Celestial Wonders and God’s Dirt

Rabbi Samuel M. Cohon, Congregation Beit Simcha, Kol Nidrei Eve 5783

You have seen the astonishing photos that sent back the past couple of months from the James Webb telescope, launched by NASA last December and now a million miles and more out in space.  The Webb telescope is 100 times more powerful than the old Hubble telescope, launched 32 years ago and still in operation, and for the low, low price of $10 billion we are getting a glimpse towards the beginning of time that was never possible before.  In a sense, we are peering into the intricacies of Creation.

What photos that telescope shared with us!  Amazing images of fantastic celestial colors, stars upon stars upon stars, nebulae exploding into existence in star nurseries, beautiful and wonderful.  And also, just slightly intimidating: there are so many galaxies out there, such a profusion of light energy radiating everywhere, far more even than we had previously imagined.  There are galaxies and nebulae and an incredibly richly immenseness of stars of every size and description, and the photos demonstrate this in vivid color.  We may feel a little like the first users of telescopes must have way back in the 1500s when they used their brand-new tool to look out at the night sky and saw just how much more was there in the heavens than any naked eye could ever discern.

As we grow as a species and develop the abilities to peer deeper and deeper into the nature of existence, our eyes can see things our imaginations never could.  It is amazing just how much of creation is out there to discover.

And it's also a reminder that we are all, in essence, made out of stars: the carbon, nitrogen, oxygen and hydrogen that make up most of our own bodies were generated the moment the first stars began burning.  We truly are made out of starlight forged at the beginning of everything.  What is it Shakespeare wrote?  “There was a star danced and under that was I born.”  Or, to be more accurate, out of that star was I born.

I don’t know how you could be anything but stunned by the vision of the distant views of our enormous universe, not an empty, black void but one filled with blazing, colorful light.  We saw stars and galaxies that date back to the very beginning of time.

Most astronomers and astrophysicists believe that the initial moment of creation, the Big Bang, took place around 13.7 billion years ago, when the first stars began to burn, shining forth with primordial light and creating the elements that compose everything in the universe.  The 21-foot Webb Telescope, covered in golden mirrors, can see light from 13.6 billion years ago, shockingly close to the beginning of everything, light that has been traveling towards us for all that extraordinary length of time, from the moment of what Judaism calls Breisheet, the inception of creation.

I started thinking about that song from a Disney movie, the one which begins with Jiminy Cricket singing, “When you wish upon a star.”  And then, looking at these amazing photographs of the beginning of time, I got to thinking: “You know, when you wish upon a star, you are actually a few billion years late…”

A classic story: a Jewish astrophysicist is addressing a Hadassah group and he says, “In truth, if current trends continue, our world will simply cease to exist in about 8 billion years.”

From the back of the room a woman’s voice cries out loudly, “Oy Vey!  Oy Gevald!  Oy Vey iz Mir!” 

The astrophysicist is nonplussed.  He says, “Madam, calm yourself, please.  I assure you, you won’t be around when this happens in 8 billion years.”

“Oh,” she gasps with relief, “I thought you said 8 million years!”

In any case, it is both amazing and humbling to see just how spectacular this universe of ours really is, and to marvel at the incredible creation of it all.

Which calls to mind a salient story about human arrogance.  One day a group of scientists got together and decided humanity had come a long way and no longer needed God.  So, they picked one scientist to go and tell God that they were done with the Lord.  The scientist walked up to God and said, “God, we've decided that we no longer need you.  We’re to the point where we can clone people, manipulate atoms, build molecules, fly through space, and do many other miraculous things.   So why don’t you just go away and mind your own business from now on?”

God listened very patiently and kindly to the man.  After the scientist was done talking, God said, “Very well.  How about this?  Before I go, let’s say we have a human-making contest.”  To which the scientist replied, “Okay, we can handle that!”

“But,” God added, “we’re going to do this just like I did back in the old days with Adam.”

The scientist nodded, “Sure, no problem,” and bent down and picked up a handful of dirt. God wagged a finger at him and said, “Uh, uh, uh.  Put that down.  Go find your own dirt.”

Along similar lines, the popular astronomer Carl Sagan was quoted as saying, “To really make an apple pie from scratch, you must begin by inventing the universe.”  That might complicate cookbooks, like our own excellent Beit Simcha cookbook, but in essence it’s correct.  That’s really starting from scratch.  We think we human beings create things from nothing, but in truth we have to start with what God has already given us.

So I was surprised to read a report in the journal New Scientist that it may be possible now to actually “invent” a universe in a laboratory.  Physicists believe they can distort space-time around a tiny point in our universe in such a way that it will begin to form a new superfluid that would break off and become a separate universe.

The create-a-universe project’s success depends upon two assumptions: first, that the universe truly began in a Big Bang, and second, that it underwent rapid inflation shortly thereafter.  We know about rapid inflation from our economy this year, but what they mean by that is a super-fast expansion of energy and matter right after the Big Bang.

Now the first assumption, the Big Bang theory—the science, not the sitcom—is based on the observation that all objects in the universe appear to be moving away from one another; the universe is expanding.  Edwin Hubble, after whom that older Hubble Space Telescope was named, noted this nearly a century ago, back in 1929. The key implication of Hubble’s discovery was that the universe had to have a beginning point, when it was incredibly small, from which it then expanded.  In 1915 Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity said the universe must be either expanding or contracting.  But since that was at odds with the universally held theory that the universe was unchanging, Einstein added a fudge factor into his equations.  He called it the “cosmological constant” to get rid of the universe’s ballooning. 

So, when Hubble’s findings matched Einstein’s predictions (minus the fudge factor) exactly, his observations were criticized and resisted.  In fact, the name “the Big Bang” was a derogatory put down of the theory by astronomer Fred Hoyle.  It made scientists extremely uncomfortable to be faced with the fact that the universe had a beginning, an initial singularity, a moment of creation.

Why?  Essentially, it was because the most effective way to refute the idea of the existence of an unprovable entity like God is to say, “Why don’t we assume that the universe has always existed?  Why add the complication of some creator we call ‘God?’”

But the reality of an expanding universe and the Big Bang Theory blew that refutation away. It had obvious theological implications; you know, that God exists and created the universe. The Big Bang Theory was fiercely resisted for decades; but today, it is pretty widely accepted.

So back to that crazy idea: how do you create an entire universe in a lab?  Well, after the Big Bang, the second assumption needed to make this possible is called “inflation theory.” The theory was developed in 1981 by a Jewish MIT physicist, Alan Guth.  Guth noticed there was a period immediately following the Big Bang when the universe “inflated” rapidly, separating regions of space-time far enough apart that they functioned entirely independently of each other. 

Given these two assumptions, the Big Bang and rapid inflation, the universe “creation” project is not theoretical physics. Instead, it is applied physics, something you can actually do in the real world, like building an MRI machine or creating an atomic bomb.  Inflation theory provides the means to understand how to test this theory by making it happen in a lab.

As the journal article says, “Inflation theory…relies on the fact that the ‘vacuum’ of empty space-time is not a boring, static place. Instead, it is subject to quantum fluctuations that cause strange bubbles to appear at random times. These bubbles of ‘false vacuum’ contain space-time with different—and very curious— properties.” 

In theory, these bubbles can expand through cosmic inflation just like what followed the Big Bang of our universe.  In other words, by applying a version of their own Big Bang energy to one of these strange bubbles, and with the rapid expansion of physics inflation, researchers can create an actual universe, a new state of existence: an actual baby universe.

This is scientists creating not just a new world or planet, but an entirely new universe.  Playing God, if you will.

Japanese physicist Nobuyuki Sakai says that the “baby universe has its own space-time and, as this inflates, the pressure from the true vacuum outside its walls continues to constrain it. As these forces compete, the growing baby universe is forced to bubble out from our space-time until its only connection to us is through a narrow space-time tunnel called a wormhole.”

This fragile wormhole between our space-time and the newly created universe would quickly snap.  But the new universe would continue to grow and expand in ways we could neither predict nor affect.  In fact, from our perspective, it would appear as a microscopic black hole that evaporated almost instantly.  Which is the problem with the whole experiment: everything would happen so fast that it might be impossible to know if anything had actually happened at all.

So, after all that, this incredible effort to create a separate universe in a lab, what we end up doing is creating something that may or may not exist, and which we will immediately lose track of, forever. 

In theory, we would be playing God, creating a universe.  In practice?  Not so much.  Certainly not very effectively.

And in any case, this is hardly the creation from nothing that God did.  After all, everything we would use to make this experiment possible already exists in our world.  As remarkable as such an experiment of creating an entire universe is, we would be, like the joke, not actually starting from scratch. We’d still be using God’s dirt. 

So, since we can’t really do anything valuable about creating a new universe—at least beyond this essentially invisible experiment—let’s move a little closer to something we can actually see, on this Kol Nidrei Eve.

There are two ways to look at the enormity of the universe that we know does exist, our own universe.  One is to be overwhelmed by it, and to feel small and unimportant.  How could our small lives matter in all this immensity of stars?

The other is to understand that this grand creation is a tribute to something much greater than ourselves, what we call God—but that we, each, have an important role to play in this remarkable creation, too.  And that, while we can’t be God, or even successfully play God in an experiment, we can do something much more relevant, and more important.

There is a great teaching in Kabbalah, in the Zohar, which I teach weekly.  It says that when God created the universe, beginning with that singularity, that Big Bang, and after expansion occurred and all was ordered, God’s Shechinah, the divine flow of energy could not come into the universe and be present until the first man turned to the first woman in love.  It was that spark, between them, that completed the circuit and allowed the divine energy to flow into the world.

In other words, the Zohar teaches that God can only be present in our world if we connect to one another and bring God’s generative energy into our lives and so, into our world.  It is our task—and only we can do it—to bring God here, now.   

Since we started by talking about stars, I was thinking about a promise that God made to our very first official ancestor, Abraham.  As the elderly, childless Avram wonders whether he will ever have any progeny, anyone to inherit his belief in one God and his dream of a homeland, God literally takes him outside and promises him, “הַבֶּט־נָ֣א הַשָּׁמַ֗יְמָה וּסְפֹר֙ הַכּ֣וֹכָבִ֔ים אִם־תּוּכַ֖ל לִסְפֹּ֣ר אֹתָ֑ם …כֹּ֥ה יִהְיֶ֖ה זַרְעֶֽךָ׃  “Look toward heaven and count the stars; if you can count them… So shall your offspring be.”  And then again, in a passage we read on Rosh HaShanah morning, God promised, “I will bless you and make your descendants like the stars in heaven.”

My, what a lot of descendants those would be!  Truly beyond number, from the images we have seen from the Webb telescope: stars and stars and stars.  Uncountable numbers of people.

Now, we know the truth: there are only about 18,000,000 Jews in the world, maximum.  That’s quite a lot to count, nonetheless.  And with the different definitions bandied about regarding how we should count Jews—are they Jewish enough, who is really a Jew, and so on—it remains a fact that there are actually a lot of Jews, even if we perhaps can’t actually count all of them.  So, in a way, God was right: you can’t stand there and count them all.

Only the great Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai disagrees in his poem, you can count them,

You can count them. They. Aren't like sand on the seashore. They’re not like stars without number. They're like separate people.

On the corner and in the street.

For who’s to judge and what is judgment

Unless it’s the full import of the night

And the full onus of mercy.

You can cont them. You can count us.  Each of us counts.  We each matter.

And in a universe of light and stars, it is the light we bring into our own lives that allows God to be present, and helps us connect to the divine spark, and bring that influence into our world.  It is our work of return—to each other, to our best selves, to our people—that enables God to ignite holiness and blessing in our lives.

On this holiest night of the year, when we gaze at the infinite stars above, may we come to understand our own role in completing creation and bringing God here, now.  Over this Yom HaKippurim, this day of atonements, as we contemplate the purpose and meaning of our own existence, may we come to understand the central role we play in bringing blessings into our own world. 

May we turn in love to one another, and so allow God to be fully present down here, on earth. 

My friends, may your teshuvah be sincere and complete.  And may you be blessed with a gmar chatimah tovah, a new year of life and goodness.  

The Real You

Introduction to Kol Nidrei Eve Service 5783

Rabbi Sam Cohon, Congregation Beit Simcha, Tucson, Arizona

My favorite news story this year comes from Turkey.

In Bursa province in northwest Turkey, Beyhan Mutlu, 50 years old, went drinking with some buddies in a forest.  He wandered away from his friends, and when he didn't return home all night, they reported him missing to the authorities. While Mutlu was sleeping in a house in the forest, military forces and rescue teams were called in to search for him.

Mutlu woke up the next morning, went outside and came across a search party.  Trying to be helpful, he decided to assist in finding the missing person, and he spent an hour searching the forest with them.  But when members of the search party started calling out his name, it dawned on him that he was the focus of the search, and he shouted “That’s me!”

As it turned out, he spent more than an hour looking high and low for --  himself.  And, I guess, he found himself, too.

Which reminds me of the most famous routine of the great Jewish comedian, Jackie Mason, who died this past year, may he rest in peace. Jackie Mason began his career as an ordained rabbi, so it is not surprising that his monologues could become metaphysical. This particular shtick went like this:

“Thank God, now, I know who I am.  But there was time when I didn’t know who I was, so I went to a psychiatrist. 

“He took a look at me and right away he said, “This is not you.”

I said, “If is not me, who is it?”

He said, “I don’t know either.”

I said, “So what do I need you for?”

The psychiatrist said, “To find out who you are!  Together we are going to look for the real you.”

I said, “If I don’t know who I am, how do I know who to look for? And even if I find me, how do I know if it’s me?  And besides, if I’m going to look for me, what do I need him for?  I can look myself...  Or I can take my friends, we know where I was.  And what if I find the real me and he’s even worse than me?  What do I need him for?  ...  Let him look for me!”

“And the psychiatrist said, ‘The search for the real you will have to continue next week. That will be $500.’

And I said to myself, “If this not the real me, why should I give him the $500?  I’ll look for the real me, and let him give him the $500.  For all I know the real me might be going to a different psychiatrist altogether. Might even be a psychiatrist himself; I said, “Wouldn’t it be funny if you’re the real me and you owe me $500?”  Indeed.

My friends, tonight we begin the search for the real you—or, I guess I should say, we each begin the search for our real selves.  For that’s what Yom Kippur is all about.  Not looking around at others, but looking inside at ourselves.  Being completely open with God, yes, but most of all, being completely honest with ourselves.  Searching deep to find who we really are.

Who are you, really?  Who have you been in the past year?  And who do you wish to be in this 5783 year?

That kind of honesty with ourselves is essential on this holiest of days.  It is the only way forward from where we have been to where we wish to be, from what we have been to what we seek to become.

And so, tonight you begin the search for the real you—whether you have been lost in a forest or lying on a psychiatrist’s couch, buried in work, or wiling away empty days and nights.  That is the most important thing you can look for: your best version of yourself.  And while we begin that search tonight, we will spend more than the hour Mr. Mutlu spent looking for himself last year.  In fact, we will spend 24 hours doing it, and will only complete that quest tomorrow evening at sunset.

May your Yom Kippur search be sincere, careful and complete.  And may you find that the real you, the honest you, is ready to change for the better, ready to become who he or she is truly meant to be.

May you find the real you, and help them to a place of teshuvah, of repentance, repair, return, and growth. G’mar Chatimah Tovah.

Courageous Repentance

Shabbat Shuvah—the Sabbath of Return 5783 

I have heard that in the old Eastern European synagogues the rabbi only preached a sermon twice a year.  They were very long sermons, at least an hour each, but there were only two of them a year.  I’m pretty certain some people would prefer that we return to this tradition…

Now, the first of these European rabbinic sermons was delivered at Shabbat HaGadol, the Great Sabbath that precedes Passover, when the rabbi would preach about chameits, adulteration, removing the leavening from the home and from your life.  And the other time was on this Sabbath and the subject, invariably was repentance.

The first Shabbat of the year is always Shabbat Shuvah, the Sabbath of Return, a time of reflection and self-examination.  Falling in the midst of the Ten Days of Repentance between Rosh HaShanah and Yom Kippur, it is a special time to concentrate on how we can improve ourselves and our lives in this shiny new year.  And we are given some guidance here on how this can best be accomplished.

We are taught in Jewish tradition “For sins against God the Day of Atonement (Yom Kippur) atones, but for sins against our fellow human beings the Day of Atonement does not atone.” (Mishna Yoma 8:9). That means we can and should pray for forgiveness for anything we have failed to do for ourselves or for God.  But if we have hurt another person—and all of us have, haven’t we, over the last 12 months?—we must apologize to that person directly.  That lesson is a profound one, and particularly important in Judaism.  God can help us on our spiritual paths, but when our issues are interpersonal it is up to us to work on resolving them.  

The most important lesson of this season is that this is the time to ask forgiveness from anyone we might have offended.  We must seek to repair our relationships with those people who are most important in our lives and we must do so sincerely and openly.    

The short Torah portion we will read tomorrow on Shabbat Shuvah is called VaYelech from the book of Deuteronomy, quite near the end of this last of the five books of the Torah.  The phrase Chazak v’amatz, meaning “be strong and courageous,” appears three times in two different forms in this portion.  The first is the collective, addressed to the people of Israel, “All of you be strong and courageous.”  The second and third time the phrase occurs Moses is addressing his successor, Joshua, directly: “Be strong and courageous in leading this people.”

Soldiers are sent into battle with the exhortation “Chazak v’amatz, be strong and courageous!” for the tasks they are forced to fulfill will undoubtedly take them into life-threatening danger.  In a larger sense, that phrase has become a kind of byword in Judaism for moral courage.  We tell people who are enduring great challenges chazak v’amatz, be strong and courageous, meaning hang in there, bear up under the strain, keep a stiff upper lip.  Rak chazak v’amatz Joshua is told—just be brave and courageous and everything will work out for the best.  Do your best to stand the strain, work hard against the forces of doubt or despair, and God will reinforce your strength and redouble your commitment.  

It’s good advice, not only for future leaders of the Jewish people like Joshua, but for everyone—even bar and bat mitzvah boys and girls.  Be brave and courageous.  Face your fears and your challenges openly.  Don’t pretend that hard tasks don’t await you but know that if you are resolute and committed you can accomplish them.  Chizku v’imtzu—chazak v’amatz.  Be strong and courageous and you will overcome.

Whenever I hear that phrase, chazak v’amatz, I think of my late mother, Claire S. Cohon, of blessed memory.  She frequently quoted that to her children, or at least to me, when we were going through challenging times.  And of course, we all go through challenging times.  Knowing that if you persevere, with God’s help you can not only survive but emerge into a new, better reality—that is a powerful thing indeed.  Be strong, have courage can also mean: have faith.

