The Trouble with Tribes

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

Sermon Shabbat Vayechi 5782

Sophie and I visited my daughter Cipora in Portland, Oregon this week, a quick trip of three days to the Pacific Northwest.  I hadn’t been in Portland in many years, since I was a boy traveling with my parents.  Unlike the stereotypes of the weather up there, when we were leaving the airport in our rental car there was blinding sun shining at just eye level, and I needed sunglasses just to navigate the entrance to the highway to the city.  Of course, that was the last time we saw the sun during our three days there. 

There is a reason it’s so green in Portland: people essentially live under water. A friend of my daughter’s recently purchased a good used car and was pleased to report that it was actually growing moss on it in several places.  When I was packing up some boxes inside a car, I came to realize that the items were actually covered in a fine sheen of water—and they had been inside the car the entire time, never exposed to the everpresent mists of Portland atmosphere.  As my Bubbie Irma used to say, growing up in Portland they had a saying that Queen Victoria and Portland’s weather were exactly the same: it rained (reigned) and rained and rained and never gave the sun (son) a chance.  You could say the same about Queen Elizabeth II nowadays, I suppose…

So, as we dry out back in Tucson, and reacquaint ourselves with the yellow orb in the sky here, I must confess that I have no desire to ever live in a climate like that, no matter how lovely everyone says the summers are.

I can also say that the dark and bleak climate seems to have some impact on personalities in Portland.  People were very polite, but not exactly, um, warm.  Sophie and I tried to visit the historic synagogue there, a very impressive structure that has family connections for me.  My grandmother was confirmed at that temple in 1905, and while the building she knew burned down and was replaced in the 1920s with the current massive sanctuary, it would have been nice to see the inside of the shul and tour it a little.  First, we were aggressively turned away from walking around the outside of the building because a class of charter school kids was playing in the area next to it—no signs indicating that by the way—and then, unfortunately, we were turned away by the synagogue itself: no tours during the pandemic, vaccinations and masks or not, come back when this is all over if you like.  Oh, well.

There was another interesting facet of Portland life.  We attended the theater last night, saw a fine and well-produced play, and prior to the show announcements were made about the importance of acknowledging the centrality of Native Americans and the fact that the current theater did not sit on land that ever been expropriated from indigenous peoples.  That was followed by a statement about the importance of the Black Lives Matter movement, and of Black people and other people of color in society.  The play itself wasn’t focused on either indigenous peoples or Black identity.  After the show concluded—it was very good—the standing ovation was followed by a fairly lengthy appeal for donations for the theater and its outreach work.  Everyone politely listened to the, um, commercials before and after the production and apparently expected them.  It was a little different from, say, watching “Hamilton” at Centennial Hall here in Tucson, where the main concerns seemed to be whether the attendees could get their own selfies taken next to the thoughtfully arranged cutouts outside the show.

We live in a large and complicated nation, with a great deal of cultural and social diversity.  Portland and Tucson are a 2½ hour nonstop flight from one another, and both are certainly western United States mid-size cities—Portland is larger, with actual tall buildings in its downtown and much more serious traffic congestion—but still, they have many external similarities. All US cities have commonalities, of course, and western states are more similar to one another than different.  But like any grouping of people, there are going to be differences.  Self-selection—the “kind of people” who choose to live in Tucson, Arizona as opposed to the “kind of people” who choose to live in Portland, Oregon—but also the local and regional differences that shape our lives, geography, industries, local politics, history, demographics, religious history and distribution, pastimes and sports and local culture, and yes, the prevailing weather.

I was thinking about the way these factors impact groups of people who begin in similar places but change over time, becoming, in a way, different tribes.  Even in an era of easy movement within a nation and around the world there are always significant differences between people who are raised and live in different regions.  Of course, there can also be such differences between groups of people in the same city or region.  But the external differences are often more obviously apparent in physically separated places.  Perhaps by their very nature, people in different places tend to form different tribes.

In this week’s Torah portion of Vayechi our great ancestor Jacob, the true father of Israel, gives final blessings to each of his many sons and the tribes they will father.  Most commentators see in Jacob’s predictions for the future of the descendants of each of his quite different children either a prophecy about the character that those separate units, those tribes, will possess later on in Israelite history—or they see these verses in Vayechi as having been written much later, when the tribes who ultimately descend from the children of Israel were well established in different parts of the land of Israel.  In either case, what emerges is a picture of a diverse and often divergent array of what could only be a loose confederation of peoples unified by a common ancestry, by their presence in a shared inherited land, certain holidays and rituals and, sometimes, by the belief in the same God.  But they mostly seem like semi-autonomous tribes with very different identities, professions, and destinies.

Of course, Jacob’s “blessings” for his sons here in our portion are sometimes not blessings at all.  While some sons receive fulsome praise—the top two blessings, of course, are reserved for Joseph and Judah, who will prove to be the ancestors of the most important of all the tribes, Ephraim in the north of Israel and Judah itself in the south of Israel—other sons are not praised at all but harshly criticized.  Reuben comes in for rough treatment because of his own mixed conduct, called out for being “unstable as water” and violating his own stepmother.  Shimon and Levi are harshly attacked verbally for their brutality in the story of Dinah and Shechem, “called brothers in blood,” their violent and hot-tempered natures totally condemned, told they will be “scattered in Israel.”  One brother, Issachar, gets “you are like an ass, a strong donkey carrying loads;” thanks, Dad!  Another, Dan, is called a snake on the road.   

It’s clear that each of these tribes will have a different destiny, that each will meet its own disparate fate.

Ultimately, in the case of the tribes of Israel, that lack of unity will doom most of the tribes to disappear over the course of history.  Israel, the nation, itself will split into two countries after the death of King Solomon.  The two nations, all Israelites, will fight wars against each other, and in the end Assyria will destroy the Northern Kingdom and carry off the 10 lost tribes into the mists of antique history.  Only Judah and Benjamin and some Levites will be left—and they, too, will suffer exile and destruction at the hands of Babylonians.  You see, the tribal identifications, in the end, proved damaging to the unity of the children of Israel, Jacob’s descendants.  Only when we returned from Babylonian Exile as one unified Jewish people, without all those tribal distinctions, were we able to build an enduring religion and peoplehood based on shared values and experiences.  It was only when our ancestors experienced near total destruction that we saw the need to become Am Yisrael, the people of Israel, with the great value that kol Yisrael Areivim Zeh Bazeh, every Israelite is responsible for every other.

So how does all this relate to the kind of tribalism we have been experiencing lately right here in our own nation, America?  It is perhaps notable that whatever cultural differences—and atmospheric ones—we experience in our various regions and, well, tribes, that we have a great deal more in common than we have real differences.  It is my sincere hope and prayer that it need not take the kind of disaster our own Jewish ancestors experienced for our nation to become aware that harping on difference and accentuating the ways we do things that are slightly or even significantly distinct is no service to our nation and our own culture.  We have always been stronger together, better together, and of more value to the world when we see past these tribal divisions and accentuate our common highest goals.

Even when we have very different weather…

On this Shabbat of Vayechi, may we learn that tribalism is a stage of development that we can, and must, overcome.  And may we learn to serve God, and the good, together, so that we can enjoy, as Jacob promises Joseph, “The blessings of the skies above, the blessings of the deep below,” on our own heads, as on Joseph’s.

In Praise of Chutzpah

Sermon, Shabbat Vayigash 5782

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

You know the classic definition of chutzpah, don’t you?  Chutzpah means audacity, nerve, gall, arrogance, and mild manipulation all rolled into one.  So the classic definition is the tale of the guy who kills his parents—and then throws himself on the mercy of the court because he’s now an orphan.  But I like this one, too:

A little old lady sells pretzels on a street corner for $1 each.

Every day a guy leaves his office building at lunchtime, and as he passes the pretzel stand, he leaves her a dollar, but never takes a pretzel.

This goes on for more than 3 years. The two of them never speak, just each day he puts down and dollar. One day, as the man passes the old lady's stand and leaves his dollar as usual, the pretzel lady says, “Hey. They're $2 now."  Chutzpah.  Or maybe, this year, inflation.

In fact, Chutzpah is what makes many Jewish jokes work, because we know there is truth to the notion that chutzpah is an important part of Jewish life.  Like the old restaurant complaint—the food in this place is awful—and the portions are so small…

Or the old Jewish bubbie who limps onto a crowded bus. Standing right in front of a seated young man she clutches her chest and says, "Oy! If you only knew what I had, you'd get up and give me your seat."

The man looks at the old woman, and reluctantly, gives up his seat. The woman sitting beside the bubby takes out a fan and starts to fan herself. Grasping her chest, the bubby turns and says, "If you knew what I have, you would give me that fan." So the woman gives her the fan.

Fifteen minutes later the bubbie gets up and says to the bus driver, "Stop, I want to get off here."

The driver says, "Sorry, lady, but the bus stop is at the next corner. I can't stop in the middle of the block." Again, the old woman clutches her chest and says, "If you knew what I have, you would let me out right here." Worried, the bus driver pulls over and lets her out. As she's climbing down the stairs, he asks, "Ma'am, what is it, exactly, that you have? "

She smiles sweetly at him, and she says, "Chutzpah."

Chutzpah, of course, is an especially Jewish attitude, or at least it has always seemed so to me.  In fact, it has probably been an essential Jewish expression, for without chutzpah we would never have survived two thousand years of statelessness and maniacal persecution.  Easygoing people who don’t push in where others think they don’t belong, don’t survive the Holocaust, don’t defeat overwhelming enemy armies, or even retain their identity in a season when everything seems designed to cater to another faith and tradition. 

Chutzpah is what makes it possible for a tiny people, less than 1% of the world’s population, to produce world-beaters in so many, many areas of human accomplishment.  Chutzpah is what, in part, motivates a young guy like—dare I still mention his name—Mark Zuckerberg to drive Facebook into an entity with 3 billion members—3 billion! Or Sergey Brin to co-invent Google.  It’s what drove Bob Dylan to remake popular music and Albert Einstein to re-imagine the universe and remake the world.  It’s what was required for Jews to win numerous Nobel Prizes and to be elected to the Senate in large numbers—in states like Wisconsin and Minnesota, which have very few Jews—and to invent Hollywood and the contemporary music industry and the comic book and superhero universes out of whole cloth.  It’s what made it possible for so many of our ancestors to migrate across the Atlantic in steerage with no money to make remarkable new lives in an alien land.  Chutzpah was an utterly indispensable ingredient in creating the modern miracle of the State of Israel when no one else in the world believed it was possible, or even desirable, what in part allowed small Jewish armies, from the Maccabees’ time to the Israel Defense Forces, to defeat larger, better armed, and better trained enemies, partly through sheer audacity.  Chutzpah is what motivates Jewish hyper-achievers now, and always has.

There is a downside, of course, to chutzpah.  It can make Jewish groups of people less than tolerant of error, and occasionally, well, slightly critical of others, and even of ourselves.  The ubiquity of chutzpah can make working with Jews, even for rabbis, into a challenging experience, because they are willing to say and do anything if they believe it can lead to the result they think desirable.  Let’s be honest: most Jews do not lack chutzpah.

I’m reminded of Jackie Mason’s routine about the difference between a Jew and a non-Jew entering a restaurant.  The non-Jew comes up to the hostess and when he’s told that there is a 40-minute wait for his reservation he says, “OK”, and takes a seat.  The Jew asks for the manager, and somehow convinces the staff that they are in the wrong and he needs to be seated immediately.  After a long wait, the non-Jew finally gets seated in the back of the restaurant next to the kitchen and accepts it meekly.  The Jew says, “You call this a table for a man like me?” and starts moving tables and chairs to make a better space.  Then he tells the manager to turn up the air-conditioning, or turn it down.  It’s not always pleasant to experience, but it certainly works…

The eternal Jewish lesson is that without Chutzpah we would be exactly nowhere.  When the game is rigged against you there are two choices: knuckle under, or rise to the challenge and find a way to succeed in spite of the odds.  And that is exactly what we have always done.  It goes back to Abraham arguing with God on behalf of Sodom and Gomorrah, insisting that God be certain that there were no righteous men there: as he puts it, memorably, shall the Judge of the whole earth not act with justice? 

Pure chutzpah… and Abraham handed it down to his descendants.  Jacob consistently demonstrated more chutzpah than any three men usually have in their whole lives.

All of which is especially relevant to this week’s Torah portion of Vayigash.  At the start of the portion Joseph, the grand vizier of Egypt, the high poobah in charge of everything, has his brothers in the palm of his hand.  Remember, these are the half-brothers who tortured and tormented Joseph, who beat him and sold him into slavery and reported him dead to their mutual father.  Now they have come down to Egypt to buy food to stave off starvation back home.  They don’t realize that the renamed Egyptian prime minister who teases and tricks and torments them is actually their hated little brother.  And so, after last week’s portion, filled with an intricate cat and mouse game in which Joseph has his wild, powerful brothers twisting and turning at his whim, we come to Vayigash and the climax of this great story.

The chutzpah here is embodied in the most powerful, and probably the smartest of the other brothers, Judah.  Judah sees that all this tzoris they are experiencing must come from somewhere.  This much trouble can’t just be bad luck, or even fate; someone is behind it.  Perhaps—no, probably—Judah even has some inkling that the dictatorial Egyptian bureaucrat they are facing, the one masterminding all of their terrible misfortune, is actually their long-lost unlamented brother Joseph. 

And then Joseph plays yet another, perhaps final card in this elaborate game of high-stakes poker.  Having forced his bad half-brothers to bring the youngest, innocent brother, his only full brother Benjamin, down to Egypt he now insists they leave Benjamin with him and depart Egypt immediately. 

Judah knows this will kill their father Jacob and destroy the family.  And in this moment of extremis Judah makes an impassioned speech, an excellent speech, a speech that somehow combines plaintive request and apparent humility with pure, unadulterated chutzpah.

