Spectacle, and Human Needs

Sermon Parshat Ki Tissa 5782

Rabbi Sam Cohon, Congregation Beit Simcha, Tucson, AZ

We had a delightful Super Bowl party here at Congregation Beit Simcha last Sunday.  Now I have to admit that it was particularly delightful for me, since my hometown team, the Los Angeles Rams, won, even if they did defeat my dad’s hometown team, the Cincinnati Bengals.  Like the world, the game was imperfect, but it certainly was exciting and it nearly went down to the last play.  And of course, the Rams won.

As you may not know, in my high school years my close friend Alan got me a gig on Sundays afternoons in the fall ushering for the Rams in the old Los Angeles Colosseum.  We would take tickets for the first quarter or so and then go in to watch our team play, and usually beat, whoever was up that week for the rest of the game.  I was a big sports fan—still am—and when that team made it to the playoffs I got to see the first playoff game, in which the Rams whipped the old St. Louis Cardinals, long before they moved to Arizona and the Rams moved to St. Louis, of all places.  After that victory, and a shocking upset in the other NFC playoff game, I was thrilled that my team might make it to the Super Bowl.  I actually waited in line for more than four hours to buy tickets to the game that would send the LA Rams, a good franchise and team that had never quite been able to make it to the biggest of big games. 

It turned out that the NFC championship game that would send the LA Rams to the Super Bowl was played on my birthday, many years ago, and since I had waited all those hours and bought the maximum number of tickets, I invited my dad and brother and sisters to go with me.  As I recall, only my oldest sister was available, and she was no football fan, but we all drove down and this time I didn’t have to usher but I just got to attend this momentous game as a pure fan.  My Rams were favored and finally, they would get to go to the greatest spectacle of all, the Super Bowl.

And then the game started, against the hated but underdog Dallas Cowboys.  The Rams were the far better team, favored by 7 points.  Early on, the Cowboys drove down and scored a quick touchdown.  I wasn’t worried. Surely the Rams would come back and crush them, and fulfill their destiny in the Super Bowl.

And then the Rams’ quarterback threw an interception, and Dallas scored another touchdown.  And then Dallas scored again, and at halftime the Rams were behind 21-0.  My sister Rachel had begun to chant “Go Rams,” in a somewhat satirical manner.  That got worse as the second half began with another Cowboys touchdown and another Rams interception.  We stayed to the bitter end, a 37-7 Dallas victory, my dear sister continuing to intone “Go Rams” as a kind of dirge over the last quarter or so.

I had waited four hours to buy tickets for this? 

I thought about that day last Sunday, when after finally returning to Los Angeles a few years ago, reaching and then losing a Super Bowl, my professional team of preference finally reached the pinnacle and won this great spectacle.  It was a pleasure to experience, of course.  But I don’t think it had quite the same resonance that a victory would have had in my childhood or adolescence.  Those illusions may die hard, but die they do.

Still, it was hard to watch the overblown hype of the Super Bowl telecast, the movie star laden commercials, the rap-oriented halftime extravaganza, oceans of confetti pouring from the sky at the end, and not understand that there is something amazing about the pure spectacle such events encompass.  Few societies in the entire history of the world have managed to pour so much energy, talent, and technology into the creation of public drama as ours.  Perhaps ancient Rome, with its excesses of months of public games and parades matched the demonstrations of the Super Bowl—and, by the way, of the Olympics being staged at roughly the same time in far off Beijing.  These enormous pageants create a kind of shared experience that turns an ordinary day into, “Super Bowl Sunday,” third most important holiday annually in America now.  112 million people watched it on TV or a streaming device.

But you know something interesting?  When the game ended, and the confetti fell and everyone turned off their TVs or screens, life went on.  And the only people whose lives were really changed by those events were the guys who played in the game—some of them, anyway—and perhaps the coaches and owners.  For the rest of us, when the Super Bowl was over it was on to the next thing.

Which, oddly perhaps, reminds me of this week’s Torah portion.  This week we read the traumatic Torah portion of Ki Tissa, the story of the Golden Calf.  It reads like this: while Moses is up on Mt. Sinai receiving the 10 commandments the Israelites start to worry that he’s not coming back.  And so, while God is carving the words “You shall have no other gods besides Me, nor make any image of them” into a stone tablet, the faithless people persuade his brother Aaron to make them an idol of gold, a calf, that they can call their new god.  Pleased with the result, they worship it and then throw a big party, a bacchanal, a carnival, Mardi Gras in the Sinai.

Coming down the mountain, Joshua and Moses hear noise from the camp below.  Joshua is astonished, and thinks it must be the sound of battle, but Moses knows what a party sounds like.  And when Moses sees all the cavorting, and the newly Chosen People worshipping a golden idol, he throws down the sacred stone tablets of the commandments, shattering them.  The music and dancing stop suddenly.  It is a shocking scene.

For the rabbis this is one of most dramatic and distressing portions in the entire Torah.  The problem is acute: according to the text, our people witnessed the divine power of the Ten Plagues, were personally saved at the shore of the Sea of Reeds by God, received the direct revelation of God’s presence at Sinai—in short, experienced God more directly than any other group in history ever has—and almost immediately afterwards turned around and rejected God in order to worship a cow made out of their own jewelry.

In rabbinic midrash this week’s events are called the Ma’asei Ha’eigel, the awful story of the calf.  How can a people given such a clear set of signs and wonders, including direct revelation and verbal commands, only follow the true God for 40 days before pursuing such a ridiculous, bovine substitute?

The answer lies in our own makeup.  We enjoy spectacle, are impressed by it, even awed by it—you know, like the fabulous but overblown Super Bowl—but as soon as it is gone its effects linger a very short time indeed.  What makes us tick as human beings, what keeps us in line, is the very dailiness of regular rules and schedules, the kinds of human laws and rituals of worship that are very much a part of practical Judaism.  We need both societal structure and the rhythms of devotion, and until these are provided in a coherent way we tend to flounder—even disastrously so, as we did at the time of the Golden Calf.

Without a way to connect to God regularly, without both prayer services and a personal commitment to do mitzvot each day, we quickly lose our ability to be holy.  Instead of goodness we chase gold, in place of God we place false deities.  We become obsessed with our own trivial pursuits, chase our own idols of gold.

We need more than grand ideas or sweeping spirituality: we need religion and a Jewish grounding in practice and experience, or we won’t be able to remain ethical.  Without these we begin to worship Golden Calves of every kind.

The Torah is filled with references to idolatry, to all the ways we can worship idols and deny God and why we shouldn’t do that, and the awful consequences of such terrible behavior.  And of course, in our own lives, it’s easy to see the ways that we end up worshipping idols of our own making, objects, items, money itself, personal promotion and honors and so on.  It’s easy, too easy, to become absorbed in desires and pastimes and obsessions that become idols in and of themselves.

And none of those bring us closer to real holiness, or to living lives of meaning and purpose and sanctity.  The path to those far more meaningful things requires regular practice and a dedication to the good.

At the end of Ki Tissa there is a denouement to this painful story of spiritual failure, providing a kind of limited redemption.  Moses goes back up Mt. Sinai and brings down another set of tablets.  And then he asks God to reveal God’s essence to him.  Moses doesn’t get exactly what he wants, but he is provided the privilege of experiencing God’s passing presence.  And then Moses, too, must continue to try to sense the presence every day thereafter.

In other words, even Moses, the best of us, the person closest to God, must continually seek God’s presence.  

How much more so is that true for the rest of us Jews today, we modern-day Israelites?  In spite of our failures of faith and action, in the face of our frequent focus on the inconsequential and the trivial, if we nonetheless choose to continue to seek to find God, we too will be blessed with a touch of that sacred divine presence. We, too, will find holiness. Whether or not our teams win the Super Bowl.

The True Sanctuary of the Jewish People, Then and Now

Sermon, Shabbat Tetzaveh 5782

This Shabbat, as Carol has told you so eloquently, we receive the commandments regarding the lighting of the Ner Tamid, the eternal light.  That light was kindled in the Tabernacle in the Wilderness and later the Temple in Jerusalem, and it was kept burning perpetually through the efforts of the priests.  It is symbolized today in every synagogue in the world, our unique Ner Tamid representing God’s presence as every Ner Tamid in every temple in the world does as well.  It is a reminder that the Shechinah is always available right here, in our congregation and every other one that worships God.