That phrase, chazak v’amatz, applies to our own teshuvah, our efforts at repentance, as well.  Are there those to whom you are uncomfortable apologizing for mistakes you made in the past?  Take courage, Vayelech teaches, and in this week of Shabbat Shuvah find the strength to ask them to forgive you.  Are there those you do not wish to forgive?  Be brave and let those resentments go, take the initiative and forgive those who have wronged you.  

Mind you, this doesn’t mean forgiving those who keep on wronging you.  Judaism does not council forgiving people who are actively hurting you.  That isn’t teshuvah; it is co-dependence.  But for anyone who hurt you in the past, who damaged you in some way but isn’t doing so now, being able to let it go is crucial to growing from it and moving on into that new, cleaner reality.  Ask forgiveness, and grant forgiveness.  Be bold about both, for only when you can do both of these can your teshuvah be complete.  Only then can you truly emerge whole.

If we can each be brave about our teshuvah, if we can do this now we will help heal our own damaged relationships, and mend the torn fabric of our community.  Perhaps we can then truly begin to heal this very damaged world of ours, and begin the new year in the right way.

May you each find your own teshuvah over this Shabbat and on Yom Kippur this coming week and help to begin 5783 with clean hands and a pure heart, boldly free of the mistakes and the pain of the past, courageously embracing the future with hope, energy and life.

Shabbat Shalom and G’mar Chatimah Tovah, may you be sealed in the book of life for a good year!

The Best You Can Be (Vin Scully)

Rosh HaShanah Morning 5783 

“Hi, there everybody, and a very pleasant good afternoon to you wherever you may be.”  I have missed hearing the voice of the marvelous Los Angeles Dodgers’ announcer Vin Scully, who had an unbelievable 67-year career as the best sports broadcaster who ever lived.  Hmmm.  67 years, that’s three score and seven in Biblical terms… The last day of the Jewish year 5776 was also the last day Vin Scully announced a Dodgers’ game.  And this past summer he died at the beginning of the mournful month of Av, during a Dodgers-Giants game in the dog days of August, at the age of 92. 

For some perspective, Vin Scully’s first game as an announcer was in the Jewish year 5710; Harry Truman was president of the United States.  Scully started as the 21-year-old voice of the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1950, palling around and going ice skating with Jackie Robinson, and he retired nearly seven decades later with accolades from Sandy Koufax, Clayton Kershaw, and movie star Kevin Costner.  Vin Scully was not only an incredibly talented and enjoyable broadcaster, he was a thoughtful, humble, and generous gentleman.  And he was something more.  He was an inspiration. 

For six months of each and every year of my boyhood, from March through October, 162 games plus spring training and, when they got there, the playoffs and World Series, Vin Scully was the voice of spring, summer, and early fall.  No one has ever told a story better than Vin Scully, rolling out the details gradually, interspersed among actual baseball events unfolding before him.  No one has ever set a scene better than Vin Scully, laying out the drama inherent in what might seem like child’s play of ball, bat, and glove.  He made it all magical, but realistically gritty, too, without forgetting his essential task to describe.  He was just so good.  He created magic.

As children, we listened to Vin Scully in our homes and on the way, and certainly when we would lie down at night…

Each evening I would sneak a transistor radio into my pillowcase and listen to the end of the Dodgers’ game, narrated vividly in Scully’s easy, lyrical baritone.  He would slowly bring on the drama, until you’d find yourself clinging to every syllable: “Two outs, bottom of the ninth, bases loaded with Reds, the Dodgers lead by 2. Johnny Bench at the plate… he has already homered tonight, and he’s fouled off the last three pitches; what does a pitcher have left to throw, here?  Mikkelson looks in to get the sign; toes the rubber, wipes his brow, and who wouldn’t?— and now he’s set.  Checks the runners, and the pitch is a PALMBALL, swung on and missed, strike three, the Dodgers win!”

If I could deliver just one sermon that captivated everyone like Vin Scully did with a call like that, I could die happy.  And if that sermon, or the Too Jewish Radio Show, reached just 10% of the people that Vin Scully did during a meaningless weekday ballgame… well, that would really be something, as Vin would say.  Of course, I remember many Rosh HaShanah services in which the telltale earpiece from a transistor radio testified to the fact that a congregant was secretly listening to Vin Scully broadcast the World Series during High Holy Day services.

As a kid, I realized early on that my dreams of playing major league baseball would go unfulfilled.  Growing up in my neighborhood, we would all have liked to have played for the Dodgers.  But because of Vin Scully we also wanted to announce for the Dodgers.  Every front yard game of baseball, over-the-line, or whiffle ball was accompanied by steady commentary from at least one of the kids pretending to be Vin Scully.  It wasn’t enough to strike out a batter or hit a home run; you had to narrate it, colorfully, with detailed descriptions of pulling at your non-existent cap and marvelous anecdotes about your own surprising backstory.  But you know what?  Not only weren’t we going to play for the Dodgers.  It turned out that we weren’t even close to successfully imitating the guy doing the announcing.  Because he was special.

When you attended a game at, as Scully put it, “beautiful Dodgers Stadium in Chavez Ravine” the number of people listening to him on transistor radios was so great that you could actually hear him everywhere in the ballpark during games.  Mind you, we were watching the game itself, we could see with our own eyes what was happening in front of us, but it only became real when we heard Scully describe it.  I’m not sure this analogy isn’t sacrilegious, but it’s just a little like the Israelites hearing the 10 Commandments directly from God at Mt. Sinai and then telling Moses to get them in writing and bring them back and announce them formally before they would believe them.  Only it was Vin Scully, like Moses a deeply humble man of great accomplishment, who was proclaiming the truth from the mountaintop high up in the grandstand.

No one has ever captured a moment of actual athletic greatness better than Vin Scully. I stood in a windy gas station filling my car in October 1988 and heard him narrate the drama of overmatched Dodgers’ star Kirk Gibson struggle up to the plate with two bad legs and fight off two-strike pitches from the best relief pitcher in history, Dennis Eckersley.  And as the tension built nearly beyond endurance, he announced, “High fly ball into right field… she is gone!” and after the crowd roared and roared and roared—and several grown men in a gas station 120 miles away who did not know each other jumped up and down—it was Scully who captured it in one amazing sentence, “In a year that has been so improbable, the impossible has happened!”  Amazing.

So what could a redheaded baseball radio announcer from the Bronx—and a devout Catholic—possibly teach Jews on Rosh HaShanah here in Tucson, Arizona?

First of all, this: Vin Scully wasn’t a star player, manager, or owner.  In fact, he wasn’t in any of the glamor roles we associate with sports.  He was just the guy talking about the people who really mattered, and he sold gasoline and hot dogs along the way.  Yet somehow, with his talent, dedication, humor, humility, and innate decency, he became as important as anyone who played or managed.  In fact, more important.  He elevated what he did, this commercial act of broadcasting, into a hugely popular, inimitable art form, a unifying voice in the community, a soundtrack for people’s lives, and he did it through excellence, consistency, and joy.

And yet, he said, again and again, that he felt incredibly lucky to do something he loved, to keep on fooling people into believing that he was good at what he did.  He said and wrote about how fortunate and blessed he was, when he was the one who blessed so many of us. 

There is a wonderful lesson in this.  You see, everyone can’t be the Most Valuable Player. Everyone can’t hit the winning home run.  Everyone can’t be the owner of the team, or the star of the movie, or the captain of the ship or the CEO or the major general.  Everyone can’t play for the Dodgers—or even be their radio announcer.  But everyone, each one of us, can elevate what we do through our dedication, decency, and excellence.  Each one of us can do work that has meaning and do it well. Each of us can find our purpose.  Every one of us can live a life that matters.

That means that each of us can take pride in what we do, each can value his or her work enough to be prepared, to care, to seek always to improve.  And each of us can do what we do in our very own way.  For we each have our own unique authenticity.  We each have skills and talents no one else has.  We each can make a positive difference in this world.  If we do what we are good at doing well, with integrity and care and joy, we, too, will bring blessing to others, and we will be remembered.

Today we begin the Aseret Yemei Teshuvah, the Ten Days of Repentance.  Teshuvah means repentance, but coming from the root word shuv; most of all, it means return.  Teshuvah means return to the best that is within us.  It means finding a way, over these ten days, to return to the best you that you can be.

That is the true lesson of Rosh HaShanah.  We do not have to be the greatest scholar, or the most heroic leader, or the best-looking, or the thinnest person in any room.  We do not have to be the greatest American hero.  We do not have to be a superstar, or a movie star, or a major league ballplayer.  We do not even have to be Vin Scully. 

We simply have to be the best of ourselves. It is that person whom we are seeking today, on Rosh HaShanah, and whom we wish to reinvigorate over these Ten Days of Repentance. You see, if you can find the best version of yourself at this time of Teshuvah, if you can recommit to doing your work with energy and dedication, if you can find the joy in your life, you will also find a way to bring blessing to this shiny new year.

One more Vin Scully story—there are as many of those as there are Midrashim, I think, and this is an atypical but true story.  It seems that a very rich, very push guy convinced the Dodgers staff to let him in to meet with the great Vin Scully in the radio booth where he was carefully preparing for the coming game.  Scully, a perfect gentleman always, arose and shook the man’s hand, and the guy puffed out his chest and said with great arrogance, “I wanted to meet you because you are at the top and I am at the top.  You are the number one broadcaster, and I am the number one building contractor!” 

Scully said, who had exquisite manners, thought for a moment, and then said, “Is that so?  That’s wonderful.  I’d like you to meet some people.”

And he turned to the other people in and around the booth and said, “First, I’d like you to meet Steve.  He’s the number one statistician.  And John, he’s the number one caterer.  And Esteban, he’s the number one janitor.  And Rachel, she’s the number one usher.”  This continued for several minutes, as Scully introduced all the employees standing there in an ever-widening circle.  The man’s face went from pride to reddening embarrassment to outright humiliation.

Finally, much, reduced, he left the radio booth…

Because, of course, the point wasn’t that Scully was great because he thought he was great.  He was great because he respected the goodness, even the greatness, in all those around him.

There is a famous Jewish story about this.  Once, the great Hassidic Rebbe Zusia, came to his followers, his eyes red with tears, his face pale with fear.

"Zusia, what's the matter? You look frightened!" his concerned students asked.

"I just had a vision,” Zusia answered.  “I learned the question that God will one day ask me about my life."

His followers were puzzled. "Zusia, you are pious. You are scholarly and humble. You have helped each of us. What question about your life could be so terrifying that you would be frightened to answer it?" they said.

Zusia turned his gaze to heaven. "I have learned that God will not ask me, 'Why weren't you Moses, leading your people out of slavery?'  God will not ask me why I wasn’t the best Moses I could be."

His followers persisted. "So, what will God ask you?"

"And I have learned," Zusia sighed, "that God will not ask me, 'Why weren't you Joshua, leading your people into the Promised Land?'  God will not ask me why I wasn’t the best Joshua I could be."

Again, they asked, “So, nu, what will God ask you?”

“And I have also learned,” Zusia moaned, “that God will not ask me, ‘Why weren’t you the Prophet Elijah, fighting against the injustice of the king and queen?’  God will not ask me why I wasn’t the best Elijah I could be.”

Finally, one of his followers approached Zusia and placed his hands on Zusia's shoulders. Looking him in the eyes, he demanded, "Reb Zusia, what will God ask you?"

And Zusia answered, "I have learned that God will say to me, 'Zusia, there was only one thing that no power of heaven or earth could have prevented you from becoming.' God will say, 'Zusia, why weren't you the best Zusia you could be?'  And that is why I am distraught.  I don’t think I have been the best Zusia I could have been.”

The best Zusia.  Not the best Moses.  Not the best Joshua.  Not the best Elijah.  Not even the best Vin Scully.

What we are asked to do over these Days of Awe, over this Rosh HaShanah and through to Yom Kippur, is rediscover the best version of ourselves.  To find the person within who is open enough to learn, generous enough to give, caring enough to comfort, conscientious enough to do our work well and with pride.  In a way, this is the greatest teshuvah that any of us can do: to find the Jew within us who will be true to the best that is within us.  To find the human being we can be, the one who can do the mitzvot that will make our lives better, and so improve the whole world.

And, as Vin Scully told graduates of his alma mater once, “Don’t let the winds blow your dreams away,” he said, “or steal you of your faith in God.”

May he rest in peace.  And may each of you find your own teshuvah, to return and repair yourselves to be the best you can be in this beautiful new year of 5783.

The Last Shofar-Maker of Morocco

Introduction to the Shofar Service of Rosh HaShanah 5783  

There are many names for the holiday we celebrate today.  Perhaps the most obvious is Yom Teruah, the day of the sounding of the shofar.  In honor of this I’ve brought along a favorite shofar of mine, which comes from Morocco in this shofar box and brings with it a story.

Some years ago, I was on a rabbinic trip to Morocco.  In those days, Israel had no formal relationship with Morocco.  It was only about two years ago, in fact, that changed.  Our mission then was to meet with members of the Jewish community and officials of the Moroccan government—they had and have a king—seeking to improve its relationship with Israel.  I don’t know how much impact we really had, but we did connect to some of the amazing Jewish history of that remarkable community. 

Our rabbinical group traveled from Casablanca to Rabat to Fez to Marrakesh, visiting the remnants of what was once a huge and vital Jewish community.  We saw Maimonides’ house in the mellah of Fez, met with a variety of Moroccan officials in Rabat, attended Shabbat services, had dinner with the Jewish advisor to the king, visited the French-speaking Alliance Jewish day school, went to the Casablanca Jewish Center—a high-rise club, really—and ate a lot of couscous.

Every Jewish place of importance I have visited I have always tried to bring back something unique to that Jewish community, as a way of connecting to the heritage of our far-flung coreligionists everywhere in the world.

Our guide on this rabbis’ trip was named Moshe, and he was a Moroccan Jew.  When we began the mission, I asked him if there was a uniquely Moroccan Jewish ritual object that I could find to purchase; perhaps a Moroccan shofar?

Yes, of course, he said.  He knew exactly where I could get it.  A very special shofar, only in Morocco. 

The trip was about 10 days, and each day I would ask Moshe—is today the day we will get that Moroccan shofar?  And each day, he would say, “Soon, soon—the next city we will get it.”

The trip was marvelous, but by the time we had come to the last days I still did not have my Moroccan shofar.  We were arriving in Marrakesh, the remarkable city with its ancient, crenellated ramparts still intact.  Again, I asked Moshe—would I get my shofar today? 

No, he said, tomorrow—the final day of the journey.  We were flying out the next night. 

I noodged him: when exactly?

Well, machar, he said meet me tomorrow afternoon at 1pm at a specific spice store in the old city of Marrakesh.

Finally, all set, or so I thought.  The next afternoon a rabbinic friend and I walked through the great square in Marrakesh, the Jemaa el-Fnaa and found the large spice store, which doubled as a kind of pharmacy.  Moshe introduced us to the proprietor and then, well, disappeared.  That was the first problem, since the proprietor spoke Arabic and French and I spoke English, Hebrew and some Spanish.  I mimed blowing a shofar, and the man pointed to an ancient, bedraggled looking ram’s horn on a high shelf.  The horn was cracked through and clearly not anything anyone could blow.  I was disappointed and managed to convey the idea to him that we would be interested in other shofars—did he have any?

The guy motioned yes, and led my friend and I out of the back of the spice store to a little alley.  There, seated on a Motobecane scooter, was a portly Arab man.  He to spoke only Arabic and a little French.  The owner of the spice store motioned for me to get on the back of the scooter.  I looked at my friend, a rabbi of considerable girth himself; clearly, I was the only candidate to fit onto that scooter. 

By now I was a little uncomfortable with the whole scenario.  But I really wanted to get that Moroccan shofar.  And so onto the back of the scooter I climbed.

We immediately took off, driving at breakneck speed through the rough stone streets and dirt alleys of the Old City of Marrakesh, dodging chickens and donkeys and pedestrians and metal rods jutting out from the walls.  Gradually the streets became narrower and narrower, dirtier, and darker.  I could see the headline: “Rabbi disappears on trip to Morocco.  No trace is found… and no shofar, either.”

Finally, we navigated the narrowest of the alleys and came to a stop at a doorway covered by a curtain. 

I hopped off the scooter and pulled open the curtain—and there on the ground in a tiny, grimy workshop, were three men making shofars and shofar boxes.  It was, apparently, the last shofar maker in Morocco.

Without any shared language but the workshop foreman’s small calculator I negotiated to buy 20 of the shofars and all the completed shofar boxes they had to sell.  I had never seen a shofar box made out of horn before—or any shofar box, for that matter.  But I was sure the other rabbis would rush to purchase these, too.  I managed to convey the name of our hotel and a time to meet, said Salaam, and went back on the Motobecane scooter for another harrowing death ride through the back alleys of the old city of Marrakesh.

The shofar-maker was as good as his word; he showed up at our hotel that evening, not long before we all had to leave the country.  And the rabbis descended on him to purchase the shofarot and the shofar boxes like the locusts did in that plague in Egypt.  I kept this box, and this unique Moroccan-style shofar, as a remembrance of that amazing place and experience.

You see, on this holiday of Rosh HaShanah Jews all over the world—really, all over the world—will blow shofarot and connect not only to God and to teshuvah, but also to each other, everywhere on this planet.  Because on this holy day we are all one, all connected, from Marrakesh to Israel Tucson.  On this Yom Teruah we are truly all one.  Our melodies may be different.  Our locations may be different. But we are all connected by the shofar and the religion and peoplehood we share.

May you enjoy a festival of true Teshuvah, of growth and hope and joy.  And may the call of this shofar, of every shofar, bring you closer to our people of Israel.

Rosh HaShanah Dreams

Sermon Rosh HaShanah Evening 5783

A question for you: do you have anything that you dream of doing?  Is there something you’ve always dreamt about but not yet had the opportunity to experience?  What are your dreams?

For example, my friends, when I was a child, I dreamed of becoming an astronaut. But sadly, my dad crushed those dreams years ago.

He'd always say, "For you, son, the sky's the limit!"

Sorry.  OK, seriously now: What dreams do you have for your life that you have not yet fulfilled?  Which of your dreams are you ignoring?

In our lives we function in pragmatic ways, deal with the problems and practicalities that take up most of our time.  But within each of us, even the most prosaic, there are dreams.  Over the course of our lives nothing may matter more than these.  Yet often we simply bury these dreams.

Dreams can take many forms.  Some are more fantasies than dreams: we can dream of being a rockstar or a ballerina or, if we are Elon Musk, of colonizing Mars.  Or we can, I supposed, dream of being as rich as Elon Musk.

But alongside these fantasy dreams are other, more down-to-earth dreams: dreams of family reunification, of love, of children or grandchildren’s success, of travel to a new place, of learning a new language or skill, and perhaps most importantly, of making a positive difference in this world with our lives.  And it is of those dreams that I ask again: which of your dreams are you ignoring?  And what are the consequences of not living your dream?  And how can you change that?

