Bring the Light

Sermon Parshat Beha’alotecha 5782

This week features the longest days of the year in the Northern Hemisphere, with the summer solstice coming up this Tuesday, on June 21st.  There are Jewish holidays associated with each of the equinoxes, spring in March and autumn in September, and the winter solstice in December.  But there is no Jewish sun-related holiday in June.  This demonstrates some interesting things about Judaism, and about all religion.

Judaism, unlike other ancient religions, views God as Creator of the natural universe.  Rather than seeing the sun and moon as gods, or the stars and planets as independent entities, we have always understood the entirety of nature as being the result of God initiating creation.  You can call this a religious form of the Big Bang Theory, if you like; I tend to think of it that way.  God began all creation out of nothing, Creation ex Nihilo, and the central idea is simply that the sun, moon, planets, stars, galaxies, and other celestial entities revolve and rotate and expand or contract in ways initiated by God’s original act of creation.  These heavenly bodies aren’t seen as bearing any astrological magic, they don’t impact our lives directly through some spiritual or mystical process, but are simply objects created by God. 

But we Jews have always been influenced by the surrounding cultures in which we lived, and we have often utilized some of the ideas others have found relevant and important.  We just use them to demonstrate the central idea of one God, and God’s role forming and shaping the entirety of the universe.

In nearly every culture in the world the place of the sun in the sky has been of interest, and often a central focus of religious practice as well.  In Egypt, the sun god Ra was a central deity, as was Aton, the solar disk. Mesopotamians worshipped Shamash, the sun god, whose name became the word for sun in Hebrew, shemesh.  Other peoples worshipped the sun too, and many created special rituals and monumental religious places dedicated to the solar cycle, from Stonehenge in Britain to the Temple of the Sun in Beijing to the Pyramid of the Sun in Teotihuacan near Mexico City. 

Because of the predictable quality of the solar year, nearly every region and people on earth has ritual holidays associated with the dates when days were shortest and nights longest—the winter solstice, as well as days longest and nights shortest—the summer solstice—and the dates when the days and nights were of equal duration, the spring and fall equinoxes.   Those holidays had various names and rites, from the Babylonian Nisanu spring festival to the Midsummer day in Scandinavia to the fall festival in Vietnam and China to the Roman Saturnalia that was transformed into Christmas. 

Judaism developed rituals and holidays around these solstices and equinoxes too: Passover, near the vernal equinox in spring, is our chag haAviv, our springtime holiday of freedom.  Rosh HaShanah, the Jewish New Year, and Sukkot, our harvest festival, occur around the fall equinox.  And in winter, of course, Chanukah, our festival of lights, comes at the darkest time of year near the winter solstice.  Even though we don’t acknowledge any special religious significance to the cycles of the sun—our Jewish calendar, of course, is based on the moon—we still manage to cover three of the four special solar times with important festivals.  These holidays are officially unrelated to sun-worship, but in keeping with a Jewish genius for adopting customs of other traditions we utilize them to advance Jewish ideas and values.

We Jews do this for the key spring, fall, and winter dates but not for the Summer Solstice, this coming week.  It seems slightly odd that we connect to the other three crucial periods of the year for solar religiosity, while on the one day of the year that seems most likely to inspire religious connection we do bubkis, nothing.

Perhaps we don’t do anything for the summer solstice precisely because it was such an important element for many ancient religious traditions.  In Israel, the Essenes, an ascetic Jewish religious group active during the 1st century CE, were the only sect to use a solar calendar, rather the lunar one. At the time, nearly 2000 years ago, Essenes were one of about 24 different Jewish religious sectarian groups in Israel.  Archaeologists found that the largest room of the ruins at Qumran (where the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered) was a sun temple.  This Tuesday, at the time of the summer solstice, the rays of the setting sun will shine at the angle of 286 degrees along the building's longitudinal axis, and illuminate its eastern wall. The room is oriented at exactly the same angle as the Egyptian shrines dedicated to the sun gods. Two ancient authorities -- the historian Josephus and the philosopher Philo of Alexandria -- wrote that the Essenes were sun worshipers, and here we have the evidence.

In a world thus permeated by the glow of sun worshippers, Judaism thus found itself in a position in which it needed to avoid establishing anything that could become a catalyst for more solar devotion.  And so, no Summer Solstice celebrations for us this week, and no special dedications on behalf of solar devotionals.

But the days are sure long now, and filled with light.  Which leads to another thought about light.

This week we read the Torah portion of Beha’alotecha, the third parsha in the Book of Numbers.  In Beha’alotecha the command is given for the greatest symbol of Judaism ever created, the menorah, the candelabrum that comes to symbolize everything meaningful about Jewish inspiration and ritual.  Is the menorah the becomes the chief image of Jewish life for over three thousand years, the menorah that is the official state symbol of Medinat Yisrael, the state of Israel, the menorah that is the most important visual representation of what Judaism is all about. 

The seven-branched Menorah represents, in a picture, everything that is meaningful about Judaism for millennia.  The oldest Jewish tombstones we have are decorated with menorahs.  In the remarkable collection of ancient Jewish objects that you can find in the Vatican in Rome, for example, there are dozens of images of menorahs.  No wonder Israel made it the symbol of the state, the most modern and meaningful expression of Jewish life today.

Now I know that the so-called Star of David, the Magein David, is the picture everyone has in her or his mind about what really represents Judaism.  But the Star of David is actually a Johnny-come-lately.  It has only been used for perhaps 700 years as a Jewish symbol at all.  For much more of Jewish history it has been the menorah that matters.

That menorah is lit in our Torah portion of Beha’altoecha this week to prove the presence of God, the symbolic daily representation of God’s presence in our midst that really represents what is holy and brilliant about Judaism.  The Menorah was the 7-branched light lit in the Tabernacle in the Wilderness and then the Temple in Jerusalem, as the sign of God’s eternal presence. When it was lit, God was there.

Now we are all familiar with the Chanukah menorah, the 9 candled lamp that that we tend to think of as a “menorah”.  Actually, that is not a menorah, really, but a Chanukiah, a specific kind of lamp.  The Chanukiah, while a much older symbol of Judaism than the Magein David, the star of David, is still kind of newish—less than 2200 years old, 1000 years younger than the menorah itself.  

The lamp we have here in Beha’alotecha is the 7 branched menorah that was the central symbol of Judaism, the one you can see being carried off by Roman soldiers on the Arch of Titus in Rome.

So you should be asking yourself an important question by now:  just why are we talking about a 7-branched menorah?  After all, we don’t actually use such a menorah in any Jewish rituals at all today.  It is an archaic symbol, something so out of date that, with all our many rituals and candle lightings and brachot and services, we don’t even have one single rite in which we use a 7 branched menorah for anything.  That symbol has become meaningless.

Which is important.  Because no matter how central the menorah was to our people’s history and symbolism, no matter how much it represented God’s inspirational presence in our midst, it is now, in matter of fact, meaningless to Jews.

Why is that?

Because we didn’t use it. After the Temple was destroyed for the last time we never again lit a 7-branched menorah for any ritual purpose.  And so, it just doesn’t matter.

We do keep it around, as a memento of our great past history.  But it isn’t something you would want to buy in a gift shop, or give for a bar mitzvah or confirmation gift. 

And why not?

Because there is no practical use for it.  A 7 branched menorah is like an outdated computer or useless old cellphone today.  No real meaning.

Now, why is this relevant tonight?

Because that menorah truly can serve one important practical purpose.  Just as our Judaism serves an important practical purpose.

In a basic way, that golden menorah was a way to keep track of the days of the week—a new light was added each day from Sunday through Friday until, finally, all seven branches shone on the holiest of days, Shabbat. 

Each day, we added a bit more light.  Each day, our ancestors added to the illumination of God’s holiness.  Each day they remembered to bring just a bit more brilliance into their lives.

If we can remember to do the same—to add a bit of extra light into our lives each day—then perhaps we, too, will find holiness in our own lives, and reach closer to God.

Be’ha’alotecha instructs us to light the menorah in the holiest place, commands us to bring illumination, to add light to the world.  We Jews have always believed this is our truest task, to brighten the darkness of cruel or thoughtless societies.  There was an entire Jewish movement, the Haskalah, the Jewish Enlightenment in the 19th century, that believed that intellectual honesty and integrity and openness could help bring more light to the dark places on our globe, could inspire us to grow in goodness, holiness, and responsibility.

So too, today, in a society and a world where darkness seems to spread unchecked, it is our role to bring light even into these superlong days, to seek to brink the illumination of care, love and integrity into our world, to brighten everything through our own example.

So may it prove to be for each of us this week.

A Great Blessing Indeed

Sermon Shabbat Naso 5782, Rabbi Samuel M. Cohon

You may remember this gesture from a re-run of the famous TV show Star Trek, or one of the many movies they have made based on that show.  Spock, the Vulcan Science Officer on the Starship Enterprise, raises his hands and with his fingers shaped into a kind of extended “W” format says in his rich baritone voice, “Live long and prosper.” 

That gesture was not originally designed by a TV director, writer or showrunner, not even the redoubtable Gene Rodenberry, creator of Star Trek.  It is actually the ancient sign of the Kohanim, the high priests, used since the days of the Temple in Jerusalem as part of the traditional blessing bestowed on the people during the ceremony of birkat kohanim, called duchenen in Yiddish.  The story behind it appearing as a feature of Star Trek is that Leonard Nimoy, who gained fame playing Spock, was asked to come up with a physical gesture of farewell that a Vulcan would use.  Nimoy grew up an Orthodox Jew in Boston, and he himself was a kohein.  He immediately thought of forming his hands into a Shin, symbolic of Shadai, an ancient name of God, and added the Biblical-sounding phrase, “Live long and prosper.”  That’s not far from the way most people have understood the priestly blessing, which asks God for physical health and safety and material sustenance.  And so a primal Jewish blessing was transformed into an otherworldly invocation.

Leonard Nimoy was a fascinating guy, with a rich and complicated Jewish heritage.  As a boy he had such a good singing voice that he was one of the meshor’rim, the singers in his shul’s choir, and he impressed people so much at his bar mitzvah that he was asked to reprise it the next week at another temple.  As his also Jewish co-star on Star Trek, William Shatner, said, "He is still the only man I know whose voice was two bar mitzvahs good!"

In popular culture, the great Canadian-Jewish troubadour, Leonard Cohen, concluded a concert in Ramat Gan, Israel about fifteen years ago by raising his hands in the traditional gesture and reciting the Birkat Kohanim, learned in his own Orthodox youth in Montreal.