Which brings up an important question about synagogues today.  I’ve been thinking the last few weeks about the situation of the Jewish community of America in the wake of the Coronavirus shutdown and the remote experiences that have prevailed in its wake.  At heart, I am always optimistic about Judaism in the United States and believe that the synagogue as an institution remains vital for the future of Jews as a people and Judaism as a religion in this incredibly important American Jewish community.  But there will be changes in how we “do Jewish,” and it’s valuable to explore what those changes are likely to be.

There are somewhere around 6 million Jews in America today, depending on how you count us and who thinks they are Jewish.  That makes this the second largest Jewish community in the world, and nearly equal to the population of Jews in Israel, which passed the US in total Jewish numbers only a few years ago.  The American Jewish community remains one of, if not the most successful Jewish community in all of world history, with incredible accomplishments in every field of endeavor, and an infrastructure of synagogues, schools, Jewish community centers and Jewish institutions of every kind are spread across this huge nation. There are Jewish communities of importance in every major and minor city, and there are genuinely significant Jewish organizations in every state. 

Rabbis, cantors, educators, and Jewish administrators are trained in respected institutions of higher Jewish learning, and good Jewish camps for children and teens exist in every region of the country.  There is a strong Jewish presence on every major college campus, often led and supported by two or even three different national institutions.  Support for Israel, one of the central pillars of the American Jewish community’s efforts for 75 years, has reached historic highs, at least among the larger, non-Jewish American population.  In spite of rising Antisemitism, individual Jews are accepted and important at every level of American society, from politics to business to entertainment and culture.  All should be well.  

So why does it feel like we are at an important crossroads, and that all this evident success hides a more serious problem underneath it all? And why do the events of the last couple of years point to underlying weaknesses in our national Jewish communities that illustrate that a kind of hollowing out, an undermining of the entire enterprise may be afoot?

Of course, we Jews, with our long history of tsoris, of persecutions and disasters, always can find the black cloud surrounding every silver lining.  Still, there are three areas where the challenges facing the American Jewish community have become evident: aging, assimilation, and the diminishing of the central institution of Judaism, the synagogue.

There have been many efforts in recent years to focus attention on the aging of the American Jewish world.  Americans in general are getting older, on average, since we have fewer children and allow fewer immigrants into the country, many of whom do tend to have more children.  Jews are, in fact, one of the oldest religious demographics in America.  Part of this is simply the graying of the Baby Boom generation, the fact that for non-Orthodox Jews—you could say for non-ultra-Orthodox Jews—having more than one or perhaps two children is just something that doesn’t happen much.  The math is simple: there are fewer Reform and Conservative Jewish kids to replenish the Jewish community.  And while there are more Orthodox kids, proportionally, most of them are born to ultra-Orthodox families.  They are certainly Jews, and very active within their own ultra-religious sphere, but their involvement in the larger Jewish community is quite limited.  You don’t typically find ultra-Orthodox Jews participating in larger Jewish causes or organizations.   

After aging, the second issue is the one we have been dealing with for, oh, 40 years or so: it’s that many Jews are choosing not to affiliate with the Jewish community in any specific way or are simply walking away from their Jewish identity in every way.  Assimilation has been a grave concern for American Jewish leaders for better than a generation.  We used to focus on the dangers of intermarriage.  But with the Jewish-non-Jewish marriage rate for non-Orthodox Jews now around 70%, as it has been for a decade, we have also discovered that it is possible to raise committed Jews in intermarried homes.  It turns out that two Jews married to one another have the capacity not to join synagogues or support Jewish institutions, while a couple with one Jew and one non-Jew can become highly active pillars of the Jewish community.  There is no particular consistency to this.

We also used to worry that we Jews would be loved to death because of the ease with which we had come to be part of American society in the absence of the prevailing antisemitism of earlier generations.  But it turns out that the larger issue is the fact that we haven’t done a great job of making Judaism integral to the lives of non-Orthodox Jews.  There is so much meaning, purpose and joy in living a Jewish life.  But both within our families, and in our institutions, we haven’t succeeded in making the case that it’s at least as important to be actively Jewish as it is to be, say, a big fan of your sports team, or a fan of a rock band, or up to date on the latest streaming TV shows.  And that means we have to up our Jewish game, if you will, and work creatively to compete—not with other synagogues of Jewish organizations, but with the larger culture.

And finally, the gravest danger to the American Jewish community today does not come from rising Antisemitism—Antisemitism is real, and dangerous, and of course distressing, but not truly damaging in any larger sense.  It must be resisted and responded to forcefully, whether it is in the form of an Amnesty International report or a congressperson’s hostile remarks.  But, if we are honest about it, in today’s America it is no more than a frustrating irritant for the vast majority of us.

No, the greater danger to the future of American Judaism comes from the erosion of support and involvement in American Jewish synagogues.  There has been a long process devaluing the central institution of Judaism for the past 2000 years, insisting that we don’t need temples to be Jewish, that every idea and Jewish cause supersedes the need for synagogues.  There are Jews who believe that Jewish values without Jewish practice or study is the future for all Jews.  There are many Jews who are so closely attached to supporting Israel that they don’t do anything else Jewish—not Shabbat, not festival observances, not Jewish study or ritual or even tzedakah, Jewish charity, in any form.  And there are some Jews who are so focused on remembering the Holocaust that they don’t have time to go temple or pray.

There are even some Jews so enamored of Jewish ideals that they believe that their principal mission as Jews is to attack Jewish institutions and causes that don’t live up to the highest Jewish ideals and ideas—that is, that it’s more important to protest Israel’s treatment of Palestinians than it is to belong to a synagogue or support help for the Jewish needy.  I have always believed that in order to criticize a Jewish institution you should be part of it first, have an investment in its mission and only then seek to improve it.

And of course there are a variety of Jewish organizations that insist that they represent the best way to be Jewish nowadays: by giving to a philanthropy, or a hospital, or a university, or attending a conference, or participating in an online forum or social media interest group.  That’s the best way to be Jewish—not by attending or supporting an old-fashioned organization like a synagogue.

Look, there are many ways to express your Judaism.  But the only way to do so in a genuine community of belief and practice, of prayer, study, communal spirit and social justice work, is through a synagogue.  I have said it before, but I’ll say it again: if you had all the many forms of Jewish expression available in this nation, all the many fine American Jewish organizations and interest groups, all the pro-Israel and anti-Antisemitism institutions and causes, but no synagogues at all—well then, in one generation Judaism would disappear here.  And if you took away all those great organizations, all those valuable interest groups and social media platforms and political action groups and only had synagogues—well, then Judaism would still continue in a vital way in future generations.

But I also believe that those synagogues cannot just be virtual.

I have heard people—rabbis—express the grave concern that since COVID-19 hit congregants have come to realize that they can attend services online while they eat dinner in their sweatpants, and this means, in part, that a lot of them will never come back to services.  And that since they can attend glamorous, over-publicized synagogue services in New York or Los Angeles online, they won’t come back to their local shuls.

That may prove to be true for some folks.  But I’m just as certain that we human beings need actual live contact with other actual live human beings, that virtual community is not the same as living community, and that the ways that synagogues can continue to flourish is for us to be the warm, welcoming places we like to say that we really are. 

Sure, we’ll need to be better at technology—but that’s getting easier, not harder, every day.  And being online provides a great service—no pun intended—for people who are housebound or traveling or don’t have such a congregational community in their own locations.  But there is no substitute for attending a good temple, and if we wish Judaism to continue to matter in America, we need to shift resources from the cluttered cornucopia of Jewish organizations and institutions and support the only one that really guarantees the future vitality of Jewish life in America—the synagogues. 