I wonder how many of you have a dreamcatcher or two somewhere in your homes?  I know that many of our daughters—and sons—grew up sleeping under these Native American pieces here in Tucson.  According to the guy who sold me one there is a belief among indigenous Americans that the night is filled with dreams, some bad, some good.  The dreamcatcher’s design is supposed to catch bad dreams and allow only the good ones to come through to your child.  Lovely. 

Originally called a “spider web charm” by the Chippewa people of the Great Lakes, and hung over babies’ cribs, dreamcatchers became popular during the Pan-Indian movement of the 1960s and were adopted as New Age merchandise shortly thereafter.  Whatever you feel about cultural appropriation, dreamcatchers are everywhere in Tucson and the west, on sale from museums to convenience stores, more popular even than kachinas.  I have even seen dreamcatchers with Jewish stars woven into them.  Perhaps next year for Rosh HaShanah we’ll have dreamcatchers with shofars woven into them.  So goes American-Jewish merchandising.

But the original goal of dreamcatchers, to control the flow of dreams, is a window into a primal human need.  The Hebrew word for dream is chalom, and in the simplest way dreams are the unconscious play of the mind while we are in REM sleep, the deepest form of sleep.  According to scientists, dreams are an involuntary flow of emotions, images, sensations, and ideas. 

We all have them, typically five to seven separate dreams a night, although lots of us don’t remember most of our dreams; some of us don’t remember any of them.  And despite an almost obsessive scientific interest in them, we still really don’t understand the purpose of dreams.  

From a scientific perspective, dream interpretation is still a mystery. “There’s no real consistent, scientifically proven theory linking specific content back to what a dream means,” says a noted behavioral sleep medicine expert.

Dreams also pose a problem.  Dreams represent a time when our primary tool for exerting control, our minds, are literally out of control, when visions of potential disasters are allowed to freely roam through the unconscious mind, to be remembered the next morning, and when dreams untethered to the real world in which we are truly free can flourish. 

There are many Jewish teachings that reflect a level of discomfort with dreams.  In the Talmud the rabbis express fear that the “prison of sleep” is too much like our final prison of death.  When we are asleep, we don’t have any ability to act; we are like a prisoner in jail.  That is why our morning prayers, our Birchot HaShachar, say, “Blessed are You, God, Ruler of the universe, who frees the captive prisoner, matir asurim.”  This is not a blessing about redeeming soldiers captured in war.  It is a way of saying, “Thank you, Lord, for freeing me from the prison of lost control that is sleep.”

In our Zohar classes we’ve been exploring how dreams are a challenge for mystics, too.  You see, a primary goal of all mysticism is to enhance our awareness of the presence of God, to find the divine everywhere in our lives.  The best way to do this is to create a greater level of intentionality in thought, to become clearer and more conscious of what we are thinking about at all times.  Mystical work seeks to make us more mindful of everything going on both inside of us and around us, to be increasingly attentive to our inner and outer worlds.  Meditation helps us harmonize those worlds, and contemplation trains us to focus on ideas and practices that improve our opportunity to sense God everywhere.

As Jacob famously says in the story of the angels on the ladder—also known as the Stairway to Heaven tale—“Truly, God was in this place and I, I did not know it.”  Through mysticism we try to become aware that God is in this place, and in every place; to “know it,” if you will.

But no matter how carefully we train our minds to experience the mystical presence, whether we call that presence God or Shechinah or Ribono Shel Olam, no matter how much we focus on controlling or shaping our spiritual impulses, thoughts, and feelings, when we go to sleep, we lose that control, including the ability to direct our thoughts.  We are helplessly subservient to an unconscious flow of images, ideas and experiences cascading through our sleeping brains.  In sleep, the best-trained mystic, the most advanced practitioner of the most sophisticated form of spirituality, the greatest Kabbalist or Guru has no more volition than a 2-year-old.  Once we close our eyes and drift off to REM sleep, we are at the mercy of processes beyond our control.  Without any ability to channel or direct the process, we dream.

It is no wonder that those who follow Kabbalah invented the Tikun Chatzot, a midnight awakening and meditation that interrupted this process of dreaming and created a time for deeper mystical awareness and connection with God at just the time dream-sleep would be most intense. 

In a way, the month of Elul is testament to the anti-sleep aspects of Jewish tradition.  In Jewish movements most identified with Kabbalah, the Sephardim and the Chasidim, the the month just past, last month of the Jewish year, is the time when we begin our repentance with Selichot, prayers of apology.  While we Ashkenazic Jews have Selichot prayers at midnight, we only do this once, on a Saturday night prior to Rosh HaShanah.  But the more mystical Sephardim and Chasidim hold an entire month of Selichot services, getting up from bed in time to be at temple at midnight every weekday of Elul, interrupting their personal dream-time to offer prayers of repentance.  And the Selichot prayers can be intensely mystical.  In other words, they stop the flow of dreams so that they can assert a greater level of control over thoughts and actions. That way, they can focus on teshuvah, repentance, which surely must be a conscious, waking process, not some dreamy experience.

The Zohar has a midrash about what happens to our souls when we fall fully asleep.  According to tradition, just 1/60th of our souls remain in our bodies.  All the rest of our soul travels to Gan Eden, the Garden of Eden, where it communes directly with God in a blissful foretaste of paradise.  That means that when we start to wake up, our souls must return to our bodies, or we won’t wake up at all and will die. The beautiful, poetic morning prayer Elohai Neshama, which thanks and praises God for restoring our pure souls to us and allowing us to live another day, is an almost practical statement of gratitude based on this remarkable teaching.

The Zohar then quotes the Talmud and tells us dreams are also 1/60th part prophecy, that is, when we dream we are receiving a form of communication directly from God.  The hard part is knowing which part of the dream is revelation and which isn’t.  Or, to put it another way, which part of what we dream comes from God and which part comes from a weird movie we saw before drifting off, or from eating too much garlic at dinner.  1/60th part prophecy sounds both too important to ignore and much too ambiguous to believe in.

And yet, the Zohar also says, “An un-interpreted dream is like an unopened letter.”  We should not ignore such powerful potential communication.  We may not be able to invite or cultivate dreams, we may find them disturbing at many levels, we may even try to prevent ourselves from having dreams, but once they come they must be treated seriously.  The Zohar goes on to explore just what dreams may mean, if they are true or false, if they are favorable or unfavorable, and, most importantly, what this process is all about.  And perhaps that is where all of this dream exploration leads.

The figure most closely associated with dreaming in Jewish tradition is our ancestor Joseph, the great dream interpreter of the Torah.  His brothers derisively call him “Ba’al hachalomot”, the master of dreams.  Joseph rises to great prominence because of his ability to interpret the Pharaoh’s bad dreams.  And his unique ability to leap to the top of the heap relies primarily on an extraordinary talent for understanding and explaining dreams.  So how does he do it?  What can Joseph teach us about dreams?

It is apparent in these sections of Genesis that Joseph is able to probe the unconscious imaginings of the minds around him—and of his own mind—and discern the parts that are truly divine prophecy from all the rest.  He has the uncanny ability to find the 1/60th part of true golden revelation in dreams and filter out the 59 out of 60 parts of dross that surround them.

I think Joseph is so successful in interpreting dreams because he is very good at putting aside what really doesn’t matter.  Joseph ignores the aspects of the dreams that aren’t important.  He finds the kernel inside the husk, filters out the chatter, hears the central melody within the noise.  In Talmudic terms, he goes straight to the ikkar, the root, the heart of the matter.  He understands the one thing that is really important and focuses his attention on exactly that.  When people listen to Joseph and come to understand his emphasis on priorities, that ability to do what is most urgent first, they succeed beyond their own dreams.  When they can’t do that, when they are distracted by their own ego needs or busyness or resentments, they miss out.

Perhaps that is what dreams, or at least our Jewish approach to dreams, can teach us best: how to focus on which parts of our dreams really matter.  That is true of what we imagine when we are awake, also, what we more generally call our dreams, our goals in life.  These can be filled with images of fame and fortune, of beachfront relaxation or new homes or cars or children’s accomplishments or winning the lottery, even of sports teams winning championships.  But how many of these are really not true dreams at all but just the 59 parts out of 60 that are just, well, stuff, and I don’t mean “the stuff that dreams are made of?”

Perhaps the greatest modern dreamer in Jewish history was Theodore Herzl, father of Zionism, who helped dream the State of Israel into existence.  His most famous quotation is, of course, im tirtzu ein zo aggadah; if you will it, it is no dream.  More than anyone, he was able to focus a disparate and divisive group of Jews into a movement that led to the modern miracle of a Jewish state. 

You might say that Congregation Beit Simcha, similarly, is a kind of dream.  Four years ago we agreed to create a congregation, a synagogue committed to high Jewish standards and a true, loving community where everyone pitched in.  That dream, through much labor, has become something very real and very precious.  It will continue to flourish so long as we remain true to our central dream of a congregation committed to Jewish excellence, warmth, and creativity, and to demonstrating respect and kindness to all members and guests of our community.  This synagogue is a dream in the making.

So, I’ll ask you tonight, on a personal level: what are your dreams for yourself?  Which of them are truly divinely inspired, and which are not? 

A friend recently told me that her greatest dream was of material success, really making it financially.  Yet everything she is most interested in doing now is related to spiritual growth, not money.  Another friend spoke of his dream of becoming free of encumbrances, being able to travel and move without hindrance.  Yet he has since entered into a serious relationship that limits that.  I know people who dream of making aliyah to Israel when that is not a genuine possibility for them, who dream of making it in Hollywood and yet remain anchored in Tucson. 

And I know of other people whose dreams are of repairing breached family relationships, of spending more and better time with those they love, of working to heal the world and help the homeless and hungry.  Who dream of deepening Jewish knowledge and commitment or seek to find greater joy and meaning through service. 

What can you do in this new year to realize your essential dreams, the heart of your dreams for yourself?

My friends, in this 5783 year, may we each commit ourselves to finding the worthy, divine dreams that lie within us, the truest of our own dreams.  And may we learn to filter out the others so that we can make those very real, holy dreams come true.

In America on January 1st we make New Year’s resolutions.  But in Judaism, at Beit Simcha, on the 1st of Tishrei we have a different goal: to make our New Year’s dream commitments come true. 

May it prove to be so for you in this brand-New Year; and for us all.  L’shana Tova.

Imperfect Choice

Imperfect and Eternal

Sermon, Parshat Nitzavim 5782

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

As a perfectionist I am always frustrated by the impermanent nature of most improvements.  Fix a broken water faucet and sooner or later it will start to drip again.  Get your car tires aligned and within a few thousand miles, or a few hundred, they are out of alignment.  Get a tooth filled and six months later you have another cavity somewhere else.  Hire someone for a job, get used to them, and then they leave. Life seems like a succession of lacuna, of ellipses, of fixing one thing only to see another break.  As poet Robert Browning puts it “on earth the broken orb, in heaven the round complete.” Nothing is eternal; everything changes. 

This is true in every aspect of life, and in every profession, with the possible exception of government work.  But there exists the possibility for something more.  Let’s look at law for a moment—any lawyers here?  Well, how would you like to write a contract that could never be broken, an agreement of such perfection that there exists absolutely no loopholes?  How would you like to be able to create a truly eternal contract?

This is the last Shabbat of the year, the final sermon of of 5782.  What a great Torah portion to send us off into the Yamim Nora’im!  The rabbis who arranged our current reading cycle had a pretty good idea of what they were about.  Our final parashah of the shanah, our last taste of Torah before the year changes, is a message of personal responsibility and commitment—and it includes a truly long-term contract. 

Atem nitzavim hayom, kulchem, it begins, each of you stand here today—every single Jew, every member of our community, men, women and children, immigrants and native born, wealthy and powerful and poor and humble.  You all, each of you, enter into a brit, a covenant with Adonai, your God.  You are God’s people, and the Lord is your God, and you agree to follow the mitzvot.  And this is not some ancient, hoary agreement, yellowing on old paper, not dry parchment flaking into dust—this is very much a living document, a contract made not only with the people of Israel standing today but with every generation of Jew to come, with unborn sons and daughters of Israel for time immemorial, all Jews who ever lived, all who live now, and all who will live for millenia still unexplored.

Think about the sort of deal, the kind of contract delineated here: an eternal brit that extends beyond the grave, beyond the century, beyond the millenium, beyond all boundaries of time.  A forever agreement that applies in all jurisdictions—from Sinai to Israel to Babylonia to Rome to Spain to Germany to Lithuania to Tel Aviv to New York to Tucson, Arizona.  What a remarkable idea!  This is the covenant that God establishes with us and our progeny, and it is, effectively, unbreakable.  Because our ancestors once stood—nitzavim—before God, we, too, become partners in this unending covenant.   

And what does this agreement consist of?  If we return, make teshuvah to God, we and our children will be rewarded with open hearts, and with the openness of God’s heart toward us.  Perhaps more importantly, we will be blessed with a Torah that is accessible to us all, a Torah that “is not too baffling or beyond reach,” a contract written not in legalistic language but in words that we can grasp and learn and teach to our own children and grandchildren.  This is not “God’s in His heaven, all’s right with the world” to quote Browning again—it is a teaching, an instruction in the way to live life that is not high up in heaven or far across the sea—it is close at hand, in our mouths and hearts.

So we are blessed with an unbreakable contract here, eternal, endless, right?  But then Nitzavim tells us something paradoxical, contradictory.  We are parties to this great and ancient and powerful brit, yet we are also free to abandon it.  God tells us “I set before you today life and goodness, death and evil—I call heaven and earth to witness that I offer you life and death today, blessing and curse—uvacharta chayim—choose life, that you and your descendants may truly live.”  In other words, we are all party to this unbreakable contract—but we have complete freedom to either observe it or ignore it.  What kind of perfect agreement is that?  How do you like that for a loophole?

Now the great rewards of doing the brit, living the commandments are spelled out, and so are the consequences of choosing to ignore mitzvot and living a rotten life.  But the choice remains ours.

Sigh.  Another disappointment for perfectionists.  For there can be no doubt that this is yet another time when we think we have things licked, when we believe that a great way to live has been effectively mandated, and we sadly learn that even God is unwilling to close the loopholes. 

Beyond the obvious comfort that God is not truly an attorney—although soon, on Rosh HaShanah, we will consistently use prayers that see God as a judge, the highest form of attorney, right?—we must be satisfied with a remarkable level of personal autonomy and an even greater degree of respect for the essential mystery of the interplay of free will and morality.  That is, we are taught here what is right, but it is always up to us to choose to act in those ways.

And perhaps that is the central message of this text.  For what this covenant actually covers is how it is that we may best live—ethically, ritually, Jewishly.  What it does not cover is whether we will choose to direct our own souls correctly, and come to live lives of blessing.  God wants us to choose the right path; God urges us to choose the right path; God just about begs us to choose the right path.  But it is always, always our own choice.

Perhaps that’s because if we were compelled to do the right thing at all times we would no longer be true creatures in God’s image, independent actors with the capacity to make our own decisions about how to live.  We would be no more than automatons, puppets, robots, acting out scripts written for us by God.  The goal is to have us make the right choices, to choose life and blessing and mitzvot, to accept that all other people on this earth are also created in God’s image and that our actions must reflect that. 

The true brit here is probably encapsulated in another verse of today’s portion: Hanistarot lAdonai Eloheinu, v’haniglot lanu ulvaneinu ad olam, la’asot et kol divrai haTorah hazot.  The hidden things belong to the Lord our God, but the revealed truths are ours and our children’s forever… to do the words of this Torah… to choose to do the things God asks, to act to make this world a better, kinder, more decent, more honest world, more reflective of the values we wish to represent, that Judaism stands for. 

The reason we are allowed choice may not always be clear; after all, if we didn’t have it the world could be made perfect very easily, right?  We just wouldn’t be human beings anymore or exist as images of a God who acts.  Either way, we possess this gift of choice, and must live in an imperfect world. And thus, perfection in our lives is not possible, but real virtue is.

May we come to discover our true course for the coming year, not as a process of personal or communal perfection, but simply as an acceptance of our role as representatives of a great and moral teaching, a continually evolving Torah of truth.  That is perfection enough, and it has allowed this sacred contract to become a truly eternal covenant for all time—and for our time.  May we, in this coming year, live to that standard. 

War and Peace in Judaism

Shabbat Ki Teitzei 5782

Shabbat is a day of rest and peace—of course, that’s what we mean when we say Shabbat Shalom.  But in our world, peace can often seem elusive.

The news this morning brought reports of a breakthrough by the Ukrainian Army in the northern part of the country as it recovered many miles of its country from the Russian invaders.  This grinding war has taken up the attention of the world over the past six months and more, with its terrible death tolls and awful destruction.  But of course, Judaism is not exactly unfamiliar with the topic of war.   

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

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

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

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

Since 9/11, the concept of jihad and Islamic warfare and terrorism have become distressingly familiar to us in America, and almost exactly 22 years after 9/11 we have finally extracted ourselves from the longest conflicts in American history in Iraq and Afghanistan—and the net results of both wars are disheartening.  Both wars were provoked by acts taken in the name of religion, and both were filled with perverse, ugly forms of religious fanaticism.  While ISIS was beaten back in Syria and Iraq, the current state of thos nations is terrible.  And Afghanistan certainly doesn’t look like it will end any better.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The 22nd Anniversary of 9/11

We are now just two weeks from Rosh HaShanah, the Jewish New Year, which begins Sunday night, September 25th.  This is a wonderful time to look back on the year that has nearly passed, examine our conduct and see the ways in which we might return to the best that we have within us.

And we are also commemorating the 21st anniversary of 9/11 today.  While the memory of that terrible day has faded into history for most of us, Judaism is a religion that focuses on the importance of preserving memory and learning from our past.

The World Trade Center and Pentagon murders perpetrated by Al Qaida were a brutal destruction of life, and the responses these horrific acts provoked led to death and destruction around the world.

Nearly 3,000 people were murdered on 9/11, and the circles of grief and loss extended far beyond the many victims to their families, friends, and communities, to the serious health and psychological problems of first responders and those within range of the destruction. 

The emotional trauma severely damaged our nation and our world.  9/11 changed many things, virtually none of them for good.  Forces were unleashed we scarcely understand even now, 21 years later, and over which we are not really in control.

I chaired 9/11 commemorations here in Tucson for ten years, coordinated and participated in many events remembering those who died.  In every one of those ceremonies we chose to create bonds of respect, honor and love across all boundary lines of religion and race.  We did this because it was right.  But we also did this because we needed to demonstrate to those who perform despicable acts in the hopes of destroying human solidarity that they create the opposite effect.   Their acts of violence and evil brought Americans together and engendered respect, understanding and love among people with varying beliefs and of different races and origins. 