As the child of a Kohein myself, I used to practice that gesture as a kid by stretching my fingers on the seat back of the chair in front of me.  I wasn’t sure of the exact way the ritual of blessing the people was performed for a very good reason: in the Conservative and Reform synagogues in which I grew up it wasn’t done.  They didn't duchen, that is, have the kohanim, the descendants of Aaron the High Priest, do the weird, antique ritual at all.

In fact, even in Orthodox synagogues outside of Israel the Birkat Kohanim with its full ritual is usually only performed on the three pilgrimage festivals, Pesach, Shavu’ot and Sukkot.  I first had the opportunity to participate in duchenen when I was 16 years old, on a trip to Israel with my parents.  It was over the holiday of Passover, and my father and brother and I went to the Kotel in Jerusalem, where thousands of people had gathered for the festival prayers.  When the time came for the Birkat Kohanim, for the priests to offer the three-part blessing to the assembled throngs of people, hundreds of Kohanim had gathered at the Kotel.  We all faced the Western Wall, covered our heads with our tallises, and chanted the blessing enabling us to sanctify the people with the blessings of Aaron.  And then we turned and raised our hands in that shin gesture and chanted the words of the blessing, and the stirring, modal melody that accompanied them, over the assembled congregation. 

When you do this blessing, people are supposed to hide their faces from you, as in that moment, theoretically, you as a kohein take on the same divine illumination that suffused Aaron when he gave these blessings, much like the aura that radiated from Moses face after communing with God.  The men opposite us covered their faces with their tallitot.  But one little boy peeked out from under his father’s talis, and my dad always recalls watching his father’s hand circling around and covering the boy’s eyes…

An artist named Rachel Farbiarz describes watching this priestly experience at her own temple growing up: “At a specified time in the service, the community’s kohanim discreetly excused themselves to perform their preparatory ablutions. The faint sound of the priests’ shuffling was followed by a call-to-attention—Koh-Haahh-Neeeem!–summoning them to their posts before the ark. The men of the congregation gathered their children and their children’s children under the prayer shawls they had drawn over their heads.

“The kohanim faced them, cloaked too in their billowing shawls. Their arms outstretched, their fingers extended and conjoined in the cultic v-shape, the priests swayed and chanted the blessing–distending its syllables, trilling its notes. Only after the kohanim finished the blessing did the face-off of masquerading ghosts end: Modestly, the priests turned their backs to the congregation and took down their shawls, unveiling themselves before the ark.

“I actually was not supposed to have witnessed any of this. All of us, kohanim and congregation alike, were to have had our eyes closed or averted downward, to shield ourselves from the awesome power that emanated from between the kohanim’s fingers. I have always suspected though that we protected ourselves not only from the Divine, but also from something very human: the tendency to turn an act of blessing into an act that invests one group with power at the expense of the other.”

Which raises a question that I, too, struggled with this past week: why can only some people confer blessings?

How many times have you been in a service or at a life-cycle celebration and heard the rabbi or cantor intone or chant or sing, “Yvarechecha Adonai v’yishmerecha, May God bless you and keep you…”  But did you ever think about whether the person officiating really had some special ability to bless people that other human beings don’t have?

Which raises the further question: just what is a blessing in today’s world?

At its most basic level, a blessing is a kind of gift being given by one person to another.  We use this colloquially to mean anything good that happens to us, or even a person who helps us—“my mother’s nurse is a true blessing” or “that child has been a blessing to us”—but in its most typical, pure, narrow form a blessing is a way to convey divine favor from the giver to the recipient.  When one person blesses another, he or she is passing on something that is, in actuality, not really his or hers to give: the one giving the blessing is acting as a kind of conduit for God.  When you give a blessing, you are conveying a gift from God to another person. 

In Jewish tradition, blessings are often given by a parent to a child.  Each Friday night at the Shabbat table, in a ritual that we do publicly here at Congregation Beit Simcha but which you are also supposed to do at home, fathers and mothers bless their children, using that formula that goes back millennia: “May God make you like Ephraim and Manasseh, may God make you like Sarah, Rebecca, Rachel and Leah.”  And some parents then add the priestly blessing, “May God bless and keep you, May God’s presence illuminate you and be kind to you, May God’s presence turn to you and give you peace.”  This is generally experienced, I think, as a form of parental love being conveyed, rather than an actual gift of divine favor.  Dad or mom is showing how much they care for each child, placing a hand on his or her head, touching them and offering a wish for goodness for them.

In other words, it’s a lovely gesture, a beautiful one, sweet and caring and nurturing.  But I’m not sure how many Jewish parents or children think that something divine is being directly conveyed.  I mean, in my experience, very few Jewish children think their parents are God…  and none after about age 5.  Certainly, no teenagers think that way.

But if parental blessing makes sense in a human way, what are we to make of the public offering of blessing by a religious leader?  The idea that one person—any person—has the capacity to bring special favor to us through his or her personal action, which is the idea behind a priest or rabbi or minister or imam “giving a blessing” seems archaic, out of date.  There was certainly a time when the common understanding was that a person who held a ritual role literally brought God’s presence to the person being blessed.  But in today’s world, when religious training is essentially academic—learn the content of these books, listen to lectures, study a subject and demonstrate proficiency—the notion that there is something mystically powerful that the representative of a religious tradition alone can convey is a relic of a past age.  And, frankly, it demonstrates a bit of arrogance on the part of the clergyperson doing the blessing, as if to say, “Only I can give this blessing from God to you.”

And yet…

I recall a fundraising event at a congregation I was serving.  It was the standard sort of function put together for such a purpose by synagogues and other organizations: a prominent person is honored, his or her friends are asked to donate to a tribute book and host tables for a significant donation, and funds are raised for the organization.  The program included a video tribute to the person and his accomplishments, speeches by community leaders and family members, and a banquet-style meal.  And then I, as the rabbi, was to say some words of tribute.

It was clear that the organizers—prominent members of my congregation at the time—did not want the evening to be “too Jewish.”  This was a purely secular tribute to a person who didn’t attend synagogue much and did most of his volunteering at other organizations, but he was a good man and a member, and I was the rabbi.  I might only see him twice a year—Rosh HaShanah and Yom Kippur, unless he skipped one—but I still had the responsibility to connect this fundraising gig with Judaism. 

I think the time I was allotted to do this on the hour-long program was listed in bold as, “Rabbi Cohon talks—2 minutes.” I have never spoken long at such events—no one wants a sermon at a tribute dinner—and I didn’t then.  But when I finished my remarks, and started to leave the podium, I noticed something amiss.  The honoree was clearly distressed.  The organizer rushed up to me, and grabbing my arm whispered in my ear, “He wants to know what happened to the blessing?” 

And so I re-ascended the dais and called him and his family up, and I asked everyone to rise, and I lifted up my arms and shaped each hand into the form of a Shin, symbolic of Shadai, the most ancient name of God, and I chanted and intoned those ancient words from Naso, “May God bless you and keep you…”  And the honoree’s disappointed countenance relaxed. I had given him his blessing.

Looking back, I know why I was so surprised.  The whole evening had been devoid of religious feeling or ceremony, from the cocktails flowing freely at the opening reception to the jazz played by the hired band to the lame jokes and less-than-moving speeches and tributes during the program itself.  And then, suddenly, it became clear that being blessed mattered very much to this very successful but apparently religiously uninvolved man. And that the rabbi had to be the one to give him that blessing.

I’m still not sure that a Kohein, a priestly descendant, or a rabbi or any religious figure has a special power to invoke the deity or bring divine favor or somehow schlep God into the room in a unique way.  To me, God is always present, and God’s blessings flow when we work to make them happen.  But there definitely remains something in many people’s consciousness that testifies that a blessing given by a rabbi or other clergy is special, a sacred gift that only religious figures can offer.  In a sense, I hope that they are right and I am wrong…

Look, I was born a kohein.  As the old joke has it, my father was a kohein, my grandfather was a kohein, and by golly I wanted to be a kohein too.  So I got to be one, and learned to make the magical sign with my fingers, the shin of blessing. Mazal Tov.

I like being a kohein, getting called up first to the Torah on occasion, and when I happen to be in a shul that duchens and conducts the old-fashioned priestly blessing publicly I like going up and being part of it.  It’s a cool ritual: you take off your shoes, the Levites wash your hands, you cover yourself in a big talis while the congregation hides its eyes, chant the weird and powerful call-and-response melody of the blessings with the cantor.  It’s slightly spooky, beautiful, unique.  And when people hide their eyes during the blessing, they do so as though God’s very presence was shining from us kohanim, as though we really were conduits of divine energy.

But what makes a Kohein any holier than anyone else?  In Temple times Kohanim had to live a different lifestyle, couldn’t farm or go to war, had limits on their marriage prospects, were trained from early in life for Temple service, and lived the rites of sanctity every day.  But realistically, kohanim today can be observant or not, ritually adept or not, good people or not.  It’s a roll of the dice.  So why preserve this ancient ritual? 

Perhaps it’s for a very, very simple reason.  You see, it’s not just Kohanim who have a hereditary role.  Judaism is all of our inheritance, it’s in our DNA, whatever our theoretical tribe, Kohein, Levi, Yisrael, whether born Jewish or having adopted this sacred trust by choice. 

The real purpose of it is to remind us that we are all part of a sacred inheritance, that we each are members of the true religiously royal family, that we each can, and should, wear the keter kehuna the crown of priesthood.  We truly are the inheritors, spiritually, of what we are told earlier in the Torah, part of this mamlechet kohanim v’goy kadosh, the kingdom of priests, members of the holy people that is responsible to live lives at a higher moral level.

And that Birkat Kohanim, that simple, three-part blessing, may confer on each of us a little bit of that holiness.  So may it be: May God bless you and grace you.  May the light of God’s presence shine on you and illuminate you; may God’s presence turn to you and give you peace.

Everyone Counts

Shabbat Bamidbar 5782 Sermon

Rabbi Samuel M. Cohon

If you have ever closely read our Torah portion this week, then you know that in most ways Bamidbar is a stupendously dull portion, one of the least superficially interesting Torah portions of the entire year.  After all, it’s nothing more than a series of lists, a counting, a census of people.  How many were in the tribe of Reuben, head by head, one by one, age twenty and over, all able to go out to war?  46,500.  How many were in the tribe of Shimon, head by head, one by one, age twenty and over, all able to go out to war?  59,300.  How many in the tribe of Gad, Judah, Issachar, Zevulun, Ephraim, Menasseh, Benjamin, Dan, Asher, Naphtali, head by head, one by one, age twenty and over, all able to go out to war, on and on, thousands upon thousands, all counted one at a time?  Numbers and numbers and numbers, added together, a Torah portion only an accountant could love. 