And I don’t mean the ultra-Orthodox ones, where women are devalued and involvement in the Jewish community means supporting only their own organizations and institutions.  I mean the synagogue communities that truly reflect contemporary Jewish values of openness, acceptance, and commitment to social action, that are egalitarian and warm and creative, that respect serious contemporary scholarship, that teach everyone, and that have music that connects modern Jews to our amazing heritage.

The ones that truly keep that Ner Tamid burning in this world. 

May our commitment as a community to the vitality and purpose of the synagogue be replenished in the post-pandemic world.  And may we all participate in keeping the flame of divine presence and promise, of justice and holiness, of spirit and meaning, burning brightly.   

How to Truly Live, or What the Heck Can Ritual Sacrifice Teach Us Today

Sermon on Terumah 5782

What is the true purpose of a temple? 

Asu li mikdash v’shachanti b’tocham, “Make Me a sanctuary and I will dwell among them,” God commands in this week’s Torah portion of Terumah, and the sanctuary ordained here is for the purpose of ritual animal sacrifice. Defunct in Jewish tradition for over 1900 years, since the destruction of the Second Temple in the year 70 CE, just what the heck can ritual sacrifice teach us in the year 2022 CE?

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

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

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

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

Human sacrifice was ubiquitous in the ancient world.  One can make the case that Christianity was a way of reaffirming that ancient practice, ritualizing in a highly graphic and disturbing way a literal human sacrifice, the killing of God’s own son.  It soon became a way of asserting the primacy of the world-to-come over life in this world, future possible super-human life in place of real world, current, actual human life.

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

In our tradition, after the destruction of the 2nd Temple nearly 2000 years ago, prayer and tzedakah replaced ritual sacrifice.  It is not blood that God seeks now, but our own passionate devotion: to holiness, to personal and professional morality, to social justice, to creating and affirming the good that we can bring in this world.

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

The garments of the high priest were of such beauty,

The jewels so radiant, they dazzled the people.

Daily in the sanctuary he made sacrifices to the Lord,

Of the lamb and bull

The dove and the little cakes

To the shepherds and farmers

Who brought the sacrifices

These were the means of life.

Thus they proclaimed their willingness

To give life itself to their God.

In all ages, at all times,

People have traded value for value…

But for those who love God the only sufficient gift

Is the symbol of life.

Teach us, God, the spirit of sacrifice;

Will You accept as sufficient

Our prayers and our attempts to pray

As You once accepted the lambs and grain

Of our ancestors?

Will You accept our struggling efforts

To return love for hostility

And justice for partiality?

Will You find our study acceptable?

Teach us God the spirit of sacrifice:

How to devote out lives to our highest ideals.

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

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

Jews and Money

Sermon Shabbat Mishpatim 5782

 So, a Catholic, a Protestant, a Muslim and a Jew are in a discussion during dinner.

The Catholic says, "I have a huge fortune... I am going to buy Citibank!"

The Protestant says, "I am very wealthy, and I’m going to buy Tesla!"

The Muslim says, "I am a fabulously rich prince.... and I intend to purchase Microsoft!"

They all wait for the Jew to speak. The Jew stirs his coffee, places his spoon neatly on his saucer, takes a sip, looks at them, and casually says, "I'm not selling!"

Or there’s this one, told by a young Jewish comedienne.  “It’s so strange hanging around with WASPs—they are so concerned when they talk about money.  Like, I was at a friend’s home and they said, in a very embarrassed way, ‘Our children will each inherit $6 million dollars.’  And I thought, ‘They should be embarrassed.  I mean, I’m Jewish—that’s just not that much money…’”  That’s called leaning into a stereotype.

These plays on the supposed extreme wealth of Jews are funny, but also imply that the stereotypes of rich Jews are true, and that we really do control the international financial system, as the Anti-Semitic slanderous propaganda would have it. 

Then there is the uncomfortably troublesome joke people insist on telling me, which extends the slander to the rabbi. 

A priest, a minister and a rabbi are discussing how much of the donations they receive they should keep and how much should go to God.  The priest says, “I draw a circle on the ground, take all the money from the collection plate, throw it in the air.  Whatever lands inside the circle I keep for myself and whatever lands outside I give to the Lord."

The priest says: "I have a similar process but when I draw my circle and throw my money, I keep what lands outside the circle and give what lands inside to the Lord."

The rabbi says: " I throw the money in the air and whatever God wants, he takes!"

These jokes pale next to the classic literary illustration of the greedy, rapacious Jew. There is an infamous scene in Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice (Act 2:8) in which two Venetians are discussing Shylock, the Jewish moneylender at the heart of the story.  They describe him walking the streets of the Ghetto in anguish, crying out over the loss of his daughter, who has eloped with a Christian merchant, Antonio, and perhaps worse, absconded with Shylock’s money and his jewels.  The character Solanio says to his friend, Salarino, speaking about Shylock:

I never heard a passion so confused,

So strange, outrageous, and so variable,

As the dog Jew did utter in the streets.

“My daughter! O my ducats! O my daughter,

Fled with a Christian! O my Christian ducats!

Justice, the law, my ducats, and my daughter!

A sealèd bag, two sealèd bags of ducats,

Of double ducats, stol'n from me by my daughter!

And jewels—two stones, two rich and precious stones—

Stol'n by my daughter! Justice, find the girl!

She hath the stones upon her, and the ducats.”

This chaotic passage has been used often to stereotype the Jew as a moneygrubbing creature, so obsessed with gaining filthy lucre that he cannot decide if he cares more for his money or his child.  The term “Shylock,” of course, came to refer to an unscrupulous moneylender, a loan shark.  Charles Dickens played on that slanderous slur in his character of Fagin in Oliver Twist.  The evil fake “secret document” that created the vicious slander of an “international Jewish conspiracy,” the Protocols of the Elders of Zion was written to hammer this awful point home.  It was created a little more than a century ago by the Russian Secret Police, and it has served as a long-standing slander that fed into the Nazis’ propaganda.  Jews are rich, got rich by tricking non-Jews out of their honest, hard-earned money, and are controlling the world with their wealth and influence.

You still hear this awful slur repeated today, in a small way through such ugly insults as “he tried to Jew me down.”  When Donald Trump was running for the nomination for president in 2016 he famously told a group of Jewish Republicans, “The reason you oppose me is that I don’t want your money.”  Michael Bloomberg’s failed candidacy two years ago brought out accusations of Jewish money trying to buy the presidency, even as he campaigned against another Jewish candidate, Bernie Sanders, who always decries the prevalence of money in American politics, yet raises a great deal of it regularly.  And when Michael Milken was pardoned by then-President Trump—Michael Milken!  Creator of junk bonds!—it raised the ugly association of Jews, manipulation and money that has been used to hammer us for so long, with names like Ivan Boesky and Bernie Madoff coming to mind. 

So how did we get to this point again here in America?  How have we come to revive this stereotypical association of Jews seeking only money, and doing so by any means they can contrive?

In fact, our own textual tradition teaches us exactly the opposite, and it does so, particularly, in this week’s Torah portion of Mishpatim.  But it also does so throughout our entire tradition. 

There is a famous Jewish teaching that tells us that when we die, the criteria for admission into heaven will be quite simple—the answer to one, single, simple question.  That question will not be “Have you believed in God?” or “Have you prayed regularly?” or even “Have you observed the commandments?”

It will be “Have you dealt honorably in your business dealings with your fellow human beings?”  In other words, “Were you ethical in how you did business?”

If we can answer that question “Yes,” we will be admitted to Gan Eiden, the Garden of Eden that awaits us, eternal paradise.  If not, we are barred forever from entry.

So the Talmud teaches in the tractate on the Sabbath.  For in Jewish tradition, treating those who are economically dependent upon us in a fair and just manner has the highest ethical priority. If we fail to act morally in the way we do business, it doesn’t really matter how much we pray or how fervently we proclaim our faith.
 

In Jewish law, and in our lives, how we deal with those over whom we have economic power determines whether we are decent human beings.  And how we handle this is a central issue that illustrates the decency of our entire society.
 
In this week’s portion of Mishpatim, the Torah tells us we are commanded not to keep the cloak of a working man in pledge overnight.  We are directed in both Leviticus and Deuteronomy that a worker’s wages must be paid on the day the work is performed.  Throughout our Jewish tradition, we are taught again and again that no one is to be exploited when they are in our economic debt.
 