Over the decade of 9/11 commemorations I chaired, and many I participated in later, it was clear that interest waned over time.  In 2001 we all needed to gather and share and pray and heal one another.  In 2002 we still needed to gather to pray, mourn and remember.  But each year thereafter, no matter how moving the ceremonies or how broad a group we gathered—our high was 24 different religious denominations represented in our Tucson Multi-Faith Alliance services—the numbers of attendees diminished.  It’s the way of the world: immediate tragedy becomes memory and quickly moves into history before we even notice.

This year, I suspect, most of us see this date as a time to mourn those whose lives were stolen from them over two decades ago.  Some see it as a time to focus on the war against terrorism and religious insanity, such as the radical, evil form of Saudi Islam that intoxicated the perpetrators of 9/11 and still threatens civilization in many parts of the world.  

But some of us choose to see this date as a reminder of what America can be when it decides to be.  At a time of great trauma and crisis what was most extraordinary was the way Americans pulled together.  We reached out across all boundary lines of race, creed, color, and politics and supported each other.  Arizonans and Southerners and Midwesterners all cared about New York, Red State and Blue State differences didn’t matter, Republicans and Democrats bonded over shared tragedy and the dedication to healing, strength and pride.

I’d like to suggest that we look back in a different way at the aftermath of 9/11.  Not because there was anything to be nostalgic about in 9/11: it was horror and disaster, a national loss of innocence and sense of security.  But there was a quality to the way we Americans responded then that teaches us something essential we have forgotten recently. 

After 9/11, when things seemed blackest, Americans chose to seek each other’s understanding, respect, support, and love, and to offer those to one another freely and with concern and care. 

Thank God, and our US intelligence services, we do not face another 9/11 today.  But at a time of ever-increasing national discord and division, of the endless online cultivation of mutual disrespect and hatred, we can take an essential lesson from that terrible time.  We can personally and collectively choose to build respect, understanding and love in our society.  We can reach out across religious lines and celebrate the greatest strength of America: our amazing diversity.  We can demonstrate caring and kindness in place of anger and hostility.  We can show respect for one another’s faith, race, gender, identity, even politics.

We can choose to do what Americans are supposed to do: reject the temptations of easy stereotyping and quick judgment.  And then we can do what Americans are best at, in a pinch: we can pull together and seek to make our country, and our world, truly better, more generous, more respectful, more gracious. 

God knows, this world can use it.

Labor and Judaism

Sermon Shabbat Shoftim, Labor Day Weekend 5782

One of my favorite jokes is about labor.  It goes like this:

Hard work fascinates me.  I could sit and watch other people do it for hours. 

My friends, it’s Labor Day weekend, which in many parts of the country means the last hurrah of summer.  But here in the Sonoran Desert, Labor Day is just a brief interruption during an already busy fall schedule. We started public school a month ago, Religious School is going full speed, and Rosh HaShanah is just over three weeks away. In fact, here in Tucson, Labor Day weekend is typically just a quick breath before plunging into the deep end of the swimming pool of a hectic fall—or an excuse to drive to San Diego for a final beach vacation of the year.

But long before this holiday became another American excuse for a three-day weekend, Labor Day was a significant statement about the value of a human being’s hard work.  When it started, the very concept that labor had value, morally and economically, was controversial—as it remains in some quarters today.

Labor Day was created in the 1880’s to celebrate and support the workingman and woman, and as         an expression of the importance of organized labor in America.  It was a way of saying that labor mattered, that capital wasn’t the only positive value in the US economy and society.

We Jews have always believed labor has moral quality.  One of the great sentences in Pirkei Avot, the Ethics of our Ancestors, says “Al shlosha devarim ha’olam omeid: al hatorah, v’al ha’avodah, v’al gemilut chasadim: the world is based on three things: on Torah, on work, and on acts of selfless kindness.”  The Hebrew word Avodah, labor, can mean religious service—but typically it means practical and prosaic work, and the connection of labor to Divine service is intentional.  In other words, honest work is a form of prayer.  This exaltation of basic labor as a foundation of society—and a way to serve God—is consistent throughout Jewish tradition. 

You might not know that until fairly recently being a rabbi wasn’t a paying profession.  Most of the great rabbis and scholars in Jewish history had day jobs, from Rabbi Yossi Hasandlar, a shoemaker in the days of the Talmud, to Maimonides, a physician in 12th century Spain, to the rabbis of Eastern Europe who made a living in the lumber trade or as butchers.  For Jews, there has never been any shame in hard work. 

In fact, a movement based on exalting work, the Labor Zionists, created the State of Israel.  They are celebrating the 125th Anniversary of the first Zionist Congress in Basel Switzerland this very weekend, by the way.

The first immigration of Jews coming back to Israel in the 19th century was made up of idealistically motivated Labor Zionists—what we call socialists today.  They created the institutions of the modern state of Israel, including the Histadrut, the labor union-based organization that still has enormous influence in Israeli life, and internationally as the Jewish Agency.  Until the 1970’s every Prime Minister of Israel came from the Labor Party; its influence in the Knesset has eroded steadily since, but the mythos of Israel is deeply imbued with exaltations of labor and work.  Early Zionist songs include lines like “heChaluts l’ma’an Avodah, Avodah l’ma’an heChaluts”—the pioneer lives for the sake of work, and work is there for the sake of the pioneer.

And of course, one of the great old institutions of Israeli life, the Kibbutz, which did more to shape the character and reputation of Israel than virtually anything, was based on labor and shared ownership and responsibility.

Here in America many important labor organizers, from Samuel Gompers to Emma Goldman, were Jewish. 

Samuel Gompers was one of the first great labor organizers in American history, founder and longtime president of the American Federation of Labor, the AFL part of the AFL-CIO.  Gompers said about this weekend’s special holiday, "Labor Day differs in every essential way from the other holidays of the year in any country.  All other holidays are … connected with conflicts and battles of man's prowess over man, of strife and discord for greed and power, of glories achieved by one nation over another. Labor Day... is devoted to no man, living or dead, to no sect, race, or nation."

As Abraham Lincoln, said, “Labor is prior to, and independent of, capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration.”

The Jewish appreciation of the value of labor goes way back.  There are many injunctions in the Torah concerning the rights of workers and laborers: one must not keep the wags of a worker overnight, but instead is legally required to pay her or him everything they have earned on that same day.  One must provide a living wage, that is, enough for a worker to be able to afford food, clothing, and housing.  In the economic agenda established in Deuteronomy, the book we are reading now establishes extensive rules to protect workers and allow them to support themselves in the society that is being created in the Land of Israel.  No one is to be too rich, and no one is to be left behind, or rendered too poor.

I’m not sure exactly when “labor” became a dirty word in American politics, or when the very concept of unions became problematic.  Today in America, and certainly here in Arizona, Labor Day has lost its sense of purpose, as has our understanding of the value of labor.  We celebrate the great tycoons of the new Gilded Age, the Elon Musks and Jeff Bezoses and Bill Gates and the Mark Zuckerbergs; of course, in our Twitter-driven society that means we also excoriate them from time to time, but in general they occupy a good deal of the attention of the public sphere.  There are currently well over 700 billionaires in the United States now, I am informed—sadly not enough of them donating to Beit Simcha, but still—that’s a lot of super-wealthy people.

The average CEO today makes 355 times as much as the average worker; back in 1965 that ratio was just 25 times as much as the average worker.  That means since the musical “How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying” satirized the inequities of corporate America the gap between the top executive and the worker who makes his or her job possible has been enlarged by a multiple of about 15.

Deuteronomy would not approve of that gap between the richest leaders and the ordinary workers in our current American society.  In fact, our Torah portion of Shoftim very specifically commands that even kings must not accrue too much wealth, but instead remain wealthy only in proportion to their subjects’ prosperity, and never in some gigantic multiple of the laborers own success.

For fifty years now the labor movement has declined, in many cases precipitously and so has protection for workers in our American society.  The percentage of workers belonging to a union in the U. S. peaked in 1954 at 35% of the working population, while the total number of union members peaked in 1979 at 21 million. Union membership has declined ever since, with private sector union membership now just 7% of private sector employees. Public sector unions have grown, but generally speaking unions have faded badly.  And that means that workers have not fared well in society, have seen their purchasing power and access to the benefits of our society, from housing to medical care to education, reduced, while the very wealthy have become, well, the incredibly wealthy.

One Labor Day won’t fix that, of course, not even at a time when the US is experiencing full employment, statistically, and when it is nearly impossible to fully staff most companies.  The truth is that until we return to the concept of the centrality of labor in producing the benefits of society, we will not see these matters improve.  And the Torah could well be our guide in this.

A personal note on the subject of labor: my late mother Claire’s parents, my Zaide Lou and Bubbie Dora, were members of a group called the Workmen’s Circle—the arbitering, Jewish Socialists who didn’t much believe in God but certainly believed in Jewish life and the value of labor and workers.  I used to do a Passover Seder for the Arbitering that managed to make no mention of God, but was otherwise about as traditional as you can imagine—except that Moses came off as a union organizer.

So even as we will all enjoy a day off from work, perhaps with barbecues or swim parties, we should remember that labor, and work, are central to Judaism and critical in our world.

Lo  alecha hamlacha ligmor, v’lo ata ben chorin l’hibateil mimena, Rabbi Tarfon informs us in Pirkei Avot, the great Ethics of our Ancestors in the Mishnah—it is not up to us to finish the work, but neither are we free to desist from doing the labor.  Which includes helping our society to recognize the intrinsic value of work, and workers.

May we remember the importance of labor, ourselves work always for the good, and seek to remind our society of its central importance. 

Choosing Blessing

Sermon Shabbat Re’ei 5782

Rabbi Samuel M. Cohon

I know it's unbelievable, but public school started for most students three or even four weeks ago, our Beit Simcha Religious School began last Sunday, and the High Holy Days are coming up in just over a month. We bless the new month of Elul on this Shabbat because Rosh Chodesh Elul is Sunday, the beginning of the last month of the Jewish year. It's the time of year for us to think about the state of our relationships, to prepare to do a cheshbon hanefesh, an accounting of the state of our souls, to reflect on where we've been, where we are in our lives, and where we are headed.

We are beginning the yearly journey of getting ready for the chagim, the Jewish fall holidays, examining the choices we continually make and the way our choices have worked out for us in the past year.

The opening lines of this week's parsha, Re'ei, are about choice.  In that passage Moses says to us, the people of Israel,

Re'eh, anochi noten lifneichem hayom bracha u'klalla.
Et habracha asher tishm'u el-mitzvot Adonai Eloheichem asher anochi m'tzaveh etchem hayom.
V'haklallah im-lo tishm'u el-mitzvot Adonai Eloheichem…

See, I give you today a blessing and a curse.
The blessing, if you listen to the mitzvot of your God which I command you today.
And the curse if you don't obey or listen.

Re’ei goes on to talk about turning away from God and the mitzvot, and commands us, when we go into our land, to read this blessing and this curse on top of two different mountains there.  On the surface, it seems like a simple, if powerful, restatement of the central message repeated all through Devarim: if you do good, you will be blessed; if you do evil, you will be cursed, the Deuteronomic covenant that lies at the heart of the Torah’s understanding of ethics.

But commentator Nechama Liebowitz points out that it's not really the case that there are two parallel “ifs” here, “blessing IF you listen, curse IF you do not," though most translations hide that fact.

The Torah uses two different words: it reads "et habracha ASHER tishm'u", "v'haklalla IM-lo tishm'u".  That is, the blessing comes because you listen, and the curse comes if you do not.

In a footnote on Rashi the commentary Torat Chayim summarizes this point as K'tiv haklallah b'lashon tnai, v'habracha b'lashon vedai which translates to "the curse is written in the conditional, and the blessing in the declarative."  That is, the blessing of God is definite while the curse is only a possibility.

Liebowitz makes a very interesting point out of this.  She says that God actually gives us a line of credit, a mitzvah equity loan if you will, and we can borrow blessing on the speculation that we will likely do mitzvot.  It seems like a good deal for us, but not necessarily a good one for God.  We can make the assumption that all this blessing borrowing will not cause a fiduciary blessing crisis in the financial markets on high.

In any case, this credit analogy is a comforting thought; we get blessings from above loaned to us on the hope that we will do mitzvot.  God rewards us and then trusts—and maybe prays—that we will act ethically.  God gives, we accept, and everyone hopes we do right and good. 

But what if we read this passage a little differently, as some other commentators do who focus on a different part of the verse?  How about if we translate it,

"I'm setting before you now a blessing and a curse,
a blessing because you are with me today listening to the mitzvot of God your Lord that I am sharing with you,

the curse if you don't continue to listen and be linked in community with Me and with each other and instead turn off to a path that leads to you not knowing what is holy in your life."

This takes the phrase at the beginning of Re’ei, asher tishm'u, “if you listen” and reads it as "because you are already currently listening together with your community."  There is support for reading it this way from the Maharam, a 13th-century German commentator.  He points to a connection between these lines in Re’ei and Psalm 133, which is speaking about this passage when it says Ki sham tziva Adonai et habracha, chayim ad-ha-olam.
“Because there, [in the mountains of Zion] God commanded blessing, life eternal.”

The Maharam highlights that this passage in Re’ei is one in which our ancestors pronounced blessing and curse as they assembled at the foot of the mountains.  And if you look at the beginning of the Psalm you will find the famous text Hineh ma tov uma na’im shevet achim gam yachad—the one we sing so often at every Jewish event, “How good and lovely it is for us to be together.”

You know, “we are family,” and we must join together right now… in unity.  That begins the Psalm, and then later sentence it adds, “Ki sham tziva Adonai et habracha, because there God commanded blessing, life eternal,” echoing Re’ei.  It means that when family and community come together, when shevet achim gam-yachad… sham, in that very coming together there, that’s when God makes a gift of blessings to us.

In other words, the sharing of mitzvot together is the bracha, the blessing. And that blessing of being together in community, in synagogue, according to these texts and their commentaries, is life at its fullest.  When we join together we discover and enjoy brachot, blessings given by God.

So perhaps we already get these blessings by doing the work as a community to be ready for the chagim, by spending this coming month of Elul looking at our past year and seeking to find new ways to improve our lives, our temple and our community.  By coming together to prepare for and celebrate the High Holy Days, to share joy, to remember that we are all anxious and humble together, that we all long to be blessed and inscribed together in the book of life, and that we are each vulnerable and each flawed, by doing this, Re’ei promises, we receive the blessing of life.  It is this, in itself, that is a blessing we definitely can have just for the asking—or rather, just by showing up and being present and helping.

In this interpretation of Re’ei, being together in Jewish community means being inscribed fully in the good book of our own lives.

Just as we are enjoined to return and prepare our Teshuvah in this coming month of Elul, so we return now to that first point of Re’ei: that blessing is offered first, while curse is only there in reserve.  It is a promise that God is predisposed to favor us, that forgiveness and love are there for us in advance.  We only need to look at our own lives and make a sincere, honest effort to find, and be, our best selves.

Perhaps then this can be a model for our cheshbon hanefesh, the honest scrutiny required as we enter this holiest period of the year.  When we look at our lives, the Torah suggests that we have a much kinder friend in God than we can often be to ourselves.  In fact, God’s advance affection for us is so practical that the Torah contains messages of forgiveness in advance for the fact that, being human, we will inevitably screw up and require that forgiveness.

Psalm 27 is traditionally said every day during Elul.  It includes the beautiful passage:

Horeini Adonai darkecha unecheini b’orach mishor

lulei he’emanti lirot betuv Adonai, b’eretz chayim

Teach me Your way, God, and lead me in a straight path

I believe that I will see the goodness of God in the land of the living.

On this Shabbat of Re’ei, and during the coming month of Elul, may we each make the choice to accept God’s offered blessings, in community—and may we also work, in goodness, to be worthy of them.

Reward and Punishment

Sermon Parshat Ekev 5782

I was asked by a bar mitzvah student what the difference is between commandment, mitzvah, and covenant, berit.  I explained that commanded mitzvot are ethical acts we are ordered to fulfill, while covenant, berit, is a kind of sacred contract, a deal we make with God: if we do this, then God will do that.  A covenant can include mitzvot, but essentially it is a deal, a quid pro quo.  It limits us to a course of action that is specified in the contract, the berit—and oddly, it also limits God, who is stuck doing whatever God promised us if we stuck to the rules.

I know that I believe in mitzvot, the moral and ritual ways we Jews structure our conduct.  But while I believe in berit, I wonder if it really works that way.

So if you do good things do you expect a reward?  When you act badly do you anticipate punishment?

If you answered yes to those questions our Torah portion this week is for you!

Ekev begins with the classic statement of the central covenant of Deuteronomy: v’hayah ekev tishm’un et hamishpatim ha’eileh, ushmartem va’asitem otam…  if you listen to and observe these laws and guard them and do them, the Lord your God will guard you, and the covenant and the kindness that God swore to your ancestors… God will love you and bless you and multiply you, and God will bless the fruit of your wombs and fruit of your lands… You shall be blessed above all other people… the Lord will protect you from all sickness and dread diseases…”  And so on. 

A bit later, the message is repeated in a different way: “Kol hamitzvah asher anochi m’tzavcha hayom tishm’run la’asot… All the commandments that I command you today you shall guard and observe to do them, that you will therefore live long and thrive and increase and inherit the land that I swore to your ancestors.”

In other words, the Deuteronomic Covenant of perfect, complete, purely conditional love.  If we do what God wants, we will be rewarded. If we don’t do what God wants, we will be punished.  This is, to paraphrase the title of a famous book on this subject, the theology of why good things happen to good people and why bad things happen to bad people. 

The opening word of our Torah portion, which gives it its title, is quite intriguing.  The word Ekev means “something that follows inevitably.”  It is derived from the word for heel, akav, and it is the source of the name of Jacob, Ya’akov, our great patriarchal ancestor and the true father of all Jews.  Its linguistic meaning is that what is described by the word Ekev is going to definitely occur, just as your heel follows your toes when you walk. 

The Book of Deuteronomy is very clear on this point: do good, follow mitzvot, and you will surely be rewarded.  Fail to do good, in fact do evil, and you will just as surely be punished.

This theology is at the heart not only of Deuteronomy but of a great deal of religious thinking in this world.  Of course, not everyone actually experiences this in our world, and so some religions move this covenant to the next world: do good in this life and you will get your reward in the Great Beyond, bye and bye, because you will go to heaven and enjoy bliss eternal.  Do badly and you will be punished in the fires of hell.  I’ve taught that in my Life After Death in Jewish Belief course in our Adult Education Academy.  But that idea comes much later in Judaism.   Devarim, and Ekev, don’t bother with afterlives at all.  This covenant is for the here-and-now.

We can summarize this good old Deuteronomic Deal in just eight words: Do good, get prizes; do bad, get zapped.