No wonder there are so many Jewish CPAs.

But then, on closer examination, Bamidbar looks—well, even less intriguing.  Details about the arrangement of the camping sites of the tribes.  Minutiae relating to the census.  Nothing with the vaguest whiff of interest or challenge or meaning.  Nothing fun at all. 

In fact, when you come right down to it, most of Bamidbar looks a whole lot like the regulations for the establishment of a census.  Count each and every person carefully, total them up, move on to the next area or region.  Each and every single individual is tallied.  A good process for the statisticians, but what can it possibly mean to us?

In an interesting sidelight of history, one of the first duties of the United States government under the new Constitution, ratified back in 1789—the Constitution we still use, “We The People” and all that—one of the first duties on the US government was to take a census of the population, by state.  Every qualified individual in the entire country was to be counted once every decade.  Each person had to be recorded and tallied, carefully and regularly. 

This is still done, of course, and the results of the decennial census help determine everything from congressional representation to the allocation of federal funding.  Each American is counted regularly.  This tradition is so strong that even when more efficient means of tabulating populations are developed—scientific sampling, for example—the resistance is fierce.  We actually prefer to be counted in the old, archaic way, and generally speaking we still do a good job of it, in spite of the best efforts of politically motivated idiots who don’t want everyone actually counted.  The US census still really matters, and it is done, on the whole, quite well indeed.

But in the larger sense, in a nation of 340 million people, how much does one single person really matter?  There are so very many Americans; we lost 1 million people or so in the Coronavirus pandemic, an incredible tragedy—and yet, there still remain about 340 million.  And moving beyond the national, there are so many people here on earth today, nearly 8 billion people on this planet.  That’s quite a lot.  How important is it really to count everyone?

To put it another way, how much could one human life really matter? 

There are many philosophies that assert that people only matter in the collective.  They are called Socialism or Marxism; nowadays there are other variations, such as Communitarianism.  In these understandings, people only really matter as part of an aggregate whole, a member of the people’s collective, when they belong to the larger entity of which they are an otherwise insignificant member.

On the other side of the argument, in authoritarian regimes like Russia, Turkey, Syria, Saudi Arabia or Hungary, it seems as though the only person who really matters is the dictator in charge at the moment.  Each individual only has significance in relationship to how she or he serves the president, prime minister, king, or dictator at the top of the pyramid.

Or perhaps it’s a small group of exceptional people who make a difference, not the whole group.  What is it I read once?  “It is the incidence of heroes that counts, not the pattern of the zeros.” (Robert Heinlein, Glory Road, p. 277)  The sum total isn’t what matters at all; it’s the top individuals who have real impact and who stand up and deserve to be counted.  It’s the few who should be counted.

That’s not, however, the message that Bamidbar is trying to convey in this week’s accounting-influenced portion.

Judaism has always believed that each and every human life has meaning, is holy, because each of us can truly change the world.  That is, we have to count everyone—everyone—to be sure that we are considering the human value, the tzelem Elohim, the image of God encapsulated in each person.

Consider, if you will, an oddity in the text of our Siddur.  In most prayerbooks the Shema is written as it is in the book of Deuteronomy in the Torah, with the large ayin at the end of the word Shema and a large dalet at the end of the word Echad.  If you don’t believe me, turn to pages 34 and 35 in your prayerbooks.  There it is: Shema with a large ayin, echad with a large dalet.  Curious, no?

There are many interpretations as to why the ayin and dalet of these two words of our most important prayer—our must important Jewish idea of all, monotheism—are written it this way.  But the most famous, and most powerful, says that the two letters, near the beginning and at the end of the Shema, actually form a word: Eid, in Hebrew, which means witness.  The midrash tells us that the Shema itself—the holiest statement of Jewish belief, God is one—is meaningless unless we each are witnesses to its truth.  Only when each one of us accepts this phenomenal concept do we begin to understand Judaism, or indeed all ethics.  We each matter.  Everyone counts.

We will hear this same concept again tomorrow night and Sunday on the holiday of Shavu’ot, which commemorates receiving the Ten Commandments at Sinai.  After counting out each day of the 49 from Passover to Shavuot, counting the Omer—another Jewish accounting process raised to the status of holiness—we will learn that in Jewish tradition, every single Israelite human being alive stood at the foot of Mt. Sinai and heard God’s word.  And not only every Jewish human being alive back then, some 3250 years ago, but every human being not yet born, every Jew ever to be, stood at Sinai as well and experienced God’s presence.  We all, each of us, have importance because we all, each of us, stood at Sinai.

Bamidbar teaches this lesson in a much more basic way, and perhaps in an even more important way.  Because Bamidbar, this system of counting, reminds us that we each matter to our people, our nation, and, most importantly, to our God.

There is a value to this, of course, that goes beyond the theological or even the political. It is a psychological quality, a sense that if every one of us truly matters to God, and to our people of Israel, our Jewish nation, we are never truly alone.  We really do count.

I was listening to music last night and a song from the musical Dear Evan Hansen came on; the most popular song from that adolescent-focused Tony and Emmy-winning show: “You Will Be Found.”  Its theme is simple, really: when you feel alone and abandoned, like no one ever notices you, like you don’t matter at all, it’s simply not true.  As the lyric promises, “When you are broken on the ground—you will be found.”

On this Shabbat, may we each find our own way to recognize that holiness in ourselves, and in every single person we encounter.  And may we seek to build a society dedicated to recognizing that sacredness, to making certain that everyone counts.

True Jewish Heritage

Sermon Shabbat Emor 5782

Apparently May is Jewish Heritage Month in America, something I didn’t actually know until I read it this week.  This commemoration has been a thing since 2006, when it was started as a belated way of celebrating the 350th Anniversary of American Judaism, which actually took place in 2004.  Jewish Heritage Month was proclaimed by Congress in 2005, and in 2006 it was signed into law by then-President George W. Bush. 

For this year’s celebration, President Joe Biden said that “The story of America was written, in part, by Jewish Americans who, through their words and actions, embraced the opportunity and responsibility of citizenship knowing full well that democracy is not born, nor sustained, by accident.  Inspired by Jewish American communal leadership, our Nation’s first President pledged that our Government will “give to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance.”  Inspired by Jewish American poetry, our shores have welcomed millions with the words “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to be free.”  Throughout our country’s history, Jewish Americans have proudly served our Nation in uniform, in elected office, and on our Nation’s highest courts.  They have made enormous contributions to America’s cultural, scientific, artistic, and intellectual life, and they have marched, petitioned, and boarded buses to demand civil and political rights for all — from women’s rights to voting rights to workers’ rights.”

High-minded words indeed, and accurate.  Jews have played a central role in much of American history and development, and we continue to contribute tremendously to American life.

Still, I think I would be more excited about this American-Jewish Heritage Month if I hadn’t looked up just how many National Heritage Months our US Congress had already proclaimed.  You probably were unaware of the fact that there are currently national heritage months for Irish-Americans, Italian-Americans, Greek-Americans, Hispanic-Americans, Filipino-Americans, Asian-Pacific Americans, Haitian-Americans, Native Americans, as well as Caribbean-Americans.  For some reason, German-Americans only merit a single day on the calendar, not a whole month, but since Germans are very efficient that’s probably all they need.  For us Jews, who are far messier, I think a month may not prove fully sufficient… in addition, of course, we also have Black History Month and Women’s History Month. 

When you start looking at all the commemorations and holidays proclaimed by our federal government you begin to think that the Jewish calendar’s plethora of festivals isn’t really so over the top:  there are actually 46 special months recognized by American presidential proclamation—46 special months when there are only 12 months in the year; only the government could manage that arithmetic!—as well as 20 special weeks and 47 special days recognized by presidential proclamation.  This even makes the Catholic saints’ day calendar, which has had many more centuries to develop, seem kind of reasonable.

Just this month our American-Jewish Heritage Month is shared with Asian Pacific American Heritage Month, Haitian Heritage Month, South Asian Heritage Month, Older Americans Month, National Physical Fitness and Sports Month, National Foster Care Month, and Mental Health Awareness Month.  At least I can understand sharing May with Mental Health Awareness Month—after all, we Jews invented psychology, once called “the Jewish science,” with Sigmund Freud as the principal creative force.  And I am married to a psychologist, and Beit Simcha’s president is a psychologist.  We should be very mentally healthy around here.

Some of my other favorite special American periods of national time include National Financial Literacy Month, National Cybersecurity Month, and the ever-popular National Critical Infrastructure Protection Month, all real winners in the excitement category. But who can fail to celebrate National Dairy Goat Awareness Week with appropriate festivities? 

I was, however, distressed to learn that we no longer regularly celebrate another presidentially proclaimed holiday, National Catfish Day… But I was pleased to discover that today is National Apple Pie Day.

Now for all the excesses of publicly proclaimed special American months, weeks and days, the idea that certain periods of the year should be celebrated resonates with Jews quite naturally.  In this week’s portion of Emor, which Allan will chant tomorrow, all the Biblical holidays, from Shabbat through Rosh HaShanah and Yom Kippur to Pesach, Shavu’ot and Sukkot are enumerated, including the seven weeks/50 days counting of the Omer that we ritually fulfilled earlier tonight.  Each of these holy days are explicated with their timing, rationale, and ritual observances. 

And of course, in addition to the many festivals spelled out in Emor, a number of other Jewish holidays have been added to the calendar over the more than 2000 years since the Torah was completed.  We have added a slew of other holidays and commemorations: Purim, Hanukkah, Tu Bishvat, Tisha B’Av, Simchat Torah, Lag Ba’omer, Yom HaAtzm’aut, Yom HaShoah, and Yom Yerushalayim among other special times that make the Jewish ritual calendar both rich and complex.  So, in a way, if you follow and observe the many Jewish holy days every month can seem like Jewish Heritage month.

In any case, May is indeed National Jewish American Heritage Month, and since we have been around here in America for 368 years now, ever since the first group of refugees from Brazil landed in New Amsterdam, and in an era when people now think that bagels are a purely American baked good it’s worth noting that our contributions to American society are extensive and go well beyond the culinary.  But it is wise to highlight both the contributions Jews have made and continue to make to America, and the challenges we face today. 