In fact, quite the opposite.  We are repeatedly enjoined to help the poor and the stranger among us, to leave the corners of our fields for the widow and the orphan.  Tzedakah, righteous generosity to create justice in our society and in our world, is a central commandment for every Jew.

In addition, the texts we have in our Torah, and in our rabbinic literature, are designed to prevent anyone from falling into debt.  They seem to argue, unequivocally, against charging interest to anyone.  The Mishnah, completed 1800 years ago in Israel, extends the prohibition to preclude something that might be called “moral usury,” and includes everyone present at the giving of such an illegal loan—the one loaning the money, the witnesses, even the scribe who draws up the document—in the category of violators who should be punished.

In Mishpatim, Exodus 22:22-26, it reads in full:

You shall not wrong a stranger neither shall you oppress him; for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.

You shall not afflict any widow, or fatherless child.

If you afflict them in any way—for if they cry at all unto Me, I will surely hear their cry…

If you lend money to any of My people, even to the poor with you, you shall not be a creditor to him; neither shall you lay interest upon him.

If you take your neighbor's garment as a pledge, you shall restore it to him by the time that the sun goes down;

for that is his only covering, it is his garment for his skin; what will he sleep in? It shall come to pass, when he cries to Me, that I will hear; for I am gracious.

This may seem strange when we consider the stereotype of the Jew as moneylender, exemplified in Shakespeare’s Shylock, demanding his “pound of flesh.”  That profession was actually forced upon Jews by Christians who were unable themselves to loan money during the Middle Ages by decree of the Catholic Church.   The prohibition on “usury” was later suspended, and Rome eventually established a Vatican Bank.  But before that happened, in order to have a functional economic system, Christians needed a way to borrow capital to finance voyages, build trading systems, fund major construction, and support royal excesses.  The solution was to force the Jews to loan them money.

Somehow, this enforced profession became the perniciously false stereotype of the avaricious, scheming Jew, always trying to extract more money. 

The reality, of course, is very different.  The usual answer given to this is to focus on just how much we Jews give to good causes.  While applauding tzedakah, we should be careful of embracing this approach.  Of course, we Jews are at the forefront of every meaningful philanthropic endeavor of importance in every society in which we live.  But in a strange way, this plays into the stereotype: after all, only wealthy people can afford to give away large sums of money, right?  Like, say, the Sackler family?

So how should we respond?  The answer lies in Mishpatim.  It is in the way we choose to do business, how we live our lives.

I have had the privilege in my rabbinic career of completing the conversions of many people to Judaism.  I can tell you that a surprising percentage of them have told me a variation on this: “I worked for a Jewish man and he always treated his employees so well, decently, honorably.  I thought, ‘There must be something to this religion.’  And so, I started studying it.”  Or, “My neighbors were Jewish, and the wife always gave her housekeeper a little extra every time, and she got to know her children and helped them all go to college. And I thought, this is the right way to be.”  Or, “My Jewish accountant used to do taxes for those who couldn’t afford it without charging them,” or “My attorney did pro bono work for people in need, and he never told anyone.”  “A Jewish colleague of mine helped her former immigrant employees get US citizenship and loaned them down payments for their homes.”

These kinds of true stories demonstrate that the ideas of Mishpatim are very much at the heart of what Judaism truly represents, and how it should be represented.  It is not just the grand, sweeping ideals of the Ten Commandments, or the powerful liberation story of the Exodus.  It is the practical decency, the moral approach to doing business and seeking economic justice in our society in pragmatic ways, that are the core values of Judaism.  How we treat others within our small spheres of economic influence is at the center of who we are.  And how honest we are in our own financial transactions truly matters.

Once, Israel Ba'al Shem Tov, the founder of Hasidism, was traveling by coach. The coachman halted the horses in order to reap some barley from one of the fields adjacent to the road, a field that surely did not belong to him. He asked the Ba'al Shem Tov to keep guard and call him when he saw anyone watching him. As soon as the coachman put the sickle to the barley, the rabbi called out, "There’s somebody here!  There’s somebody here!"  Quickly the coachman dashed to the coach, got up on his seat, looked around and saw nobody. He turned angrily to the Ba'al Shem Tov to complain about his needless intervention.  “There’s nobody there!” he said.

"But there really is," answered the Ba'al Shem Tov, pointing to heaven, "there really is."

So Mishpatim teaches us.  Observing Jewish ethics in business and in all matters of money is something we must do when no one, except God, is watching.  It is the best way to live, and the best way to respond to the false stereotypes afoot in society. 

May we learn that lesson well, and practice it always.

Once on a Mountain, and Now, Here

Sermon Parshat Yitro 5782

Mountains play a major role in our lives here in Tucson, Arizona.  They literally surround us, and they are beautiful, a constant, powerful reminder of the incredible natural world God has created.  Living among them as we do, we do well to take a moment to notice that they are quite wonderful.  It is traditional on seeing such magnificent reminders of the natural world to say the prayer thanking God for the beauties of the earth we have the privilege to live in: Baruch Ata Adonai Eloheinu Melech Ha’olam, oseh ma’aseh v’reisheet—Blessed are You, God, Ruler of the Universe, who does the great work of Creation.  More about mountains in a moment.

I must tell you that this particular Shabbat reminds us that there is something sacred about a kehillah, a congregation gathered together in Jewish prayer.  Synagogues are a unique affirmation of community, and true community has unfortunately become an unusual occurrence in our American society these days.  Perhaps because we seem to have become such a fractious, polarized country, it is more necessary than ever to gather across all boundary lines and join in prayer, song, study, and community.  When we participate together in services, work together to improve the justice of our society through social action, study Torah and serve a shul that teaches and inspires our children and challenges us to live to our highest ideals, we are doing holy work that defies easy categorization.  It is hard to explain precisely what we mean by Jewish community—but we know that it is extraordinarily important.

And we also know that it is just what we Jews have been doing for over two thousand years, and why we have been able to continue as an eternal people.  It is what has allowed us not only to survive but thrive, evolve and grow everywhere in the world.

Every synagogue, every Jewish community is different, of course.  Yet there is a common denominator for each one.  And that is what our Torah portion addresses this week.  For it was at a great mountain that we were first committed to the covenant of community, the agreement with God that our peoplehood would be unique, special, sacred.  It was at Mt. Sinai that we truly became the people of Israel.  Our own synagogue is an expression of that covenant—every true synagogue is—a practical reflection of the holiness that God gave us at that remarkable moment.

If we were Orthodox Jews we would, in theory, believe that what God revealed to our people at Mt. Sinai was not only the Ten Commandments but the entirety of the Torah, all Five Books, as well as the rest of the Tanakh, the Hebrew Bible, and the Oral Torah of the Mishnah and the Gemarah, the Talmud, as well.  Yet that is well beyond what our Torah portion of Yitro tells us.  In fact, by saying that the entirety of Jewish law, the whole of the written and oral Torah was gifted to us at Sinai we rather devalue the Ten Commandments themselves, the only direct revelation our tradition says was ever given to our entire people directly by God. 

So why does our tradition teach this?  Why does it say that the mitzvot, the commandments were all given to us by God at Sinai when it isn’t factually true?  Is this just an issue of alternative interpretations?

This question troubles the rabbinic commentators, who believe the Torah never wastes a phrase, and certainly never makes a mistake.  The rabbis’ brilliant answer teaches a profound truth about ourselves, our synagogues and our communities—and maybe even a bit about mountains.

According to the commentators, all the commandments theoretically given b’Har Sinai, at Mt. Sinai, are actually given miSinai, from Sinai—with the metaphoric authority of Sinai.  That is, Mt. Sinai is not just a geographical location, no matter how important, and it is not a simple matter of a place at all.  It is much more than that, something both broader and deeper. 

Mt. Sinai is a sacred idea, a holy concept.  For wherever we learn and do mitzvot, whenever we complete good acts, do tzedakah, observe religious rituals with sanctity and meaning, study Torah, pray together with sincerity and work to perfect the world through tikun olam, wherever and whenever we strive to make the world a holier, more Jewish place—well, then we are standing at Mt. Sinai.