Some of you may, in fact, believe that life always works this way.  But for the rest of us the covenant as stated in Ekev causes some real problems.  For we know that in our own lives it is not only the good who flourish and not only the wicked who are punished.  In fact, the correlation between ethical action and reward often seems completely random, if not sometimes in inverse proportion.  We all know of good people who suffer or die too young.  And we all know of rotten people who seem to suffer not at all and flourish in spite of—or, occasionally, because of—their moral relativism. 

In fact, sometimes it seems that, as that fine Jewish songwriter Billy Joel once put it, only the good die young. 

Philosophy—and theology—have a word for the problem posed by this seeming paradox.  It’s called theodicy, the key issue for most religious traditions.  If I am supposed to be good, and goodness brings reward, why do bad things happen to good people?  And, of course, why do good things happen to bad people?

The examples we could cite are legion.  Without resorting to the eternal problem that the Holocaust poses to the Deuteronomic covenant, how can we explain the randomness of people who have died from COVID-19?  And how can we ever rationalize the deaths of children, the suffering of innocents?  How can we see the triumph of unpunished evildoers or the failure of good, caring tzadiks and still believe?  Doesn’t this vitiate the whole notion of covenant?

What are we to make of this flat statement in the Torah that doing right makes for happiness, and that doing evil leads to destruction?

A friend and past guest on Too Jewish, Rabbi Harold Kushner, wrote a fine, useful book called “When Bad Things Happen to Good People.”  I recommend it often to those who have suffered unexpected loss.  It is a thoughtful, helpful, sincere, caring work.  The only problem with it is that, while it raises all the right questions, it provides very few answers.  Comfort, yes.  Insight even.  But answers?  No—because, as Rabbi Kushner always notes, it is not called “Why do bad things happen to good people?” but “When bad things happen to good people”, assuming the essential reality of tragedy and injustice in our world.

So what answers are there to provide?  Without resorting to the mild cheat of claiming that God will rectify all these injustices in the World to Come, how do we address this enormous challenge posed by theodicy, by the apparent falseness of our Torah portion of Ekev?

I believe that we do so by reframing the discussion. 

The truth is, of course, that there are many, many things in life we do not control.  Natural disasters, pandemics, unemployment, taxes, the stock market, terror attacks, hereditary illnesses, economic change, the weather and much, much more.  In fact, when you think about it, our own actions, for good or evil, are just about the only things we do control. 

We have the capacity to do mitzvot, to fulfill moral acts in a practical way.  When we choose to do so on a regular, daily basis we have the ability to make ourselves good.  When we choose to do otherwise, to lie, cheat, steal, and injure, or sometimes just ignore the needs of others in a selfish way, we cause damage to our own character.

In effect, what Ekev teaches us is that we have been given the power and strength to remake ourselves as moral beings.  We can become good by acting well.  We can create goodness, perhaps even holiness, by fulfilling commandment.  We cannot guarantee ourselves or those we love will be safe from disease.  We cannot prevent war.  We cannot protect against the painful vicissitudes of deep misfortune.  We cannot always protect our loyal friends from unemployment and economic disaster. 

But we can, and we should, seek to perfect ourselves and our actions, make our own conduct better and holier.  We should do everything we can to avoid injuring others, both their health and their well-being.  We can help the stranger, support the refugee and immigrant.  We can seek to help those who are unemployed, call those who are ill, comfort those who are bereaved.  If we can do these things, we will fulfill our end of the covenant, hold up our side of the berit, and in this way serve God and begin to redeem this world.

As the central message in Ekev frames the issue, “What does the Lord your God ask of you?  Only to revere the Lord your God, to walk in all God’s ways, to love God, serve the Lord your God with all your heart and all your soul, to keep the mitzvot, the commandments… befriend the stranger.”  To live a good life, to keep up our end of the berit, the covenant, to make ourselves and our lives good, whatever the circumstances that swirl around us.

By coming to understand that the question is not “why is this world unfair” but “what can I make of myself morally”, we learn that although we are only mortal, and limited, and unable to control our world even by mitzvot, we may nonetheless create great ethical beauty and supreme moments of moral holiness.

And that is, after all, the real point of both commandment, and covenant.  That is the true goal of life: to seek good with all of our abilities. 

May this be our will.  And God’s.

Compassion in a Field of Dreams

Shabbat Va’etchanan/Nachamu 5782  

I don’t know how many of you saw the Field of Dreams ballgame yesterday.  The idea comes from a classic film of that name from 1989, starring Kevin Costner, James Earl Jones, Burt Lancaster and Ray Liotta, which was in turn based on the 1982 novel Shoeless Joe by W.P. Kinsella.  It’s a fantasy sports movie in which an Iowa farmer memorably plows up his cornfields because, a bat kol, a mystical divine voice tells him, “If you build it, he will come.”  The “he” in this story is not God or the messiah, but Shoeless Joe Jackson, a baseball great banned from the game for gambling and throwing the World Series at the height of his talent and fame.  The farmer does build it, against reason and economics, and Shoeless Joe and other long-dead ballplayers emerge and play on that field.

After “Field of Dreams” became a sports film classic, the owners of the Iowa farm where the field was built replanted the corn, while the owners of the farmhouse kept it as a draw for tourists and sold them souvenirs.  Niles brought me a t-shirt back from there this summer, knowing our shared love of baseball.  And so things remained for about 20 years; farms, with one farmhouse selling Field of Dreams’ souvenirs.

Then, about 10 years ago, the new purchasers of the farm where Hollywood shot much of the movie plowed under some of the corn and built a baseball stadium, framed by real cornfields, in Dyersville, Iowa.  Last year Major League baseball, which traffics in nostalgia as much as competition, produced the first Field of Dreams game, a regular season major league contest which naturally ended on a dramatic 9th inning game-winning home run into the surrounding cornfield.  Last night they repeated the game, with different teams playing; the game wasn’t quite as amazing as last year’s edition, but it was fun to watch, and captured the same magical feel of the original game, and of course the movie.  The Cubs, who are bad this year, beat the Reds, who are worse this year, but that didn’t actually matter at all; it was fun watching them in old-timey uniforms playing with a barn and farmhouse as a backdrop and all those rustling stalks of corn behind them.

Never mind the fact that only 2% of Americans actually work on farms these days.  The feeling was that this is how it all began, that this was the pure, original game created on fields in the heartland that links the generations of our nation together.  It was captured beautifully in those images.

Like other obsessed baseball fans, in preparation for the Field of Dreams game, I rewatched the Field of Dreams movie earlier this week.  The movie has held up well, the magical, mysterious, magisterial voice intoning, “If you build it, he will come”; it still works.

There is in the film version of Field of Dreams a neo-Biblical quality.  A divine, magical voice out of nowhere directs a simple human being in an Abrahamic way to do something no one in his right mind should be expected to do.  And then, when the guy does it, it all works out in ways no one could have anticipated.  Very much like Genesis and Exodus, really.

But watching the film again, I was struck by the second command the voice gives in the movie.  It tells the protagonist, Ray, to “Ease his pain.”  He doesn’t, at first, know whose pain he is to ease.  He doesn’t even know when or where he will find that person.  But again, he is led against logic and economics to set out on a mission to do just that, to ease the pain of another human being by helping him fulfill his own lost dream.  He is compelled by a superior power, or perhaps merely by a superior suggestion, to go out and do something directly to help a person who is suffering.  He is supposed to ease another’s pain.   

My friends, this Sabbath is called Shabbat Nachamu, which means the Sabbath of Consolation, and it always follows Tisha B’Av, the commemoration of the destruction of the First and Second Temples in Jerusalem, as well as other days of great national tragedy for Jews.  The name for this Sabbath comes from the Haftarah chanted tomorrow morning, taken from the writings of the great prophet Second Isaiah, that begins with the words, Nachamu nachamu, ami—literally, “Be comforted, be comforted My people, says your God.”  Second Isaiah will supply all the Haftarot, the prophetic readings, for each Shabbat between now and Rosh HaShanah, over the next seven weeks, and every message is one of support and comfort for a people who has seen too much tragedy. 

For historical, literary, and spiritual purposes, it’s worth noting that the reason we call this prophet Second Isaiah is that he taught and prophesied after the destruction of the First Temple by the Babylonians, which took place in 586 BCE.  First Isaiah, author of the first 39 chapters of the book of the Bible called “Isaiah,” did his own preaching some 125 years earlier, when Assyria destroyed the Northern Kingdom of Israel and then threatened the southern Israelite kingdom of Judah. 

In truth, we don’t know the name of this prophet we call Second Isaiah, and the fact that his own poetic prophecy was included by the editors of the Bible with his earlier predecessor’s made it simpler to just call it all “Isaiah.”  Both were great writers and created beautiful, evocative poems on important Jewish religious themes.  But First Isaiah, or more realistically just “Isaiah,” was much more likely to preach about the coming deserved destruction of the sinful Israelite nation in the hope of bringing about reform and return to God and ethics, teshuvah, by the Jews of his era before punishment would be exacted. 

Second Isaiah, whatever his actual name, came along at a very different time.  His goal was something else: consoling a defeated nation of exiles whose homeland and temple had been totally destroyed.  These ancestors of ours had experienced great tragedy and were on the verge of collective deep depression.  That national misery, that absolute discouragement could easily have led to the disappearance of Judaism and the end of the nation of Israel forever.  It was Second Isaiah’s calling to help our people find hope at a time of despondency.  That he was effective in this work is testified to by the fact that we still chant his verses today, that his messages still bring hope and meaning in times of personal and national darkness.  

Second Isaiah provides a powerful lesson in the fact that not all prophets are Cassandras preaching destruction or the end of the world to an unrepentant people.  Some—admittedly just a few—bring something quite different.  Second Isaiah is the prince among these prophets: in place of condemnation, he brings consolation; in place of censure, solace.  In place of harshness, he brings hope.

One of the most beautiful phrases in Hebrew is the one that signifies compassion.  It is used throughout the Bible, and it is here at the beginning of our Haftarah of Consolation on this Shabbat of Consolation: Dabru al Lev Yerushalayim, it reads, literally, “speak to the heart of Jerusalem.”  Now, remember Jerusalem is destroyed at this point; the city is being used as a representation of the entire remaining peoplehood of Israel, the Jews.  That idiom, “speak to the heart,” is meant to convey comfort and understanding.  It is employed in a variety of places throughout the Tanakh, in which “speaking to the heart” expresses a connection that creates comfort.  And it teaches a beautiful lesson.   

At times of loss and destruction, how are we able to bring consolation?  The answer comes from that phrase, “speaking to the heart,” vayidaber al lev.  It means, essentially, connecting and conveying compassion and care.  It means letting someone we care about know that they are not alone, that their hearts are not suffering in isolation.  

What is compassion, then?  Is it simply empathy, making it clear that none of us is truly alone, helping a sufferer to feel cared about?  Or can it be even more?

Five years ago, during a trip to the Himalayas in northern India, I had the privilege of meeting the Dalai Lama.  While I heard him speak for a number of hours, his essential message was then, as it has been throughout his long and extraordinary career, about compassion.  According to the Dalai Lama, compassion is the highest form of human action, the greatest goal for any sentient being.  He has put it this way: "Love and compassion are necessities, not luxuries. Without them, humanity cannot survive… The whole purpose of religion is to facilitate love and compassion… Love and compassion are the true religions... Compassion and happiness are not a sign of weakness, but a sign of strength… If you want others to be happy, practice compassion. If you want to be happy, practice compassion.”

Compassion, at its heart, is active.  It is more than simple empathy: it is taking action to relieve the suffering of others.  It is an ethical imperative to try to improve the situation, to try to fix the wrongs that cause the suffering.  In the words of that first Isaiah in last week’s Haftarah, compassion should motivate us to “Seek justice; relieve the oppressed; uphold the orphan’s rights; take up the widow’s cause.”  It is a powerful message: we can heal another’s pain not only by sitting with him or her or sharing that pain, but by working to change the injustices and inequities that cause that pain.

In Judaism, the concept of compassion is deeply connected with doing mitzvot, actively trying to fix the wrongs that cause sorrow.  We offer caring and hope, but our most effective means to console, to bring comfort, is not simply emotional or even personal.  It lies in the imperative to work to right the wrongs that caused such damage in the first place.  This, of course, can take many forms.  One of them might be to ease the pain of others—you know, to “ease his pain.”

It can be something as simple as bringing peanut butter to a food bank so parents can make sandwiches for their hungry children.  It can be fixing a broken sink for a neighbor or paying a bill they can’t afford.  It might be going to a hospital to visit a friend who is ill and lonely and offering a prayer for healing.  It could be seeing someone in hospice, and easing their course out of their terminal illness by assuring them that they can go.  It can be cooking a meal for someone who can’t do it for themselves.

It might be counseling a lost soul, holding the hand of a person struggling with fear, helping rebuild another’s weakened will.

It might be something joyful, like celebrating with a couple who have found love and companionship and happiness, ending their separateness in simcha. 

Compassion includes passion, which implies, in fact insists upon action: helping, doing, actively easing that pain, bringing not only solace but solutions.

On this Shabbat Nachamu, may our goal be not only to hear other people’s pain, not just to sympathize and show care—but to help others ease their own pain.  And then, perhaps, all of our dreams may become more real.

Jewish Love of Learning

Sermon, Shabbat Devarim-Hazon 5782

 This Shabbat we start chanting the final book of the Torah, Devarim, Deuteronomy.  The traditional name of this book is Mishnah Torah, which means “the repetition of the Torah,” reflecting the fact that Deuteronomy consists of three long speeches by Moses recapitulating everything that happened in the last three books.  If there is nothing new under the sun, as Ecclesiastes teaches, there is definitely nothing new in the Torah of Deuteronomy.  The English name, Deuteronomy, taken from the Greek means something similar to the Jewish Mishnah Torah, Deutero Nomos, perhaps “Repeated Law” or “Second Law.”  That doesn’t sound very entertaining, does it?

And yet the book itself turns out to be gripping reading, compelling and interesting in ways that other parts of the Torah aren’t always.  Devarim is filled with new insights, moral and inspirational highlights that are powerful, motivating and elevating.  And Deuteronomy is also rich in pathos, with its ongoing theme of Moses’ God-decreed inability to enter the Promised Land. 

The Hebrew of Deuteronomy is also particularly notable.  It is sharper, more precise, fresher in its use of language than any other book of the Torah.  It is perhaps the most immediately quotable book the Torah if not the entire Tanakh, the Bible.  The Shma is here in Deuteronomy, and the Ve’ahavta, and the Ten Commandments are repeated here, but there is also Tzedek Tzedek Tirdof, pursue true justice, and uvacharta Chayim, “I set before you today life and death, blessing and curse, choose life!,” and “man does not live by bread alone” and so many other classic statements of Jewish belief and wisdom.  It’s great stuff, from the concise history of the Israelites listed in this week’s portion all the way through to the end with the death of Moses.

Perhaps what makes Deuteronomy a favorite book for rabbis is that it represents the concept of “Torah” in its literal meaning, teaching, the most completely of any of the five books.  I mean, Moses is supposed to be standing up there telling all of this to the Children of Israel, instructing them in how to live lives of goodness and blessing, how to truly serve God and   their people.  And teaching; well, by golly, that’s what we rabbis do for goodness sakes.  It is here in Deuteronomy that Moses earns the title Moshe Rabbeinu, Moses our teacher, our rabbi, most fully.  Not bad work for a guy with a speech impediment.

Now I know that the Book of Deuteronomy almost certainly dates from the 7th century BCE, fully 500 years after Moses has died.  The Bible, in the book of 2nd Kings, tells us it that Devarim was “discovered” when King Josiah had the priests renovate and cleanse the Temple anew, and it was at that point that the public reading of Torah was first instituted.  But it doesn’t really matter whether this was a pious retelling of the story of the Israelites or the original text created in the time of Moses; it’s a brilliant piece of educational material, a great, gripping explanation of Judaism’s highest values and wisdom.  It’s a fantastic educational text.  And that gets us back to rabbis, and teaching.

I have a close friend, Alan, going all the way back to high school, who refers to my need to teach Judaism as an “addiction.”  Of course, the very word “rabbi” means, essentially, teacher, so there is something highly appropriate about that addiction, I suppose.  I do like almost everything about the process of teaching people Jewish subjects, seeing understanding and knowledge grow and develop.  That motivation—maybe it's a compulsion, even, as Alan suggests—is true in every area of Jewish learning, at nearly every level.  From watching a pre-school child learn to sing the Shma for the first time to discussing complex theological issues with sophisticated adults to exploring obscure mystical texts in community, I find the process of Jewish learning beautiful and fulfilling nearly always.  That’s true of my Too Jewish Radio Show as well, where we strive to entertain but also educate. 

Now, in my weekly role here at Beit Simcha I typically teach five different ongoing Adult Education Academy classes on various subjects, and at times I have taught as many as seven or eight.  The weekly adult classes range from Torah to history to Kabbalah mysticism to Mussar, Jewish self-improvement, to Hebrew.  Of course, I also teach bar and bat mitzvah students, Confirmation students, and Hebrew school students.  But it is in adult teaching that I get to explore new areas and express things most fully and, I hope clearly.

Typically, during the summer I have taken a break from some aspects of my day job as a congregational rabbi to recharge my intellectual batteries and deepen knowledge of various aspects of Judaism and, well, anything interesting.  That means that for, say, the month of July I don’t teach adult classes much.  But this summer, for the first time in a while, I didn’t really take that break.  Our Religious School was off for the past couple of months, so there was less instruction of kids to do, but I ended up teaching a full Adult Education Academy schedule over the summer, and even added some classes.  I also attended the Talmud class my wife, Sophie, has been teaching.  And next Wednesday I’ll start teaching a Mussar Group at the JCC.

It made for a different summer experience, of course, but it also reinforced my strongly motivated love of Jewish teaching.  There is something magical about the alchemical process of learning along with your students, and even when it is hot and you are tired, an incredible Jewish concept can leap off the page—or out of your Kindle or laptop—and fire your spiritual imagination. 

There is one exception to this personal rule of mine, the love of all Jewish learning, and that exception is near-heretical: I don’t really like learning or teaching Talmud very much.  That is a painful confession for a rabbi, hopefully not a truly terrible one, or a disqualification. 