As President Biden’s proclamation continued, “Today, we continue to strive to live up to our founding ideals.  As the scourge of white supremacy and antisemitic violence rises, we remain committed to ensuring that hate has no safe harbor.  That is why we have created new laws that give us more tools to combat hate crimes; developed the first-ever National Strategy for Countering Domestic Terrorism; provided assistance to religious organizations, places of worship, and nonprofits to protect their facilities and members; and named a new Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Antisemitism.  We will use the full force of our judicial system to confront bigotry and antisemitism wherever and whenever it surfaces.”

The proclamation concludes ringingly, “The Jewish American story, and the story of our Nation as a whole, is fueled by faith, resilience, and hope.  It is a story defined by a firm belief in possibilities, the resolve to make real the promise of America for all Americans, and a commitment to perfecting our Union, heeding the timeless words of Rabbi Tarfon, the first-century scholar who taught ‘It is not your duty to finish the work, but neither are you at liberty to neglect it.’”

All true enough.  So go ahead and feel especially proud to be an American-Jew for the rest of this month of May—and, of course, find a way to celebrate by doing things that are actually and actively Jewish, like attending Shabbat services, as you are doing tonight, or studying Torah, or taking classes, or enjoying Allan’s bar mitzvah tomorrow or coming to our big Shavu’ot celebration on Saturday night, June 4th.

Because something worth celebrating in one month of the year is well worth taking active pride in all the other months, too. 

Scapegoats

Sermon Parshat Acharei-Mot 5782

Do you know the two Yiddish words, Schlemiel and Schlemazel?  They are similar, of course, but they convey slightly different meanings.  Both a schlemiel and a schlimazel are, well, losers, but there is a subtle difference between the two words.  To clarify, a schlemiel is someone who spills his entire bowl of hot soup on the guy next to him.  The schlimazel is the one he spills the soup on.

I was thinking about that important Yiddish linguistic distinction while reading this week’s Torah portion of Acharei Mot, because it is in the beginning of this portion that we get what might be the most important example of a ritual version of the shlemazel in all of Jewish tradition.

This famous section of Acharei Mot describes the rituals of Yom Kippur, and the way we atone for our collective sins.  The most notable part of this ancient practice is the way that the High Priest, the leading religious figure of antiquity, transfers the guilt of the entire people of Israel to a poor innocent goat, sending it out into the wilderness to carry the iniquity of the nation away.  This marks the invention of the function of the scapegoat, the sacrificial goat who is not actually sacrificed, but instead is preserved to wander the wastelands on the fringes of the Promised Land, carrying its permanent burden of the errors and evils of others into eternal semi-exile.

Of course, our society has accepted this term, scapegoat, for anyone who is blamed for the wrongdoing of others and sent off to suffer a dismal fate for the crimes and misdemeanors of others, usually higher ups.  That scapegoat term from right here in Leviticus has received such universal acceptance that those who foul up and are blamed for losses in sports, fairly or otherwise, for many years have been called simply the “goat” of a lost World Series or Super Bowl or NBA Championship; the “scape” part was dropped in the sports world’s usage.

In recent years a new sports term has come along, oddly, the “GOAT”, in our craze for acronyms, standing for “Greatest Of All Time”.  It is applied and argued about, who is the “GOAT”, the greatest quarterback, pitcher, basketball player, hockey goalie, and so on.  There is an irony to this; apparently the scapegoat remains damned, but the GOAT is now actually a hero. 

The idea of a scapegoat accepting the sins of his betters and becoming the fall guy—by the way, there is a section in the Talmud that says that the scapegoat wasn’t just sent off to wander but was actually pushed off a cliff, making the scapegoat also the fall guy, I suppose—has become universal in our society.  The truth is that when people at the top of a company, or a government, or a social organization get into trouble it’s handy indeed to have someone further down the pecking order to blame.  What was that term that became popular during the Watergate scandal?  Plausible deniability?  If you can just blame someone further down the food chain for what went wrong, well, perhaps you can simply skate past the scandal with minimal damage.

I’ve been listening to a podcast the past few months when I go cycling called “American Scandal.”  It’s put together and narrated by a successful podcaster named Lindsay Graham—not that Lindsay Graham, a different guy altogether—and it chronicles a wide array of national scandals that range both geographically and chronologically.  The scandals on this show come in many varieties: political, economic, environmental, military, religious, bureaucratic, sexual, commercial, musical, obscenity, and on and on, and since they have recorded some 40 seasons of these scandals—some are just a few episodes; others take as many as 6 shows to complete—after a while you get a good sense of how these things work.  While sometimes the scandals depict bad events that led to some sort of justice being done and the perpetrators punished and the damage restored or at least compensated, more often than not the guilty parties in these scandals manage to transfer the righteous punishment to someone down the line; that is, they dump it on, you know, a scapegoat.  Sometimes the scapegoat takes all the blame, and sometimes the true perpetrators eventually find a way to pardon even the scapegoat.

While I like this “American Scandal” series and have learned a great deal about famous controversial events I thought I knew well, and even more about some events I didn’t know existed, I must admit that after a while it can be, well, depressing to realize that so many of these scandals resulted in the guilty escaping punishment and innocent people suffering.  And of course, quite frequently—nearly always—some poor schnook became the scapegoat for the failings of a system or a person or a nation or an institution.  A lot of the scapegoats in these scandals actually become schlemazels, abandoned and blamed by the very organizations and people they helped reach their seedy heights.

Clearly, that was never the intent of the Leviticus ritual for Yom Kippur.  After all, the Day of Atonement was one in which collective responsibility for the good of society was shared by all Israelites, in which the greatest and the humblest both were required to atone for sin seek forgiveness, not dump their mistakes on the nearest likely candidate for schlimazelhood.  The symbolic goat was just one aspect of this day of self-examination, self-reflection, self-abnegation.  We were immersed in the idea of responsibility for own actions, not the culture of passing the buck to a likely loser. 

So what do we learn from Acharei Mot and that poor wandering goat in the Wilderness?  Is the scapegoat just an older version of the chad gadyo, the only kid my father bought for two zuzim in the Pesach Seder who gets bitten by the cat, who is eaten by the dog who is beaten by the stick that is burned by the fire, etc. etc., low animal on the totem pole always getting the worst of it from above?

Perhaps the most important function of religion is to assure us that eventually God will restore justice to unjust situations, will find a way to balance the inequities we see in our own lives and in our society.  The Jewish God, in particular, is a God of Justice, insisting that ultimately it is both our responsibility, and God’s, to create   Looking around at the world we live in, as our ancestors must have done, does not yield a rosy picture of justice fulfilled on a planet teeming with righteousness and goodness.

The scapegoat, by allowing the Israelites to be relieved of the sins they had committed, literally helped free them of the burden of seeing an unjust world and believing they had caused it.  It allowed them to let go of their sins of the previous year and permitted them to enter the newish year with clean hands and pure heart, at least officially.

By the way, the English term for this goat, scapegoat, is said to come from famed Bible translator William Tyndale, who called it the “escapegoat” because it avoided the fate of its partner goat who was slaughtered and offered to God.  It took on the sins of the people, but remained alive and headed off to the hills, as goats are wont to do.  “Escapegoat” became “scapegoat” forever.

What are we to make of the scapegoat now?  Of course, we know that it is often easier to seek to blame another for one’s own failings, and to redistribute blame towards an innocent instead of accepting responsibility.  Psychologically, it is far easier to shunt misdeeds and errors off on another than to carry the burden oneself.  This tendency to avoid responsibility is certainly human, and normal.  Who wants to walk around with the guilt of the world, or even of our own mistakes, on your own back when you can blame it on someone, or something, else?

The scapegoat, sent off to Azazel in Acharei Mot on Yom Kippur, directed to wander the wilderness bearing its sinful burden, served a most useful purpose.  It allowed our ancestors to let go of the weighty detritus of their own failings and gave them the opportunity to begin again free of that painful baggage.

So what should we use in place of this Azazel scapegoat today?  The last of these poor animals went off into the Judean Desert nearly 2000 years ago.  You would think that we would have figured out a better way to handle things than dumping our problems on a scapegoat.

How are we contemporary Jews to handle our own burden of sin and error?

Of course, some of us still employ scapegoats to take on the responsibility for our own mistakes.  Our parents didn’t love us enough: we were misled by our spouses; we were pressured by our employers, or employees, or our neighbors; we cut corners because bad guys run the world and we don’t want to play into their hands.

Doing good can be hard.  Blaming others is easy.

I would suggest that we are in fact fortunate that Judaism abandoned the scapegoat motif so long ago.  Instead of a magical transfer of guilt to a goat, we instead took on the responsibility of resolving our own issues directly.  It was up to us—it is up to us—to seek to fix those damages we create in our own lives and in our world.  No High Priest can transfer out sins and errors to a helpless animal and send our guilt off into the wilderness.  We must seek out the people we have injured and make amends.  We must see the world’s damages and try to repair them. 

In a world that has so many challenges—brutal invasive wars, global warming, paralyzing political polarization, and the eternal scapegoating of minorities—among them, of course, Jews—it is up to us to address those challenges.  It is our responsibility, not that goat’s, to right the wrongs and restore justice.  In our own lives, and in our world.  May we learn from Acharei Mot to do so speedily, and soon.   

Got to Get Ourselves Back to the Garden

Sermon, Shabbat Final Day Passover 5782

As you may know by now, there are four different names for the holiday of Passover.  The first name is Pesach, of course, the festival of the paschal lamb that recognizes the blood on the doorpost that signaled to the angel of death to leap over our Israelite homes; the Pesach offering was the sacrificial roast we ate on the first night of Passover in days of the Tabernacle and Temple.  The second name is Chag HaMatzot, the festival of the unleavened flavor-free bread, Matzah, baked in haste and flat and easily packed and digested with difficulty.  The third name for this holiday is Zman Cheiruteinu, the season of our freedom, central theme of this great and universal freedom festival. 

But fourth there is that oldest name of all, Chag haAviv, the springtime holiday, commemorating this loveliest time of year, when the earth bursts forth with life and blossom and all the world can seem like a glorious garden.  By tradition, spring is the season of hope, the rebirth of belief in the goodness of God and of God’s green world.  It’s not that hope can’t blossom at any time and in any weather, but the green grass, warm, pollen-filled days, and the rich embracing feel of the air of spring are somehow all hopeful in their own ways.  Spring is, of course, the time when life seems new, fresh, dreamlike; in short, washed in the lovely shades of bright spring flowers and bursting green growth.  As poet Christina Rosetti put it, “There is no time like Spring, when life’s alive in everything.”