Almost literally, as committed Jews we take Mt. Sinai with us into our communities, our congregations, and so bring God’s very presence into the world.  It’s a powerful message indeed.  And that is just as true whether we are standing at the foot of Mt. Sinai or here in northwest Tucson, seeing the Catalinas through our windows.  As long as we gather in a congregation, as long as we create true Jewish community of study, prayer and social justice we are standing at Sinai.

In other words, it’s like the old Yiddish proverb: “Mountains do not come together.  People do.”   It’s not the mountain that matters; it’s us.

A great lesson.  But still, there is that matter of the mountain.

I must admit, I like mountains very much, and have spent much time among them, sometimes hiking up them, sometimes skiing down them, occasionally first one and then the other.  And mountains have always held an important place in Jewish tradition.  We sang a Psalm earlier tonight, Psalm 121, Esa ainai el heharim, I lift up my eyes to the mountains from where my help comes, one of many Psalms and prayers that center on the mountains.  Various mountains feature prominently throughout Biblical and ancient Jewish history.  Among the many heights ascended in the Tanakh are two mountains that rise above all others spiritually and are truly central to Jewish tradition: the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, which remains both focal and controversial today, and Mt. Sinai.  We will talk about the Temple Mount another time.  Tonight, a little more about Mt. Sinai.

I have a personal story about visiting Mt. Sinai.  Seven years ago on this very night, the Sabbath evening of Shabbat Yitro, during a sabbatical journey around the world, I traveled to nearly all of the holiest places on earth in a bit less than three months, visiting the greatest sacred sites of every major religion.  The most important place I wanted to see, on a personal level, was Mt. Sinai, or at least the place most people believe was the location of Mt. Sinai.  It’s 140 miles from Sharm el Sheikh in the southeastern part of the Sinai Desert, in Egypt, a place called Jebel Musa in Arabic.  I decided that I would hike up Mt. Sinai on the Shabbat when we traditionally read the Ten Commandments from the Torah in synagogue, Shabbat Yitro, this very Shabbat—and ascending it overnight when I reached the top I would chant those Ten Statements, the Aseret HaDibrot, in Hebrew at dawn.

The full story of my journey to the mountaintop that day included nearly as many twists and turns as the Biblical narrative of our ancestors’ travels to the same place.  As it turned out, it involved a convoy of military vehicles escorting our mini-bus—and others—to protect from terrorist attack, many long delays and confusing instructions, lack of water and organization and the kind of oddities and insecurities that often accompany travel in Egypt.  Eventually, very short of sleep, water and food, tired from the climb up the 7500 foot peak, I had the rare experience of standing in what is truly an awesome place, the top of Mt. Sinai, watching rose-fingered dawn spread from jagged peak to peak across that stark and amazing wilderness.  And I chanted the Ten Commandments in Hebrew—from my iphone Tanakh app, of course—while around me people were reciting the Koran or singing Christian hymns or meditating.  It was weird, and gorgeous, and moving, a once-in-lifetime experience.

And yet, the truth is that as intense as that memory is, as extraordinary as it felt at the time, that wasn’t really the most powerful part of Jewish religious experience.  In our tradition, being at what might actually have been Mt. Sinai was not as significant as being here tonight, in community, kehillah, seeking God and Torah and holiness and justice in a synagogue.  This experience matters more because it requires the daily action that brings Judaism into the world in practical, meaningful ways.

So what is this amorphous thing, community, kehillah, and what does Judaism teach us about that?  And what does it have to do with Sinai?

This is the Shabbat when we remember and read the Torah portion of Yitro, when we hear just how our ancestors prepared themselves to experience receiving the Ten Commandments, and then heard those great statements directly from God and, in a larger sense, received Torah at Mt. Sinai. It should also be a time when we have the opportunity to see just how our synagogue can become better, stronger and more vital, can bring us together in more meaningful and holier ways, can continue the work of inspiration and achievement that began at Mt. Sinai.

This is the time to build further on our community, continue to develop our synagogue in ways that create greater learning, spirituality and justice.  Because, you see, as awe-inspiring as the experience of Mt. Sinai was, as amazing as climbing that mountain can be, it is not on a far-away peak that we find God, but right here that we can bring the feeling of that sacred mountain into our daily lives in real, practical ways.  It is here where we have the opportunity to decide to make our lives and actions reflect the values given to us so long ago, symbolically, on that great mountain.

The Kotzker Rebbe was once asked: “Why is it called z’man matan Torah 'The Time that the Torah was Given,' rather than 'The time the Torah was Received?’” He answered: “The giving took place on one day, but the receiving takes place at all times.”  Giving Torah was up to God, long ago.  Receiving Torah—that is up to us, on this Shabbat and every day.

You see, Mt. Sinai was only great once.  But the tradition that was created, and the synagogue, the institution responsible for teaching and making real that tradition, for creating true community based upon it—that can be great any time.  Any time we gather together for sincere prayer.  Any time we learn together, teach together, create justice together, seek to heal the world together.  Any time we treat one another with great respect and love.

On this Shabbat of Yitro, may we learn that extraordinary lesson, and come to live it in this synagogue—here in the shadow of these mountains.  Ken Yehi Ratson.  So may it be God’s will—and more importantly, ours.  Shabbat Shalom.

Freedom and Commitment

Sermon Parshat Bo 5782

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

At the beginning of every football bowl and playoff game this season, following the longstanding tradition established by baseball, the Star Spangled Banner, our national anthem, is always sung.  And the conclusion of that stirring song stuck out this week: you all know it, it’s the line singers struggle with, “the land of the free, and the home of the brave.”

My high school textbook for AP US History—they called it APUSH when my kids took the course—was called Land of the Free, as I recall.  That dedication to freedom, and thus liberty, has always been a central proposition of our country’s heritage.

America, we are told in song and pledge, is the sweet land of liberty, dedicated to the proposition all are created equal, and each of us has the inalienable right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of material possessions or happiness, whichever comes first.  We know the definition we use here for freedom includes some brilliant and noble conceptions: freedom from want and fear, freedom of conscience and public expression, freedom of the press, of thought, of religion, freedom from coercion and tyranny.  We tend to think that the Lockeian ideals of individual rights are the first, foremost, and only way in which human beings can seek freedom, and that freedom is, in and of itself, an unassailable, intrinsic, greatest possible good for all human beings.  We even seek actively to export freedom to all the peoples of the world—or at least those we can reach by military expedition or to commercial advantage.  We even take it to extremes, pretending there is a freedom so central and powerful it precludes having any responsibility to other citizens.

Freedom is a big deal in America.  But shockingly, America was actually not the first entity to address the concept of freedom, or to accept its necessity for human contentment.  As important as the American dedication to the notion of freedom—a notion that has spread in recent years to include exporting freedom to the rest of the world, by force if necessary—as important as that notion is, it is predated by a few millennia by the freedom story we read this Shabbat in the book of Shemot, in Exodus.  And the Jewish notion of freedom, ancient as it is, has something to teach us.  In fact, it had a few things to teach Thomas Jefferson and the Founding Fathers of American freedom as well.  And those Jewish teachings about cherut, freedom, reach to the core of what it means to be truly human, and to live lives of meaning, purpose, and importance.

First, let’s recap where we are in this great tale of ours.  The Israelites have been slaves in Egypt for the better part of four centuries, servants to Pharaoh.  They have been employed building mud brick store cities for the richest country in the world. 

Please understand that slavery was a way of life in the ancient world, that the majority of people alive in those days were not free.  Some societies—like the ancient Greeks, who invented the democracy on which our own system is based—had cultures in which something on the order of 90% of the people essentially served the other 10%.  Egypt, in this respect, was no better or worse than other contemporary kingdoms.  Most of the people lived lives that mirrored Hobbes’ definition of nasty, crude, brutish, and short, and were also fettered and delimited by servitude of one kind of another.  They did not own themselves, their own bodies, their own lives.  They were subject to the control of others.