Now Talmud—by which we generally mean the Babylonian Talmud, which was completed in today’s Iraq by great Jewish scholars over 1500 years ago—is the preeminent text of all Jewish learning.  It is the authoritative source for Jewish law, Halakha, and the greatest compendium of Jewish legal and legendary information ever assembled.  For Orthodox Jews Jewish learning and Talmud are nearly synonymous, and there are many people of every Jewish stream of religious observance and non-observance all around the world who begin each day by studying a Daf Yomi, a page—actually, it’s two pages—of Talmud every morning.  That includes my 96-year-old father and my own wife, among many others of all ages.  Sophie teaches such an engaging and well-prepared Talmud class that her students range in age from 23 to 85, and they are vital and connected throughout the class.  Sadly, except for me… 

I have studied a good amount of Talmud in my life: the entire tractates of Brachot, Blessings, and Sanhedrin, which deals primarily with capital offenses, as well as Kiddushin, about weddings, and lots of sections of tractates—that is, book-length discussions—on all the many holidays, on commercial transactions, and many other subjects.  I know Aramaic, the language of most of the Talmud, fairly well, mostly understand Talmudic reasoning, have explored some of the many commentaries on the Talmud—Rashi, of course, and others from ancient to modern—and always got top grades in seminary classes on Talmud; I even won the Talmud award there.  I have studied Talmud in ultra-Orthodox yeshivas in Jerusalem and at Chabad synagogues in California and at Reform movement study conferences and with Conservative rabbis, in chevrutah, and online, and in groups and so on.  I can successfully study Talmud, whatever that means.

But I have come to a conclusion: I just don’t enjoy studying Talmud, nor do I find it nearly as fulfilling as digging deeper into the Tanakh, the Hebrew Bible, or exploring Zohar, the greatest text of Jewish mysticism, or reading Jewish philosophy or novels or learning more Jewish history.  When studying Talmud the same thing always happens to me: I start out engaged and interested, exploring the text and the various winding ways of its arguments and its many seemingly random detours, its associative logic that leads it farther and farther afield.  And then, every single time, after about 40 minutes or so, I find my mind has completely wandered away and has no great interest in coming back home to the page of Talmud.   

Now, I also don’t want to read or study American legal codes or cases, which is why it’s good I never became yet another Jewish lawyer.

I’m quite sure this Talmudic aversion is simply a failing of mine that will be rectified in the world to come.  But until the Messiah arrives and that occurs, I will continue to love studying and teaching almost every aspect of Jewish learning, from Bible to liturgy to commentaries to music to poetry to archeology.  And I will quote Talmud where required and explain it as needed and respect Talmudic scholars and teachers and students, may God bless them and extend their lives in health. 

Now, this anti-Talmudic confession reminds me that I never tire of studying Torah, especially a book like Deuteronomy.  Because at its heart, Devarim, after our introductory section this week, teaches us remarkable life lessons, and holds exceptional moral truths.  And there also sections that seem outmoded and archaic?  Well, they become grist for the intellectual mill, a way to see how people, our ancestors, living in a different time struggled with complex ideas and situations that we address differently today.

I’m reminded of a concept in Judaism that teaches us that we should learn a little each day.  Our morning prayers are structured in such a way that early on we actually have a passage from Torah, another from Mishnah, and third from Gemarah so that we can fulfill this mitzvah almost automatically. 

But if there is one great lesson to take from Devarim, it is that the process of Jewish learning is a beautiful opportunity to keep our minds fresh, our hearts open, and our wisdom growing every day of our lives. Perhaps then, like Moses, we will be able in the fullness of our lives to continue to learn, and teach, and direct ourselves and others to the holiness that God seeks for us in this world.

Life is a Highway

Sermon Shabbat Matot-Masei 5782  

Do any you watch those streaming TV shows which always have cliffhanger endings?  You know, like Game of Thrones a couple of years ago, or Ozark last year, or Stranger Things, or Yellowstone, or Better Call Saul, or Outlander?  Those shows where each episode ends with the protagonists in grave danger, uncertainty abounding, and dramatic music plunging you into the final credits?

There’s a good reason those shows are so wildly popular.  They drag you into the next episode without giving you any time to think about what you actually should be doing instead of watching the next show…  You just have to see what will happen in the teaser before they let you skip the opening credits and you are back on the roller-coaster of drama and suspense.

I am here to tell you that this literary device is not a new thing, and it started in books and stories, not on video.  And we find it expressed vividly in this week’s Torah portions.

This Shabbat we complete reading the underrated Book of Numbers with the double parsha of Matot-Masei.  While there are five books in the Torah, and Bamidbar, Numbers, is just fourth of five, the end of the book completes the great 40-year journey of the Israelites from Egyptian slavery to the borders of the Promised Land.  The final book of the Torah, Devarim, Deuteronomy, while a fascinating and powerful text, is just a recapitulation of the events of the previous three books, a reinterpretation of the story told in Exodus, Leviticus, and Numbers.  To paraphrase a later book of the Tanakh, there isn’t much new under the sun in Deuteronomy.  So, this double sedrah, Matot-Masei at the conclusion of Bamidbar, is a good time to assess the meaning of the journey of our people.

On superficial examination, the Israelites have made enormous progress over the four decades covered in this book.  Early in Exodus our people were enslaved and remained human chattel for many generations.  The traditional count is 400 years of slavery, near the end of which a genocidal program was advanced by the Egyptian king, the pharaoh, to destroy us.  Moses was called by God and emerged as an effective revolutionary leader, assisted by his brother Aaron, and through God’s power the people of Israel were redeemed from slavery and given the gift of freedom.  After surviving an attempt to re-enslave them, the Israelites entered into a covenant, a contract with God at Mt. Sinai and were taught a way of life structured by moral law and ethical action, mitzvot.  They were progressively organized into a structured, mobile community, given social rules for successful human society, taught how to centralize religious worship in a unifying way, forged into a growing young national group, and directed towards what will become their own permanent homeland.

The nascent nation was then brought through a variety of challenging experiences, some imposed by outsiders, others the result of internal conflicts and struggles, and eventually arrived at the borders of their land-to-be as a strong, young, energetic, impressive people, organized and powerful.  It is a success story in a world in which few emerging nations, then as now, successfully make the transition from overthrowing oppression to building a positive, powerful, cohesive national identity.

Given the nature of this narrative of national identity formation and coherent peoplehood it is puzzling that the Torah breaks off the story here, just as the Israelites are about to enter the Promised Land of nationhood.  In other words, after all this drama, all the sturm und drang, we finally reach the borders of the land that will become Israel.  But before we can rejoice in the full redemption of the people creating a nation of their own in a land of their own, the story stops, and the journey is paused.  And not briefly paused, either; the entire Book of Deuteronomy is interposed, and we don’t find out just what it’s like to actually enter Erets Yisrael, the Land of Israel, until the Book of Joshua.  In fact, since the Torah concludes with the death of Moses at the end of Deuteronomy and the Book of Joshua isn’t even included in the Torah or in any regular, public reading cycle of Bible, we never really get to see the Israelites enter the Land of Israel. 

It is an unusual choice for our tradition to make.  It is as if we were taught the story of the American Declaration of Independence and the Revolutionary War but never told who won the war or how the nation turned out.  It is like following the entire World Cup soccer tournament, discovering the final was between, say, France and Croatia, and never discovering who won the crown.  It would be like watching the entire major league baseball season, all 162 games, and never finding out who won the World Series, or even who made it to the World Series.

So why does the Torah leave us at the borders of the Promised Land but never bring us in?

The easy answer is a familiar one: the journey is the destination.  Like Moses, who dies on Mt. Nebo in today’s Jordan without ever getting into Canaan, the Israelites don’t enter the Promised Land because we, their descendants, need to learn that it’s not the arriving the counts, but the journeying.  It’s not what we find when we get there but how we travel along the way that matters.  In this view, the long transit of the Sinai Desert is a metaphor for our own lives, an object lesson on just what it is that truly matters. 

As a familiar poem by Rabbi Alvin Fine puts it

“Birth is a beginning

And death a destination

But life is a journey:

From childhood to maturity and youth to age…

looking backward or ahead we see that victory lies

Not at some high place along the way

But in having made the journey, stage by stage/ a sacred pilgrimage.”

Like the Israelites, we are all on a journey, a life voyage, and how we grow and change and learn and develop, the adventures we experience along the way, the people we meet and befriend and love, the enemies and obstacles we overcome, these are all far more important than what seem on the surface to be our ultimate accomplishments. 

We will never enter the Promised Land at all.  We are not even supposed to do so.  What we are supposed to do, what we are taught by our Torah, here in Matot-Masei and elsewhere, is that the adventure is the journey itself, that our goals and accomplishments are in advancing that expedition, serving with honor, journeying well and courageously.

As Winston Churchill put it, “You know you will never get to the end of the journey. But this, so far from discouraging, only adds to the joy and glory of the climb.”

This is not exactly a new message, although it was a lot newer when the Torah was written than it is now.  Still, it might be the essential message of all honest religious traditions: how we live, how we get there is far more important than where we are going. 

When my kids were in an elementary school chorus here in Tucson, they sang a setting of a pop song that was featured in the animated movie “Cars”; its lyrics were, “Life is a highway, I’m going to ride it all night long…”

Life is a highway, as it were, and we are going to ride it all our lives long… and who we really are is much more a function of the way we travel that highway than where we will ultimately park our car.

It reminds me of a joke about a couple of rock songs on that theme: “If there’s highway to hell, and only a stairway to heaven, it says a lot about anticipated traffic numbers.”  But perhaps I have taken a detour…

In any case, the idea that the Torah is teaching us by a kind of graceful omission, by a chosen form of cliffhanger, that it is the journey, not the destination, that truly matters, is beautiful.  As deeply connected as we feel to that Promised Land of Israel—and we are planning to go there in November of this year, God-willing—as important as the end-result is for any human accomplishment, we will likely spend much more time getting there than being there.  Even the word for Jewish law, Halakha, simple means “The Way,” the path we walk to achieve goodness in our lives.  The path, the road, the highway.

When we formed Beit Simcha back in 2018, we made a mutual commitment that we would seek to make this a true house of joy, a place where we enjoyed being together and working together and praying together and making music together and, of course, eating together—but also cleaning up together.  It was, and remains, exceedingly important to us that the process to be joyous and good, and that the things that aid that celebration of Judaism, and our community, will always be emphasized.  And that commitment has been a true blessing for us.

Look, we wouldn’t even have the Torah if we had not ultimately succeeded in conquering the Land of Israel and making it our own.  But over the long course of Jewish history since then we have learned, again and again, that how we travel this road, this path, this highway, makes all the difference in our lives, and in our people’s life.

May we find ways to celebrate our own travels in this world, and may we learn to fill each day with goodness and blessing, and so appreciate our own journey.

Passionate Judaism

Sermon, Parshat Pinchas 5782

I don’t know how many of you were raised in Classical Reform congregations, or experienced them in years past.  Almost all Reform synagogues were essentially Classical Reform in their liturgy, ritual, and music until the 1970’s, and if you attended Shabbat or the holidays or a life-cycle event at a Reform congregation from the 1890’s up to about 1974 you were very, very likely to experience a Classical Reform service.  In fact, in many parts of North America those Classical Reform services continued right up through the 1980’s, and there are still a few retro, anachronistic synagogues scattered around the continent that persist in making a Classical Reform experience their principal form of worship.

I am talking about services using the old Union Prayerbook, largely conducted in English, and based on responsive readings with a few musical anthems.  The only prayer texts typically offered in Hebrew included the Barchu, the Shema, the Kiddush, and the Kaddish.  A rabbi, who didn’t wear a yarmulke but did wear a black robe, would deliver a long, carefully reasoned sermon.  A stately organ would play, and there was frequently a mixed choir singing from somewhere invisible.  Many congregations took a financial offering at the conclusion of services, even on Shabbat.

Now Classical Reform Judaism had many wonderful qualities.  It was rational in nature, intellectually impressive, and never offended the intelligence of the congregation.  The English language employed in its prayerbook, the small blue Union Prayer Book, the old UPB, was elegant. My own grandfather edited the edition used by most congregations in the 1950s and 60s.  The UPB was like reading a Jewish version of Victorian prose and poetry, which was essentially what it was, most of it having been orginally composed in the 1890s.  Classical Reform Jewish music was reliably stately, homophonous, filled with heavy organ chords and sung in well-harmonized anthems that were clearly understandable: God is in His Holy Mountain, There Lives a God, Let us Adore the Ever-Living God.  People dressed predictably and formally. There was excellent decorum at services, with congregants showing up on time or even early, sitting quietly, rising when requested, sitting when told to do so, reading the words they were supposed to read and singing, sometimes, on cue. 

The rabbi spent many hours preparing a logical sermon that worked hard to sway the convictions of the congregation towards good purpose through reason.  The Oneg Shabbat was often elegant, with homemade treats and tea or coffee served in china cups.  The entire experience was predictable, pleasant, and usually quite peaceful.  And, well, rather Protestant in quality.

This brand of Reform Judaism flourished, in its way, for many decades.  But eventually the critique of it was that, for all of its strengths, the worship experience it presented was cold, rational, and dull.  There was very little warmth, less energy, and almost no emotional involvement.  The antique joke was that Reform Jews had become God’s Frozen People.  In part, the strongly rational nature of Classical Reform Judaism made it the enemy of religious passion.  If traditional services were filled with Hebrew prayers chanted by men, often energetically and fervently, with a certain chaos of people arriving and leaving, swaying and moving to the davening or even chatting with neighbors, Reform services were filled with the sonorous tones of the rabbi reading English, the musical swell of organ and choir and the not-very-passionate participation of a passive, orderly congregation.

Over time Reform Judaism changed dramatically, and eclectically.  You can find many congregations today that base their worship experience on sung and chanted Hebrew, use few or no responsive readings, and seek to carry the experience with vigorous congregational singing and contemplative meditation.  Some Progressive congregations have transformed their music into pop-oriented, English-based sets of camp songs, or even removed all prayerbooks and use video screens for what’s called “Visual Tefilah”—that started long before so many of us ended up on Facebook and Zoom screens—some congregations who dance during services, or have an extremely informal style that is its own orthodoxy. 

There are even some synagogues stuck in the faded orange-and-brown tones of the late 1970s and early ‘80s who use the Gates of Prayer siddur and the same music, a mix of Debbie Friedman, Ben Steinberg, and Joni Mitchell compositions, that they used when the rabbi or cantor completed his or her own education and stopped growing.   In effect, all are looking for what Classical Reform Judaism lacked: warmth. But they are also looking for religious passion. 

When many hundreds, even thousands of Reform Jews, overeducated, hyper-civilized, and superannuated as they are, rise up at biennial conventions and dance through giant ballrooms or auditoriums where Shabbat services are held, they affirm anew the resilient need we all have for something warm and, especially, something passionate in our religious experience.  By the way, they don’t usually dance very well.  No matter.

Cool, calm, rational Judaism just isn’t enough.  We need passion.  Or at least warmth.

I have a unique perspective on this because I was actually raised about 45% in the Conservative movement and 45% in the Reform movement, with another 10% in Orthodox shuls.  And I can tell you: Conservative Judaism wasn’t exactly a place to find religious passion either when I was growing up.  The services were a lot longer, all in Hebrew, and with less focus on decorum.  The cantor chanted, and chanted, and chanted.  Once in a great while the rabbi would interrupt to lead a responsive reading—usually a Psalm in archaic linguistic form.  Sometimes people sang along on the occasional congregational melodies.  People stood, then sat, then stood, then sat.  Then the Torah service ambled in, in all its semi-organized confusion, and often took a really long time.  And then the rabbi did a long sermon, which might or might not be good.  You know how rabbis’ sermons are…  And finally the announcements which were somehow even longer in Conservative than in Reform congregations and no more compelling.  Only after three hours or so were we released to head for the Kiddush.  Of course, lots of people avoided the issue by showing up an hour or even two hours late for services, in time for the sermon, Kaddish, Adon Olam, and the Kiddush

Orthodox services?  Um, let’s say they weren’t exactly lively themselves.  If it’s even conceivable, they were longer than the Conservative services, had exactly no English, seated the women away from the men, occasionally included some odd ritual I had never heard of, and somehow, the rabbi’s sermon was always about Israel, a place I had never been, of course.  That—the rabbi talking about Israel—was often, but not always also true in the Conservative services of my youth.  The Reform sermons in my youth seemed to be about the lettuce boycott, or racial issues, or the next presidential election, although sometimes they were actually about ideas.  I liked those sermons best.   

Look, let’s be honest: the religious experiences available in American synagogues in our youth, or at least mine, were not always exactly compelling.  And one word you could never use for Shabbat services of my youth: passionate.  They were surely not ever that, not in any of the shuls, congregations, synagogues, or temples of my youth or adolescence.

But the need for a form of religious expression that includes emotion and passion is real, and human, and present today.  It could not have been absent back then.  It is not exactly a new quest. 

The desire to connect with God passionately, and to unite with the human beings around us in fervent, energetic worship, is as old as religion, which means it is as old as humanity.  As I discovered on my sabbatical journey around the world back in 2015, the first major human structures ever built, 12,000 years ago, were temples for worship in today’s southern Turkey.  They were constructed by large teams of hunter-gatherers, 500 and more at a time, to allow for collective worship in a central site.  It is incredible to imagine the enormous effort needed to do this work, and the way that it banded together early human beings who lacked all the qualifications for civilization testifies to a deep and passionate need for holiness and community. 

Clearly the need for religious fervor and passion is the most ancient of our collective needs, and it still resonates today.  But what exactly is the role of ritual passion in Judaism?

This week’s portion of Pinchas, in combination with last week’s concluding section of Balak, explores this question in a fascinating way.  The Pinchas incident is the final one in a series of failed rebellions against the leadership of Moses and Aaron, and presents an extreme demonstrated lack of religious fidelity by the Israelites’ own leaders.  The disastrous actions of the princes of the people, who are just below Moses in the hierarchy of the Children of Israel, is stunning.  Only the passionate actions of the young priest Pinchas saves the Israelites from annihilation. 

Pinchas’ act of extreme violence is shocking, and his reward for doing this is shocking too. Instead of punishment Pinchas receives a brit Shalom, a covenant of peace, an eternal commitment that he and his descendants will be priests of the Holy One forever, honored and separated from the ordinary people and raised up to divine service.

In another sense, however, this is not so hard to understand.  For in his new role Pinchas, and his presumably hot-blooded descendants are prohibited from ever again carrying spears or going to war.  Instead, this jealous energy for God and the hot passion for the right, will be dedicated to religious service, avodah.  Not to war but to worship will the drive, determination, and fervor of Pinchas be directed.  His spear will be reforged into an incense censer, his sword into a menorah.  Redirected, instead of retribution he will have to develop a passion for prayer, and a covenantal commitment to peace.

In other words, although his act was needed at the time, it is now, and forever, going to be needed not for violence but for sacred service.

The lesson here is that the service of God requires emotional commitment and ardor, enthusiasm and zeal, equal to, even surpassing the kind of passion that leads to violence.  In fact, if that fervor is focused on worship it will be sublimated into the holiest of causes. 