First, without being asked, Judah steps forward towards the throne on which Joseph sits.  This is a huge breach of protocol, and might have proven to be a fatal one.  It is hard to imagine how much chutzpah this took: it’s as though someone had crashed a White House audience with the president, just bodied his way forward to make his point.  It’s pure chutzpah.  In any case Judah steps right up to the throne and says, “Don’t be mad at me, I’ve got to talk to you personally and privately.  You won’t want to miss this…”

And then Judah proceeds to tell the real story of their lives.  Well, kind of.  He leaves out all the ways in which the brothers betrayed and sold-out Joseph.  He plays on all the heartstrings, though, emotionally pleading on behalf of their mutual fathers’ distress, the strain of the potential loss of his beloved youngest child. Judah’s speech is a model of schmaltzy manipulation—seemingly a manly declaration of personal responsibility, under closer examination it sounds like the guy who has killed his brother and asks for mercy since he is now an only child.  It is really, really chutzpadik—and, of course, it works.  There is a reason we are all named Jews after this guy, Judah.

Joseph knows who he is dealing with, of course.  And yet, in spite of his supreme self-control, his astonishing ability to think and reason and manage and lead, he cannot help but be overcome by family-tinged emotion.  He sends out all the advisors and interpreters, the whole kitchen cabinet and the entire court, and faces his brothers alone, as he did twenty years earlier when they tossed him into a pit and sold him into slavery.  And now, in one of the most dramatic moments in the Torah, Joseph cries aloud, admits his identity—“I am Joseph”—and asks plaintively, “Is my father still alive?”
   

It is a stirring moment of reunion.  And without tremendous chutzpah it would not have happened.  And without that reunion, we would never have come down to Egypt, been enslaved, experienced the Exodus, reached Mt. Sinai, received the Torah, been given the Promised Land of Israel.  Without this chutzpadik speech there would be no Jews today at all.

We owe our very existence to chutzpah.

Of course, there are many aspects of this ingrained Jewish Chutzpah that may seem undesirable—the so-called pushy Jewish stereotype is part of it, as is the tendency most of our people have to be utterly certain that we are always right about, well, everything. 

But the truth is that what many people call fate or destiny is often the result of the determination of those who most need it to make something positive happen.  Our chutzpah needs to directed towards positive goals like feeding the hungry, housing the homeless, fighting injustice.  Even building up a young congregation.

In an interesting way, how much chutzpah we display can be the most accurate measure of our own Jewish commitment and energy, the truest measure of how serious we are about our Judaism.  So how much chutzpah are you willing to demonstrate for a good cause?  Are you willing to be chutzpadik to make the world a better, holier place?

Judah took a chance and created a future for our people.  It’s our responsibility to do the same.

How To Be The Light

Sermon Parshat Mikets 5782, Rabbi Sam Cohon, Congregation Beit Simcha, Tucson, AZ

How many of you have personally experienced the midnight sun, those days in the farthest reaches of the north near the Arctic Circle, in say, Alaska or Scandinavia, where the nights basically disappear—and depending on how far north you go, they totally disappear?  It’s a very odd sensation the first time you look out the window at, say, 2am and it’s fully daylight outside.  In many Baltic nations and other northern countries the summer solstice around June 21st is a holiday, Midsomer Day, and often the days on either side of it are also festive.

Of course, we are now in the opposite time of year, the period with the very shortest days, the time when light is more often experienced from artificial sources than from the eternal Tucson sun of other seasons.  We might have 310 days a year of sun here—like today—but our sunny days in December are far shorter than they are in June.  It’s for that reason that so many cultures throughout the Northern Hemisphere have festivals of light this time of year, at the time of the winter solstice, or thereabouts.  It is an effort to bring light into darkness, to illuminate artificially what the natural order has left dimmed. 

This desire to light up the darkness of December is a nearly universal cultural phenomenon.  It is no accident that pagans had special ceremonies for the winter solstice, in places like Stonehenge in England and in Babylonia and in Iran and in Japan and in Guatemala and in Peru—and that later, Christians and others simply adopted the dates those cultures celebrated and some of their practices.  And it is probably no accident that our Hanukkah menorah, our Hanukkiah, adds its own brilliant lights to this otherwise dark season.  When things are darkest, we simply add light.

I told the following story on our Hanukkah broadcast this week, but it bears re-telling.  Once there was a shammes who was afraid of the dark.  “Tell me, Rabbi,” the shammes asked his rebbe, “How can I chase the darkness from the world?”

So the Rebbe sent the shammes into the deep darkness of the shul’s basement.  Handing him a broom he said, “Go sweep the darkness out of the basement.” 

Before long, the shammes returned. “Rabbi, I swept and swept, but the darkness did not budge an inch!”  The Rabbi nodded and murmured sympathetically.  “Darkness can be stubborn thing…”

He then reached into his drawer and took out a ruler.

“Take this stick and drive the darkness out by beating it.”  Soon the Shammes returned and told the Rabbi, “Beating it did not chase away the darkness!”  So the Rabbi suggested he shout and scream at the darkness to frighten it away.  But yelling at the dark did not work either; it only made the Shammes’s voice hoarse.

Exhausted, frustrated, he made his way up the stairs, tired and afraid, and approached the Rabbi again. The Rabbi took out a candlestick, lit the candle, and led the Shammes back down the stairs.  And it was a miracle!  For wherever the light’s glow met the darkness, the darkness evaporated before their eyes.

“We dispel darkness,” the Rabbi said, “Not by sweeping gestures, or by violence, or by loud noisy cries, but by bringing a little bit of brightness to our world.”

The mitzvah on Hanukkah is to light a small flame, L’Hadlik ner shel Hanukkah.  That is the essence of the Jewish response to a world that seems to fill with darkness.  When faced with darkness, shine a light.

We have always been afraid of the dark. Our sages tell us that as night descended at the end of humanity’s very first day on earth, Adam saw the sun go down, and was terrified.  Would the sunlight ever return? Adam sat and wept. Was the light to be banished forever?  And God gave him the capacity to think of a great idea, perhaps humanity’s most important innovation: to pick up and rub two sticks together and so to create light.

This year, many of us have experienced moments of anxiety and fear. We want to banish the darkness, to sweep it away, but our efforts seem futile. We strike out, and change nothing positively.  We shout angrily, but the world is the world, it is large and indifferent, even sometimes hostile.  The gloom lingers. 

We are only finite creatures of flesh and blood and weakness who cannot prevent sickness and loss, who cannot stop terror attacks or political insanity or alleviate great suffering. So how can we possibly sweep darkness out of the world?

We can’t.  But we can learn from the story: it is not our task to sweep away darkness, or beat it into submission.  Instead, it is our task to kindle light.

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

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

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

In the darkness of a dungeon, he lights a light.  It is the light of help and the light of hope for his fellow prisoners.  And it eventually not only sheds a little light on the subject, it turns out that it actually banishes the darkness.  That light will ultimately lead Joseph to save the entire country, and then his own family, from death, and finally catapult him to the throne.  What an inspiring reminder that just a little bit of light can spread and shine out to the whole world.

This has been a frightening period for many of us in the past year, since Hanukkah 5781.  COVID-19 raged all last winter, and only with the arrival of vaccinations did it abate.  And every time we thought it was safe to go back in the ocean, as it were, another variant seemed to come along to frighten us again.  As so many of us mourned the deaths of relatives and friends, and others worked hard to defeat the virus, in a twisted response, some of our own politicians chose to add much heat, and no light at all, to the response to the greatest public health emergency of our times.

It is notable that there are prominent Jews central to the development of the most effective vaccines, Albert Bourla of Pfizer and Tal Zaks of Moderna.  Bringing light into dark times.

In another area, darkness also remained thick.  Anti-Semitic actions occurred in many places in the world, as they always seem to do.  And we Jews responded as we must: by building bridges with other people of different faiths to combat the dark insanity of religious persecution that waxes and wanes but never truly leaves.  

My friends, our job, as Jews, is to be an or lagoyim, a light to the nations.  We do this by challenging all who would bring destruction to the world, and all those who would choose to act to violently silence those who believe differently than they do.  We must also act to respond to those who would refuse the responsibility we have to guarantee freedom of religion to others in our society.

Chanukah is the ultimate holiday of religious freedom, celebrating the victory that affirmed monotheism’s right to exist in this world.  Without the events we Jews celebrate at Chanukah, Judaism would have ended more than 2100 years ago.  Christianity would never have happened at all—Jesus came from Israel, in the Galilee, out of a completely Jewish society—and Islam, the second great daughter religion of Judaism, would never have developed. 

Which should remind us that freedom of religion is not automatically guaranteed in any society, even one as open as America’s. 

In place of heated rhetoric, we must instead encourage light.  Hanukkah affirms religious liberty as a human right.  It also has a great deal to do with securing that liberty against any who would destroy it, including religious extremists.  It is our responsibility both to fight any who would deny the right of others to believe and practice as they wish, and to guarantee that no one, through violence or other means, is permitted to destroy the rights of free people to worship freely.  Both are central to the message of Judaism, and to America.

During this holiday of dedication and renewal, may we renew our own dedication to guaranteeing freedom of religion, and the security to celebrate it, now and always.

And may we also choose, like the rabbi of that story, to illuminate the cellar containing the darkness of ignorance with the light of knowledge, to affirm bright, intelligent choices for our own society at a time when dark wells of dusty falsehoods remain to be dispelled.

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

We can truly become the light we all need.

Chag Chanukah Samei’ach.  Chag Urim Sameiach—May this become a happy, bold, bright holiday of light.

Family, Fate, Fortune-& You

Family, Fate, Fortune—and You

Rabbi Samuel M. Cohon’s Sermon on Vayeshev 5782

This week we read the Torah portion of Vayeshev, which begins the story of Joseph, one of the great narratives in all literature.  We will continue with this fateful tale throughout the rest of the book of Genesis, and the extraordinary plotlines involving Joseph eventually set up the rest of early Jewish history.

But first Vayeshev starts by further illustrating the exploits, good and mostly bad, of one of the truly, spectacularly dysfunctional families in all of history, the great patriarch Jacob and his four wives and 13 children.  If you thought the Borgia family had problems, if you believe that Oedipus had a bad home life, if you feel that the Kennedys were cursed, if you think that the Kardashians—OK, never mind about the Kardashians.  But for the others, none of these epic familial failures have anything on Jacob and his brood. In fact, you can make a case that the Jacob clan has some of the troubles of each.

In addition to the vigorous rivalry between the varsity wives Leah and Rachel (until she dies giving birth to the twelth brother, Benjamin), the bulit-in rivalries between the jayvee wives, Bilhah and Zilpah, the phenomenal sibling rivalries that take place among all the 12 vigorous, manipulative brothers, all abetted by truly lousy parenting by the distracted patriarch Jacob, there is also plenty of bad, fateful luck.  There are betrayals galore, rape, revenge killing, incest, mass circumcision, mass slaughter, massive deceptions, conspiracy to defraud, and, of course, selling a blood relative into slavery in another country.  Frankly, this is not conduct we prefer to see in our own families, no matter how heated the Thanksgiving table discussions might have become.

But with all the action—of every kind—in Vayeshev there is also a moment of pure fate, an incident that illustrates that something greater than mere human weakness is at work here.  Early in this week’s parshah Joseph is sent by his father to spy on his own brothers.  Jacob suspects that his boys—young men by now—have  been taking care of dad’s sheep, but probably selling a few on the side to make some extra shekels.  While searching for his brothers Joseph gets lost, and wanders helplessly until, we are told, he bumps into a stranger, who sends him off on the right path to find his brothers.  When he reaches them it sets in motion events that land Joseph in slavery and later into prison in Egypt; and his rise from that nadir eventually lead to the whole Jacobite family going down there and later being enslaved.  Then, of course, a few centuries later everyone is freed, they cross the Red Sea, and get the Ten Commandments at Mt. Sinai—and, well, the world has never been the same since.

But none of it would have happened if Joseph hadn’t happened upon a friendly, anonymous stranger who helped him out.  That is, all the turbulence, energy, and activity of Jacob’s family would not really have mattered if not for a namelss stranger who sets our story onto its true course, one that will eventually end in peoplehood and a great posterity.

First, one simple nameless guy had to point the way…

You might wonder: why is this seemingly trivial incident even included here in Genesis?  The story of Joseph is so action-packed that it seems unnecessary to even mention the anonymous stranger who gave our hero directions on the road.  I mean, just in this Shabbat’s Torah portion we have an entire novel, or perhaps a Netflix or Apple+ binge-watchable-series. 

Vayeshev, in short (!), is Joseph being spoiled by a grieving Jacob, Joseph’s coat of many colors, Joseph’s arrogant announcement of his dreams, Joseph’s brothers hatred of him, Joseph being sent out to spy on them, Joseph being beaten and tossed into a pit, Joseph nearly killed and then sold into slavery, Jacob deceived into assuming Joseph is dead, Joseph down in Egypt rising to the top of the slavery pyramid as head of Potiphar’s household, Joseph’s attempted seduction by Mrs. Potiphar, Joseph avoiding being seduced but falsely accused of rape, Joseph tossed into an Egyptian prison, Joseph interpreting dreams for his fellow prisoners one of whom is freed and elevated back to his former high place in Pharaoh’s household and who then promptly forgets Joseph—and oh, just by the way, the entire Judah-and-Tamar story is interspsersed with the Joseph tale, with dramatic twists and turns that are just as spectacular.  This is high-speed narrative, great writing, foreshadowing, characters developing, whiz-bang Biblical storytelling at its very best.

So why do we have this seemingly meaningless random guy giving Joe directions to meet his brothers and his fate?  I mean, it’s not like you include mention of following your GPS directions when you tell your family about your day, right? 

Perhaps it’s merely this: in a tale filled with great drama of profound historical importance, somebody other than Joseph—or even Judah—turns to be a crucial piece in the puzzle.  That is, when all kinds of great events, and important figures are changing the course of destiny, one random, anonymous human being can matter quite a lot.

