8 Billion, and One

Sermon Shabbat Chayei Sarah 5783

Last week the UN announced that the 8 billionth person on earth had been born.  This marked a new high in world population, and UN Secretary-General António Guterres called it “an occasion to celebrate our diversity, recognize our common humanity, and marvel at advancements in health that have extended lifespans and dramatically reduced maternal and child mortality rates.”  All fine sentiments indeed as we crossed the 8 billion population number for the earth.

Now 8 billion is quite a number, remarkable to even think about.  That’s 8,000 million people, for example—and a million is a number that few of us can really grasp.  And whatever fears people have had about the overpopulation of the Earth, however many humans were tragically killed the last few years by COVID, or in terrible wars, somehow or other our human race keeps muddling on and, well, growing.  I don’t know if you fall into the “we-have-too-many-people-for-the-planet-and-it’s-irresponsible-to-have-children” crowd or “the we don’t have enough humans and should grow and populate the solar system” group, but wherever you individually land on this issue, one way or another, we now have 8 billion of us here.

Out of that 8 billion, we Jews only number about 18 million people, maximum, these days.  Interestingly, in our Torah portion of Chayei Sarah this week Rebecca’s brother and father send her off to marry Isaac with a blessing, at hayi l’alfei re’vavah—may you become the mother of thousands of ten-thousands.  We still use this phrase in the build-up to a Jewish wedding when we do the bedeken, the veiling ceremony.  Literally, if you do the math, when we say “May you become the mother of thousands of ten-thousands” we are saying “may you become the mother of ten millions.”  We Jews now total around about two of those ten million now, all descended from our matriarch Rebecca.  In a way that blessing, first given 3700 years or so ago, has literally come true. 

It turns out that experts in population scholarship, historical demographers, have done some calculations on the number of Jews throughout time.  They have estimated that there were approximately 7 million Jews in the world prior to the Great Revolt against Rome and the destruction of the 2nd Temple, which ended in the year 70.  Based on their estimates of the Jewish population of the known world back in antiquity, they have calculated that if we Jews had not experienced horrendous persecution and Anti-Semitic attacks in their many forms over the centuries, Jewish world population would have been expected to grow, by modern times, to literally hundreds of millions.  Imagine that: not 18 million Jews, but 400 million Jews.  Think of the arguments we could have!  What’s that old joke?  Roses are read, violets are bluish; if it wasn’t for Christmas we’d all be Jewish? 

Actually, these demographic scientists make the case that if it wasn’t for brutal persecution and Anti-Semitism a lot more of us would be Jewish, if not everyone.

Even if the much more contemporary disaster of the Holocaust had not occurred, just 70 years ago, demographers agree that we would have something on the order of 32 million Jews in the world today, instead of 18 million. 

Of course, those tragic persecutions did take place, and drastically curtailed Jewish population, so much so that Israeli geneticist Shai Carmi and his team of scientists have calculated that all the Jews in the world today are actually descended from a population base of no more than 350 individuals, total, an even mix of Middle Eastern and European Jews.  That is, at some point around the year 1350 there were no more than 350 Jews who passed on their chromosomes to the rest of us.

Another genetic study believes that half of all Ashkenazic Jews—half of all Ashkenazi Jews!  Something like 4 million people—are actually descended from a total of four women living in the Roman period.  They are the historical matriarchs of our people, sort of the Sarah/Rebecca/Rachel and Leah of half of Ashkenazic Jewry.

So just when you think that even among Jews there are enough of us to go around without your help, that your own contribution to this complex people is unimportant, remember that you might just end up being the ancestor of something like half of our people someday.  I mean, it happened within historical time once before. And of course, the Torah portions we are exploring in the early parts of Genesis now each have just two people carrying on the entire heritage of Judaism and belief: first Abraham and Sarah, then Isaac and Rebecca. 

So in a very real way, each Jew matters.  Or at least, when two of us are having children together, apparently, and passing on our genes. 

But this week we learned a lesson that went beyond even that.  Just when you think that any one person’s vote doesn’t matter in a large democracy—there are so many of us, there’s so much noise around elections these days and they are never decided by one vote, anyway—there arrived a story this past week that contradicts that.

A high school Spanish teacher in Connecticut named Chris Poulos decided to run for the state General Assembly in an open seat with no incumbent.  He was energetic, knocking on 5,300 doors to ask people to vote for him, in a district with fewer than 11,000 total voters.  Essentially, he knocked, quite literally, on half the doors in the district and shook many, many hands. 