The lesson is not just for Pinchas, and it applies not only to our ancient ancestors.  All Jews need to have some of Pinchas’ passion for God, in thought, prayer and ritual.  We have to find our own ability to serve God with all our hearts, souls, and strength, as the VeAhavta teaches. 

And when we, even those rational Jews with a legacy of infinite decorum, can do that then we will be able to bring about the true covenant of passionate, and compassionate peace.

May this be our will, on this Shabbat of Pinchas; and may this then become God’s will too.

A Disney Movie in the Book of Numbers

Rabbi Samuel M. Cohon’s Sermon on Balak 5782

What does it mean when a Disney movie breaks out in the middle of the Torah?

Sefer Bamidbar, the Book of Numbers, begins with Torah portions that narrate various rebellions against the authority of the leaders of the people of Israel, Moses and Aaron.  These rebellions won’t end until the Israelites finally arrive at the very entrance to the Holy Land, Erets Yisrael, and I know this will shock you, but they continue even when we get to the Promised Land and take up residence there.  We are a fractious people, prone to arguments about everything, and according to Bamidbar we always were like that.  This whole book has mostly been a list of troubles we created for ourselves.

But then, suddenly, this week in the sedrah of Balak, in the midst of this litany of self-generated tzoris, we have a text so unusual the rabbis call it Sefer Bilam, “the Book of Balaam” as though it were a separate entity unrelated to the rest of Numbers, an extra book inserted into the middle of the Torah.  The Book of Balaam tells a very different sort of narrative, the tale of a pagan prophet hired by an enemy king who is supposed to curse the people of Israel but instead ends up blessing them on three separate occasions. 

The Book of Balaam is the kind of magical fable that Walt Disney would love.  It includes a jealous king, a brilliant pagan sorcerer, a talking donkey, gold treasure, reversals of fate, and three separate songs not yet composed for the animated screen by Alan Menken, or even by Lin Manuel Miranda.  All that’s missing is a pretty teenage girl heroine in need of rescue and you would have Frozen in the Middle East, or an early Canaanite version of Aladdin.  We could call it Maleficent in Moab or The Sorcerer’s Apostasy or even Encurso.  I can hear the earworm now: “We don’t talk about Balaam, no no no…”

Or, if you upgraded the rating of this portion of Balak to PG-17 and included the scenes of sexual license and extreme violence with the Midianite sacred prostitutes (priestesses) at the end of the parshah, you’d have a good episode of Game of Thrones or The Last Kingdom.  Just what is this crazy story doing in the Torah?

To recap, the actual tale we tell is that King Balak of Moab is terrified of the rising power of the invading Children of Israel.  He tries to hire the pagan prophet Balaam to curse the people of Israel, to cast an evil Voldermort-style spell on them to block their impending conquest of Moab.  Balaam agrees to do this for a very high price, more even than Max Scherzer is making with the Mets this year, accounting for inflation, but Balaam inserts a codicil in the contract: he insists he will only use the words God gives him.  Balak’s minions OK the deal, and Balaam sets out.

On the way to his new gig cursing the Israelites, Balaam’s own she-ass, his donkey, sees an angel with a flaming sword blocking the path, and forces Balaam to see it, too, by squashing his foot against a wall.  Balaam beats the donkey, which very unexpectedly objects out loud and begins speaking to him.  In keeping with cartoon standards, the donkey ends up sounding like a Jewish mother: “Haven’t I always carried you everywhere?  When have I ever, ever failed to be there for you?  Is one Nobel Prize too much to ask after all I’ve done for you?”  And so on.  Actually, the donkey doesn’t really say that last line, but you get the idea: the donkey can see the angel with the flaming sword, while Balaam cannot.  The prophet, the great seer, is blind to a reality his own ass can easily recognize.  In effect, any old ass can see what the great visionary can’t.

Now, about this talking donkey: as far as I can recall, the last animal in the Bible who spoke actual words to a human being was the serpent in the Garden of Eden who chatted up Eve.  If you recall, that didn’t end at all well, so Balaam now decides he’d better pay attention and behave, especially when the angel with the flaming sword tells him not to do or say anything God doesn’t specifically command.  It’s all very Disney, dramatic and slightly ridiculous, and at the end the angel, of course, disappears, poof. 

When Balaam arrives in Moab and meets the King—can’t you just picture the catchy little song as he arrives in the camp?  “Be our guest, be our guest, come please curse those Jewish pests”— and Balaam is led by Balak to his job cursing the Israelites, and taken to a high place to look down at their spreading population.  Balaam reaches down into his bag of sorcery tricks, pulls out his oracle bones and casts lots and does his mumbo-jumbo routine, and then to his own surprise finds that he is unable to curse Israel, and can only bless them.  He tries hard to do his worst but delivers instead a positive poem of praise to the Israelites.  Balaam is clearly under the kind of spell worthy of any magical fable, and the words that come out of his mouth are not hatred and curses, but blessings and generosity.

King Balak, his employer, is furious, and he tries to get Balaam to change his perspective on the matter.  The king moves this sorcerer around to different vantage points, but Balaam can only spout more and more fulsome blessings for Israel.  It’s an animated musical for sure by this time: Not one, not two, but three separate tunes about how great Israel is come pouring out of his eloquent mouth.  The third time is really the charm.  His final poem begins Ma Tovu Ohalecha Ya’akov mishkenotecha Yisrael, “How good are your tents Jacob, your dwellings Israel!” and that becomes the beginning of our morning services and the phrase we are supposed to say every time we enter a synagogue.  And it is created by a pagan sorcerer trying to summon up a curse. 

And so, Balaam ends up blessing the people of Israel in triplicate, seeing them—us—in all the Israelites’ beauty and integrity and talent and success, understanding that God has blessed them and will continue to bless them, appreciating the holiness of their covenant with God. 

After this climactic, theatrical moment the narrative follows a predictable path.  Soon after this cursing debacle Balak goes to war against the Israelites anyway, and is badly defeated by them.  Balaam goes back home, riding the same donkey off into the sunset, and everyone, or at least the Israelites, lives happily ever after in the Promised Land.  And then, having experienced this happy fairy tale, we can all sing one of those diabetically sugary infectious Disney tunes on the way out of the theater… “The Israelites, they are truly grand, the Israelites have a Promised Land, the sky’s blue and sunny, there is milk, there is honey, it’s a Jewish, Jewish land.”  You get the idea.

We have all been enjoying the wonderful world of Balaam, if you will.

Only that’s not how this story finishes.  After all, the world is not actually a Disney movie, and happily-ever-afters are fairly scarce in Jewish history.  Mind you, this is still the same people of Israel who constantly failed to follow God and practice Judaism, who consistently rebelled against Moses and Aaron.  Nearly every week in Numbers they will continue to walk a tightrope bordering on complete disaster, bouncing chaotically from crisis to crisis, from kvetching to slander to rebellion to full-on revolution to pagan apostasy to sex scandals.  The people of Israel, the Wandering Jews of Numbers, are more like a bad reality TV show than a powerful, growing nation coming into its own.  They are trouble, a grease fire just waiting to spread, the Kardashians in Canaan. 

Yet while Moses and Aaron have been pedaling full speed just to keep this group traveling in the same general direction, Balaam has been singing Israel’s praises in operatic hyperbole.  In spite of the political and social reality on the inside, to an outsider these Jews look spectacular.  There is a lesson here, and it is one that we Jews need to be reminded of today: our self-perception is often not in harmony with the way others see us.  Although we are used to viewing ourselves as the disputatious, argumentative, stiff-necked people we know that we truly are on the inside, the outside world sees us quite differently. 

We are now at a point where our public PR in the US is still just about the best it has ever been.  The contemporary perception of the Jewish community of America among non-Jews these days is that we are amazingly together, affluent, coordinated.  Our influence over the federal government, the so-called Israel Lobby, is considered overwhelming.  Other groups try to copy our successes.  Non-Jews want to marry our children.  We consistently are rated at the top of most admired religions in America.

Even the Anti-Semites, and they have been coming out of the sewers in far greater profusion in recent years than in quite a long time, are influenced by some weird sorcery, a kind of perverse alchemy.  They genuinely believe we Jews are so powerful that we control the economy and the press and social media and the government and Hollywood—well, OK, we do control Hollywood;  still, their websites and conspiracy theories are a kind of updated version of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.   

And yet we ourselves spend so much time on infighting, and on agonizing over how we are supposedly disappearing, failing, how Israel is endangered.  To the outsiders we look great.  To ourselves?  We still look like, well, shlemiels.

The truth is that we Jews, and our Jewish communities, have incredible strengths and remarkable resources.  We are truly blessed—in Balaam’s words, how good are our homes, how beautiful our dwellings.  But we often have trouble seeing it, like the prophet whose donkey has better vision than he does.

All that’s really required of us American Jews today, is commitment to our religion and our practice, and some hope and optimism—or perhaps it’s just realism.  If we can have the courage of our accomplishments, our synagogue and our Jewish community will expand and grow and flourish, as Balaam predicted all those centuries ago.  We don’t need to agonize about our place in American society as loyal citizens.  We just need to be proud of our Jewish identities, and active as religious, committed, liberal Jews.

On this Shabbat of Balaam’s praise of Israel may we come to appreciate all we have, all we already are, and all that our amazing tradition offers us.  And may we then come to embrace our own Judaism and our community, and live fully, proudly, and cooperatively, as Jews.

Tanning, and Faith

Sermon Parshat Chukat 5782

Rabbi Samuel M. Cohon

 Our Congregation Beit Simcha has a peculiar relationship to tanning.  As you know, our good neighbor right next door is a tanning salon.  And in our previous location over on Oracle Road some of you may recall that when we rented the place it was almost literally filled with tanning booths, with a neon sign over them that read “Tanning” in bright letters.  Apparently, getting as much ultraviolet light—or is it infrared light?—was a high priority for people who came there, as it is apparently a high priority for people who come to our small corner of this large property.  I’m not sure what it says about Beit Simcha that we seem to be attracted like—dare I say it?—a moth to a light bulb to these tanning salons and booths.  I mean, we live in Tucson, Arizona, which has the greatest number of days of sun in America, and nearly the most in the world. Still, professional tanning establishments apparently flourish.  Which brings up the question of light.

We passed the summer solstice a couple of weeks ago, but we are still in a period of the year when sunrise is early and sunset late, long days of heat and especially, light.  Light in Jewish tradition is associated, first and foremost, with God.  The first words God speaks in the Torah are y’hi or, let there be light, and the opening section of Genesis is focused primarily on the distinctions and qualities of different manifestations of light: the lights of the day and the night, the various stars and the regularization of the distinction between light and darkness, light in its most primal form.  Light becomes, in Breisheet, in Genesis, a symbol of God’s presence in the universe, God’s ordering of the energy of the world into the elements that create structure and purpose.  As it says, God saw the light, and God saw that it was good.

There are many different words for light in Judaism: or, the all-purpose term; ziv, the divine emanation that comes from the Ein Sof, the mystical ideal of God, light energy without limitation; or Adonai, the glowing expression of God’s presence; and so on.  Each aspect of God’s influence in the world can actually be expressed as a form of light.  Light is not only central in Judaism; you could say that it lies at the heart of the Jewish understanding of God, and that each element of Jewish tradition embraces a different illuminated expression of the divine presence.  Light is good, and was created by God—but in a deeper sense, light is actually part of God.  In a way, when we see light, we see God.

So this time of great light should be, in its own way, a season of particular holiness.  These very long summer days lend themselves to a certain slowness, and that should give each of us the chance to appreciate just what we have, and what light means in our own lives.   

Here in Tucson we are particular experts on the subject of light.   Experiencing well over three hundred twenty sunny days a year we are likely to begin to take light for granted.  We even begin to object to it: another sunny day in the desert.  What else is new?  Perhaps it will rain soon, we certainly need it!

And yet these long days of summer have more meaning than that, for light is a gift.  Poet Michael Leunig writes beautifully of how light fills this season:

 We welcome summer and the glorious blessing of light.

We are rich with light; we are loved by the sun.

Let us empty our hearts into the brilliance.

Let us pour our darkness into the glorious, forgiving light.

For this loving abundance let us give thanks and offer our joy.

                  (Micheal Leunig, The Prayer Tree)

Now the flip side of these days of endless summer is that, in fact, we are already on the downside.  June 21st marked the summer solstice, the longest day of the year.  So even though the change is imperceptible, the truth is that days are actually getting shorter now.  That is, we are headed down the slope towards the dark days of December… and there’s nothing to slow or stop the slide for the next six months.  That’s right folks: we are rapidly moving from sun and light to darkness and shadow.  It’s all downhill from here, nothing but growing darkness and diminished light to come, until Chanukah comes to rebrighten things again. 

Like so much of life, you see, it’s all in how you look at it…  We are either enjoying the longest, brightest days of the year, or we are creeping, day by day, to that long dark night, our brief candle burning lower and lower.  It’s not light that is increasing, but darkness; not sunshine but night that is reaching out to capture us.

Which is true? 

Well, both of, course. But how you see this time of year depends very much on two things: context, and your own inclinations.  It’s either very light or getting darker; both are true, and both are legitimate ways to see the world.  But the results of adopting one view over the other can be quite different indeed.

We have an example of that in this week’s parshah of Chukat.  The start of this week’s Torah portion includes three disparate parts: the ritual of the red heifer, the parah adumah, the ashes of which formed the essential element used to cleanse the impurity of ritual contamination in Biblical times; second, the story of the death of Miriam, sister of Moses and Aaron; and third, the brief, dramatic tale of Moses’ striking a rock to draw forth water, instead of speaking to it as God has commanded, forfeiting his chance to go into the Promised Land.  The most powerful of these sections is this last one, describing the events of the waters of Meribah, where God oddly asks Moses to do something he has never before done in order to achieve a result he has gotten before by more direct means. 

It’s a short, strange story. There are many unanswered questions in the narrative: how many times has Moses, at this stage of his career, gotten water to flow for the people by whacking a rock?  Why does God ask him to talk to a rock instead of hit it?  What symbolism is buried in this short story that has such long-standing consequences for Moses, the greatest leader of our people?

At the time this fateful event takes place Moses has finally brought the people of Israel to the very borders of Erets Yisrael, the Promised Land of Israel.  He, and they, have just about made it.  After 40 years of wandering and loss, our ancestors are almost there.  It should be a great time for Moses. He has persevered and endured, brought his stubborn and rebellious flock mei’afeila l’orah, from darkness to light.  Now he should feel great, and have reached a point where he can really enjoy, sit back and kvell about how they have nearly made it. 

But instead of enjoying this moment in the sun, something goes wrong.  Faced with yet another crisis, Moses responds not by simply doing the things that bring goodness and blessing—and most importantly, will demonstrate his faith and leadership.  Instead, this time he acts out and smashes the rock.  Rather than seeking to show the people that God is filled to overflowing with power and mercy, God will provide for all their needs, in spite of the fact that they have continually questioned God the Divine Source has always come through—this time Moses simply shouts at the people “Here it comes, you rebels!” and swings his trusty staff and whacks the rock, hard, twice.

God can’t leave Moses out on a limb here, so water actually does flow.  But the die is cast: Moses can’t get into the Promised Land, and his act of serious rebellion marks him as a kind of tragic figure.  Our greatest leader failing to lead.  In other words, at a time of great light Moses sees only the growing darkness.

It’s interesting: it’s not as though Moses has been an unfailingly negative guy until now.  On the contrary, throughout the complex narrative of the Israelites’ wanderings, Moses has been the one who saw the good in the people of Israel, who sought to save them from God’s negative—and accurate—view of their failings.  But now, at the very gates of the Holy, Promised, Land, Moses own faith gives out.  After 40 years of insisting the sun was shining, he now discovers it’s getting dark outside.  Why?

I think the key to this paradox is found in the text.  The word for rock in Hebrew is tzur.  It’s a common enough word; but it is also used in a phrase that you may know, tzur Yisrael, the Rock of Israel, which is part of the Mi Chamocha prayer in the morning service.  And in that context tzur means something else: it means God. 

In other words, Moses striking out at this moment is not just Moses hitting instead of talking to a rock; it’s a very physical manifestation of a loss of faith.  A loss of faith in the people of Israel; a loss of faith in his own leadership; and, most centrally, a loss of faith in God.  Moses is striking out at God. 

You can, of course, make excuses for Moses.  His sister has just died.  He is certainly getting on in years.  Everyone he has known, the whole of the old generation, is just about gone.  It’s not easy serving the Jewish people for over 40 years.

But the heart of the matter is simple.  Moses has had a failure of belief.  He simply can’t bring himself to trust in the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, the One God who has consistently brought blessing and goodness—and light—to the people of Israel.

Faith is a strange concept, really.  It is, at heart, the triumph of belief over reason.  In Moses’ failure here we learn something simple, but powerful.

It is only this: that, at heart, light is God’s eternal gift to us.   The ability to see and appreciate and celebrate light is a blessing that can help define us.  We can, if we choose, embrace the light that comes, and understand it as an expression of the holiness that is everywhere in our world.  And when we begin to do that, we find illumination, and embrace it, and make our lives holy as well.  We do this by accepting God’s presence—by choosing not to strike the rock, not to deny the Tzur Yisrael, but to speak to it—that is, to talk to God, to pray, to argue, to sing, to worship.

For when we do that, we will surely feel God in our world.

The same thing is true for our own congregation, Beit Simcha: when we focus on what we can achieve and accomplish, we find we can accomplish anything, and do so with joy and light.

In this season of light, may we come to celebrate the goodness that is everywhere.  And may we come to mark that goodness with our thoughts and our actions.  For then we, too, will bring light.

Flags and Rebellion

Rabbi Samuel M. Cohon’s Sermon on Korach 5782 

This Monday is the 4th of July, which makes this Independence Day Shabbat, I suppose.  This is a good Shabbat, Korach, for that celebratory experience, which I’ll explain in a little while.

Now growing up as a very patriotic American Jew, I always liked the 4th of July, the cookouts, ballgames and fireworks especially, and we used to hang up a large American flag in front of our house early in the morning on the 4th when I was little. 

Everybody did, and it didn’t demonstrate that you belonged to one particular political party or supported one or another candidate.  It was just what you did.  But I think we stopped doing that sometime during the Vietnam War. 

As I recall, nearly everyone on our block hung up an American flag on the 4th of July, and sometimes also on June 14th for Flag Day and some people did it on Memorial Day as well.  But some time in the late 1960s or early 1970s that stopped happening in our middle-class neighborhood in Los Angeles.  I think it was the net effect of a general disenchantment with inherited, reflexive patriotism.  It seems likely that it was a response of some kind to the race riots of the 60s—we lived pretty close to where the Watts Riots happened, and could see the smoke rising from the fires from our front porch.  It might have been the collective impact of the assassinations of the Kennedys and Martin Luther King.  It certainly was effected by the Vietnam War and the protests against it, and then finally the whole saga of Watergate.  Putting up a flag on the 4th of July just didn’t feel the same way that it had to many people. 