The moral of the story?  You never know just what your own small act can do for someone else—or how or when it might affect history.  Your role may not seem so critical at the time.  But by acting in ways that reflect your values, simply choosing to be helpful and make a difference, well, you might indeed be impacting the entire future of everyone.

Every human action has the capacity to make a difference, for good or ill.  And every human choice that we make can bring direction or aimless wandering…

So in this coming holiday season, why not take a moment and do something for someone else that you weren’t intending to do already?  Why not choose to fulfill a mitzvah—not matter how small—for someone you don’t even know?  You, too, like our anonymous figure in the middle of the Joseph story of Vayeshev, might make the world a better place and shape the future towards its better destiny. 

No matter how well-adjusted your own family is.

Becoming Ourselves, Becoming Israel

Sermon Shabbat Vayishlach 5782

Rabbi Sam Cohon, Congregation Beit Simcha, Tucson, AZ

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

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

Last week, in Parshat Vayetsei, we witnessed Jacob’s unkindness to his wives. The Torah actually describes Leah as “hated”! Jacob’s greater love for Rachel is understandable, but nonetheless, Leah is essentially an innocent victim of her father Laban’s treachery, undeserving of Jacob’s scorn.  The commentator Rabbi Simcha Bunem of Prezucha suggests the Torah text does not mean that Jacob hated her, but rather that she hated herself, as a righteous person who saw her own faults.  Well, maybe.  In contrast, the Etz Hayim commentary says, “Knowing what we know of human psychology, we can also suspect that Jacob did indeed hate Leah because, by reminding him of the fraudulent circumstances of their wedding, she reminded him of his most shameful memory, the time he deceived his father. We often hate people for confronting us with what we least like about ourselves.”  Leah is so neglected that she pathetically names her sons, serially, “maybe my husband will see me, hear me, connect with me.”

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

But finally in this week’s Parsha, Vayishlach, we see that Jacob has changed in many ways.  Twenty years before, when he left his home, after the dream of the ladder to heaven, he prayed to God in what a bargaining manner: if God would protect him, if God would supply his needs and if God would return him safely home, then he would acknowledge God as God and set aside a tithe for Him!  But now, here in Vayishlach, an older and perhaps wiser Jacob prays a more mature prayer – he knows he has nothing to offer God, and that he has already been granted a plethora of blessings: love, family, and wealth. So now he asks only for God’s protection so that he can be an instrument in fulfilling God’s plan.

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

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

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

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

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

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

And we always we meet the Other who is not what we expect, who is filled with his or her own ambitions, fears, inclinations, desires.  Ultimately, we meet a succession of Others with whom we wrestle.

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

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

Jacob’s life is indeed difficult and painful. He has been both manipulator and manipulated, deceiver and deceived. Our lives may or may not be as dramatic as Jacob’s life. The question is do we have the courage to leave, even psychically, at a low point in our lives to commit ourselves to live with integrity? What do we make of our lives if we don’t fulfill our own personal pledge to act responsibly?  And… can we return “home” as the different people we became due to our “getting out of town”? This can be as daunting as the original leave-taking because we fear we will regress to the old us and lose all the hard fought changes we have made. The stories of our ancestors are full of promises made to and by human and recognizable people. They are flawed individuals who accomplished great things. Our responsibility is to fulfill our promise to live a life worth living, and so make our own contribution to the legacy of our people.

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

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

Who we were, we still are.  But the glory of human growth is that we too, like our ancient ancestor, need not accept our shortcomings as defining.  Instead, we can struggle with our own angels and wrestle with the demons we retain from our youth.  While we will never obliterate the Jacob within, it is within our power to transcend him.  We, too, can grow to become Israel.

Dreyfus, Then & Now, There & Here

Sermon, Shabbat Vayeitzei 5782

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

This week, we read of our ancestor Jacob’s consistent struggles with his father-in-law Laban.  In rabbinic literature, Laban is turned into a kind of arch-fiend, not just a trickster and manipulator but an evil pagan sorcerer who seeks to destroy Jacob out of jealousy for what the Jewish people will become in the future.  In other words, he is a kind of prototype for Anti-Semites in later history.  And there have always been Anti-Semites, true?

Well, a new museum opened just last week in Paris that has great importance for Jews—and should have great importance for all people who live in free, Western, democratic societies.  It’s the museum of the Dreyfus affair, which had an enormous impact on the development of modern Zionism and modern anti-Semitism.  Nearly 130 years after it began l’Affaire Dreyfus still teaches critical lessons about the perilous balance between civilization and barbarism that lurks in every seemingly civilized society.

I suspect most Americans don’t know anything about the Dreyfus Affair, although any Jews with even a rudimentary knowledge of Zionism should know about it.  The story is set in the late 19th century, the 1890s in fact, in France.  This was an era that is often called la Belle Epoque, the beautiful period, and it saw France, and especially Paris, host a glittering array of great artists—among them Monet, Renoir, Van Gogh, Gaugin, Matisse, & Toulouse Lautrec—and equally fabulous writers and outstanding musicians.  The Paris Opera hosted what the greatest artistic expressions of the entire era.  It was a time of rapid industrialization, great new inventions, and spreading empire for the nations of the west, like Britain and France, and a period that saw fantastic advances in technology and society to parallel the cultural magnificence.  Paris was, for the first time, truly the city of light, since it had received gas streetlights illuminating its new grand boulevards.  It was a heady time.

It was also a time of strain and apprehension in France.  The Franco-Prussian War of the early 1870s had ended disastrously for France, a radical commune had taken over the city in its aftermath, dictatorship followed its collapse and then a Third Republic was established. But an uneasy peace existed.  France and Germany stared at each other across a border that was far from friendly, and often seemed on the knife edge of exploding into another major war.  That didn’t happen again until 1914, and then again in 1939, but the underlying stress, suspicion and downright hostility was a constant throughout the period. 

It was in this context that a French Army Captain named Alfred Dreyfus, a Jew from Alsace, a province that France had surrendered to the new German mega-state after the lost war, became the most polarizing figure in the entire western world. 

Dreyfus was serving in Paris on the Army’s General Staff under an anti-Semitic commander in 1894.  A torn-up note was found showing that a spy within that General Staff was selling French Army secrets to the German military attaché.  Dreyfus, a Jewish outsider in the military elite, was accused of being the spy.  In less than three months, by January 1895, Dreyfus was arrested tried, convicted in a secret military court martial and publicly humiliated before being sent off to exile on Devil’s Island for a life sentence in that penal colony hellhole.  Before a large crowd of jeering spectators in Paris, Dreyfus cried out: "I swear that I am innocent. I remain worthy of serving in the Army. Long live France! Long live the Army!"

In 1896 another French officer, a Catholic named Georges Picquart who was head of counterintelligence, uncovered evidence that the true spy was not Dreyfus at all but his supervisor, a Major Esterhazy.  Quickly the courageous officer Picquart was reassigned to Tunisia, and Esterhazy was acquitted.  But the case leaked to the press, a vigorous debate about Anti-Semitism and civil rights began, and soon pro- and anti-Dreyfus societies sprung up all over France, then all over Britain and even distant America. The Dreyfus case became the most famous court case of the 19th century, and the most notorious abuse of justice in the world.  In its day, it received public attention that combined the draw of the OJ Simpson trial with a presidential impeachment, at least back when those weren’t so commonplace.  Everyone in the civilized world had an opinion about it, and voiced it publicly and loudly, often in an organized group.

French and European and even American societies lined up on one side or the other; pro-Dreyfus groups were liberal, democratic, and modern in orientation.  Anti-Dreyfus groups were conservative, Catholic, and reactionary.  Both opposing sides commanded large sectors of popular support.  It was at the height of that time of pro- and anti-Dreyfusard fever that the non-Jewish journalist Emile Zola published a famous letter that began “J’Accuse!” I accuse, and accuse he did, the military and the government and establishment of France of profound Anti-Semitism and moral and fiscal corruption. 

Finally, Dreyfus was given a second trial—the real turncoat spy, Esterhazy, by that time had fled the country and confessed his espionage to a journalist in England—but poor Alfred was convicted again, on forged documents, and in spite of all the factual evidence of his innocence, and he was sent back to Devil’s Island.  This time the pressure on the leadership of France grew so intense that the president finally offered Dreyfus a full pardon in 1899, fully four years after his first conviction.  Although innocent of any crime, Dreyfus accepted the pardon, rather than die on Devil’s Island.  Dreyfus was eventually restored to the army, promoted, and he served France nobly throughout the First World War.

The impact of the Dreyfus Affair was far-reaching, not least on a Viennese Jewish journalist who covered the trials for his newspaper.  Theodore Herzl heard the Paris mobs outside the courtroom crying, “Death to the Jews!” and realized that if that could happen in France, the first nation on earth to grant full civil rights to Jews as citizens, the most enlightened nation on the planet at that time, in Paris, the great City of Light in the Belle Epoque, well, it could happen anywhere.  Jews would never truly be free, or safe, until we had our own nation with our own protection provided by our own military.  Within a couple of years, by 1897, Herzl had organized the First Zionist Congress, which led ultimately to the founding of the State of Israel.   

Last week, French President Emmanuel Macron dedicated this new museum in northwest Paris to Alfred Dreyfus and the Dreyfus Affair, including a frank examination of anti-Semitism. Macron said in his remarks dedicating the museum, that nothing could repair the humiliations and injustices Dreyfus had suffered, and "let us not aggravate it by forgetting, deepening or repeating them."

The reference to “not repeating them” is a contemporary comment by Macron.  It follows attempts in much more recent times by the French far right to question Dreyfus's innocence.  A French army colonel was cashiered in 1994 for publishing an article, on the centennial of the beginning of the affair, suggesting that Dreyfus was guilty.  Far-right politician and avowed Anti-Semite Jean-Marie Le Pen's lawyer responded back then that Dreyfus's exoneration was "contrary to all known jurisprudence."  And now Éric Zemmour, a far-right political opponent of Macron who has said that France's Second World War Nazi collaborationist leader Marshall Philippe Pétain, who assisted in the deportation of French Jews to Nazi death camps, actually saved their lives.  Zemmour has also said repeatedly in 2021, this very year, that the truth about Dreyfus was not clear, his innocence was "not obvious".   

I hope this new Dreyfus museum helps more Parisians, more French, and more people of all nationalities understand that if the most sophisticated and liberated population in the world could perpetrate a deeply Anti-Semitic crime of this magnitude, every one of our societies has the capacity to do so.

It is not true that France is more Anti-Semitic than other nations in Europe, of course—or than America, for that matter.  Recent surveys of Anti-Semitic attitudes, and Holocaust attitudes, in France, the UK, Canada and the US have shown striking similarities in matters of ignorance and in anti-Jewish attitudes.  Unfortunately, Anti-Semitism never quite seems to die, and our responsibility to address it is perhaps larger than ever now. 

It should be obvious to us here in America, as the trial of Neo-Nazis in Charlottesville winds down, as Jews on campuses are attacked for supporting Israel, as Anti-Semitism on both the right and left of the political spectrum has become ever more widely acceptable, that we aren’t so far from the Dreyfus levels of Anti-Semitic invective and action right here, in our own contemporary, technologically advanced society.  We know that the internet has emboldened Anti-Semitism through its anonymity.  We know that violent attacks on American synagogues have been perpetrated by extremist right-wing terrorists in recent years, that neo-Nazi symbols and signs were used during the January 6th Capitol insurrection in Washington, DC.  We know that leftist mobs have defaced synagogues, and that some radical progressives have made common cause with known anti-Semites.  We know that in a nation, America, in which Anti-Semitic attacks had declined for decades, over the last few years we have seen a steady upward trend in Anti-Semitic invective and violent action.

We don’t have a Dreyfus Museum here in America, of course.  We do have Holocaust museums that are well made and well supported.  But I wonder if we may not need something like that here, too, a place that will remind us that Americans are not exactly innocent in this regard. 

A little over a century, in 1915, a Jewish businessman named Leo Frank was lynched by an Anti-Semitic mob in Georgia for a crime he didn’t commit.  That led to the founding of the Anti-Defamation League, the ADL, and a concerted effort of Jews to respond positively and proactively to combat Anti-Semitism in an active way.  Lord knows we have enough Jewish organizations at work now, and perhaps we have enough museums, too.  But surely there is a need for this Dreyfus Museum in France, and just as surely, we need to find more effective ways to respond to genuine anti-Semitism at work in our society today.

In the Torah—and in Midrashic tales and commentaries—Laban is finally defeated by Jacob, and our people ultimately survives and thrives.  But Jacob succeeds not because he ignores Laban’s tricky proclivities, and not because he pretends they are worse than they truly are.  He overcomes Laban because he is open and honest—for the first time in his life, I might add—about those challenges, and because he trusts God.  And eventually Jacob acts to separate himself from Laban and his brand of evil.

At the least, we in America must now choose to actively separate ourselves from those who harbor and demonstrate truly Anti-Semitic attitudes and beliefs, even if we agree with some of their other positions.  And we need also to think about ways in which we can address the systemic Anti-Semitism of our own political allies, and not just those of our enemies.

And maybe we need a Leo Frank Museum dedicated to the history of American Anti-Semitism, too…

Mom Liked You Best: Family Trauma, Tricksters & Destiny

Sermon on Toldot 5782

by Rabbi Sam Cohon

Do any of you remember the old Smothers Brothers comedy team from the late 1960s?  They had a variety show which was very popular then, only to be cancelled by CBS’s CEO William Paley because they got too political—that is, they let their opposition to the Vietnam War become evident and booked lots of emerging rock & roll acts and activist comedians and musicians on their show.  Times surely have changed; today, you can’t have a successful variety show without being overtly political. 