For the first time in my life, we held our home Seder this year outdoors, on the green lawn of our backyard, surrounded by flowers and trees and enjoying a perfect spring evening.  It was a great way to enjoy Pesach during this hospitable time of year in Tucson, and it gave a very different meaning to the springtime festival.  No longer was it a matter of extrapolating the season from a few sprigs of green parsley on a plate or in saltwater—instead we were surrounded by the beauty of nature, and thank God the weather generously cooperated with a truly glorious spring night under the full moon and stars.  It was a magical night, Seder al fresco.  Instead of the front door, we opened the garden gate for Elijah the Prophet.  Barring weather complications, I think we will always hold home seders outdoors in the future, even it makes hiding the afikomen a little more complicated. 

To further the springtime theme, Sophie and I went to the Tucson Botanical Gardens today to celebrate the Chag HaAviv and see their wonderful little butterfly exhibit.  It is possible that there is nothing more lovely in the natural world than fluttering butterflies and flittering moths, and there are something like 100 of them in the enclosed greenhouse at the Botanical Gardens.  They range in size all the way up to the huge and beautiful Atlas Moth, with a 12-inch wingspan of intricate design, and there are butterflies of all shapes and sizes, one with amazingly deep-colored blue wings that are a quiet brown on the underside.  These moths and butterflies live for only a few weeks, sometimes less, but they are quite wonderful to behold indeed.

And there is one further garden motif to enjoy on this holiday.  Tomorrow, on the Final Day of Passover Shabbat, we also read a special selection in addition to our Torah and Haftarah readings.  It’s in the last section of the Hebrew Bible, the Ketuvim, and it’s called the Song of Songs, Shir haShirim.

The Song of Songs is the ultimate love poem of the Bible, a beautiful and complex hymn to human, physical love unequaled in Western religious literature. Shir haShirim asher liShlomo… “The Song of Songs which is Solomon’s—kiss me with the kisses of your mouth” it begins, and then it gets really hot.  It is a nearly post-modern text in which the voice changes with every chapter and within every chapter.  You aren’t always sure who is speaking—one man?  A woman?  Two women?  A group?  And you aren’t always sure to whom the gorgeous love poetry is addressed.  It’s a rich, swirling tapestry of love and desire.

A perfect text for the springtime of the year, when we are told that young people’s, and not so young people’s, hearts turn to thoughts of love and life renewed and begun.  Shir HaShirim includes many images and metaphors of springtime growth and blossoming.  There are lush descriptions of lillies and apple trees, of cedars and roses, of figs hanging from trees and heavy clusters of grapes drooping on vines.  Buds appear, pomegranates bloom, doves coo, flowers waft sweet fragrances everywhere.  The Song of Songs is literally a garden of love, and the garden motif is used repeatedly throughout; a young woman is a garden; the king has a garden filled with delights; a young lover has a garden filled with flowers that he plucks.

Biblical scholar Phyllis Trible has written movingly about Song of Songs. She says that if the Garden of Eden is paradise lost, then Song of Songs is paradise found: “… it portrays Paradise in this world, rediscovered through love.”

But the Song of Songs is more even than that.  It is a celebration of the gift that God has given us to love freely and with our bodies as well as our souls. In married human love Judaism sees an opportunity for joy and holiness, for sanctifying life through physical and emotional fulfillment. 

What a great, and sexy, gift in this verdant time of year…

But let us return, if you will, back to that idea of the garden, of the rich growth and absolute vitality of the natural world in this glorious season.  For spring is a reminder to all of us that we have a moral obligation to this good earth.  Adam was given the task of tending and nurturing the garden first, lovdah ul’shomrah, to serve it and to guard it, in Genesis. He failed in his initial task, perhaps, but that obligation, to be stewards of this earth, remains for us, his descendants, to protect it for our own children, our grandchildren, and great-grandchildren. 

You know, in the renewed hustle and bustle of this slightly post-pandemic world, when our concerns range from war in Ukraine to inflation at home to a fractured politics to acts of terror and Anti-Semitism, it is easy to lose sight of our responsibility to this earth we share.  But the reality is that our first task as human beings is to take care of our home planet, to prevent its destruction and pollution and ravaging by our own acts of selfishness and error.

Global warming didn’t stop when we spent the last few years focused on Coronavirus—although the sharp drop in human activity actually slowed it for a year or so—and it certainly isn’t stopping for high gas prices or Putin’s brutal war of aggression.  We need to remind ourselves now, and always, that this garden we enjoy can be destroyed not just with a bang but through a plethora of simple human mistakes, of people, us, refusing to change simple habits and bullheadedly insisting that our own minor comforts take precedence over long-term disaster.

I was thinking about an old song today, written in the 1960s by Joni Mitchell, over 50 years ago.  Its words seem right on track for today, again—or rather, still:

Well, I came upon a child of God

He was walking along the road

And I asked him, Tell me, where are you going

This he told me

Got to get back to the land and set my soul free

We are stardust, we are golden

We are billion year old carbon

And we got to get ourselves back to the garden

Well, then can I roam beside you?

I have come to lose the smog,

And I feel myself a cog in somethin' turning

And maybe it's the time of year

Yes and maybe it's the time of man

And I don't know who I am

But life is for learning

We are stardust, we are golden

We are billion year old carbon

And we got to get ourselves back to the garden

And I dreamed I saw the bomber death planes

Riding shotgun in the sky,

Turning into butterflies

Above our nation

We are stardust, we are golden

We are caught in the devil’s bargain

And we got to get ourselves back to the garden

If there is one more lesson to take from the Passover holiday this year, it is this: the Chag HaAviv reminds us that springtime is a gift, that this gorgeous, precious earth is a gift, and now is our time to save ourselves, and our own descendants, from the destruction of this sacred planet which we have been given.  We have been given a beautiful, holy place.  As Shir HaShirim enjoins us, B’rach Dodi—hurry, beloved.  For now is the time to act to protect and preserve this, God’s garden, our garden.

The First Month?

Sermon Shabbat Tazria-HaChodesh 5782

When does the year begin?  This should be a basic, elementary question that any reasonably bright child could answer easily.  We learn our months by the time we move from pre-school to kindergarten, just after we learn the days of the week.  Yet even the answer to this simple question—when do we start our year?—can take on peculiar trajectories in Judaism.

“This month is the first month of the year” begins the special maftir Torah reading for Shabbat HaChodesh, the Sabbath that celebrates the beginning of the Hebrew calendar month of Nisan which falls tonight and tomorrow with Rosh Chodesh Nisan.  Since the Jewish year as we know it today begins in the fall with Rosh HaShanah, this declaration in Exodus requires a bit of explanation.  How can this be the first month of the year if the year doesn’t start for another six months?  Isn’t that the same as declaring that July 1st is actually New Year’s Day 2023?

The answer tells us quite a bit about the way our religion evolved. 

All annual calendars are based on astronomical calculation, either the visible cycles of the moon or that of the sun or, occasionally, the stars.  Some calendars combine lunar and solar aspects to reach a kind of heavenly compromise.  But the calendars we have today—the Gregorian one we use in America and Europe and most countries, the Jewish calendar, the Chinese calendar, the Muslim calendar and so on—are all based in one way or another on visible features in the sky and the flow of seasons that come from those cyclical variations.  

Now the beginning of the calendar year is essentially an arbitrary choice, just like deciding when year “1” will be.  As a society or ruler, you have to choose: do you start your year with the shortest day or the longest?  Or do you choose the time when the land is sprouting new life everywhere?  Or perhaps you begin the new year after harvest time, during a period of gratitude and plenty?  Or do you base your New Year’s Day on some historical event or religious experience and count the days and months from there?

Throughout human history, including during the time of the events of the Hebrew Bible, most societies decided the year began in the spring.  People were entirely dependent on the fertility of the land, and spring heralded the time when things began to grow: trees filled with leaves and blossoms, grain started its climb from the earth, herd animals gave birth.  The ancient Sumerians, whome most historians believe to have created the very first civilization of all, celebrated their Akitu barley-sowing New Year’s festival on the first day of the first month of spring.  That springtime month for them, and for their Babylonian and Assyrian successors, was called “Nisanu,” essentially identical to our own Hebrew name for this month, Nisan.      

The other and actually, the older Jewish name for this month, Aviv, simply means “spring” in Hebrew.  It’s no accident that our own great Chag ha’Aviv, the springtime festival of Passover, starts this month.  This time of year was the obvious choice, when the earth God has given us demonstrates its incredible generative power.  And so, the Torah tells us that this month is the first month of year, very much in keeping with the practices of the even more ancient civilizations of the Middle East.  The first month, the rosh Chodashim, is therefore Nisan.

But what are we to make of the fact that while the Torah tells us that this is the first month, in our current Hebrew calendar it’s the 7th month of the year?  How does one become seven?

There may be a practical reason for that; Judaism is, after all, pragmatic idealism, and we have adapted often in our long history to changing conditions.  It may simply be that after we established ourselves in the land of Israel we became more settled and eventually less dependent on the largesse of the natural world that God had created.  We focused on the established rituals of a settled people, and the collective communal experience of purging sin, error and guilt became ever more significant.  Perhaps it was simply that people living in cities had so much more opportunity for sin than the rural country folk we were at first in Israel…  In any case, the release from sin that typified the period of the fall High Holy Days made Rosh HaShanah and Yom Kippur increasingly more significant, the time of year when our soul’s journey is central. 

The spring month of Nisan, and its great growth festival of freedom, still mattered, of course, and it was likely still considered to be a kind of equally important “new year.”  But the new year for the monarchy was established as taking place at Rosh HaShanah, not Nisan, on the first of Tishrei.  That became the date when we changed years, officially, even if Nisan remained the first month.

But when we were expelled from our land and forced to wander the earth, the first-day-of-spring holiday celebrating agricultural growth became significantly less important.  The Passover message of freedom mattered most—of course,  it still matters profoundly—but it was no longer considered “the new year festival.”  That was now clearly Rosh HaShanah. 

The rabbis of the Talmud associated other great events with the 1st of Tishrei, too—the creation of the world, culminating in the creation of the first human beings, was also assigned by attribution to the 1st of Tishrei—I mean, none of the rabbis who came up with that were actually present when Adam and Eve were brought into the world, so it has to be by attribution—which made Rosh HaShanah into “HaYom Harat Olam”, the day of the world or universe’s birth, the birthday of the world.  And in the time of the Temple in Jerusalem, Rosh HaShanah was also the date when taxes were due, the 10% tithe assessed on almost all produce and most animals, making it kind of the April 15th of Biblical Judaism.  Tishrei 1 also became the date for beginning sabbatical years and jubilee years, although the Torah actually commands that the Jubilee, at least, was supposed to begin on Yom Kippur, not Rosh HaShanah.

