi’s commentaries in France; the Zohar and the Mishnah Torah were written in Spain; the Misnhah Berurah in Poland, and so on.  Great Jewish literature came from many of these disparate communities, as did liturgy, poetry, music, art.

And it’s worth exploring all of these fascinating traditions, learning from them, enjoying their insights and their artistry.  Judaism would not be what it is today without the incredible contributions of the Diaspora Jewish communities that were once great.

But it’s also a reminder that Jewish life continues to evolve and develop in new, exciting and interesting ways.  There are as many Jews in Tucson now as there are in all of Italy, and while we have yet to create anything like the great works of Jewish history here the potential is always present.  For when you are part of a living, breathing, active Jewish congregation, when you participate in Jewish life on a regular basis and pray, study, schmooze and discuss Jewish ideas with other Jews weekly or daily, you are actually doing something that potentially is more important than all the wonderful things our interesting ancestors did in all of those beautiful communities that are no longer so vital.

Our Torah portion Ekev reminds us of this: we are to affirm God’s covenant in the way that we live our lives now.  We are told repeatedly in Deuteronomy about the Torah and the mitzvot that our goal is v’chai bahem, to live by them.  And only a living, breathing, talking, arguing, singing congregation can truly do that. 

Which, in its own way, is a gift to us, and a reminder that we have the capacity to achieve a great deal as just such a living community, right here, and right now.

Ken yehi ratson—may this be God’s will, and most importantly, ours.

High Holy Days 5782

We will come together in awe and contemplation for the High Holy Days at these services:

Selichot, Saturday, August 28, 8pm, Study & Services: “What Do We Owe One Another?”

Rosh HaShanah Eve, Monday, September 6, 6:30pm

Rosh HaShanah Morning, Tuesday, September 7, 9:30am

Kol Nidrei, Wednesday, September 15, 6pm

Yom Kippur Morning, Thursday, September 16, 9:30am

Yom Kippur Afternoon, Yizkor & Ne’ilah, Thursday, September 16, 3pm

Break-the-Fast, Thursday, September 16, 6pm

Beit Simcha members in good standing will receive in-person admission, as will all registered guests. Guests can register at 5782 High Holy Days Registration. The suggested donation is $118 for individuals, $180 for families, with those funds applicable to membership fees if you choose to join. You can also mail your request with a check to Congregation Beit Simcha, 2270 W. Ina Road, Suite 100, Tucson, AZ 85741. We will also stream all High Holy Days services over Facebook Live. Streaming will be available to Beit Simcha members in good standing and all registered guests.