I actually met Tommy Smothers, back when I was in the sixth grade.  It was after their show was cancelled and they fell from popularity.  I liked to explore things back then—some things don’t change—and on the street, La Jolla Avenue, that I walked on going home from school there was this motor home parked.  It was exactly like the one my family was renting for an upcoming trip through the western United States.  It had a ladder on the back of it, so naturally I ascended it to see what the top looked like—and as soon as I climbed on top, Tommy Smothers stuck his head out the window of an apartment next to the motor home and asked me if I’d like to see the inside, too.  I was totally busted, as we said then.  But Tommy Smothers turned out to be a very nice man indeed, and instead of turning me over to the juvenile authorities he politely showed me around his motor home and then sent me off home.     

In any case, the Smothers Brothers most famous routine was that the older, wiser brother, Dickie Smothers, would straighten out Tommy Smothers, who was prone to rant on subjects he clearly misunderstood or had exaggerated or simply lied about.  After being hilariously corrected and put down by his brother, Tommy would stop with a look of total puzzlement on his face, and then angrily say, “Well, Mom always liked you best!”

Mom always liked you best.  A standing routine for a comedy duo from my youth.  Or, perhaps, the most accurate description of nearly everything that goes wrong in the entire Book of Genesis.  I’ve often wondered what lessons we are being taught about parenting and familial relations in this primary book of the Torah, the Bible, indeed all western religion.  I mean, if you want to teach people how to be good parents, Genesis provides object lessons in how not to do it. 

Sibling rivalry starts with the first brothers, Cain and Abel, and it goes, if not downhill—how do you do worse than that?—certainly sideways.  In every generation of note thereafter familial tzoris abounds: Noah and his sons, Sarah and Hagar, Ishmael and Isaac, and of course this week’s protagonists, Jacob and Esau.  And just wait until you hear about Rachel & Leah, and Joseph and his brothers and sisters in the coming attractions…

But for all the general family dysfunction evident in Book of Briesheet, perhaps the greatest challenge is the one posed by the sibling rivalry of Jacob and Esau, heroes—or at least central figures—of Toldot.  And you know, the Torah foreshadows the whole problem from the very beginning.  Fraternal twins in Rebecca’s womb struggle prenatally, and are quite different from birth.  And of course, in true Smothers Brothers fashion, we are told that Isaac, their father, favored Esau, the outdoorsman, the hunter, the thoughtless, active, physical, anti-intellectual son.  And Rebecca favored the oh-so-slightly younger Jacob, the studious, homemaking, mama’s boy.  For Esau, mom indeed liked Jacob best—but dad liked him best! 

What a parenting mess.

You know, Jacob, Ya’akov, is the most interesting and confounding of all our patriarchs and matriarchs.  He is, in a literal sense, the true father of our people, since it is his 12 sons who are the ancestors of the 12 tribes of Israel.  But what a complicated father of our people this man is!

On the one hand, he has many characteristics we all should admire: Jacob is intelligent, industrious, courageous, romantic, creative, clever and prolifically productive.  He repeatedly triumphs over better-equipped adversaries and eventually creates a huge family that will evolve from a clan into a nation, our nation.  Jacob lives an extraordinary, and extraordinarily important, life, and without him monotheism would not have survived at all.   

On the other hand, Jacob is also tricky, manipulative, whiny, and as duplicitous as a modern-day politician.  Throughout his life he is far more concerned with results than morals.  Jacob is an awful sibling, a lousy son to his father, a mediocre husband, and a spectacularly bad parent, and he repeatedly ends up in weirdly terrible situations that he has, either directly or indirectly, caused.  And while he benefits from others' forgiveness, he himself will hold onto grudges until his last breath.

Esau is a different matter altogether.  As presented in Toldot, and later on in Vayishlach, Esau is tough, energetic, active, thoughtless, emotional, extraverted and reactive.  He moves almost obsessively, a constantly hyperactive guy.  In one short passage that changes his life forever, we are given five consecutive verbs about Esau:

Esau is all id to Jacob’s superego.  

The story of these twins, Jacob and Esau, begins in utero.  Rivals from before birth, wrestling in their mother Rebecca’s womb, the red-haired outdoorsman Esau and his grasping, domestically inclined younger brother Jacob spend Toldot vying for their father’s and mother’s love and attention.  Each is partly successful, and each partly fails.  That sibling rivalry shaped the course of our people’s early history, but it also can teach us something about ourselves.

First, a word about words: Toldot is rich in real-life details told in spectacularly perfect writing.  Rebecca, pregnant with the two boys wrestling inside her, tells God, “If it’s like this, why am I alive?” prefiguring the words every pregnant mom thinks (or says!) at some point. Esau is hairy and rough at birth, Jacob is smooth, born holding fast to Esau’s heel.  Esau, famished from a long hunt, trades his birthright for a bowl of stew and then vayochal, vayeisht, vayakom vayelech vayivez eisav et habchoro—Esau ate, drank, got up, left and despised his birthright, his own inheritance.  All at once, the series of active verbs delineating his turbulent, thoughtless character.  Jacob, smooth-faced and smooth-talking lawyer that he is, audibly calculates the coming consequences of each action.

Now, on to that little rivalry.  The familial tension in Toldot is palpable throughout.  In fact, there is tzoris enough to go around for everyone in this small family: Isaac, the father and link between more important patriarchs, finds trouble everywhere but avoids it by simply moving on.  Each time he finds more success, and then more trouble, and moves again.  Rebecca sees the wayward ways of her eldest boy, Esau, and chooses to manipulate the situation to give the family inheritance to Jacob, remaking the birth order retroactively.  You know, “mom liked you best” for real.

Mom certainly liked Jacob best, while dad just as surely liked Esau best.  That kind of favoritism cannot end well, and in the short term it doesn’t.  At the end of our portion Esau has been doubly defrauded, while Jacob is forced to flee the consequences of his own duplicity, running from the only home he has known without so much as a blanket, the homebody forced into the wilderness his brother has always loved.

In a sense, the explosion of this conflicted nuclear family damages all its members.  Each member is wounded, none left whole.  It is a drama like so many of our own lives.

And yet, in a couple of more Torah portions, we will see that each member of this now shattered nuclear family has played, or will play, a central role in furthering God’s design for our world.  Despite their mistakes and injuries, each helps, ultimately, to carry out pivotal elements that further God’s mission, and that will create the great people of Israel.

So, what is there to learn from this saga beyond how not to treat our own children? 

In challenging times, and in conflicted families, it is often hard to see that ultimately there is a divine plan, or a place for each participant within that plan.  But Toldot—which means generations—teaches that in spite of what we might perceive in our own, small field of vision, God is at work in this world, and we may very well be furthering a greater plan.

Why is it that Jacob is the one who will become the true father of our people?  He is clever and verbal, cerebral, but he clearly lacks basic moral qualities that we should find critical.  But Esau, too, is no bargain, all physical exertion and emotional outburst, instinctive but unreflective.  In fact, it is through both of them that the great story of God’s oneness is carried forward.   

Through both of them, for all their flaws, God finds a way to work for the future and for destiny.  

The message is complex, but useful.  The truth is that we are all both Jacob and Esau, partly thoughtful, partly instinctive.  We, each of us, are also twins in this sense: we can act with deliberation and care, or forcefully and without judgment.  And we all have the capacity to be either ethical or unethical.

In that dichotomy lies our innate humanity.  And in the persons of Esau and Jacob, we can see ourselves and learn that it is only through God’s providence that we may truly find our own Promised Land.

Arguing for Justice

Sermon Shabbat Vayera 5782

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

What do you think is the essential Jewish characteristic?  Is it the ability to survive, as we have been doing for 3800 years, since the days of Abraham and Sarah?  Is it Jewish resilience, the ability to rise from destruction and defeat and rebuild our lives in new places and in new ways?  Is it the enjoyment of food, without which no event seems truly Jewish?  Or is it our profound and ancient commitment to learning that is our most unique quality? 

Or is it the willingness to argue that makes us truly Jewish?

You know the stereotype: when you have two Jews you have three opinions—and four synagogues and five rabbis and at least ten Jewish organizations.  We have developed, over the millennia, a remarkable talent for disagreement, and that is reflected in everything from our taste in synagogues and Jewish food to our Talmudic literature—what is the Talmud, really, but a very, very long, extended argument? 

There is the classic Jewish joke about the desert island: a ship is sailing in a lonely part of the South Pacific when the captain sees smoke coming from what should be a deserted island.  He steers a course for the island, and as he approaches it he's startled to find that there is actually a full pier, and a well-dressed man waiting on the beautifully built dock.  The captain crosses the gangplank and is welcomed by a man who says his name is Goldberg.  "I'm astonished, Mr. Goldberg," the captain says.  "How'd you get here?  And how did you construct this magnificent dock?" 

"Oh," says Goldberg, "I was shipwrecked here, alone, 5 years ago.  But the dock is nothing.  Come see the rest of the island."

So Goldberg leads the captain on a tour of his island, which includes a beautifully paved main street--he made the cement himself from seashells and coconut milk--with a store, a school, every possible convenience.  The captain oohs and aahs, but what really impresses him are the two magnificent buildings at the end of the street, both with stained glass windows.

"My God, Goldberg, look at what you have done here, with nothing but your bare hands.  But I'm curious," said the captain, "what are those two incredible buildings?"

"Oh," says Goldberg, "those are synagogues."

"That's incredible," the captain says, "but why do you need two?"

"The one on the right is my shul.  The one on the left I wouldn't be caught dead in!!"

Now this tendency to argue, often at full voice, is certainly typically Jewish.  But you may not know that it is also quite ancient, dating back to the very first Jew, Abraham, who in this week’s Torah portion of Vayera teaches us something important through the medium of argument.

In our Torah portion last week, Abraham was called by God to leave his homeland and journey to an unknown land.  Atypically for all the Jews who have followed him, he did so unquestioningly, taking a great leap of faith into a new and strange place. For this Abraham is sometimes called a knight of faith, trusting in God to bring him to his destiny without questioning.

But that’s not the whole story, of course, and in this week’s Torah portion of Vayera, things are different.  Our portion is truly quite a spectacular one, filled with fascinating incidents, as Alan has taught us.  Early on in Vayera, it includes the remarkable tale of the impending destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, a traumatic decision by God to try to attempt once again to eradicate evil from the world.  In one of the great short scenes in Biblical history, God tells Abraham of his plans to destroy the wicked cities—the Las Vegas and Atlantic City of their day—and instead of nodding politely and accepting God’s decision, Abraham nobly steps forward and protests the decision.  And he does so with another one of the great Jewish qualities: Chutzpah. 

What if there are fifty righteous people in Sodom—would God destroy the city then?  Wouldn’t that be immoral, the judge of all the world acting unjustly—hashofeit kol ha’arets lo ya’aseh mishpat as the Torah says?  He actually employs Jewish guilt on God!

And it works.  God agrees with Abraham’s objection, but the noble Abraham keeps arguing—what if there are forty-five righteous?  Forty?  How about thirty? Perhaps God won’t destroy Sodom for the sake of twenty righteous people?  Ten, a bare minyan?  And God agrees that even ten would be enough to save the cities. Of course, there aren’t ten who are righteous—for a minyan, you don’t go to Sodom!—and the fleshpots of evil are marked for destruction. 

But it is Abraham’s noble defense of what might just turn out to be a righteous remnant, theoretical or real, that stands out here.  For this is the essential way all Jews ever since have interacted with God: we question and struggle and test God, always seeking greater justice in the world.  We argue with God—and become holier and better people through that process.

Pirkei Avot, the great ethical tractate of the Mishnah, tell us (Avot 5:17) that kol machloket l’shem shamayim sofah l’hitkayeim—every argument that is for the sake of heaven—will yield lasting benefit. That is, if we argue as Abraham did, for the sake of justice, holding even God to a higher standard, then we are being the best Jews we possibly can be. 

This will come as a surprise to many Jews, but not every argument qualifies as a machloket l’sheim shamayim.  Pirkei Avot explains that the kind of arguments that Hillel and Shammai had, as they explored the correct interpretations of Torah, seeking to understand God’s will for how we live our daily lives, are the kinds of arguments truly conducted for the sake of heaven.  But it continues that a machloket shelo l’sheim shamayim, an argument that is not for the sake of heaven will not bring enduring good, and indeed it implies that it will bring destruction.  The example they use is the rebellion of Korach, who sought personal glory, who used clever, even ingenious arguments as he sought to advance his own power and reputation.  This kind of self-interested machloket, this sort of naked power grab, is ultimately damaging and, frankly, evil in the eyes of Judaism.  When we argue for own egotistical desires, our own ego needs, we are arguing for the sake of ourselves, not the sake of heaven.

Obviously, we need to take care that when we use this Jewish characteristic activity of argument that we do so for what truly are the best reasons and that we are seeking to improve humanity and our society.  Abraham didn’t argue all the time, remember.  He only did so when in his view it was a matter of justice.

And so, when we argue against human immorality in the world—the brutal Chinese repression of the Uyghur, for example—or against the environmental destruction of our planet, or in favor of the rights of the downtrodden such as the homeless right here in Tucson, well, then, we continue what Abraham began in this week’s portion.  These truly are machlokot l’shem Shamayim, arguments that are truly for the sake of heaven, for justice right down here in our world, la’asot mishpat, to create righteousness.

That is the true heritage of Abraham.  For when we make these kinds of sacred arguments, when to fight for the cause of justice, our lives can, like Abraham’s, bring great blessing.

Ken Yehi Ratson.

To Build Like Abraham

To Build Like Abraham

Sermon Shabbat Lech Lecha 5782

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

We are enjoying the beautiful fall weather here in the Sonoran Desert, as our society moves towards fully opening in the aftermath of the COVID-19.  Perhaps, after a year and a half of Coronavirus strangeness, and then Delta variant scares, we are closer to ready to resume our lives more fully, and can try to reembrace creating, building and working to establish a new and better world.  And that is all to the good.  