The Talmud also tells us of two other new years, by the way, one of which we still celebrate—Tu BiShvat, the new year for trees in the winter—and one of which we don’t, the first of Elul, just a month before Rosh HaShanah, when our ancestors used to pay their cattle taxes.

Much later, in the Middle Ages, yet another new year was added, even if we don’t all think about it that way: Simchat Torah, the new year for Torah, when we finish chanting the Torah with the end of Deuteronomy and start all over again with Genesis.  Is that five new years each and every year?  That would be a little too much, no?

So, if we haven’t confused you enough yet, let’s go back to what makes this particular new year, the ancient one of the first of Nisan, special still today.  Rosh Chodesh Nisan, the first of Nisan, tonight and tomorrow, is an annual reminder of the beginning of the month of spring, which automatically had to be associated with Pesach, the springtime Chag HaAviv, the festival of spring.  It is an ancestral memory of this special month of growth and new life, and it retains three vital messages for us.

The first is that we have a responsibility to be good stewards for the natural world that God has gifted us.  It is up to us to preserve the planet we have been given, to prevent its destruction through thoughtless and selfish misuse.  In an era of global warming, when we can see the threat to the very survival of our species on this God-granted earth as a real possibility, we have a Jewish responsibility to address this danger and to protect the natural world.

The second message is just as important.  As the proverb tells us, we must count each day so that we can make each day count.  Living our lives in a meaningful, even holy way requires that we work to make every day valuable and even sacred. 

And the third lesson is likely the greatest one.  It is this: in this season of fresh growth and budding nature, we can take hope and energy from the vibrant, vital natural world of Nisan.  On this Shabbat of Aviv, of spring, we, too, can begin again in a season of fresh energy and eternal hope. 

May this first month of the year, however we think about it, be a month of joy and goodness for you, for our people Israel, and for this troubled world.

Created in the Image:

“The Bread of Life” prayer at Multi-Faith Service 3 24 2022

As you know, the US Senate recently passed a bill mandating daylight savings time all year.  Now, for us here in Arizona, this is rather amusing; it apparently means our stubborn insistence on refusing to spring forward and fall back has been right all these years when people everywhere else in America made fun of us.  So there: we Arizonans were right all along about Daylight Savings Time! 

But my friends, the debate about just when morning should begin is not a new one.  In fact, there is a beautiful story in the Babylonian Talmud, the great Jewish source of law and lore that was completed in the 5th century.  I first learned this passage from an Episcopal rector doing interfaith work years ago, and later looked it up in the original Aramaic.  This is the story:

There is a great debate in the Talmud about just when Jews are supposed to say morning prayers.  These prayers, the Shma, affirming the oneness of God, must be said after sunrise, when night has ended, dawn arrives, and morning has come.  The Talmudic discussion is about what that means, just exactly when night has ended, and morning has come.  One rabbi says that morning has come when a person can tell a black thread from a white thread—which doesn’t take much light.  Another rabbi argues that this is too lenient a standard, and night is over, and dawn has arrived, when a person can tell a blue thread from a green thread, a much harder standard.

After much discussion, the answer is given: the dark night is over, dawn has arrived and morning has come when we can look upon the face of another human being - and see there the image of God, the tzelem Elohim.  

I love that story.  The dark night is over and morning begins when we can look on the face of another human being and see there the image of God.  Whatever color, denomination, nationality, race, gender, height, shape.  Each human being is created in the image—if only we are enlightened enough to see it there.

I’d like to add one more element to this beautiful idea.  For when we join with our neighbors and break bread together, when we can participate with them in that most basic of all human activities, eating the very bread of life that keeps us whole, we are more than seeing them as fellow creations of God.  We are also reaching across all those artificial boundary lines that separate us, and sharing an experience that connects us in that most basic of ways.  And if we can do that, well, then we are on a path of friendship and mutual understanding and support and good.

The Jewish prayer for bread is both simple and paradoxical.  It says, “Blessed are You God, Ruler of the Universe, who brought forth bread from the earth.”  Yet we know that bread is a joint project of human cultivation and the divinely given natural world.  There are no bread trees—only planting and cultivating wheat, harvesting, milling, and baking.  That is, the most basic Jewish food prayer highlights our covenantal connection to the One God.  Anything we do is accomplished in partnership, with God and with our fellow human beings.

And so, I offer this short prayer: Baruch Ata Adonai Eloheinu Melech ha’olam, Hamotzi Lechem min Ha’aretz—we bless You, God, Ruler of the Universe, who allows us, through our work, to make bread from Your earth, so we can share it with all other people, all made in the image of God.

Silence and Action

Sermon Parshat Shemini 5782

There is a classic Jewish joke.  One friend says to another, “My rabbi is so brilliant he can talk for an hour on any subject.”

And his friend answers, “My rabbi is so brilliant he can speak for two hours on no subject.”

Jews talk and talk; and rabbis, in particular, really talk. But you know, sometimes this Jewish tendency to talk is an impediment.  Sometimes Jews, even rabbis, need not to speak.

The Tzartkover Rebbe often stood in silence instead of preaching.  When asked why, he replied to his disciples, "There are seventy ways of reciting the Torah.  One of them is through silence."

Our portion of Shemini this week reaches an early and brutal climax in the story of Nadav and Avihu, the two eldest sons of Aaron the High Priest.  Early in our parshah these young men are shockingly killed for offering eish zarah, strange fire to God.  On the eighth day of their inauguration into the Priesthood, they are suddenly killed by God.

In our portion, Aaron is notified of the death of his children.  The Torah continues, "Then Moses said to Aaron, This is what the Lord spoke saying, ‘Bikrovai ekadesh v’al pnai ha’am ekaveid, vayidom Aharon: Through those that are near to Me I will be sanctified, and before all the people I will be glorified; and Aaron was silent."  (Leviticus 10:3)

That silence is fascinating.  It is the only record we have of Aaron’s response to this devastating event.  That’s all we get: he is silent.

We humans fill the universe with words.  Jews especially are famous for talking through everything.  In end, when all is said and done, much more is said than done. 

Yet speech is important.  It is through speech that we most closely imitate God, Who created the world with words.  Every aspect of the creation of the universe in Genesis begins with the phrase, “And God spoke”, usually Vayomer Adonai. 

Yet speech is not always appropriate.  As we learn from the book of Ecclesiastes, "To everything there is a season, and a time for every purpose under heaven ... A time for silence and a time to speak."   (Ecclesiastes 3:1,7)

After the death of Nadav and Avihu, Moses tries to comfort his brother, Aaron, saying, "This is what the Lord spoke saying, through those near to me will I be sanctified."  Aaron hears the words but does not react.  All he can do is be silent.  Moses tries to help with words, but Aaron does not need words at that point.  Sometimes the proper reaction to tragedy is silence.

In the book of Job, the protagonist, Job, suffers a number of grievous losses - his wealth, his children, his health.  His wife finally tells Job, "Curse God and die," get it over with, but Job replies, "Should we accept only good and not evil?"  (Job 2:10) His three friends come to comfort him.  But they sit in silence next to him for seven days, waiting for Job to speak first.  From this we learn the Jewish tradition that when visiting a shiva home, visitors are supposed to remain silent until the mourners speak first.  Silence is appropriate in the face of great grief.

In the Bible, Job calls on God to appear before him and justify God’s actions. At the end of the book God appears before Job and engages in a long soliloquy.  "Who is this who darkens counsel, speaking without knowledge? ...  Where were you when I laid the earth's foundations?  Speak if you have understanding."  (Job 38:2,4) Job listens to God's words, and says, "Indeed I spoke without understanding, Of things beyond me, which I did not know... Therefore, I recant and relent, being but dust and ashes."  (Job 42:3,6) Job finally speaks—and regrets it.  In truth, silence would have been the appropriate response.

We have seen tragedy in the world many times—terrorist killings, horrifying war in Ukraine and Iraq and Afghanistan and Syria, pandemic deaths in New York and California and here in Tucson, random shootings all over our nation.  As Jews, we are always looking for words to explain or soften the tragedy.  We are such a talkative people who seemingly don’t know how to be silent; two Jews, three opinions, and many, many words.  Our lives are filled with words—verbal, written, electronic; TV, radio, email, text, Facebook, Twitter.  Words everywhere and always.  Even sermons.

Nonetheless, I cannot help but believe that sometimes silence is wiser in the face of tragedy.  Like Job, we humans cannot truly understand the ways of God. 

In our Middle School Religious School curriculum, we study Pirkei Avot, the Ethics of our Ancestors in the Mishnah.  Shimon ben Gamliel, the son of another great scholar, says, “All my days I have grown up among the wise.  I have found nothing to be of better service than silence… not learning but doing is the central object; and whoever is profuse of words literally causes sin.”

In our Beit Simcha Mussar Study Group, one of the Midot, the moral qualities that shape our character that we studied was silence.  I thought I might have the class sit silently for 90 minutes to explore the concept, but I wasn’t quite able to make myself do it… we had a fascinating discussion about silence, which sounds like a contradiction in terms, but highlighted just how important silence can be.  And in our upcoming community Mussar study programs we will undoubtedly also explore this idea.

Certainly, we Jews talk a lot.  But when sadness hits, it is not the time to discuss theology.  Words about God's justice are scant comfort to the bereaved and the injured.  Moses' words brought little solace to his brother Aaron following his tragic loss.

There is a time to speak and a time for silence.

But where words cannot help, sometimes actions can. 

When people in our own community are struggling, bereaved, ill, frightened, sad, there is something we can do.  When people are terrified by deadly illness, there are times when simple silent presence is the best thing we can do.  When refugees need food, clothing and shelter, reassurance can come, but not from words.  We can do something more.

That something is embodied in a passage in our Siddur, taken from the Mishnah: it reads, “These are the things that are beyond measure: honoring father and mother, acts of loving kindness, welcoming guests, visiting the sick, comforting the bereaved, accompanying the dead for burial, helping bride and groom celebrate, coming early to the temple to study Torah and to teach children Torah, helping the stranger.”

It’s these acts—not words but acts—that help most in times of deep distress, in moments of fear and loneliness.  It is these primary Jewish acts that may allow us to heal those who are most deeply injured. 

Moses may not have had the right words for his brother’s loss.  But he was present, and brought healing in that primary way, just by being there.  We don’t actually need to have the right words always either.  Silent action, being there for people—even on FaceTime or email or text or phone or Zoom, or by donating to help refugees—can say far more than speeches.