On election night the results came in.  Poulos had a six-vote lead over his Republican opponent Tony Morrison, a retired tech executive.  But in a recanvas of more than 10,000 ballots over the course of the day last Monday that lead dropped to a single vote.  And that’s where it stayed.

The final total was 5,297 votes for Poulos to 5,296 votes for Morrison.

“Having knocked on 5,300 doors it’s clear that people are divided,” Poulos said. “We need to wipe the slate clean of animosity and we need to move forward together in a civil and productive way to do what's best for our town and our state.”

He praised town election workers for an “absolutely professional” handling of ballots.

Lawyers for both parties oversaw the recanvas of ballots.  Steve Kalkowski, Southington Republican Town Committee chairman, said he’s never seen an election decided by one vote. 

“There was one hand count ballot that was the difference. The voter put their pen on Morrison and made a dot then circled Poulos,” Kalkowski said.  “That did it.”

One vote.  One person’s vote, to be more specific, was the difference in that election.

The closely divided nature of our national electorate has been demonstrated repeatedly in recent years, and even decades.  That has made politics seem like a zero-sum game, and a painful one at many times.  We win, you lose; or you win, we lose.  And it all conspires to make us feel frustrated and even powerless.

But looked at through the lens of this one election, I think we can take a quite different lesson of individual empowerment.  One vote can make the difference.  Each vote matters.

That is, every single person counts.  What a great reminder of that essential truth, one that Judaism has always believed, from Abraham’s time to Rebecca’s time to those four Roman matriarchs to that medieval total of 350 Jews to our own time.  Each individual human being matters.  Every single person has value. 

As Pirkei Avot teaches us in the Mishna, she’ein l’cha adam she’ein lo sha’a, there is no person who has not their hour.  Every one of us matters. 

And the Talmud tells us that one who saves a single life is accorded the merit of having saved the entire world.  Each of us counts.

That’s a lesson worth relearning, again and again, for it’s true not just in an election like that one in Connecticut, not just in some genetic passage of DNA, but in every aspect of life. 

When we believe someone is below our notice, we miss the central truth that every single person has value.  And when we are down or depressed, we may also fail to realize that we, too, matter and will have our time.  We are, each of us, created in the image of God. 

Whether it’s one single vote in a state election in Connecticut, or being the tenth person in a minyan at a synagogue service, or doing our own part to carry on the work of a valuable larger organization, or caring for our own families.  Each of us matters. Everyone counts.

That’s something we need to be reminded of, again and again.  And it’s something we learned again this week.

May we remember it over this Shabbat, and in the weeks, months, and years to come. 

Revolutions

Sermon Shabbat Vayera 5783

As you may know, I am preparing to ride the Tour de Tucson in about a week, the 100-mile bicycle extravaganza that tests your stamina and, um, zitzfleish.  I last rode the Tour, for the fourth year in a row, just before I realized that I needed back surgery.  Then they had to cancel the next tour, in 2020, because of COVID-19.  They did run the Tour in 2021, but I wasn’t sure I was up to the 100 miles yet, so I just went out for a 40-mile recreational ride after services that day, far from the madding crowd. 

But this fall young Leif Nelson-Melby asked me I wanted to ride the Tour with him—he has never ridden it before—and that was the inspirational encouragement I needed to head back out for the full ride again.  It’s actually great fun, if you don’t mind sitting on a bike for six or seven hours.  Now, to make the event a more beneficial experience for all concerned, we decided to encourage sponsorships of our ride to benefit Beit Simcha.  You can donate per mile, or just sponsor at a financial level you’d like on our website.  As we ride that day, you will help Beit Simcha ride on!

All of this is a prelude to telling you that when you are training for the Tour, or just going out for a recreational ride of three or four hours, there is a lot of time during which your mind requires entertainment, and I have become a podcast addict.  I particularly enjoy listening to history podcasts, and my favorite podcaster is a guy named Mike Duncan, and my favorite podcasts are his Revolutions podcasts.  Duncan, who previously recorded the entire History of Rome in podcast form, is a wonderful storyteller, and snarkily funny besides, and he makes the ride time float away.  He has narrated revolutions beginning with the English Revolution of the 17th century through the Russian revolution of the 20th century, with stops at the American Revolution, the French Revolution, the Haitian Revolution, another French Revolution, some Italian and German Revolutions, the connected and convoluted revolutions of Latin America, yet another French Revolution, and the Mexican Revolution. 