In the aftermath of traumatic events we need to look around, assess the damage, and decide that we will start over.  When tragedy strikes and things go wrong, there is always an adjustment period that follows, and often it feels chaotic and disturbed.  But sooner or later we pick ourselves up, gather our resources, and begin to rebuild.

It happened for the first time, according to the Torah, with Adam and Eve getting kicked out of the Garden of Eden.  It happened again for Cain after his brutal invention of murder, and his further exile.  It happened with Noah in last week’s Torah portion of the flood.  And in truth, it happens every time something in the world goes badly wrong, or even when something in our own world goes badly wrong and we have to pick up and—what’s that line from the old Jerome Kern song?  “Pick yourself up and start all over again.”

Some of that comes from the fact that there is a deep human need that many of us have, to build something enduring, something that will continue after we are gone.  We want to feel that we are part of an entity greater than ourselves, that we have made a material difference in living our lives.  And after things fall apart, most of us actually see an opportunity to rebuild and create something enduring.

For many people in history this has taken the form of creating a physical structure, a great construction project.  For others, it’s committing to serving their country in a dedicated way.  Still others find purpose in working for financial success, or seeking to create works of art or music or theater or literature that have lasting value.  And of course, some see their families as their great lifeworks.

 It’s true that not everyone has high ambitions for furthering their own posterity, but many—perhaps most of us—do.  We want to change the world, or enhance it at least, in meaningful ways that will outlast us, that will carry beyond the limited span we are given on this earth.

Judaism provides a prime example of a person who wished to transform the world based on a different kind of enduring project: a change in the way we perceive God and understand faith.  In the Torah this week we begin the story of Abraham, the first person who can truly be called a Jew, whose choice to dedicate himself to the belief in one God, and to practicing a form of ethical monotheism changed all western religion.  Coming of age in a world in which no one conceived of God as a unity, Abraham—first called Abram—sought a higher concept than “lots of gods making lots of ethical points of view.”  He had the pristine, powerful belief that there was only One God, and that One God had the power and authority to create a world of meaning and purpose and beauty. 

It was an incredible undertaking, and one that must have seemed impossible at times.  First, he had to convince an entire world dedicated to a morality dependent on various sources and the winds of change that there could even be One God and one source for right and wrong.  And then, he had to hope that someone would carry on after he himself was gone.  In fact, Abraham comes close to losing faith several times: he tells God that he has no child who can carry on his belief, and God has to reassure him with a covenant and the promise that sooner or later he will be the father of a great nation. 

Ultimately, of course, he succeeded.  But his own building program was unique: it was consisted creating a society, a civilization, a religion and a people who cared more about right than power, for whom justice mattered more than wealth, for whom decency was the central value not strength, and who strove to build a world of goodness, not an empire of domination.

You see, for Jews, as much as we love our synagogues, it’s not the buildings, or the organizations or the wealth that determine our success in passing on our values.  It’s not even the number of children or grandchildren we engender. It’s the way we are able to carry on the vision of our great founder, Abraham, in maintaining our commitment to that One God, and to advancing his unified concept of a world that God created based on justice and holiness.

That’s the true challenge of being Jewish, and the gift: to strive to make the world reflect the moral beauty of this quest on a daily basis.  It is our goal as Jews to work to build this into a world in which being good is valued highest, in which justice really exists for all, in which we protect and preserve the health and beauty of the earth as God gave it to us.

It’s a great mission indeed, and it’s one that every Jew has the responsibility to fulfill. 

Abraham’s legacy is secure—but it’s up to us to live to that standard.  And perhaps now, in the aftermath of a pandemic, more or less, we can reconsecrate ourselves to this very real, and crucially important rebuilding.

May this be our will.  And, of course, God’s.  Ken Yehi Ratson.

The Ark We Need

Sermon on Noah 5782

Rabbi Samuel M. Cohon, Congregation Beit Simcha of Tucson

This week’s Torah portion of Noah is perhaps the best-known of the entire cycle of readings in the whole year.  You’ve heard it before: an old guy, a boat, animals, a dove, a rainbow.  It’s on a million baby’s quilts, in several comedian’s routines, and it might just be the most famous story in all of human history and certainly the best of the sea tales: right up there with Jonah, Moby Dick, and Finding Nemo.

The interesting part of hearing a story of such overwhelming familiarity is that we typically take it for granted, and usually pay no more than superficial attention to it.  It’s easy to assume that Noah is a child’s story, a fairy tale explaining why we have rainbows or reassuring us that God won’t destroy the world.  A male and female of each species, 40 days and nights of rain, and a covenant, all in one neat, hackneyed package.

But the truth is that Noah is much more than a legend about an Old Man and the Sea.  In the midst of all the storm and fury, the lightning and the thunder, with all the animals, with Noah as the principal actor and God as the motive force, the one character that really stays with me after the flood is, well, the ark.  In essence, this whole narrative has a great deal to tell us, but much of it is embodied in the boat that the stock figures of human beings and animals are afloat in.

At heart, Noach is an unusual lesson about just what an ark is, why we each need one, and why we can’t stay in one forever.

“Build a teivah,” the Torah says, an ark.  It’s a word that’s used rarely in our most sacred text—the next time it figures prominently is at the beginning of Exodus, when the baby Moses floats down the Nile in a much, much smaller one.  An ark is a watercraft of some kind or other, designed to float, water-tight but also designed without any rudder or keel, a boat that goes in whichever direction it is wafted by the water around it.  When you get into an ark, you put your trust in God, all right, because you can’t pilot it anywhere in particular.  As they say in some religious traditions, wherever you go, that’s where you are.  In a teivah you are afloat, and you are also in the control of the good Lord and the vicissitudes of water.

But what constitutes an ark?  In essence, an ark is a refuge, a place of safety and isolation that preserves us from the danger and chaos of the world around us.  When all else is in turmoil, we have a retreat that allows us to live and be without fear.

We here in America had something like this experience on a national scale, right up until September 11, 2001, 20 years ago last month.  America is a fine, large country, and the concerns of the world outside our borders can seem pretty distant from our shores.  It should come as no surprise that through much of American history we often felt like we were on a kind of ark, and that we had no need of engagement with the world beyond, no matter how fouled up it was.  That strain of American isolationism is still present in our society, of course—America First!, you may have heard the phrase—although it has changed somewhat.  Now it is framed by the notion that we simply need to build a high wall around us to keep out the world.

Yet after 9/11 we realized that this ark of ours was something of an illusion, and that we needed to remain engaged in the world around us.  In fact, it was an imperative.  How we best choose to do that is still a matter of great debate.  But the need to be engaged is clear.

In one sense, our whole country was a kind of ark until 9/11… and then, it wasn’t, and we weren’t all in this alone. And even though we have, in various ways, tried to isolate ourselves from this complex world we have been quite unsuccessful in doing so. We are part of the whole of humanity, and our mutual success—even our long-term survival—are very much predicated on understanding and acting with that in mind.

COVID-19 reminded us of this again. You might think that what we needed to do was close all access to the world when the Coronavirus, which came from China, started to spread. But that proved to be completely impossible—and the leaders of the vaccine programs at Moderna and Pfizer are an Israeli Jewish immigrant to the United States and a Thessaloniki Jew from Greece whose family just barely survived the Holocaust before he immigrated here as a child. We are all connected, aren’t we?

The Torah tells us that Noah was righteous in his generation; and the rabbis of the commentaries tell us that being righteous in his generation means he wasn’t really righteous in any larger sense, as Shira has pointed out so beautifully. After all, what kind of a tzadik would hear that God intended to kill all other human beings and not protest or try to save them?
Noah’s non-involvement was a kind of sin, or at the very least a kind of weak form of righteousness.  We need to remain engaged, to seek justice in order to be righteous—and in order to try to create a more just world.

But the lesson of this Shabbat is more complex than just that, for we also need an ark, a place and space that allow us to retreat from the world, to feel safe and secure, to know that the tangled and troubled affairs of the world can be set aside while we gain a measure of peace and tranquility.

We need an ark of our own in this challenging world, in our complicated lives.

Nobel Prize-winning poet Wislawa Symborska, has a beautiful whimsical poem about what goes into each of our Arks:

An endless rain is just beginning

Into the ark, for where else can you go,

Your poems for a single voice,

Private exultations,

Unnecessary talents,

Surplus curiosity,

Short range sorrows and fears,

Eagerness to see all things from all sides…

Play for play’s sake,

And tears of mirth.

As far as the eye can see, there’s water and hazy horizon.

Into the ark, plans for the distant future,

Joy in difference,

Admiration for the better man…

Outworn scruples,

Time to think it over,

And the belief that all this

Will come in handy some day.

For the sake of the children we still are,

Fairy tales have happy endings,

That’s the only finale that will do here, too.

The rain will stop,

The waves will subside,

The clouds will part in the cleared up sky,

And they’ll be once more what clouds overhead ought to be,

Lofty and rather lighthearted

In their likeness to things

Drying in the sun—

Isles of bliss…

What occupies our own arks is, in a sense, the best of who we are, freed of strife and stress, left to own the holiness of time and the beauty of a safe space. 

So, what is your ark?  Where do you go to find your own peaceful place, your vessel of quiet floating on the turbulent seas of life? 

The Jewish ark traditionally is the sanctuary of the Sabbath, and Shabbat is an ark of time.  We can’t really float away from the troubles of the world each week.  But we can remove ourselves from the conflict of daily life in time, as Abraham Joshua Heschel reminded us.  We can find a place and a space for peace, rest and joy.

Shabbat is, at least it can be, a place in time that tumult and tzoris cannot penetrate.  No matter what storms resound outside, no matter how hard the rain, Shabbat, for 24 hours, is our ark.  If we choose to make it so.  If we choose to find our own place of peace and refuge. 

May this Shabbat be an ark for you.  May you find a way to choose to make not only this Sabbath, but each one, a time of holiness and nurturance.

And may you return, in time, to our complicated, messy world with your ideals refreshed, and your commitment to the covenant of God’s holiness renewed.

Shabbat Shalom!

Creation and Creativity

Breisheet Sermon 5782

Rabbi Sam Cohon, Congregation Beit Simcha, Tucson, AZ

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

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

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

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

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

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

In other words, what existed before the beginning? 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What’s Your Favorite Holiday?

Shabbat Sukkot 5782, Rabbi Sam Cohon

Congregation Beit Simcha, Tucson, Arizona

Shabbat Shalom, Chag Sukkot Sameiach and Mo’adim L’Simcha!  They say that life imitiates art, but I think sometimes life imitates humor.  My favorite story about building a sukkah, the temporary tabernacle we put up in our backyards as a reminder of the booths our ancestors built at the harvest time, and as a further reminder of the 40 years of wandering they did in the Wilderness of Sinai between leaving Egyptian slavery and arriving in the Promised Land, is a true story.   

This Sukkos story involves my grandfather on my mom's side, my Zaidie Lou, who was famous for never throwing anything out, ever.  When he and my Bubbie Dora moved out to California in 1948 or so he took along a multitude of glass jars filled with screws, bolts, nuts, and washers.  And he took the chains you need to attach storm windows for the winter--not realizing that storm windows are not exactly a staple of life in Los Angeles.  

Anyway, one year my Zaidie Lou and my dad were putting up the Sukkah in the backyard.  Neither one was exactly a precise builder, but they both worked with great enthusiasm.  They had the Sukkah pretty much built out of old plywood, scraps of two by fours and leftover wooden crates.  It wasn't much to see, but they were very proud of it and were stepping back to admire it, when they noticed that it was not just a Tabernacle, but a lean-to, and it was leaning alright, way over to the left.  My Zaidie Lou and my dad stood back, sweating, and looked at the sloping Sukkah. 

"Well, if we had some way to pull it back to the right, maybe it would be OK for Sukkos," my dad suggested. "We could throw something over the apricot tree and pull it straight."

And my Zaidie Lou said, "I've got just the thing in the garage."  So he went in and rummaged around in a garage full of those glass jars of screws, bolts, and washers imported from East Coast; and he found just what he needed--the chains from the New Jersey storm windows that had traveled three thousand miles to California. 

So my Zaidie Lou and my dad slung the big chains over a branch of the apricot tree, and then attached it to the right side of the Sukkah; and then my dad pulled on it, and the Sukkah indeed lurched over to the right--just a little too far to be called straight. 

"Oy," Zaide Lou said. "Maybe if we throw the other chain over the left side from the Sukkah, we could straighten it out that way."   And so the second storm window chain went over the apricot tree, and around the left side of the Sukkah; and my Zaide Lou pulled on that chain, and the Sukkah pulled back left--again, a little too far to be centered.  So my dad pulled on his window chain, and the makeshift Sukkah moved right, and then my Zaide Lou pulled on his window chain and the Sukkah moved left, and so on as they tried to even out their great Tabernacle.  Back and forth, back and forth went the Sukkah seesaw...

Meanwhile, my mom's mother, Bubbie Dora, had come outside to watch the proceedings.  She stood quietly, wiping her hands on her apron, viewing the spectacle.  Finally she spoke, in Yiddish--"Sholom Aleichem is geshtorben far der tzeit"--the great Yiddish humorist Sholom Aleichem died too young—he should only have lived to see this! 

You know, usually people associate the Jewish calendar month of Tishrei with the fall holidays, but in truth this period started well before that, in the last weeks of the month of Elul.  Just to recap the experience of this time of extraordinary activity in our young synagogue, the season commenced with Selichot eight days before Rosh HaShanah, about a month ago, and has run through Rosh Hashanah, Tashlich, Yom Kippur, and now Sukkot to get us here. It is a time in which Jewish events and rituals follow each other with startling speed and in very close proximity. 