That part of the world, northeastern Africa, still houses slaves in the year 2022, by the way.  The Sudan, Egypt’s troubled southern neighbor, still has an active slave trade, mostly conducted by Arabs buying and selling black Africans.  So does Somalia, another failed state in that region.  It’s remarkable how little attention this gathers internationally.  I guess Sudan and Somalia just aren’t on most people’s radar, including most of the NGOs and other agencies and organizations entrusted with advocating freedom in the world.  This shouldn’t shock us.  The world, even the free, democratic world, has long tolerated slavery as a fact of life.  Until 156 years ago—less than two lifetimes—slavery was actually legal here in Tucson, Arizona.  It is not at all inconceivable that some of your parents actually knew people who had been slaves, or people who owned slaves.

In any case, back when our ancestors were slaves, so were lots of other people.  The idea of slavery wasn’t novel, or even interesting.  But the idea that slaves could become free was both. 

You see, an individual slave might run off from a master, and escape for a while.  But an entire class of slaves, a whole category of servants was very unlikely to rise up en masse and suddenly claim freedom.  There are many historical documents from the ancient world, but few seem to demonstrate such an event taking place—save our own Torah.  Perhaps this is because the masters tend to write history—I am reminded of Bertolt Brecht’s great poem about the unnamed masses throughout history.  It begins “Young Alexander conquered India—he alone?” and continues “The books are filled with names of kings.  But was it kings who hauled the craggy blocks of stone?”  The records of our past are not written by the nonentities, by the humble illiterates who toil in the fields and shlep the building blocks.  They are written by priests and academics, the storytellers and entertainers of the aristocracy.  And perhaps we simply don’t know about many such rebellions throughout history.

But somehow I doubt it.  For this record we Jews have preserved, this dramatic narrative of our oppression and escape is too well documented, too deeply ensconced in our literature and our memory to be just one of many such events.  We weren’t part of some mass movement of the time, nor are there many such accounts from the ancient world—that is, up until modernity, more or less—that record similar events.  A successful grand escape of slaves, effectuated by God or otherwise, is pretty much unique.  Whether the Israelites were released through a progressive series of miraculous plagues, or by a sequence of natural disasters, or by a mass uprising; well, frankly, it doesn’t really matter.  It is, in historical terms, simply something that didn’t happen much in the ancient world. 

Rabbi David Wolpe created quite a furor a few years back when he told his Conservative congregation, Temple Sinai in west Los Angeles, that he didn’t believe the Exodus actually happened as it says it did in the Torah.  While this was not exactly a startling revelation to members of Reform congregations, most people missed his larger point, which was that whether it happened as described or not, the dramatic Exodus narrative of liberation was so important and powerful that it didn’t really matter if it factually occurred.  But I would go further than Rabbi Wolpe: I think that this narrative of liberation has to have elements of truth in it or it would never have survived, even it didn’t exactly happen this way.

In this week’s portion of Bo our ancestors experience freedom for the first time.  They are out of Egypt—out of Africa, too—headed on to a new life.  There is a giant celebration to come, next week, a great song of redemption and liberation, of salvation from slavery and from death.  Mi Chamocha ba’eilim we will sing next week in the the Torah portion of B’shalach—and we’ll enter into a communal life based on a new concept, freedom, with individual liberty as a central feature of it.  It is an exhilarating moment.

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

And herein lies the paradox.  For the Jewish definition of freedom is not simply an absence of compulsion, a lack of requirement.  Freedom is not just the ability to be out from under the lash of slavemaster, under the thumb of a tyrant or dictactor or king or mullah.  That may be the first requirement of freedom, but it is only a prerequisite.  It is not enough to be out of chains, although that is a great blessing.  It is not enough to have no demands, no obligations.  That, as it turns out, is not going to be Jewish freedom.  That is merely anarchy.  That is abdication of responsibility.  That leads to chaos—and perhaps to January 6, 2021.  That is, in its own way, enslavement—slavery to our natural base impulses, slavery to the random vicissitudes of our nature and our world.  Freedom like that is, in the words of that old pop song, “just another word for nothing left to loose,” a negative freedom from choice—the freedom of the lost child, immature, ultimately ineffective, compromised, lost.

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

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

That choice is still ours. In America, we sometimes forget the obligations of freedom, the requirement to choose to live to standards and holiness, to choose that which is good and comes from God.  We remember the freedom to choose, but abdicate the need to actually make such a choice with principle, authenticity and commitment.

That is what progressive Judaism truly represents—the freedom to choose to live as Jews, to pray and study, to work to improve the world, to choose to be free as Jews understand true freedom to be: devoted, dedicated, to our religion, to education, to God, to goodness, and, thus, to our people.

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

On this Shabbat of parshat Bo, may we so choose to live lives of commitment to God—and, so, again, become fully free.

Artificial and Real—New Year’s Eve Shabbat 2022

Sermon New Year’s Eve Shabbat 2022, Shabbat Va’Eira 5782
Shabbat Shalom and Happy New Year!  Of course, it’s not really a Jewish new year, although it certainly can be fun to celebrate it.  In fact, we were discussing the possibility of dropping a large ball from the ceiling during my sermon, and someone suggested we drop a large matzah ball, but then saner heads prevailed.  I mean, it’s nice to wear a tuxedo once a year, and to dress up in finery and sip champagne at shul and eat fancy hors d’oeuvres instead of bagels and lox, and use black tablecloths and put sparkly stuff on the tables.    

It’s all very artificial.  But really, that’s appropriate, because all calendaring is quite artificial, in truth.  January 1st is no different in any intrinsic way from December 31st or January 2nd, so making January 1st into New Year’s instead of, say, February 1st is simply an arbitrary choice.  But saying “Happy Arbitrary New Year” doesn’t have much of a ring to it, does it?

Here’s an odd New Year’s fact that might change your whole perception of this evening, maybe forever.  While we are not really sure that Jesus was a historical figure at all, but if he was a historical figure, he likely wasn’t really born on December 25th.  But if Jesus had been born on December 25th then January 1st would have been the eighth day after his birth, and as a Jewish boy that would make it the date of his bris, his ritual circumcision.  Perhaps we should be wishing each other “Happy Jesus’ Bris Day” instead of Happy New Year.

An unusual way to think about New Year’s, no? 

Of course, that’s not really the way we think about New Year’s.  In fact, the American celebration of New Year’s is odd enough all by itself: dress up in fancy clothes, go out to an expensive dinner or a party, stay up until midnight, drink a lot of booze, especially champagne, watch a large ball descend into Times Square on TV—and then nurse your hangover the next morning watching parades and college bowl games while you think about making new year’s resolutions—resolutions like not to drink as much as you did the night before.  A strange way to start to a new year.

I must note that even the years we mark were established in a similarly arbitrary way.  This year is not actually 2022 years from any notable date at all, including the date it supposedly reflects, the year of Jesus’ birth.  According to scholars, based on the events in the New Testament itself, if Jesus was a historical figure, he was likely born in the year 6 BC; that is, he was born 6 years before himself.  Now that would truly be miraculous!  By the way, there is no year zero the way we calculate years.  That is, we go from 1 BC to 1 AD with no zero year in our history books and timelines.  That’s like going from 1999 to 2001 without the intervening year 2000.  So 2022 is actually 2022 years from a non-existent point in time. 

There is more oddity.  Speaking historically, the people who lived in the first century, 2000 years ago, had no idea they were living in the first century of anything.  In those days the calendar was usually dated from the beginning of the current royal house.  In Israel, for example, they dated official years from the formal beginning of the Seleucid Empire around 250 BCE, which if it were still true would make this year 2272, instead of 2022.  Alternatively, back then in Israel, they used Roman dates, which were based on the Julian calendar, established arbitrarily by Julius Caesar in the year 46 BCE.  He made New Year’s January 1st because the month of January was named for Janus, the two-faced Roman pagan god, and Caesar figured that a new years’ day should therefore be two-faced as well—one looking backward and one looking forward.  At his orders on Caesar’s Roman legal calendar the consuls, the top Roman officials, changed on January 1st. That became New Year’s for the government, which, then as now, everybody distrusted and more or less hated.  And so, for this weird 2000-year-old reason we will celebrate New Year’s starting after midnight as January 1st.