Mike Duncan originally thought his Revolutions podcasts would run 15 episodes each of an hour, but when he came to the French Revolution he went 55 episodes, and then his series on the Russian Revolution was 103 episodes.  All of that was great for very long bike rides as I prepared for the Tour—but, believe it or not, I have now finished all of his past podcasts, and am listening to his new series on just what constitutes a revolution.  As usual, it’s interesting, entertaining, informative and thought-provoking.

Duncan posits two kinds of revolutions: political and social.  Political revolutions change the nature of a political system; it’s not enough to just replace one ruling elite with another one for it to constitute a true revolution, it must be an actual transformation of the kind and quality of the government.  You have to change not just the government, but the entire way that governing is done.  Social revolutions, on the other hand, change the nature of the way people make a living, the very structure of social organization of society, and how the different aspects of that society interact.  For a revolution to be truly great—that is earth-shaking—it must be both a political revolution and a social revolution.

For example, the American Revolution was definitely a political revolution, but it wasn’t really a social revolution.  The system of government definitely changed dramatically, and who was in charge was quite different before and after the American Revolution.  But the relationship between the different classes in society, and how they made their living and lived their lives, didn’t actually change dramatically at all. 

On the other hand, the Industrial Revolution was a very dramatic social revolution that didn’t really change the political order most places it occurred, at least not in any dramatic or sudden way.  You can make the same case for, say, the Scientific Revolution of the 20th Century, or the Digital Revolution of the early 21st century, the one we are in right now.  These are social revolutions that aren’t also political revolutions.

In contrast, the French Revolution—the first one, the big one with the Bastille and the guillotine and Napoleon and all that—was the both a political and social revolution.  The people in charge changed—a lot, several times at least, and a lot of the ones who had been in charge were, well, decapitated later—the system of government changed, and the social organization of society changed so dramatically that they even reinvented the way they measured distances and calculated time and years. 

While I think that these categories of revolutionary change are certainly accurate enough, I would also say that this misses an important category of revolution: the revolution in belief.  Now I know that this Revolutions podcast is primarily dealing with the early modern and modern worlds.  And it explores the ideas that shaped the revolutionary fervor of each and every one of these dramatic, truly society-shaking events, often over decades of changes.  Still, there is something missing when you explore the situation historically and sociologically without focusing on another crucial kind of revolution: the revolution of ideas and beliefs, what we might call a thought-revolution.

This thought-revolution can completely change the way that life is lived, because in truth a thought-revolution that is also an emotional revolution.  It occurs when a new approach to spirituality arises and transforms the way that people believe, feel, and live.  It’s exactly that sort of revolution that we have been exploring in the Torah portions of Genesis that we read here in the synagogue over these weeks in autumn, a spiritual record of the way that our own Jewish people transformed the world by insisting that there is just one God, and that only God is the true source of morality and ethics. 

In a world of polytheism, filled with multiple gods and contrasting systems of morality, this was truly revolutionary in every sense of the term.  No one thought that way, and the shocking idea that one God created everything and was the origin for the ethical structure of what we need to do to be good and to create a good society was totally alien to that world.  It eventually caught on, but it remained a minority belief system throughout antiquity. 

I was thinking about that with regard to the Torah portions we find ourselves in the midst of this Shabbat.  In last week’s portion of Lech Lecha Abraham heard God’s call and began a journey to the Promised Land and thereby he began a thought-revolution that still resonates today.  The idea that there is one God, and only one God, who has created the universe and who calls us to a covenant of righteousness and goodness, was unique when it came about in a world of many gods and multiple sources for ethics.  That quite revolutionary notion of monotheism, of the unity of God, creation, and ethics was shocking, and about as tiny a minority belief as you can imagine.  No one thought there was one God, let alone one source of morality back then.  

And, in many ways, it still is a minority position to take, in spite of nearly four thousand years of development of civilization.  In our own world today, the alienation from religious belief and practice, on the one hand, vies with the insistence that there is only one path to God that must be followed, or else...  The concept that one God of ethics is the source of a morality that anyone can follow, however he or she or they practice their religious experience, or don’t, is somehow still not a generally accepted belief in our society, let alone throughout the world.