I remember when I was working my way through UCLA serving as a very part-time cantor on weekends and holidays.  My fraternity, AEPi, like all fraternities at UCLA then, had meetings every Monday night.  One fall the schedule was much like ours this year, and in the way the holidays occurred I ended up missing the Monday meetings because I was conducting festival services each Monday for about a month.  The guys in the fraternity gave me a very hard time and claimed I was inventing new holidays each week just so I could miss meetings…  what was the name of that holiday again, Cohon?  Shemini Atzeret?  Do they have medication for that? 

Well, look, any excuse to miss a meeting is a good thing, of course, but it was all legitimate.  They are all real Jewish holidays, honest.

Now each of these holidays has its high points.  In fact, every Jewish holy day has its fine features, and each has its supporters. 

But the one thing I am sure of is that there is not one single Jew for whom Shemini Atzeret is his or her favorite Jewish holiday.  Simchat Torah, maybe; but not Shemini Atzeret.

So, what’s your favorite Jewish holiday?  For many people it’s Passover, in spite of having to eat matzah—lots of friends and family, rituals and traditions and food and freedom.  Many of us love Chanukah, especially children, with its great music and candles and magical quality of the miraculous.  Some like Purim best; lots of folks mention Simchas Torah with its celebrations; others prefer Shabbat, for its regularity and rest.  Many Jews will mention Rosh HaShanah, with the drama of the shofar; some even like Yom Kippur, best, believe it or not, with the gorgeous Kol Nidrei melody and the sense of deep holiness and personal growth.  Shavuot gets a little bit of play from fans of cheesecake—the food, that is.  And once in a while you find a person who, like me and Sophie, thinks that Sukkot is the loveliest, most pleasant of Jewish festivals. 

But never have I heard anyone say, “You know, the best Jewish holiday is Shemini Atzeret; I just couldn’t live with myself if I missed that one.  The prayer for rain really gets me every time…”

And you know, that’s kind of a shame.  Because Shemini Atzeret combines the themes that all the other fall holidays highlight, and it does so in a way that can connect us with the messages of each of those festivals meaningfully.   And as close as it falls to the conclusion of the fall festival endurance contest, Shemini Atzeret serves to carry the meanings of this great season into the eleven months still to come.

Shemini Atzeret, the 8th day of assembly, in a ritual sense is nearly as holy as Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, and it includes Yizkor, the prayers of memorial and remembrance that Yom Kippur incorporates; it is part of the great Thanksgiving festival of Sukkot, and so connects us with the natural world and the great concept of gratitude that is at the heart of religious living; and it has some of the joy of the festival of Simchat Torah, the celebrations that carry with them the simchah shel mitzvah into the non-holiday world that will follow for the next eight weeks of the Jewish year.

In a way, Shemini Atzeret is the most covenantal of all the fall festivals.  At its heart is a ritual that is both agricultural and liturgical: the prayer for rain, Geshem. Sung in a unique melody, the prayer for rain enunciates the depth and beauty of the brit, the covenantal partnership we share with God for the maintenance and stewardship of the natural world.

So, after praising Shemini Atzeret, which we will celebrate on Tuesday morning at services, I have to add one more festival note about this time of year.  In the time when the Temple stood in Jerusalem, an additional holiday was celebrated during Sukkot.  It was called Simcha beit haSho’eivah, the water drawing celebration, and it included some remarkable rituals of its own.  Each morning of Sukkot, the priests went to the pool of Shiloach (Silwan) just outside the western side of the city of Jerusalem to fill a golden flask. Shofar blasts greeted their arrival at the Temple’s Water Gate. They then ascended and poured the water so that it flowed over the altar in the Temple simultaneously with wine being poured from another bowl.  The Talmud recorded that “one who had never witnessed the Rejoicing at the Place of the Water Drawing had never seen true joy in his life.”

It describes the festivities in detail, from the lighting of immense menorah set in the Temple courtyard (each section of it held gallons of oil and was fit with wicks made from priests’ worn‑out vestments), which generated such intense light that they illuminated every courtyard in the city. A Levite orchestra of flutes, trumpets, harps, and cymbals accompanied torchlight processions, and men who had earned the capacity for real spiritual joy through their purity, character and scholarship danced ecstatically to the hand‑clapping, foot-stomping, and hymn‑singing crowds.

We do not imagine our distinguished sages as acrobats and tumblers, but they were often agile physically as well as mentally: Rabbi Simon ben Gamaliel juggled eight lighted torches and raised himself into a handstand on two fingers, a gymnastic feat no one else could master. Others juggled eight knives, eight glasses of wine, or eight eggs before leaders and dignitaries.

At dawn, as the rejoicing subsided, the priests enacted what some have identified as the transformation of another folk rite, one to rekindle a diminishing sun approaching the autumnal equinox. With trumpet blasts, the Kohanim (priests) descended the steps to the Women’s Court, marched to the Eastern Gate, turned their faces west to the Temple, and proclaimed, “Our fathers who were in this place stood with their backs to the Temple and their faces eastward and worshipped the sun, but our eyes are unto the Lord.”

It must have really been something.  In a way, our Simchat Torah celebrations replace what was the most joyous day of our ancestor’s year.

In Biblical times, both the First and Second Temples were dedicated on Sukkot, at this exact time of year.  It was a time of great dedication to religious inspiration, thanksgiving, joy and gratitude.  Similarly, we have this one final festival period in which we can renew our commitment to live in sacred, covenantal partnership with God. 

If we can do that, the fine potential of this early year holiday season will be realized in a year of goodness and blessing and holiness and joy.  All sukkahs, all Sukkot, must eventually come down, and not all great beginnings lead to ultimate success.  But we do know with certainty that if we can maintain and continually renew our focus on the sacred, we may earn the merit of our own good beginning to this 5782 year—and may it be a much, much better year, filled with health, and success, and many reasons for thanksgiving for all of us.

Shabbat Shalom—and Moadim l’simcha, chagim uzmanim l’sason.

Chag Sameiach!

Not Doing What Comes Naturally

Jonah 5782

Rabbi Sam Cohon, Congregation Beit Simcha, Tucson, AZ 

So, let’s just say someone asks you to do something you don’t want to do.  It happens to all of us regularly, doesn’t it?  What’s your typical response?

If you are a normal Jewish person, with the usual Jewish neuroses, you immediately feel guilty for not wanting to do it in the first place.  I mean, you don’t really want to do it, but you know that you should do it, right? 

Yes, people are always asking you to do things you don’t want to do, and you know it’s the right thing to do what they ask.  You are a mature, responsible person, and others can count on you.

Still, you don’t want to do it… so what if you just don’t do it?  Wouldn’t that be a relief?  Maybe you can just avoid the whole thing.

But then, your sense of responsibility wells up in you, and is accompanied by the usual sensations that accompany guilt—a hollow feeling in the pit of your stomach, a nagging sense you aren’t being the person you should be, a queasy prickling that you are letting someone down—and you start to tackle your resistance to doing what you have been asked to do.

I really should do it, shouldn’t I?  I really have to do it, don’t I?  But I really, really don’t want to.

Oy.  It’s enough to cause high blood pressure, isn’t it?  Or at least a significant stress reaction.  Maybe even a minor rash. 

Do you do that act, even though you don’t want to do it?

But let’s also say the thing you are asked to do is especially unpleasant, and will definitely result in damage to your reputation, possibly forever.  It’s not unethical—far from that, it’s clearly the right thing to do—but it’s not going to make you look good, either.  It’s potentially painful, difficult, challenging in the extreme.  In fact, you are certain to look bad doing it, and probably get some important people really angry with you besides.

Would you do it then?  Or would you head in the opposite direction?

I’ve often thought about Jonah exactly this way.  At the start of the book that Natalie is going to read today, Jonah is given a decidedly unpleasant job to do.  He is called on to tell the most powerful men in the world that they are acting badly and must change or be destroyed.  He is asked—actually, ordered—to speak truth to power, to try to convince the leaders of the world’s greatest superpower that they are doing the wrong things and have to change.  Talk about a thankless task.

There are two ways Jonah can envision this thing going.  One possibility is incredibly unlikely: the people he is tasked with fixing will actually listen to him, and quickly reform completely.  If that actually happens, he will look like a false prophet, a failure at his own profession.  He is told to predict doom, and instead life will go on with no sign of destruction or devastation. Jonah will lose his status as a successful prophet. 

The second way it might go is that the powerful people he is told to predict destruction and devastation for will simply, well, kill him, or at least lock him up.  Which would mean that when the annihilation he predicts hits the bad guys he will be swept away as well.

Two options: complete professional and personal humiliation or, well, violent death.  Bad 1 and bad 1A.

Now that’s a truly totally thankless task.

Imagine you were in his spot.  Picture yourself being told to go to Washington, DC to tell the president and his cabinet that their behavior was terrible and needed to completely reform.  I don’t care which recent president you picture yourself addressing this way—use your imagination—but I’m pretty certain it wouldn’t go well.  “Mr. President, you are all going to be destroyed in three days because your behavior stinks.” 

That’s assuming you could even get through the cordon of security services that keep you from getting close to him.  If you didn’t end up in a prison cell somewhere along the way or placed in a locked ward in a mental health facility.  Not a good situation.

Poor Jonah.  He is faced with a terrible choice.  And so, he does what a lot of us would do.  When looking at a situation with two awful options, he picks what’s behind door number three.  Jonah runs away.

Or at least he tries to.  He heads out and gets on a boat going as far away as possible. 

He would not be the first person to run from a bad assignment.  He won’t prove to be the last. 

But he’s the one we remember.  Part of that, of course, is because of the fish-tale quality of the story.  As the saying goes, Jonah is a whale of a tale. 

You will hear the famous story again in a moment.  When Jonah is called by God flees to the local port, and takes ship—not to Nineveh, the capital of Assyria, super-empire of the ancient world.  That would be in the opposite direction.  No, he’s headed anywhere but Nineveh, in today’s Mosul, Iraq.  Instead, Jonah jumps on a cargo ship to go as far from there as he can get, to Tarshish, somewhere in the Mediterranean. 

You know the rest of the story; the brutal storm, the sailors praying to their gods, Jonah sleeping peacefully through it all in his cabin, the sailors reluctantly tossing the reluctant prophet into the waves at his own insistence, the big fish, the eventual journey to Nineveh, the great metropolis of evil.  You can run from God but you can’t hide, and sooner or later you have to face the music and do your job.

And of course, it all turns out one of the ways that Jonah had predicted: he proclaims destruction, and shockingly all the evil denizens of the worst city in the world suddenly reform.  Everyone is saved, but Jonah’s reputation as a predictive prophet is permanently shot.

He has, in the end, done what he was supposed to do.  And he has paid the professional price.  And boy, is he ticked off at God, who gave him this thankless task in the first place.  To make things worse, God hangs around with him afterwards and lectures him, like a Jewish mother or father; did you really think I should kill everyone in this city just so you would look better in the prophet ratings on Google?

So, what do we learn from Jonah?

Look, we all have jobs to do we don’t relish.  We all find ourselves in situations where we are asked to do things we would rather not do.  We all have responsibilities to fulfill, prices to pay, grown-up requirements that force us to be adults and take on tasks that are far from what we wish we could be doing with our time.

Fortunately, few of us are asked to wade into the deep waters that Jonah had to navigate.  None of us will have a great fish swallow us and dump us back where we can make good on our assigned roles. But all of us face smaller, similar dilemmas.

Yom Kippur reminds us that responsibility is part of our heritage, that we are obligated to do what we are truly commanded to do: live lives that are good, if not always happy; but the kind of people who do what they are asked to do, who hold up their ends of the bargain, who come through when they are needed.

Jonah teaches this in an antique, archaic, allegoric way.  But Jonah brings that lesson to heart on this holiest afternoon of the year: we are good people, and if wish to live as such, we have obligations to fulfill, work to do, miles to go before we sleep.

We are taught early on in Pirkei Avot: “Be not like servants who work for the sake of reward; be like servants who work without regard for the reward.”  That is, do the right thing, whether or not you benefit from it.

Kent Keith wrote a series of paradoxical commandments.  They are a good way to remind us of what Jonah forgot:

People are illogical, unreasonable, and self-centered.

Love them anyway.

If you do good, people will accuse you of selfish ulterior motives.

Do good anyway.

If you are successful, you will win false friends and true enemies.

Succeed anyway.

The good you do today will be forgotten tomorrow.

Do good anyway.

Honesty and frankness make you vulnerable.

Be honest and frank anyway.

The biggest men and women with the biggest ideas can be shot down by the smallest men and women with the smallest minds. Think big anyway.

People favor underdogs but follow only top dogs.

Fight for a few underdogs anyway.

What you spend years building may be destroyed overnight.

Build anyway.

People really need help but may attack you if you do help them.

Help people anyway.

Give the world the best you have and you'll get kicked in the teeth.

Give the world the best you have anyway.

On this afternoon of Yom Kippur, may we remember to act as we should, to learn from Jonah that fleeing responsibility does not solve anything, and live in this still new year to the best that we have within us.

Love and Fear

Yom Kippur Day Sermon 5782 Rabbi Sam Cohon Congregation Beit Simcha

My favorite Yom Kippur authority this year is apparently comedian Steven Wright. He says, “Right now I'm having amnesia and déjà vu at the same time.  I think I've forgotten this before.”   

I always feel that way on Yom Kippur.  I think I’ve forgotten this before.  I’m pretty sure I made some vows 12 months ago, and I did it each year before that, and yet when the time came to do some things differently, by God, I’m pretty sure I even forgot what it was I was supposed to change.  I’ll bet it’s the same for you.

How did I get here, again, having made the same mistakes, again, and having forgotten the same important personal insights—again.  And why am I trying to fix myself in a sort of blind rush over 25 hours of fasting, prayer, music, and atonement—again?

Over this holy day we will confess to many diverse sins, and admit to a complex variety of transgressions both collective and individual.  While Judaism emphasizes that all teshuvah, all repentance, is based on action, the heart of the problem may be a little more global than that.  For if our problems were really just a matter of changing a few behaviors, you would think that all the years of Kol Nidrei and confessions we have experienced, and all the resolutions over all the High Holy Days, would actually have affected some significant change.