On this week of Parshat Shemini may we commit ourselves to this enterprise of helping those most in need, to being present any way we can for those we can help.  And then our words, and most importantly our actions, will truly have meaning.  And then perhaps, when things are most challenging, we will be able to provide comfort, and healing.

The Happiness Quotient

Sermon Parshat Tzav 5782

You probably didn’t know it, but March 20th, this Sunday, is International Happiness Day.  It turns out that it comes a couple of days after Purim this year, which also coincided with St. Patrick’s Day—now that’s a nice combination! 

So, who here even knew there was an International Happiness Day?  But if there is one, frankly it should fall around Purim every year.  Anyway, in honor of International Happiness Day the results of the most recent study on happiness in America were released and they were disappointing, if not entirely surprising.  This happiness survey determined that Americans are now officially as unhappy as we have ever been.  That is, more Americans now classify themselves as unhappy than ever before. 

In 2022 we, as a society, are unhappier than we were during the Great Depression or after Pearl Harbor or during the Vietnam War or Watergate or after 9/11 or during the subprime mortgage Great Recession. 

And that doesn’t really make sense, does it?  Things have often been much worse by measurable standards than they are now, but we are, right now, collectively, really not happy.  In spite of Purim and Spring Fling and Mardi Gras and St. Patrick’s Day, in spite of the weather being glorious and the wildflowers plentiful, with all the springtime reasons to be glad, in spite of near-full employment and perhaps the end of the pandemic, and living in a time of incredible technological achievement and relative wealth, we apparently aren’t enjoying life much at all.

If decades should have nicknames, like the Gay Nineties or the Roaring Twenties or the Swinging 60s or the Me Decade, then this could be the Traumatic Twenties or the perhaps Depressed Decade. 

What’s gone so wrong?  Why don’t we seem to be enjoying our lives as much as we used to, or should?

There are a few reasons for this.  The first is perhaps the most obvious: we are constantly being told that we should be outraged and angry about what’s going on in the world.  We hear this nonstop from media outlets and certain prominent politicians.  Everyone is out to get us, we are told: the left—if you are on the right—or the right—if you are on the left—is totally corrupt and evil and filled with terrible ideas and schemes to destroy everything you hold dear.  The world is going to hell in a handbasket, as the old cliché would have it, and dang it, we have to do something about it right now!  Like be furious.  Or depressed.  And certainly unhappy.

Even formerly sane publications and websites have adopted this yellow journalism standard, because everyone imitates everyone else in this world, and nothing gets more attention in our society than hostile screaming. 

There are good reasons to object to many things that are happening in our national scene at any time, of course.  But the way these topics—some serious and complex and even dangerous, others merely distractions—are handled, as though they required maximum fury and outrage to even discuss them, does not help.  And it contributes to the unhappiness in our society. 

For most of us, this flood of augmented anger creates a sense of general unease and discomfort, even distress, emotions that certainly can prevent happiness.  Even though most sane individuals discount the more sensationalist and extreme claims and attitudes, there is a kind of cumulative effect, a deleterious impact on our state of mind.  And all that free-floating anger leads to a steady erosion of trust in everything, and in almost all of our national institutions. 

Of course, for those people who are not well moored, whose relationships with others are limited or damaged, these kinds of radical provocations are actually believed.  And they fester, and tragically they are sometimes acted upon.  Most of the time they just show up as hostile posts online, or random acts of anti-Muslim or Anti-Semitic or racist behavior: vandalism, or shouted epithets or the like.

But sometimes all that amplified hostility, all those spores of projected hatred, reach someone on the margins of society in whom they take root.  And then you get a massacre like Christchurch, or the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh, or the Baptist Church in Texas or the AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina.

Or perhaps, then you invade Ukraine.     

The second area that causes serious challenges to our happiness is the increasing alienation many of us have from other people engendered by our devotion to our technology.  Some of that is caused by our addiction to our communications devices, the tremendous amount of time we spend engaged with our screens: phones, tablets, laptops and computers, even smart watches.  You cannot fully function in this world without accessing internet devices to some degree, and the latest studies show that people who don’t use smartphones or advanced devices at all are actually not happy.  But those same studies show that people who use them the most are also quite unhappy.  The happiest people are those who use their devices no more than an hour or so a day.  Fascinating: when we think we are connecting to other people through social media we are actually diminishing our sense of truly connecting.

I’ll never forget one Valentine’s Day evening I spent in a restaurant; everyone around our table on this theoretically romantic night was eating an expensive fancy dinner with their dates—while simultaneously engaged in texting, posting on Instagram or Facebook or Twitter or just communicating with other people who were not their dates.  It was startling and made me wonder just what joy could come from that experience, and how those relationships were being deepened, if at all.

The third piece to this happiness problem is one of dedication.  That is, our society has moved away from commitment to community organizations and affiliations, and we have become increasingly isolated.  Almost twenty years ago Robert Putnam, a great sociologist of America—and a Conservative Jew and past guest of mine on the Too Jewish Radio Show—wrote a book called Bowling Alone.  It documented an America in which people increasingly did not join organizations and often participated in activities solo, no longer connected to the traditional religious and social entities that once bounded and enriched their lives.  Typical, regular experiences like praying together, making music together, working together to better society, even doing sports together were fading.  We were, well, bowling alone.

I’m not sure that I have the solution to this happiness crisis, except to say that the things that truly make us happy—family, friends, a warm and active synagogue, celebrating festivals, exercise, springtime weather—are the things we need to work to build up and enhance and celebrate.  And the things that make us angry or hostile or unhinged we need, wherever possible, to avoid.  Our lives are better when we live and work together for the good of all, not when we act out our ugliest impulses and most hostile tendencies.  And not when we isolate ourselves from others.

I can’t promise a happier society will prevent future violence against innocents or fix this complicated world.  But I do firmly believe that it’s time we chose a different course than the one that has been making us miserable for a while now.  And that course is one of mutual support, commitment and joy, of communal connection and commitment.

The whole Book of Leviticus, and our Torah portion of Tzav, focuses on the way our ancestors worshipped God through animal sacrifices, korbanot.  For the past 1900 years, since the destruction of the 2nd Temple in Jerusalem, prayer and study, and acts of charity and repentance, have replaced sacrifice, communal acts to better ourselves, and our world.  These are all ways we open ourselves to God and diminish our emphasis on the self. 

Sacrifice in the Torah was a way to accept not that smaller lives could be given over for the sake of our more important lives.  Instead, it was a method to connect us to the fact that our own existence is holy only when we offer ourselves to God in community.  By giving up something—a bit of our self-importance, our isolation, our anger, our technological addiction—we can give our lives meaning and sanctity.

And if we do so here, in our own synagogue, we have the chance to do so in our larger society.  And then perhaps next year International Happiness Day can be celebrated as a time of increasing joy and goodness.

Arguing for God and Unity

Sermon Parshat Vayikra 5782

One of the most distinctive qualities of Jews everywhere in the world has always been our ability to disagree and remain in dialogue.  That is, we argue but stick together.  Jewish families are typically loud, contentious, and verbally energetic.  Jewish organizations are active, engaged, and often contentious.  But we have an ability, after thousands of years of overcoming adversity, to pull together in spite of our many, many differences.  Most of the time.

I was reflecting on this fact of Jewish life the last few days.  In truth, both in our homes and in our organizational life, we often sound like we are engaged in something closer to courtroom combat than the loving and harmonious lives that we aspire to living.  This friction is something typical of every Jewish group I have ever had the privilege of being a part of, and to someone not initiated into the verbal thrust-and-parry natural to Jews it can seem that there is real animosity when the situation is quite different than that at heart.  It’s just that in Jewish life everyone considers himself or herself to be an expert on, well, everything, and when you get more than one maven in a room at the same time he or she is each certain to be certain that they are right about everything, or at least whatever it is you are talking about at the moment.

This verbal vigor is a great shock to those not raised in loud Jewish homes, and it inevitably leads some people to conclude that Jews are the most difficult, contentious lot ever formed by God.  And that’s not counting how it is to be part of a Jewish organization or organizational leadership, which frequently seems a great deal like herding cats… 

But the real point is not that we Jews can argue; everyone knows that.  It’s that in spite of these arguments we are able to overcome our differences and work together to accomplish really great things.  And that underneath the dispute of the moment we fully understand that we are not really fully breiges with anyone, that we intend to remain in conversation and dialogue and community no matter what we may say in the heat of the moment.  Real Jewish identity means understanding that we can disagree and yet remain connected. 

I’m not celebrating the contentious quality of Jewish life, but simply noting that it is a fact—and that it also camouflages a more essential unity that undergirds the whole of the Jewish community.  We might appear not to like each other very much in the moment, but we know that ultimately we are all in this together.  We are one people, one large, dysfunctional family that may have its challenges and certainly its conflicts but that sticks together, particularly when the going gets rough.  And boy, right now, the going is getting rough…

The Talmud has two famous sayings on this subject.  The first is from the Mishnah, the first great code of Jewish law, in Pirkei Avot, the ethical greatest hits of our tradition: kol machloket l’shem shamayim sofah l’hitkayem, v’she’einah l’shem shamayim, lo sofah l’hitkayem it says, any argument fought for the sake of heaven, will endure, but an argument not for the sake of heaven will not last.  That is, a conflict in which both parties are motivated to find the best course to serve God will create enduring and positive results.  But a conflict not fought for the sake of heaven, that is engaged into further ego and self-interest will not create enduring or positive results.  When we argue in order to determine the truly best course we are simply trying to figure out how best to serve God.  When we are arguing to prove how great we ourselves think we are, we are not serving God, and those efforts are destined to fail.

And the second great quote is kol Yisrael areivim zeh bazeh, every Jew is responsible for every other Jew.  That means that in times serious and sober or celebratory and joyous we all have an obligation to each other.  When a Jew is in difficult circumstances, we must respond by working to assist them.  When members of our people are physically endangered it is our obligation to rescue them.  And when a Jew celebrates, we all celebrate with her or him.

Kol Yisrael areivim zeh bazeh: each member of the peoplehood of Israel is obligated to every other.  What could be clearer?

But it is when we remember both of these Talmudic teachings then our arguments will, ultimately, lead us to goodness and unity.  In a way, they become arguments to find God, rather than arguments to try to exalt ourselves.  And according to Jewish tradition, that is exactly what God asks of us: to seek to find God by attempting, always, to find the right course.  We can, and will, disagree on this; we remain Jews, of course.  But we must do so with an understanding that we are united in our desire to find the proper path, not to attack or destroy one another.