This is made abundantly clear in this week’s Torah portion of Vayera in two quite different ways.  The first occurs when God decides to destroy Sodom and Gomorrah, and informs his covenantal partner, Abraham, of that intention.  Abraham argues with God—we Jews have been arguing ever since, of course—and insists that God be certain not to kill the innocent with the guilty, that a God of justice must always act justly; as he puts in, “HaShofeit kol ha’arets lo ya’aseh mishpat?  Shall the judge of the entire world not act with justice?”  In other words, the highest level of morality must be established by the highest source of morality.  The Jewish God is a God of universal justice, and that must be applied to all people.

That bargaining session in Vayera is one of my favorite portions of the entire Tanakh, the Hebrew Bible: in an attempt to save the innocent people of Sodom, Abraham negotiates God down from 50 righteous to just 10.  If only there were ten righteous in Sodom an entire city could be saved.  One God, one source for moral justice, held to the highest possible standard by one single human being, in covenant with God.

Of course, you don’t go to Sodom to find a minyan… Abraham’s argument doesn’t work in practical terms.  But in terms of inspiration, connecting us to the great ideals that are the core of Jewish belief, the essential need to stand up for what’s right and good and true, it is the model. Which makes the faith of Abraham, the belief in a God with whom we can be in covenant, who gives us the strength and courage to be truly good and to work to make our society good, still pretty revolutionary.  Imagine if people truly adopted the idea that acting well was the proper course in every situation because the God they were committed to required it?  Imagine if all of us—not just here tonight at Beit Simcha, but everywhere in society, everywhere in the world, were willing to challenge even God to hold to a moral standard of goodness and truth?

It's an aspiration, of course, and has been since the time of Abraham, all those centuries and millennia ago.  But the message that the God who created the universe seeks goodness from us, that our free-will actions can bring about positive change in the world, that we are committed—in fact, commanded—to act for justice in any and all circumstances--and that it is in all of our best interests to act well, that remains fresh and powerful.  And, well, revolutionary.  It’s Jewish, of course, but it’s also universal, and it can certainly help our troubled world now, as it did way back in Abraham’s time.  

And if we can not only espouse such an ideal, but choose to live it in our daily lives, when we might effectuate a true thought-revolution.  And move our society, and this complex, messy, troubled world, back towards a path of goodness and peace.  And wouldn’t that be a revolution to be proud of?

Campaigning on the Positive

Sermon Lech Lecha 5783

I have been telling people that if Jews were to believe in hell, which is unclear, we do know something important about how it would be.  Hell would be a place where you are told that you are required to pack up all your belongings and move each and every week. 

It seems appropriate this Shabbat in which we are completing our fourth move as a congregation of Wandering Jews in the desert that we are chanting the Torah portion of Lech Lecha.  Lech Lecha begins with the call of Avram, our great ancestor, to leave one place, Harran, and journey to a promised land which will eventually become Israel.  It is the beginning of the Jewish people’s journey, of which we at Beit Simcha are certainly a significant part.  God knows we have experience wandering now.

We are so grateful to our hosts here at Church of the Apostles for sharing their beautiful facility with us and allowing us to celebrate Shabbat here.  And we are eternally grateful to the incredible voluntarism of Beit Simcha, the many people who labored indefatigably to move us into our new offices, two storage units and here for services.  It was an amazing effort led by Carol Schiffman-Durham but with fantastic levels of hard work and commitment from a host of great people.  We are so fortunate and grateful, and it was, in spite of the challenge of moving, a tremendously positive experience that could restore your faith in humanity.

On the other hand, the mid-term Senatorial, Congressional, Gubenatorial, and local elections will complete in-person voting in a couple of days, and I, for one, will be greatly relieved not to have to watch any more political ads on television, Google, Yahoo, YouTube, Facebook or listen to them on the radio, or be inundated by unwanted texts and robocalls.  It’s not as though most of the political ads have been positively driven, either.  I would guess 7/8ths of them have been negative ads, harshly criticizing opposition candidates with statements and images that combine half-truths, insinuations and outright lies in an attempt to sway our votes.

I wonder if it was an election year in Harran when Abram lived there, and maybe he wasn’t leaving Sumeria for the Promised Land after all—he was just escaping all the horrible political campaign ads.

 Look, it’s not as though negative political ads are a brand-new concept in American elections, or any elections anywhere, although it seems to grow worse in each subsequent election cycle.  Still, we can’t pretend it’s something novel: in the presidential election of 1800 then-president John Adams was pilloried as a tryant and a tool of Great Britain.  In 1828, President John Quincy Adams’ people accused Andrew Jackson’s wife Rachel of being a bigamist, which had grains of truth but broke her heart and, according to Jackson, killed her before he could take office.  He never forgave his political opponents and took revenge on them for the next eight years.  Abraham Lincoln was caricatured as “The Original Gorilla” for his gangly appearance and his racist political enemies insinuated he was secretly part Black.  For many years after the Civil War, every Democratic Party candidate for office heard about the dead in that terrible conflict, and every Republican candidate at some point would “Wave the bloody shirt,” claiming all Democrats were Confederates and traitors. 