And yet, stubbornly, our problems remain.  Each year, we seem to have forgotten the same things all over again…  

The old US Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles once said, “the measure of success is not whether you have a tough problem to deal with, but whether you had the same problem last year.”  By that standard, we are failing—all of us.

So perhaps the problem is a little deeper seated than mere behavior.  Maybe there is an attitude adjustment we need to contemplate.  After all, this déjà vu amnesia isn’t likely to stop if we just keep doing the same things.  If we don’t look at how we feel inside, at how we really are looking at the world and ourselves, we aren’t likely to make the kind of changes that might get us out of this fix.

 And I think most of us really do want to make some changes for the better.  But how?  Is it even possible to do so over Yom Kippur?

 You know, I see Yom Kippur as a kind of destination resort in reverse.  Destination resorts are those all-inclusive places that labor long and hard to create a comprehensive environment for your whole experience there: décor, landscaping, food, recreation, service, everything.  Well, Yom Kippur incorporates a reverse destination resort: all of the suffering and introspection we never really wanted to do, combined with fasting, thirst, and long sermons—all wrapped up in one, all-inclusive package.  And just like most destination resorts, within a couple of weeks—or even days—of leaving the resort and going home, the effects wear off. 

 The ironic part is, we are here for Yom Kippur in what is supposed to be the perfect environment for repentance, remorse, even transformation.  And yet each year we have to work hard just to change the same things.

 So why can’t we change, really change?  What holds us back? 

 Perhaps it’s because, at heart, for most of us the effects of repentance are based on a combination of guilt—and, most importantly, fear.

It has to do with our outlook on life, and on the world.  It has to do with the difference between love and fear.

We know one of these emotions very well, but I’m not so sure we really know the other one at all.  The emotion we know well is fear.  The emotion we don’t know well at all—well, that’s love.

In the Babylonian Talmud, the tractate on Yom Kippur, Masechet Yoma, there is an interchange on exactly this subject.  Rabbi Hama bar Haninah says, “Great is repentance, for it brings healing the whole world”; and to prove it, he quotes the prophet Hosea saying “I will heal their backsliding; I will love them freely—Erpah m’shuvatam ohaveim n’davah…”  That is, if we repent our sins, God will bring us back in full healing, and give us truly unconditional love.  But then the Talmud quotes the same Rabbi Hama bar Haninah also saying, quoting Jeremiah, “Return, you backsliding children, Shuvu vanim shovavim—and I will heal your backsliding.”  In other words, if you return, I will heal you.  But there he makes no mention of loving us at all.

The Talmud resolves this subtle contradiction: in the first case, the good rabbi is referring to teshuva mei’ahavah— repentance through love. In the second case, he is addressing teshuvah mei’yirah, repentance through fear. 

Repentance thorough fear, fear-repentance, we know best. Its cold fingers are all over the Machzor. We find it in dozens of prayers throughout Yom Kippur—most famously in the Unetaneh tokef prayer, “Who shall live and who shall die?  Who shall die by strangling and who by stoning, who by thirst and who by hunger, who by warfare and who by pandemic?”  This is the message, “Repent, the day before your death—and tomorrow you may die!”  We will still be chanting words of teshuvah meiyirah, of fear-repentance, come Nei’ilah late this afternoon: “What are we? What is our life? What is our goodness? What is our righteousness? What is our power? What is our strength?  What shall we say before You? Are not the mightiest like nothing before You and the men of renown as though they were not?"  This kind of Teshuvah is motivated by the profound fear of our own mortality, our own limitation and weakness.  We are but flesh and blood…

The truth is that most of us are motivated primarily by our fears.  We get work done out of the fear of failure.  We do it well out of a fear of embarrassment.  We hide our sins and errors because we are afraid of exposure.  We spend most of our lives looking over our shoulders at something large gaining on us—and that thing is a manifestation of fear.  It is fear that drives most of us to succeed. 

We see this in small, petty things as well as larger, more meaningful ones.  We drive our cars only just a little over the posted limit out of fear of speeding tickets.  We file our taxes out of fear of the IRS.  We wear masks and get vaccinated out of the fear of COVID-19.  We change our diets out of fear of heart attacks or strokes or cancer—or obesity.  We install security systems out of fear of intruders.  We make many of the choices that affect our lives out of a fundamental emotion of fear.

Some fears are, of course irrational.  I’m reminded of Jerry Seinfeld’s comment that, according to studies, the number one fear in America is public speaking.  The number two fear is death. Which means that at a funeral, most people would rather be in the coffin than doing the eulogy…

Some of those irrational fears impact our lives, of course.  Some of us choose not to travel to Israel because we are afraid that bad things will happen to us, although no tourist has ever been injured by an attack.  Some of us fail to take advantage of opportunities that present themselves because we are simply afraid.

Of course, fear can seem beneficial at times.  Fear helps us limit the things we shouldn’t be doing in he first place—out of fear of exposure, or embarrassment, or humiliation.  Sometimes we limit ourselves out of the fear of the loss of relationships or status.  Fear as a motivation can be powerful.

But fear is also temporary. What we fear in the moment can be swallowed up by other, quite different fears.  Our fear of shame may be overturned by our fear of poverty.  Our fear of embarrassment can be overcome by our fear of loss of status.  Our fear of doing the wrong thing can be outweighed by our fear of being rejected and our need to be accepted by a group.

And fear also fades away in the absence of direct consequences.  When we get away with sins or transgressions we lose our fear of punishment or loss.  When we do things we shouldn’t do repeatedly, or don’t do what we should for a period of time, we gradually lose our fear of misconduct.

Space and time, too, lessen fear.  A frightening moment becomes less so over time.  It’s like those flashing red lights in the rear view mirror: in the moment they frighten us, perhaps even change our driving habits for a while.  Why, we might even slow down for a week or two.  But over time, we lose that fear.  Otherwise, we would need far fewer traffic police, and they would need only ticket each driver once in a lifetime.

It’s like that in here, too.  When we leave the sanctuary, the pressure to atone and seek forgiveness diminishes in direct proportion to our distance.  When you are enjoying a break-the-fast tonight, the moments of introspection and self probing will seem much less immediate than they will when you are hungry and thirsty and tired this afternoon. 

Fear motivates everyone, to some degree—fear of embarrassment, fear of being wrong, fear of failure, fear of being refused. Sometimes even fear of success.   Fear motivates—but erratically, and with rapidly diminishing returns.  And fear can also paralyze us.  Where real transformation is required, fear of change often prevents any movement at all.

Fear is based partly on experience, and partly on, well, just fear.  It is an emotion that has a life of its own.  As Franklin Roosevelt said during the Depression, “we have nothing to fear but fear itself.”

I’ve always wondered at that famous line.  After all, at that time, America faced many things that were exceedingly frightening— unemployment of 30-40%, the Dust Bowl, starvation on the streets, the rise of Fascism and Naziism in Europe, fanatics at home on both sides seeking revolution—a whole host of very real things to fear.  There was a lot to fear beside fear itself.

And yet it turned out that we could overcome all those problems, and many more—provided we weren’t paralyzed by our fears.  Provided we didn’t lock ourselves into a system of conduct that couldn’t change because of the habits perpetuated by fear.  Provided we could learn from our mistakes, and change, and transform in ways that fear didn’t restrict.

On a personal level, Teshuvah meiyirah, repentance through fear, surely has a place in Jewish tradition, and in our lives.  It is recognized as an important form of return, and the one that most of us can actually do.  If we repent through fear—and I would associate guilt with fear, as well, a profound form of Jewish motivation that is also based on fear—then God will heal us, the Talmud says, at least in the moment.  Fear-repentance is good enough, just as fear is a good enough motivator to keep us from severe transgressions—most of the time.  For a while.

But what if there was a different way?

What if there was a path, an approach to life that did not require fear.  That came instead out of love?

Teshuvah mei’ahavah, repentance through love, is the process our tradition recommends—indeed, celebrates.  Love-repentance is the teshuvah that remakes everything: if repentance through fear can heal the individual, repentance through love can heal the world, Rabbi Judah says.  It is repentance through love that our sages extol when they explain that repentance brings about redemption, that repentance turns premeditated sins into small errors; ultimately, in Rabbi Meir’s words, so great is repentance through love that on account of a single individual who repents that way all the world’s many sins are forgiven! 

What kind of repentance is that, the Talmud asks?  Only true teshvuah me’ahavah, repentance through love.

There is, however, a problem. Repentance through fear, fear-repentance, fear in general, we are well acquainted with.  But just what is repentance through love, love-repentance?

Repentance through love is something quite different.  The process is different, and the results can be quite different.

Repentance through love is based on making a profound commitment, a true change of attitude.  But if we can do it—if you can do it, if I can do it—perhaps next year we will have accomplished the transformative change we seek, and when we meet again on Kol Nidrei night we won’t have to face the exact same problem. 

So how does this process work?  How do we start?

First, decide that there are things in your life that need to change.  We all know we aren’t perfect.  Not me—not even you!  What is there that you really need to fix?  What relationship in your life is damaged and in need of repair?  What part of your personality is destructive and should be modified?

Don’t judge or condemn yourself.  Simply admit—no, confirm—that you need to change something important.  Don’t choose twenty things about yourself you don’t like, or that need fixing.  Teshuvah is powerful, but it’s not a panacea for all that ails you.  Choose one, or perhaps two relationships or issues in your life that need to be changed substantially. 

Now—and this is the heart of the matter—think about what it is you truly love.  Who do you really love?  What matters most to you?  What do you really value above all else?

So, what do you love?  Deciding this can take some time—or no time at all.  For most of us, we really do love our family members.  We love some of our friends.  We love some places, and some ideas. Find those people and those things, get them in mind, and keep them there.

Next, decide to commit to what you love.  Really commit to it.  To make it the most important thing in your life.  Because the truth is, it is the most important thing in your life.  Make that love, that ahavah, the source of the strength you need to change.  Because when you make that choice to commit to what you love, to truly commit, then change is easy.  When we make that commitment, to love, we also make a commitment to change what needs to be changed for the sake of that love.

Choose to make what you love the most important thing in your life, and act as though that were true.  Do not be distracted from that course.  Simply make that your most important priority.  Make that the heart of your actions.  Make the truth of that love the guide for your actions.

Next—and this is interesting, and paradoxical—next, in the prophet’s words, al tira, have no fear. For change through love, teshuvah mei’ahavah, requires that you free yourself of the fear of failure, of the paralyzing aspects of fear.  If you act with complete commitment to what you love you will not fail.  The changes you make may have unexpected outcomes—often, very good ones—but the very changes themselves will be for the good.  Change through love means starting fresh—simply choosing to act through love, to open yourself to God and to those people and things you love—and so to find the best in yourself and others.  It means choosing love over habit, commitment over transgression, choosing to change for the sake of the love that you are dedicated to.

When the Talmud tells us that love-repentance changes intentional sins into benign mistakes, it means that we have the capacity, by acting through committed love, to transform the error separating us from others into a good that brings us together—into holiness, and blessing. 

And now the really great part about this: if you choose to change, decide what you love, truly commit to that love, and start to make changes based on that love—then God will instantly help.

Erpah m’shuvatam—ohaveim n’davah, the prophet Hosea has God promise—I will heal them from their backsliding; I will love them freely.  When they choose to come back to me in love, I will heal them and love them unconditionally, for who they are now.  Or, as the Talmud says, if you come to repentance through love, if you choose to change because of love, you will be healed, and God’s own love will bring you to true transformation. More or less, it’s as easy as that.

When you make the decision to change your attitude, and begin to change your behavior, you will find that you are no longer shackled by routine or imprisoned by habit.  You will find that the changes you seek come quickly, powerfully, almost easily.

You will find that you are changing almost without effort.  That you are becoming someone who is just a little different.  A little more loving.  A little more open.  A little better.  A little holier. 

Want to fix your life?  Fear can work.  But love—love can transform. 

Poet Michael Leunig explains that:

There are only two feelings. Love and fear.

There only two languages.  Love and fear.

There are only two activities. Love and fear.

There are only two motives, two procedures, two frameworks,

two results.

Love and fear.  Love and fear.

The purpose of Yom Kippur is personal transformation, changing who we are and how we do things in one intense and purposeful day.  We can do it by fear.  But if we are to truly change, if we are to become the people we wish to be, if we are to fulfill God’s wishes and dreams for us, than we must seek to change through love.

 On this holiest day of the year, I pray that you are able to admit you need to change through love, discover what you truly love, and commit to that love—and that over this Day of Atonement you thus come to find your own teshuvah mei’ahavah, your repentance through love, your love-repentance.  For if you can do that, you will also find that you bring yourself to a year of goodness, and blessing, and life.

May God bless your work on this Yom Kippur, freely, and in love. 

G’mar Chatimah Tovah: may you be sealed in the book of life for a good year!

Lost and Found on Yom Kippur

Sermon Kol Nidrei Eve 5782

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

G’mar Chatimah Tovah. The wonderful poet Samuel Menashe wrote,  

Always

When I was a boy

I lost things—

I am still

Forgetful—

Yet I daresay

All will be found

One day.

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

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

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

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

Because boy, this year, we lost a lot, and just when it looked like we were going to find it all again the Delta Variant came along and we are again afraid of losing what we had started to recover.  In the past year, since last Yom Kippur, we have lost so much: time with loved ones, celebrations, group mourning, theater and concerts and sports events in person, graduations, bar mitzvahs, weddings, travel, hugs, kisses, watching our kids grow and mature.

And our children and grandchildren—what about what they have lost? 

I have a son, Gabe, who graduated college without ceremony or family or friends or, mostly, gifts.  I have a daughter whose freshman and theoretical sophomore years of college were essentially obliterated.  I’ve told you about weddings postponed, funerals and unveilings moved, Seders Zoomed instead of celebrated, family holiday gatherings cancelled.  You could all tell me about the same kinds of things, losses experienced over the past year, can’t you?