There are other unusual New Year’s notes for Jews: the Israeli term for New Year’s night celebrations is “Sylvester.” Now, Israelis calling New Year’s Eve and day “Sylvester” is more than a bit bizarre.  The name “Sylvester” does not come from the cartoon cat who was paired with Tweety Bird, but rather from the name of the “Saint” and Roman Pope who reigned during the Council of Nicaea in the year 325 C.E.  While that’s obscure enough, there is a very dark side to this Sylvester.  The year before the Council of Nicaea, in 324 CE, it was this Sylvester who convinced the Roman Emperor Constantine to prohibit Jews from living in Jerusalem.  Then at the Council of Nicaea, Sylvester also thoughtfully arranged for the passage of a host of viciously anti-Semitic legislation that was later incorporated into nearly every anti-Jewish legal code in the Byzantine Empire and throughout Western Civilization.  So why do Israeli Jews celebrate a day dedicated to a vicious anti-Semite who did serious and enduring damage to our people some 1700 years ago?

Well, it’s like this.  Since all Catholic “Saints” are awarded a day on which Christians celebrate and pay tribute to that Saint’s memory, and December 31st is Saint Sylvester Day, celebrations on the night of December 31st are technically dedicated to Sylvester’s memory, not a guy you would think that Jews would ever celebrate, especially in an era when Anti-Semitism is on the rise yet again.

Now as to the randomness of the counting of years, frankly, we Jews aren’t any better about that.  First, we have a tradition of multiple new year’s every year.

Rosh HaShanah is the most familiar one, of course, and a famous Mishnah at the beginning of the tractate on Rosh HaShanah teaches us that it is the new year for counting years, and for calculating the sabbatical and jubilee years.  It is also, of course, the new year for the soul, the day of judgment when we take account of our actions and seek to repent our sins and return to goodness and holiness.  The appropriate time for new year’s resolutions is therefore Rosh haShanah, not January 1st. 

The other new years’ delineated in traditional sources include the beginning of the springtime month of Nissan, in late March or early April, which was the new year’s for governmental affairs in ancient times and also the new year for marking holidays, making Passover, springtime freedom festival, the first holiday of the year, idiosyncratically not Rosh HaShanah. 

Then there is Tu Bishvat, the new year for trees—that’s coming up on January 16th, two weeks from Sunday, by the way, and the day we will enjoy our very special TV to Torah event with Rabbi and Cantor Baruch Cohon—anyway, on Tu Bishvat they believed that sap began to flow in the trees in mid-winter, a kind of environmentally conscious new year.  And finally, there was a tax new year, our ancestor’s version of April 15th, which occurred about a month before Rosh HaShanah at the start of Elul. 

Four Jewish new year’s; that’s not counting some later new year’s that could be tallied, too, like Simchat Torah, the new year for Torah, when we begin reading the Torah all over again at the end of the fall holiday cycle.  Four new year’s may impress you as about three too many…

In addition, we Jews have some interesting ways of calculating what year it is, too.  Back in the 1st century we used a calendar that calculated the creation of the world as having taken place 3700 years before that 1st century—that’s why we are in the Jewish year 5782 now. Which means we missed the date of the actual creation of the world by only about 4½ billion years, give or take a hundred million years or so.

I’m reminded of the theme song from the show The Big Bang Theory, sung by the rock group The Barenaked Ladies—that’s their name.  It begins, “Our whole universe was in a hot dense state, then 14 billion years ago expansion started; the earth began to cool…” and so on.  Perhaps we should be counting our years from the real beginning of everything, the true Breisheet moment of the creation of the universe some 14 billion years ago when God really began everything in that ultimate moment of singularity.  That would be the true birthday of the world, Rosh HaShanah, as Jews believe.  I’m afraid that writing 14 billion and 20 years on the dateline of a check would be a little difficult; you probably couldn’t even include it in a Google calendar. 

In any case, the ikkar, the essential meaning of all this is that this New Year isn’t really the beginning of anything unique, and we are counting 2022 years from, well, nothing real at all.  But no matter how arbitrary or strange, what any New Year’s provides is an opportunity to gain perspective, that most elusive and most important quality.  For in the dailiness of our lives we become enmeshed in the details of making our own years functional and livable.  And taking the opportunity to look backward and ahead, however artificial or forced, can be a very good thing.

In fact, this year has been a mixed blessing for Jews—as most years prove to be.  While we here at Beit Simcha were able to open to increasing number of congregants and guests, and we have now grown in membership and activity beyond pre-pandemic levels, there have been plenty of challenges and roadblocks along the way.  We are now entering the third—or is it the fourth?—wave of Covid-19 infections, the gift that keeps on giving, Omicron and rising.  With all the many blessings we have had in the past 12 months, we have also seen loss and sadness and stress.  I am reminded of the Rosh haShanah piyut, the liturgical poetic prayer we sing on the High Holy Days: let the old year and its curses end; let the new year and its blessings begin.

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

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

Perhaps in this arbitrary New Year period we can all learn a bit from the Jewish way of observing New Year’s, as we did back in September during our wonderful 3rd Rosh HaShanah for Beit Simcha.  That is, we can and probably should take the time to examine our past year and look forward to finding ways to atone for our mistakes and to seeking greater closeness with those we love and care about.  It is a time to dedicate ourselves to those causes that have most meaning to us, to improving our lives and our relationships, to supporting our synagogue, to making our society better and more just.  That’s the Jewish way to celebrate a new year, even an arbitrary one like 2022. 

If we can do that, then this year, however artificial, can be a blessing to all of us.  And if our congregation continues to do that then we will truly bring blessing to the world.

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

What God Is, and What Can Be

Sermon Shabbat Shmot 5782

Rabbi Samuel M. Cohon

Congregation Beit Simcha, Tucson, Arizona

You are no doubt aware of the tendency of Jews who immigrated to America to change their names, particularly last names.  Greenberger became Green; Katznelson became Katz, or sometimes even Nelson; Belinsky became Berlin, and so on.  Movie and TV stars were legendary for doing this, of course.  Issur Danielovitch became Kirk Douglas; Jacob Garfinkle became John Garfield; Bernie Schwartz became Tony Curtis.  Even Jon Stewart Leibovitz became Jon Stewart. 

First names, too, changed with the geography.  Lazer and Soreh became Louis and Sarah, but they named their kids Sidney and Brenda, and they named their children Steven and Heather, and they named their offspring MacKenzie and Austin.  But sometimes things changed differently in the next generation. 

This is an update on a classic Jewish joke about names. 

A young boy is walking with his father in the middle of the 21st century. A passerby ends up chatting with the child and is impressed with the interaction, and so he says to the father, “Your little boy is so smart and handsome.”  And the father says, “Thank you. I'm flattered. And so is my son.”  And the stranger says, “What's your son's name?”  And the father says, “His name is Shlomo.”  The man is taken aback.  “Shlomo? What kind of name is Shlomo?”  And the father says, “Well, he was named after his late grandfather, whose name was Scott.”

So this week the name of the Torah portion is Shmot which in Hebrew means “names.”  That is, the name is “names.”  Which raises an interesting question: how much does what we name someone, or something, matter?

A name is a funny thing.  Superficially a name seems unimportant, an arbitrary designation.  Would you really be a different person if you had been given a different name? 

Yet in another sense names can hold great meaning indeed.  William Shakespeare famously has Juliet say, “What’s in a name?  A rose by any other name would smell as sweet.”  It would, surely, but would it be the same?  Names do matter; would that play have been nearly as successful if it was called, as author Tom Stoppard suggests in “Shakespeare in Love,” “Romeo and Ethel”?

In Ashkenazic Jewish tradition we never name a child after a living relative, partially out of the superstition that it will be a jinx to both the child and the one he or she is named for.  On the other hand, Sephardim often name after living relatives, leading to jokes about all Sephardim being named David ben David ben David on Israeli comedy shows.  Some authors are quite good at creating memorable names for characters: Oliver Twist’s life takes many turns; Holly Golightly floats elegantly just above reality; Han Solo is not going to be a team player.  Sometimes names appear to predict greatness; at other times they foreshadow misfortune.  Can anyone forget the acronym of the Committee to Re-Elect the President when Nixon ran back in 1972—CREEP? 