I don’t remember any discussion about it, to be honest; I was just a kid, but we talked about things in my family; after all, we were Jewish.  But we didn’t talk about that. We just didn’t put up the flag one year and never started doing it again. 

It might be coincidental, but Paul Simon’s song, American Tune, written in 1972, around the time we quit putting up the flag on the 4th, captured the sense of disillusionment and discouragement that were much in the air during the 1970s:

“I don't know a soul who's not been battered
I don't have a friend who feels at ease
I don't know a dream that's not been shattered
or driven to its knees
But it's all right, it's all right
We've lived so well so long
Still, when I think of the road
we're traveling on
I wonder what’s gone wrong
I can't help but wonder what’s gone wrong.”

But that wasn’t the only sensibility in that song, or in the diluted patriotism of that period.  Paul Simon continues the song with a vision of his own soul liberated from his body in a dream, as in death, and continues:

I dreamed I was flying
High up above my eyes could clearly see
The Statue of Liberty
Sailing away to sea
And I dreamed I was flying

We come on the ship they call the Mayflower
We come on the ship that sailed the moon
We come in the age's most uncertain hour
singing an American tune

All of which made me think about the place of Jews in American history and American experience.  Of course, most of us, like Paul Simon’s own Jewish ancestors, came sailing past that same Statue of Liberty on our way into the United States through Ellis Island.  That same statue has engraved upon it a poem written by Sephardic Jewish American author Emma Lazarus: Give me your tired, your poor…  A touching and powerful reminder that we have been the grateful recipients of the hospitality of this land, this nation built out of immigrants and refugees and the wretched refuse of every teeming shore on the planet.  

But we Jews started our American journey long before the Statue of Liberty was built or erected.  We have a deep and positive involvement from the earliest stages of American history, from colonial times to the Revolutionary War and the creation of the United States.  In a way, this seems like a more important subject to reflect on now than it has been for some time. 

We Jews have long viewed America as a unique nation of opportunity that guaranteed religious freedom from its’ founding, and we have flourished here in the United States as much as we ever have in any nation during our very long history as a people.  After suffering religious persecution at the hands of governments all around the world for literally thousands of years, it has been our privilege to enjoy true freedom here in the United States.  We have been blessed by the ability to create thriving, vibrant American Jewish life from colonial times to today.  America has truly been a golden land of acceptance and opportunity for Jews in so many ways for a very long time, and it remains so today during our Golden Age of Jews in America, in which so much is available to us.

There have been Jews in America since colonial times, and we have always been active participants in the creation of the institutions that make this country what it is.  At the time of the American revolution, that is 1776-1783, there were very few Jews living in what became the United States.  Out of a total population of perhaps 2.5 million people in 1776, there wesre 1500 Jews sprinkled around the 13 colonies.  There were active synagogues in Philadelphia, New York, Boston, Newport, Rhode Island, Charleston, South Carolina and elsewhere, and about 150 Jews served in the American Army, ten percent of the total Jewish population and about 20% of the men.  That is higher than the proportion of non-Jews serving in Washington’s armies.

The first Jew ever elected to public office in America, Francis Salvador, was also one of the first patriots to die in battle for the Revolutionary Armies.  He was a South Carolina representative, killed August 1, 1776 fighting the Cherokees, allies of the British.  A number of other Jews served in the patriotic cause and achieved prominence fighting the British, including Mordechai Sheftall, David Franks, and Uriah P. Levy, who later became the first Jewish Commodore in the US Navy and the savior of Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello home and estate.  Famously, Haym Salomon helped finance the colonial cause and patriot army during the darkest days of the war, and personally loaned most of his funds to impecunious Founding Fathers like Thomas Jefferson and James Madison. 

Jews have been deeply involved in the development and flourishing of America from its first days, and were actively involved as dedicated patriots throughout its formative period and through every development and crisis in US history.  During every major military conflict Jews volunteered in higher numbers than proportional to defend our country. This has been true of us whether we were born here, or moved here and adopted America and were accepted by her. 

Without going more deeply into American Jewish history, the facts are that Jews have been part and parcel of the fabric of American life throughout our nation’s 243 years of existence.  We have and remain deeply patriotic Americans in the best sense of that word, seeking always to see our nation live to its highest standards guaranteeing life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness to its citizens, seeking to light the lamp of justice and freedom of conscience and expression for our own people and the entire world.  Jews are proud to be an integral part of this compassionate nation that welcomes all who come seeking opportunity, who embrace the values that have made our country a magnet for the bright, enterprising and capable people of this entire world.  We relate to American exceptionalism, of being a nation founded on a new continent without the trappings of monarchy or aristocracy, a theoretically class-free society based on accomplishment, talent and effort.

And perhaps we Jews feel American because America was founded by people who challenged the status quo, upset the applecart, and sought to remake the world.  And there is something very Jewish about that.

In reading the Torah portion of Korach on 4th of July weekend you could be forgiven if you saw it as the kind or rebellion that presaged the one led by our Founding Fathers on this continent so many centuries later.  After all, Korach describes an attempted revolution led by a group of aristocrats against a related group of similar aristocrats.  Korach and his people were Levites, the same as Moses and Aaron are Levites.  They are from the privileged class.  That was also true of the leaders of the American revolution in 1776: George Washington and Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin and John Hancock and James Madison and most of them were wealthy, privileged members of the best class, colonial versions of the titled people the British sent against them.    

But there was a difference: the founders of America rebelled but did not do so to make themselves great; they did so to bring freedom and opportunity to most people here, enslaved people and women excepted, of course.  That was not Korach’s motivation.

While we joke about the stereotype of two Jews having three opinions, the truth is that our heritage is a contentious one.  If we weren’t rebelling against God and Moses, we were fighting for control of the monarchy or against Philistines or Greeks or Romans.  And when actual armed insurrection was beyond us, we engaged in intellectual debates so intense that they bordered on warfare: from the endless, detailed, vigours Talmudic arguments to the political infighting of the Zionists to the Jewish socialists against the Jewish communists against the Jewish anarchists, there is a long and rich and highly developed Jewish tradition of what we might call Korach-ism.

The truth is that leading the Jewish people has never been an easy task—important, rewarding, ethically essential, but never easy.

So why do it?  Perhaps the answer is also to be found in our Torah portion.  Not so much in the desire we may have to see our enemies swallowed up whole by the earth before everyone’s eyes, although that is an attraction.  No, it is in the understanding, as Korach ultimately confirms, that everyone is holy in this community of priests, but that legitimate, principled, selfless leadership is also absolutely necessary in order for us to achieve that holiness.  We need direction, and organization, and the practical details of everyday functionality to be taken care of so that we might grow spiritually in holiness.  

That is, there is a significant difference between argument and insurrection for the sake of ego, striving to make ourselves feel more important, and argument and investigation for the sake of truth, trying with genuine dedication to make things better for everyone.  As our tradition teaches us, there are different ways of disagreeing. 

What distinguishes Moses from those who rebel against him, like Korach, is his humble desire to do God’s will, and to further the cause of oneness and sanctity in this world.  What he teaches us is that conflicts are not the goal—it is what happens after the resolution of that conflict that defines us and establishes our reputations in this world.

If we are true Jews of principle, we will have legitimate disagreements, and confront serious challenges.  We may even, if you will, take down our flags from time to time.  But it is our ability to accept those differences, sometimes lose the arguments, and nonetheless continue to work hard together to serve God with commitment and passion that really matters.

May the Holy One bless us all, each of us, with the wisdom to know that our path lies not with Korach and rebellion for its own sake, not with revolt for our ego’s sake, but with Moses, and a humility based on our commitments to the highest of purposes.  And may we always act in this way, and so truly serve God.

Israel, Presidents and Spies

Sermon for Shlach Lecha 5782

Rabbi Samuel M. Cohon

Leadership is a funny thing, especially in the Jewish world.  Of course, leading a people known primarily for being stiff-necked and opinionated is no bargain—not that that applies to our congregation, of course, thank God.  But nonetheless, there is a certain challenge inherent in trying to be even nominally in charge of any group of Jews, something like herding cats.  To paraphrase what Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir supposedly once said to President Lyndon Johnson, it’s like being president of a group of presidents.  Everyone in the group is pretty sure they know what to do and how to do it, and if you yourself have any inkling that you’ve got a better way, you’re probably deluded in every way: your Jewish constituents will happily tell you that your way is worse, not better, and besides, who would listen to you if you were right in the first place?

Not that I’ve had any experience with this, personally, of course…

I was thinking about Golda Meir a little this last week, because Israel is on my mind and in the news.  I know that most of the focus this week has been on the US Supreme Court and its reversal of Roe v Wade, officially announced today after the decision was leaked a couple of weeks ago.  And there has been news from the US Senate of compromise on the first national legislation to even attempt to address gun violence in 28 years.  But I am a rabbi, this is a synagogue, and one other important event took place this week 7,500 miles away, and that too matters.  I’ll get to that in a moment.  First, Golda Meir.

Golda Meir, of course, is the now near-legendary Israeli Prime Minister who held office from 1969-1974.  She was instrumental in bringing American Jewish support to the Yishuv, the pre-State Jewish settlement in British Mandatory Israel, and later in leading the country through dramatic and traumatic times.  She is still the only woman Prime Minister of Israel—I don’t believe the US has had a woman president yet—and she said many things we still like to quote, from that one about presidents to more serious reflections, such as “There were be peace between Jews and Arabs when the Arabs love their children more than they hate us,” and “We can forgive the Arabs for killing our children.  We cannot forgive the Arabs for making our children kill their children.”

Golda Meir came up a few months ago when Ukraine President Volodomyr Zelensky was addressing the Knesset by video.  Golda Meir was born in Kiev, Ukraine, when it was part of the Russian Czarist Empire, in 1898, and Zelensky quoted her saying, 'We intend to remain alive. Our neighbors want to see us dead. This is not a question that leaves much room for compromise.'

I was thinking about this, but especially that quote about being the president of a country full of presidents, when I started to prepare my sermon for parshat Shlach Lecha this week.  You see, in looking back to last year’s Shabbat Shlach Lecha, I discovered that exactly one Jewish year ago I was noting that Israel had a new government, the first one that didn’t include Bibi Netanyahu as Prime Minister in 12 years.  As I said at the time, “The coalition that was agreed to at the very last hour—actually, the last half hour before the mandate to form a new government would have expired—is a remarkable and unwieldy amalgamation of parties across the entire Israeli political spectrum from the far right to the far left…

“What unites all of these most unlikely allies into one monumentally unlikely coalition government?  Well, they all hate Bibi Netanyahu and want him out of the prime ministership.  He has been there too long, betrayed far too many political promises to pretty much everyone in Israeli politics, and his corruption trials have hung over the head of the Israeli government literally for years.  By my count, about 20 of the 61 seats in this coalition are held by people who used to support, or work for, Netanyhu and now hate his guts.  Sometimes the personal transcends the political.  And of course, all Israelis are heartily sick of national elections every six months for the past two years in which the composition of the Knesset is rearranged but nothing much changes.

“Still, this Israeli government is composed of super far right parties, very far left parties, Jews, Arabs, everybody, and it’s hard to envision how it can possibly work.  If this happened in America, it would be like Bernie Sanders and Matt Gaetz in the same coalition government… with, say, Mitt Romney and Nancy Pelosi and Lindsey Graham and Chuck Schumer and Elizabeth Warren and Susan Collins and Alexandra Ocasio Cortez. 

“In any case, I certainly wish the newly formed Israeli government luck; it will need it, even to hold together for long once Bibi isn’t there to band them all together against him.”

And then I predicted that if the government lasted longer than a year, well, we would all need to believe in miracles again.  Which is again, a paraphrase of Golda Meir, who said, “In Israel, to be a realist, you need to believe in miracles.”

So guess what?  The coalition government of Prime Minister Naftali Bennet lasted, well, just one week more than a year…  I guess we all can agree on the miracle thing, right?

Actually, the government fell because of a stunningly cynical political manipulation by Bibi Netanyahu—why does that sound like such a low bar to achieve these days?—in which he persuaded his own Likud Party members to vote against a routine measure that they fully support politically and ideologically in order to force the coalition government to fall.  It worked, the coalition government of Bennet is out, and the beat goes on.

Israel will now have a three-month respite while they prepare for elections around the High Holy Days, the fifth national election in three years.  Ya’ir Lapid, the deputy Prime Minister will become caretaker Prime Minister; a takeh metziah as we say in Yiddish.  And then, more elections, more politicking, and so on and so on.  And the hyper-democracy of Israel continues.

You know, there are many places in the world with a deep deficit of credible democracy. Every single nation in the Arab world, for example, lacks democracy and representative government, plus Russia, China, Turkey, Cuba, much of Africa, and many other autocracies all around the globe.  On the other hand, Israel seems to be positively addicted to elections of late, and sometimes you really do need a little stability.

But still, on the whole, Israel seems to continue to grow, develop, prosper and advance in nearly every way in spite of this trouble at the top.  So… I suppose the good news is that Israel is basically doing just fine in spite of its election addiction issues, and the fact that a nation full of presidents, or prime ministers, is never going to be easy to manage.  In fact, Israel is a fabulous place to visit, and our new plan is have our Beit Simcha trip to Israel in November of this year.  I can’t wait!

Which reminds me of this week’s Torah portion, again, and espionage, the main subject of our parshah.  I’m sure that there are all kinds of tests available today for determining who makes a good subject for intelligence work and who just can’t pull it off.   In spite of the oft-repeated slander that the definition of an oxymoron is military intelligence, no doubt armed services and civilian agencies have lots of ways of figuring out who is good at this stuff and who isn’t. 

In fact, this process goes back a very long way. There are actually a series of spy stories in the Bible, and there are different ways to determine the best kind of person to employ in this work.  But when you are trying this out for the first time you are liable to make a few mistakes.  And so it seems in our portion of Shlach Lecha.

The commandment given at the start of Shlach Lecha is purely practical.  God commands Moses to send men to scout out the land of Canaan and see if it is suitable for the Israelites to invade and occupy.  Each tribe is to be represented by one man, ish echad, and each of these is to be a prince of the people, a nasi.  That creates a scout group of 12 men. Well, let’s be honest; these are not scouts, but in the classic use of the term, spies.  A spying pack of 12 guys is sent, with some ceremony, to explore the land soon to be known as Israel.

I have always wondered about God’s thinking, and the methods God commands Moses to employ in our Torah portion.  What is called for here is close scouting of an alien and enemy-filled land, a land flowing with milk and honey but also full of Canaanite tribes and towns and armies.  Who is best suited to such a mission?  What do you think of when you picture a spy?

If your beau ideal of a spy is James Bond or Mata Hari, glamorous, dramatic types, then this is the group for you.  Twelve dashing young men, leaders of their people, princes of the blood, a virtual Rat Pack of glamorous types, an Ocean’s 12 of the best and brightest.  These men—all men, naturally, in those days—are known by name and reputation.  They are all from illustrious families and hold high office.  These illustrious young gentlemen are no doubt feeling full of themselves for having been selected for this important mission.  It’s all very exciting.  What an opportunity!  How thrilling!

Moses gives them instructions that are practical and thorough.  “Go up and see the Negev Desert and the mountains, see what kind of country it is; Are the people strong or weak, few or many?  Is the country they live in good or bad, are the cities open or fortified with walls?  Is the land productive and rich, or is it barren and thin?  Are there forests or not?  Be sure to bring back some of its fruit.”

In other words, go and spy it all out, see if it is productive, and see if we can capture it.  And this band of wealthy brothers sets off.

In retrospect, this wasn’t the ideal way to go about this task.  Let’s see, we are trying to find out the truth about the country we are exploring, to ascertain its military strength, to see what it’s really like.  And so, under God’s instruction, we send out one more than a football team full of prep-school guys from Ivy League colleges with titles and fancy clothes, and instruct them to bring back souvenirs.  I’m sure none of the Canaanites noticed that group wandering around the land.

It’s like sending a pack of US Senators to secretly spy out an alien land.  Actually, we do exactly that when we send those fact-finding missions overseas, the junkets our elected leaders are so fond of going on.  Those kinds of missions do find out facts, but the facts they tend to find out are just exactly the facts that the people of the land want them to find out. 

So it proves to be with these m’raglim, these spies.  They learn the land is good, beautiful and productive but they also manage to be convinced that the Canaanite tribes, small enclaves of clans really, are some sort of giant set of military nation-states filled with mighty monsters and warriors.  We should just leave them be, these princes of the people conclude; they are too many and too mighty for us!  We felt like grasshoppers next to them!

The fascinating part of all this is the question of just why God chose to use the people who are designated as nasi, “raised up”, high and mighty for intelligence work.  Because if you really want to find out just how a society works, and where the bodies are buried, the right way to do it is probably not to send an ostentatious group of fancy-pants officials to troupe about stealing grapes and gaping at the residents en masse.  No, the right way to spy out a land is by sending an anonymous looking guy or two to wander around looking unimportant, talking to locals at bars and brothels, and finding out just what the people really are all about. 

As it turns out, that’s just what Joshua himself does a generation later in the Haftarah we will chant tomorrow.  The two spies Joshua chooses aren’t even named in the Bible, and they slip unannounced into the major city of their enemies and go directly to the house of Rahab the harlot.  That’s how you find out the real facts about a country.

My good friend, the late Harold Bongarten, may his memory be a blessing, did exactly this kind of work during World War II, slipping behind German lines and pretending to be a returning soldier wandering around France.  Harold was short, chubby, and charming, had a broad smile and a kind manner, and was easy to underestimate.  He sent back a series of reports that helped the Allies know who to trust and who to arrest in each town as they recaptured it from the Nazis.

The lessons of this story of the spies are complex and rich.  But surely one lesson is about how we must approach things ourselves as Jews.  For the original m’raglim came to their mission with pride and arrogance.  They were the princes of the people, after all.  They had a high standing and knew the best way to do things.  They probably never got their hands dirty.  And, of course, they failed miserably.  You know, everyone was literally a president…

In a way, when we Jews come to services, we are a little bit like the m’raglim, secure in our smarts, sure of our knowledge and status. That makes it a slightly unlikely that we can recognize the spiritual experiences available to us if we were just a little less full of ourselves.

Perhaps what God needs from us Jews is not the pedigrees of the elite, but the hearts of the humble.  What Judaism, and Jewish community, requires is not the stature of the elect but the openness of the ordinary woman and man.  What allows us to reach holiness is not superiority but sincerity.

If we approach God, our own promised land, as simple human beings, then the secret fastness of the divine spirit, the comfort and support that comes from God, will be revealed, and opened to us.  And then our own mission, as Jews, will be fulfilled for everyone’s good.

May this become our will, and thus our blessing.  Ken Yehi Ratson.