Perhaps the worst is the students who lost most of a year of education and are looking at online experiences again this time.  The statistics on academic performance aren’t so happy: by all accounts kids have accomplished between 40% and 60% of the progress they would have been expected to achieve in a typical year.  It wasn’t a lost year—our own Beit Simcha Religious School students’ accomplishments demonstrate that, including our four students who were confirmed last May in our first Confirmation class—but it wasn’t a banner educational year, by any stretch of the imagination.

And in a very different sense, we have lost other things this year.  We have, to some degree or another, lost a bit of our Judaism.

Some of us couldn’t or didn’t attend services at all last year.  Now, to be totally honest, some years I see people I know well at Rosh HaShanah and I expect that I will have seen them most recently at the previous Yom Kippur—that is, from shofar call to shofar call they are, well, a bit lost to attendance at shul.  But this year that wasn’t really what was going on at all.  No, this time, when I didn’t see people from one High Holy Days to the next, or even from well before the High Holy Days until now, there was a quite different reason.  And the idea of having lost something valuable, a piece of community, that was a shared experience for many of us.

We became, in a very real way, lost Jews.  We are, in a real way now, lost Jews.  We are lost Jews because we have all lost something precious this past year. 

But tonight we all have the opportunity to begin to look for it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Some of us just feel lost…

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

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

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

What is it that you have lost?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Well, no…” mumbles the poor clerk.

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

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

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

Indeed.

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

What they needed was a Stone of Losses.

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

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

Maybe we’ve been looking in the wrong place for what we have lost.

In truth, the right place to look for what you have lost is right here, and right now—on Yom Kippur, at our own Stone of Losses.

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

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

I search

for what I have not lost.  

For you, of course.

I would stop

if I knew how.

I would stand

at the Stone of Losses

and proclaim,

shouting:

Forgive me.

I’ve troubled you for nothing.

All the identifying marks I gave you…

were never mine.

I swear by my life,

by this stone in the heart of Jerusalem,

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

Be kind to me;

I didn’t mean to mock you.

I know there are people here

--wretched, ill-fated—

who have lost their worlds

in moments of truth.

And I search

for what I have not lost…

“At the Stone of Losses”, by T. Carmi 

Kol Nidrei Eve marks the beginning of a quest, a search for t’shuvah, repentance.  Most of all, tonight, we are each looking for something precious that we have lost.  Only you know what it is that you lost and would like to reclaim—what it is that you need to reclaim, in order to return to the best that is within you, in order to make Teshuvah to the person you are meant to be. 

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

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

Yom Kippur is our even ha’to’in, our own Stone of Losses, our Stone of Error, our Stone of finding.  It is our moral lodestone, the magnetically charged rock that draws everything to it; the rock of our return.  This is the time and place where we can begin to come back and find what we have lost.  The best in our value system; the best in ourselves; the best in our hearts.

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

Now we know where to look.

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

Help us to recover our optimism about life.

Help us find our best selves.

Help us reclaim our childlike wonder.

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

Help us reignite our idealism.

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

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

Help us find You.

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

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

You’re Too Sensitive

Kol Nidrei Opening 5782, Rabbi Sam Cohon, Beit Simcha, Tucson, AZ

My friend Rabbi Bob Alper reposted a comic of his for this Yom Kippur.  Rabbi Alper is the only full-time stand-up comedian who is actually an ordained rabbi now that Jackie Mason, alav haShalom, passed away last summer, and he was the star of one of our first-ever fundraisers for Congregation Beit Simcha back in 2019.  Rabbi Alper’s comic on Facebook today showed a rabbi standing in front of his congregation on Kol Nidrei Eve.  The rabbi says, “And in the spirit of Yom Kippur, if there is anything I have said or done in the past year that has hurt or offended you, I say, ‘You are too sensitive.’”

OK, really, that’s not how it works.  Rabbi Alper entitled this comic, “A rabbi’s fantasy,” and while it is not exactly my personal fantasy, he does play on the fact that we all need forgiveness, even rabbis.  You see, we make the same mistakes everyone else makes.

A true story.  I was driving to Beit Simcha a week ago Monday night, going in early for Rosh HaShanah Evening services, our first High Holy Days with something like full attendance in two years.  I was tense, as I habitually am around the High Holy Days, and distractedly glanced at my phone to see if I had any texts relating to the services coming up in about an hour.  On and off over the days before Rosh HaShanah people had been emailing and texting and calling about services, about joining Beit Simcha, about signing on for the Facebook Live feed, about blowing shofar, or checking on the many details involved in creating services for the Yamim Nora’im. 

I was just past La Canada going west on Ina Road when I suddenly saw flashing red lights behind me and realized a County Sheriff was pulling me over.  For once, I wasn’t speeding, nor I had I cut anyone off or changed lanes suddenly.  Bad timing, definitely, but what had I done wrong?

“What’s wrong officer?  I wasn’t speeding.” I said.

And he answered.  “I want you to tell me the truth.  Were you on your phone?” 

“I wasn’t on my phone,” I answered, which was, at best, a half-truth.  I hadn’t been talking on my phone, or actively texting, but I had been looking at it to see what messages had come in.

“Alright,” he answered gruffly, “I wanted to give you a chance to tell me the truth.  I saw you had your phone in your hand.  I was going to let you off with a warning, but now please give me your license and registration and insurance information.”

“But I wasn’t on my phone,” I stupidly insisted, and started to rummage in my glove box for the registration and insurance paperwork.  And I muttered, “I’m a rabbi going to temple to conduct High Holy Day services…”

And he said, “I know who you are. Your son went to elementary school with my son.  I know you.  We all do it, you know, the phone while driving.  I’ll ask you again: Were you on your phone?”

“I guess I was,” I said, sheepishly, “I looked to see if someone had texted me.”

“Well, that’s what I wanted to hear.  Don’t do it.  It’s dangerous and you should know better.”

And then he handed me back my license and registration and insurance.  And I put my phone away.

L’Shana Tovah. And thank you, Officer Guerrero.

It’s not a perfect story, and it certainly doesn’t make me look good, but it’s pretty accurate, isn’t it?  There I was, caught red-handed doing what everyone does, even though it’s illegal.  And I still denied I had done it.

I wonder if anyone else has ever had that experience?  Have you ever just flat-out denied doing something wrong that was patently obvious to everyone else?  And then, did you, by any chance, do it again?

In a way, Yom Kippur is here to remind us that we are all human.  We all make mistakes, we all commit violations, we all err.  And, at times, we all deny we have done exactly that.

Well, tonight is the time when truth telling is supposed to replace that kind of denial.  Kol Nidrei is the flashing red lights behind us, telling us it’s time to put away the phone, pick up the Machzor, and work on our teshuvha, our repentance.  It’s the reminder that no matter how human we are, we can be honest about ourselves, our lives, our experiences, our faults.  May your own repentance prove to be sincere and honest.  And may you be sealed in the book of life for a good year.

What We Owe: 9 11 after Twenty Years

 Sermon Shabbat Shuvah 5782, 20th Anniversary of 9/11

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

Tomorrow we will commemorate the 20th anniversary of 9/11, a somber and terrible day in American history and one that has profound implications for the entire world.  It’s hard to grasp that it has been two full decades since that tragic terrorist attack, and it’s astonishing to realize that with the withdrawal from Afghanistan last month we only ended our last American involvement in wars that originated with 9/11 after 20 years of killing, dying, torture and maiming.  It has been a complicated twenty years, hasn’t it?

As a rabbi I chaired the commemorations of 9/11 for the Multi-Faith Alliance for many years, including through a complex 10th Anniversary series of events.  I watched as the initial energy waned over the years, as new tragedies and historical events replaced our memories of that horrible day.  Eventually, it became clear that annual commemorations that didn’t take place in New York were of less and less interest to people.  Life moves on, and shocking tragedies continue to occur that obscure our memories of past disasters. 

Yet somehow, in this season of pandemic fears and confusion, 9/11 reemerges now as a kind of historical curiosity.  Remember where you were when it happened?  I certainly do.  Questions like that can bring 9/11 back home emotionally.  But I wonder: what have we really learned over these two decades?  What do those shockingly collapsed towers, that failed attack on the Capitol, the damage to the Pentagon mean, the heroism on that plane in Pennsylvania, what do they mean to us now? 

We lost more people on 9/11 than died at Pearl Harbor.  The 20-year-long war against terrorism has, at the least, kept another such event from occurring here in America—but it certainly didn’t stop the creation of the Islamic State terror regime of ISIS, or the Taliban reconquest of Afghanistan, or the Charlie Hedbo attack, or many other terrible things from happening.

I think of my own children, whom I schlepped to annual 9/11 memorials every year of their childhood; only my oldest can remember that day, and he was just 6 years old at the time.  What will my kids take as the lesson to learn from 9/11?

We Americans aren’t very good at serious introspection as a nation. But if I were to pray for anything on this day before the 20th anniversary of 9/11, and I will, it would be for us to seriously look back and consider what we might have done differently in response.  And to try to grasp the lessons of 9/11 for this changing world in a more serious and profound way.

After all, this is 20th Anniversary of 9/11 falls on Shabbat Shuvah, the Sabbath of Return, or perhaps better, the Shabbat of self-examination.  And when we examine our own nation, and our world, we have a few things to figure out and some important lessons to learn.

While I am fascinated by history and the choices that historical figures make, I am not a military or political analyst. Still, one thing that has always puzzled me about the American response to 9/11 is the choices we made about whom we were going to attack.  Of the 19 men who were 9/11 murderers, the hijacking terrorists who killed so many of our citizens and the citizens of other nations, 15 terrorists came from Saudi Arabia.  Two came from the United Arab Emirates, and one each came from Egypt and Lebanon.  Of the 19 terrorists, four were pilots, the most highly trained and trusted of the mass murderers, and those came respectively from Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Lebanon and the UAE. 

Yet we chose to direct our American military first against Afghanistan, where the Al-Qaeda had rented space from the Taliban, and then against Iraq, which had no connection to Al-Qaeda at all and actually opposed it in every way.  At no point did we consider punishing Saudi Arabia for its citizens’ direct involvement and leadership in 9/11, although some of the 9/11 terrorists were the children of prominent figures in the Saudi political and economic leadership.

 While those Afghanistan and Iraq wars initially were widely supported by the American public, these were strange military and political choices, to say the least.  The four pilot hijackers actually trained in the United States, and were part of a terror cell that originated in Hamburg, Germany.  When the vicious mastermind behind 9/11, Osama bin Laden, was eventually tracked and killed, he was in Pakistan; the Afghanistan war effort never caught up with him.

 We have now finally concluded the long, expensive effort to build Western-style democracies in Iraq and Afghanistan.  I do not think it will surprise anyone if I say that the United States was unsuccessful in those efforts.

 So just what did we learn from 9/11 that we can take with us these 20 years later? 

 To me, the greatest of those lessons was the way that all Americans, within a very short time, came together in a unique and powerful display of solidarity.  We understood that we are, in fact, one nation, with common goals and fears and dreams.  It may have taken a tangible enemy, a truly evil attack to bring us together, to shock us out of our complacency and break down our silos and separations.  But for a while, in shared tragedy and shock, 9/11 did bring us together.  It reminded us of our common needs and hopes, of our lost innocence and security.

 At a multi-faith service that I chaired on October 11, 2001, a prominent Evangelical minister on the bimah of my congregation said, “We all came to this country in different boats, but we are all in the same boat now.” For a while, at least, 9/11 changed us.  Jews, Christians and Muslims spoke to one another, and so did Hindus and Buddhists and Sikhs and, well, every one of the varied religions and groups in America.  We realized we were part of a shared, diverse nation, that we had been attacked, all of us, because of that very diversity and openness.

 I remember visiting New York City a year or so after 9/11, and being astonished at how nice everyone was.  That had never been my experience in New York before, although I always enjoyed the city.  But now there was a completely different approach to how New Yorkers greeted people and treated people.  It was as though something profound had changed, and we all came to realize that we needed each other.  It stayed true for a while; when I visited 5 years later with three young children in tow, everyone went out of their way to be gracious and kind.  Manhattan had been transformed into Indianapolis or something, where everybody is supposed to be nice.

But really, everywhere in the US for a while people treated each other differently, better, with more kindness.  We were, in quite interesting ways, brought together by 9/11, and made one.

Well, it has been 20 years since that time.  And in so many ways we have lost that concept.  We have retreated into our own silos again, perhaps to a greater degree than ever before.  In the two decades since 9/11 we have developed nearly separate media systems, information sources that seemingly bear no resemblance to each other or, often, the factual truth.  And we have come to fetishize our differences at the expense of our commonalities.  People casually talk of seceding from the nation, habitually claim those on the other side of the political aisle are evil, believe conspiracy theories of the most ludicrous sort. 

 It seems we have forgotten the central lesson of 9/11: we are stronger together.  We are better unified than divided.  We have far more in common than we have differences. 

 On this anniversary of 9/11, on this Shabbat Shuvah, we need to rediscover that connectedness, that unity that bound us together twenty years ago.  And it shouldn’t take a great, sudden, shocking tragedy to do that. 

It might be enough for us to simply look back, look around, and do a bit of T’shuvah.

One of the things I love best about Congregation Beit Simcha is that we aren’t joined together by a political ideologies.  We are here for the purpose of creating a great congregation, a synagogue where we can pray and study and celebrate and mourn together as Jews and as a community.  And perhaps it is because of this that we may be the best kind of example of the kind of response to 9/11 that we ought to be able to all make today.  To seek to bring together, in respect, all the diversities of our community across the boundary lines of race, religion, orientation, and even ideology. 

If we can do that in our own small shul, then perhaps we can do that in this great nation, too.

And then the memories of those who died on 9/11 will have helped us to grow into the country that we should truly be.

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.