The significance of a name is just as true of places as it is of people.  Would the town of Tombstone be quite as infamous if it had been called “Harmony, Arizona?”  What if “Deadwood, South Dakota” had been called “Live Oaks” instead?  And how many of us would like to admit that we were natives of a place named “Oxnard”?  Of course, there are some locations that seem almost miraculously misnamed: Yerushalayim, Jerusalem, means City of Peace, ir shalom, but it has been forcibly and brutally conquered some 44 times throughout history.

This week’s Torah portion of Shmot, the great parsha that begins the Book of Exodus is called quite literally “Names.”  As Nancy has explained so well, it is an extraordinarily rich Torah portion, filled with famous stories and powerful experiences.  At the heart of it, in a section that I will chant tomorrow morning, the Burning Bush episode fills up an entire aliyah and it raises a deep and elusive subject: how do we understand the essence of God?  The answer begins with the names we use for God.

Now you need to know that Jews, while we have just one God, have many names for that God.  The first name used in the Torah is Elohim, which is kind of a generic word for God, and when someone speaks of God in Israel today in a popular or expressive context, they might just use that word, Elohim.  Actually, Elohim is in the masculine plural in the Hebrew, and it technically means “gods.”  In fact, it’s used to describe the gods of other peoples, the “non-gods” if you will, in some Biblical and rabbinic contests.  A shorter version of it, Elim was in our Mi Chamocha prayer tonight, taken from the Song of Moses at the Sea a little later in Exodus, where it is used to say that other gods aren’t comparable to our own God. Yet we use it consistently in Jewish liturgy—most blessings begin Baruch Ata Adonai Eloheinu… and Eloheinu is just a conjugation of Elohim, God, into “our God.”  So even this very first name of God isn’t simple in Judaism.

I once taught a class on the many names for God in Judaism.  I listed all the ones I could think of, checked around to see which ones I’d missed, and finally ended up totaling, I think, about 70 fairly common names we Jews use for God.  It’s likely, however, that there are many more.  These names evolved over time as we changed as a people, and as we became acquainted with names that other people used to describe God.  Instead of accepting that they were the names of the other gods, we simply believe that they described other aspects of the same one God.  Still, the names reveal important things about our own understandings of God. 

There is a famous section of Genesis in which Jacob, our patriarchal ancestor, has a great dream of a ladder or perhaps a stairway to heaven, with angels ascending and descending.  At the top, God appears, and offers reassurance to Jacob that he will become the father of a great and populous nation, and that the land he is lying on will become his people’s eternal home.

Jacob awakens from this dream and says, “Achein, yesh Adonai bamakom hazeh v’anochi lo yadati,” a phrase usually translated as, “Behold, God was in this place and I, I did not know it.”  That translation doesn’t truly capture the nuances of Jacob’s statement, in particular the ways he refers to God.  First, God’s name is given as Yud Hay Vav Hay, the holiest four-letter name of God.  In addition, the word hamakom is another name of God, meaning “the place,” which seems particularly appropriate since by tradition the place that Jacob is lying on will someday be the location of the Holy of Holies of the Temple in Jerusalem, the “place” where God dwells most intensely in all of Jewish belief. 

But most interestingly, when Jacob says, “God was in this place v’Anochi lo yadati,” that is, “and I, I did not know it” he uses Hebrew in a peculiar way.  Jacob need not actually say Anochi at all, since by saying lo yadati he has already said, “I didn’t know it.”  But by adding the grammatically unnecessary extra “I” he has done something commentators see as a theological statement, a description of God and God’s essence.  He doesn’t say, “God was in this place and I, I did not know it,” but “God was in this place and Anochi, I did not know God by that name.”

The word Anochi means “I” or “me,” but it means a very specific kind of “I” or “me.”  It is a stronger word than the more common basic Hebrew word Ani.  It is a word of presence, a definitive “I” if you will, a powerful statement of existence.  What God is saying to our father Jacob is, “I exist, and I am here; do not be afraid.”  That extra letter, the Hebrew letter chaf, changes the innocuous pronoun ani, I, into an actual name of God, Anochi.   In fact, there is a custom among some Jews, Sephardim in particular but also Chasidim, to make the symbol of the letter kaf with their hands, signifying the presence of God. 

Our patriarch Jacob, in one of the great moments of his life, comes to understand God as Anochi, the God who is always present and who will be with him through all his many trials and tribulations.  Anochi, the God who is most definitely here.  That very name will eventually be the way God begins the Ten Commandments: Anochi Adonai Elohecha… I, Anochi, am the Lord your God; I, God, am here, now.

And in our Torah portion of Shmot this week, Moses has his own first great moment of personal revelation.  Like his ancestor Jacob, the encounter comes as a surprise to him.  Unlike Jacob, the meeting with God is not a dream sequence, but occurs in the form of a vision.

Moses is pasturing sheep in the desert when he sees that famous bush that burns but is unconsumed.  This Burning Bush is an arresting site, and he turns from his path to approach it.  Out of the bush comes the voice of God, and Moses, startled, engages in a long dialogue with God.  God urges and finally demands Moses take up the call to fight for the freedom of the Israelites, become God’s emissary to free the Hebrew slaves serving Pharaoh in Egypt.  Moses is beyond reluctant to take on this great task, arguing repeatedly he is unqualified and should not have to go.  At one climactic moment in this dramatic dialogue, Moses asks God to identify God’s self, so that Moses can tell Pharaoh—and even the Israelite people—just who is demanding freedom for the slaves.

God’s answer appears to be ambiguous in the extreme: Ehyeh asher Ehyeh, God says, I will be what I will be, or perhaps I am that I am.  

Ehyeh shlachani elayich, God continues—Ehyeh sent me, you should say to the people.  Ehyeh is my eternal name and how I will be remembered from generation to generation.  God adds that the four-letter name, Yud Hey Vav Hey, is a name by which God was not known to Abraham, Isaac, or Jacob.

But simply put, that’s wrong.  God was known by that holiest of names to all three patriarchs, and this is not actually a new name at all.  What’s going on here?  What is God trying to tell Moses?

Again, the commentators weigh in.  It’s not the Tetragrammaton, the four-letter-name of God, Yud Hey Vav Hey, that’s a unique new designation, a fresh name for God.  It’s actually Ehyeh that’s a new name for God.

So just what does Ehyeh mean?  Literally, “I will be.”  That is, God is infinite potential, capable of anything, up to and including redeeming the nation of Israel from slavery, splitting the sea, bringing us to Mt. Sinai and an eternal covenant, and giving us the Promised Land.  Ehyeh, God can do anything.  Ehyeh, God is absolute potential, the unlimited divine energy to transform things as they are into things as they should be.

According to this interpretation, Jacob knew God as Anochi, the God who is, the God of what is, a reassuring presence.  But Moses comes to know God, through this Burning Bush episode and more elaborately in the next four books of the Torah, as the God of infinite possibility, the God of what will be.  It is this not-so-small difference between God as Anochi and God as Ehyeh that transforms an acceptance of what is into the realization that something great can be, and that we have the potential to be part of that greatness.

I believe that this has great resonance for each of us.  Faith in God as an existent reality is a wonderful thing, Anochi, and it can provide reassurance and support throughout our lives.  But belief in a God of infinite possibility, a faith that supports the incredible potential God has implanted in this universe of ours—that is the God of the Burning Bush, the Ehyeh that provides hope and promise that anything can happen if God wills it, the assurance that redemption and help can come for each of us.  

What’s in a name?  In this case, it is a gift: a gift of hope in times of distress, of light in times of darkness, of belief in moments of doubt.   

On this Shabbat of Shmot, of names, may we each find reassurance, promise and inspiration in our own understanding of Ehyeh, the God of the infinitely possible.  And may that knowledge of what can be bring us the hope, and energy, to seek to accomplish true good in our world.

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!