Our Torah portion this week, Vayikra, the beginning of the Book of Leviticus, highlights this in an interesting way.  It begins with the Vayikra el Moshe, Vayidabeir Adonai Eilav mei’ohel mo’eid, which means, “He called to Moses, God spoke to him out of the tent of meeting…” This is an odd formulation, since first God calls to Moses, then God speaks to him.  Why the double verbs here?  Why the duplication?

Rashi, the great 12th century French commentator, says that, "Every time God spoke to Moses, he was welcomed by this calling which was a term of endearment. It was the same language used by the ministering angels for they too, 'called one to the other...' (Isaiah). And the voice went to Moses alone for Israel was unable to hear the sound... Everything God said to Moses for thirty-eight years was for the sake of [the whole people of] Israel.”

That is, the word Vayikra means God may have called to Moses intimately, as God would call a close relative, but the words were not intended solely for Moses.  In fact, they were designed to unify the whole people of Israel.  That was ultimately the purpose of the rituals of the Tabernacle in the Wilderness, the model for every temple ever constructed in Jewish history, including this one.  The purpose is to bring all Jews together as one, with all their differences.

God's work was to try and keep Israel in order; similarly, Moses's calling was to promote the cause of Israel and not his personal relationship with the Holy One.

When God calls Moses to their meetings, God does so with love, saying that these people are your responsibility, but my tone is directed toward them through you. You, Moses, embody this generation in all they represent. I, God, speak to you for the primary purpose of building one nation from this disparate group.

God’s call here in Vayikra is not for the ego of one, but for the unity of the whole people.  We are meant to be together, to support one another with respect.  Differences of opinion are not a call to break up the sanctity of the sanctuary.  They are an impetus to seek, and find, the greater underlying whole.

When we Jews do this, we have the potential to help the rest of the world do this as well.  And then no challenge, no matter how frightening it may seem, cannot be overcome.

On this Shabbat of Vayikra, may we each hear God’s call in this way.  And may all of our differences be only for the sake of heaven.

Wild West and Ukraine

Sermon on Rodeo Shabbat, Vayakhel 5782

My friends, I had prepared a fun sermon for tonight, remembering the very real presence of Jews in so many parts of the wild west, including 19th century Jewish mayors of Tucson, the Jewish version of the Boot Hill Cemetery in nearby Tombstone, the important role that Jewish pioneers, trappers, mountain-men, miners, merchants, and entrepreneurs played throughout the Wild and not-so-Wild West.  I was prepared to tell you about some of my own relatives, who had stores in the gold country of California, but also about Wyatt Earp’s Jewish common-law-wife Josephine Marcus, about mining towns like Seligman, Arizona, and the Seligman and Guggenheim families who built railroads and mines that helped open up the Arizona Territory.  I was going to talk about Jacob Isaacson, who founded the town we now know as Nogales, straddling the border with Mexico so no one had to pay import taxes on any transaction, and the way Levi Strauss and his partner Jacob Davis put rivets into jeans and created western wear. 

I was planning on sharing stories of Jewish outlaws and lawmen, of peddlers and soldiers, of Jewish cowboys and ranchers and schoolteachers in the backcountry of Oregon—that would be my own grandmother—and all about the actual men and women who built Jewish life here in the heart of the western desert, and in the western mountains and on its rivers and coastlines.  It’s a fun and fascinating story, worth singing ballads about and writing history books and novels and making films about, too.  And since this is Rodeo Shabbat here in Tucson, Arizona, one of the original great cowtowns of the west and home to many a lawman and outlaw, it seemed like the perfect Friday night to tell that tale.    

I have often wondered why the Western is such a perennial favorite of filmmakers.  Westerns go in and out of fashion, of course, but eventually they always come back, in one form or another.  It it’s not movies like Stagecoach or High Noon or The Oxbow Incident or The Good the Bad and the Ugly or Tombstone or Silverado or the Unforgiven or True Grit, then it’s TV series from The Cisco Kid to Bonanza to The Big Valley to Deadwood to Yellowstone.  What is it that we find so satisfying about westerns?

I believe a big part of it is that there is, in nearly every Western, a climactic scene in which the good guys win, or at least die trying.  They always take out the villain, in the end, and justice, a rude form of justice but justice nonetheless, is seen to triumph.  Sure, some good guys go down, and it’s a rough climax, always, but in that shootout at high noon the guy in the black hat finally takes a fall.

Well, my friends, it turns out that this is a strange time to be celebrating Rodeo Shabbat.  The Russian invasion of Ukraine is reaching Kyiv even as we meet for services tonight, a full-scale, unprovoked land war in Europe exploding as an act of pure aggression by Russian dictator Vladimir Putin.  People are dying right now all across Ukraine.  Russia has command of the air and is attacking everywhere in the country.  Ukraine is fighting back, and there will be guerilla actions as well against the Russians, but Putin has invaded his neighbor with overwhelming force.

And there is not likely to be any sheriff wading into the main street of that brutal act of war and calling out the bad guy, Vladimir Putin, as black a black hat as we have on the world stage today.  It doesn’t work that way in international affairs.  There is no OK Corral shootout to end this horrific attack, this baseless invasion of a weaker neighbor.  We shouldn’t expect the cavalry to come riding in, or John Wayne or Clint Eastwood to show up with a Colt or a Winchester and save the outnumbered, outgunned, overmatched Ukrainians when the local Russian bullies have jet fighters and missiles.

When Russia invaded the Crimea and took it away from Ukraine almost eight years ago, the world responded with tepid disapproval.  After all, there were many ethnic Russians in Crimea, it had been colonized by Catherine the Great in the 18th century, really it could just be part of Russia.  And Russia has nuclear weapons, and Russia is so close to Crimea, and war is horrible, so what can we really do? 

But you see, when a bully wins by simply bullying others he or she learns an important lesson: she or he can just keep right on bullying without fear of real consequences.  I’m afraid that this is just another step in a chain of aggression that Putin has planned.  And I’m also afraid that if the west doesn’t do more than impose some economic sanctions this process of re-empiring Russia will continue.

We have seen dictatorial aggression before.  There are no innocent bystanders when a person like Putin is on the loose, sharing friendship with fellow totalitarian dictators like Xi in China, who watch just how far the west will go to protect democracy, political integrity, and freedom of the press and conscience. 

I’m going to share now a letter that I received just three hours ago from a rabbinic colleague, written by a Russian co-worker of his son in a multi-national company.  I will preserve the anonymity of the author and the employee, but otherwise read what he sent from Moscow this afternoon:

Team, friends and colleagues in Ukraine, in the US, and other locations.

Over the past two days, I've spoken with many members of the Russian team, and I can say with confidence that I speak on their behalf now.

First and foremost, my thoughts are with everyone in Ukraine right now, in particular with our friends and colleagues [names omitted here].  I am concerned for their safety and well-being as well as that of their families, and I am saddened to hear of the measures they've had to personally take to protect themselves.

Second, I am deeply worried, shocked, and concerned by Russia's aggression against Ukraine.  This is a black page in Russian history.  I personally have never felt so ashamed for my country.  The past few days have been incredibly difficult to focus as I think about our team there.  I am overwhelmed with bewilderment, guilt and remorse.  I feel responsibility as a citizen of Russia, and I feel that every Russian citizen should as well.  It's our government.  It's our army.  We can't just completely distance ourselves from this.

Yet, I feel powerless to stop it.

Unfortunately, Putin's Russia today is not a country of freedom where everyone can openly express their feelings or elect their government.  We do not have free and fair elections, and even the act of protesting is dangerous.  Police beat, arrest, and sentence people to prison for only speaking out against the government.  A year ago, I joined such a protest myself.  After my wife registered with one of the opposition groups, the police came to our house and threatened us.  Even large protests are unlikely to help, as the government just ignores the voice of people, knowing that they can't lose an election.  Within the past year, leaders of groups and political parties that oppose Putin have been either imprisoned or forced to move abroad.  Courts are corrupt.  Fair trials do not exist.  We've seen young people imprisoned [just] for posting dissident messages on social media.

Russia today is a dictatorship.  We live in a police state where free speech is non-existent.  That dictatorship is propped up by widespread propaganda.  There is no independent media here, so many who live here are completely misinformed as to the truth.  Elections are nothing more than theater, with opposition candidates banned from participating.  As an ordinary citizen, I feel powerless to change the situation in this country and to stand up to our government in any way that doesn't involve violence.

Russia is also my homeland.  It is a beautiful country with great people, a wonderful culture, beautiful cities and nature, and a rich history.  I was born in Moscow and have lived in this unique and amazing city for the past 35 years.  I love Russia as a country.  And I hope as the world looks on at us today, they separate the country from the state – the government.  As Garry Kasparov once put it: "Every country has its own mafia, and only in Russia [dpes] the mafia have its own country."

I wish the streets were full of massive anti-war protests right now.  Some brave people, including friends of mine, actually gathered on the streets yesterday to protest, but that was quickly suppressed by police before a critical mass accumulated.  Over 1700 people were arrested, and some may be sent to prison.

When you see me working at my job, and not rising up against my government, I ask you not to see it as a lack of support for my friends and colleagues and their country.  "Shame," "anger," and "powerlessness" are the three words I've heard the most within my circles in social media, from friends and family, yesterday and today, even from those who don't usually speak about politics.

I can't begin to express how sad and concerned I am for our Ukrainian colleagues right now and for their families and friends.  I sincerely hope this insanity will end soon, and I wish there was a way I could provide some tangible support instead of just saying these words.

As many in Russia do, I have personal connections to Ukraine.  My surname is Ukrainian, and my great grandparents via my father's line were from Ukraine.

Peace and safety in Ukraine must be the world's top priority today, no matter what the circumstances are.

This is not my way; I say "no" to it, and I am deeply sorry for it.

Please take care.  All my thoughts are with Ukraine and our friends and colleagues there.

Perhaps it is time, on this Rodeo Shabbat, to assess what the western ideal of freedom really means, and just how far we will go to assure that others can experience it.  Perhaps it is time for us to associate our regional ideals, expressed in books and film and TV, that no one has the right to bully and dominate his or her people, and certainly not other, innocent peoples who just happen to live nearby.  Perhaps it’s time for us to ask our own leaders to live up to these western ideals now, before it again becomes too late and our world gets dominated by corrupt authoritarians and tyrannical autocrats.

Because if we can do that now, well, then maybe next Rodeo Shabbat we can rejoice more fully in the heritage we lay claim to.   

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.