In 1884 Grover Cleveland’s campaign for president was nearly upended by the revelation that he had fathered a child out of wedlock—he was himself a bachelor at the time—and Republicans chanted at him, “Ma, ma where’s my pa?  He’s gone to the White House, ha ha ha,” perhaps the greatest negative presidential sloganeering ever.  Much more recently, in 1964, Lyndon Johnson ran the famous “Daisy” ad, showing a 3-year-old girl counting off petals on a daisy followed by the countdown and explosion of a nuclear bomb going off.  While it aired only once--once !—it devastated Barry Goldwater’s right-wing campaign.  Goldwater himself was never mentioned in that ad, by the way, not even his famous dictum “Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice.”  You were just supposed to figure it out, and people did.

In recent years negative attack ads have become more specific and much more ubiquitous: everyone running is called a crook, is supposed to have evil political and business connections and is corrupt, and even anti-Semitic ads implying Jewish control of the world economy, or of a particular candidate—can anyone remember the ads against Hillary Clinton 6 years ago that showed photos of her linked to an “International banking conspiracy” and “global political establishment” then showed photos of George Soros, Janet Yellin and Lloyd Blankfein, all Jewish financial leaders—those attacks are now apparently legal and fair game.  And while I would wager that originally more negative ads came from one side, there have been plenty of negative ads on the other side, too.  I guess our current leaders believe you can’t win if you don’t get into the gutter—or maybe the sewer.

It also seems to get worse every single electoral cycle now: robophone calls every hour, robotexts from changing phone numbers multiple times a day, pop-ups on search engines, emails and ads on social media and old-line media, road signs everywhere, and a mailbox full of political ads, almost all negative.  It’s genuinely horrible.

 At times like these, I’d like to strongly, if quixotically, suggest a return to the Jewish standards associated with ethical speech, the laws of Lashon HaRa, in our public life.  These rules come originally from the Torah, in which the clear statement is lo taleich rachil b’amecha, do not become a slanderer among your people, and are echoed and then vastly amplified in the Talmud, and particularly in the works of Mussar, the teachings of Jewish morality and self-correction.  According the greatest authority on the ethics of speech, the Chofets Chayim, there are 31 different rules limiting harsh and defamatory speech.  These go so far as to stipulate that even telling the truth in a hurtful way is prohibited, while lying to damage others is a particularly evil sin that no Jew should ever practice.  Gossip is damaging, and according to the Talmud it kills three people: the one who tells the gossip, the one who listens to the gossip, and the one about whom the gossip is said.

 In a way, this is embodied in the Rotary Club’s standard of speech, the 4-Way Test, which has always impressed me as derived from the same thoughtful, moral approach as Judaism’s understanding of the ethics of speech in its doctrines on Lashon HaRa and Motzi Sheim Ra.

 Here’s the Rotary Club 4-Way test for how to speak, which would certainly also apply to political ads:

1.   Is it the truth?

2.   Is it fair to all concerned?

3.   Will it build goodwill and better friendships?

4.   Will it be beneficial to all concerned?

I don’t think the vast majority of the ads we’ve been subjected to this election season could qualify under those standards, and certainly not under Jewish standards.  I’m not sure 10% of the ones I have seen lately would qualify.

Now, perhaps this is just a fantasy, but let’s take a moment to imagine a world in which the rules of Lashon HaRa applied to all political advertising.  That would mean all negative political advertising, by candidates or super-PACs or national committees, would simply be banned.  In that imaginary America campaign world, you could say as many positive things about your own candidate as you’d like, and about your party if you wish, over any medium you chose.  But you couldn’t spend your funds, creativity and effort to create a negative image of the opposing candidate.  You couldn’t attack them personally, you couldn’t commit Lashon HaRah by making ugly innuendos about their family, you couldn’t insinuate that they were involved with international Jewish cartels to control the country, you couldn’t claim they want to allow murderers and rapists to swarm over your homes or that they are cowards and liars.  You certainly couldn't engage in motzi shem Ra, and simply lie about them over social media or the airwaves or in texts and emails and on websites and news programs. 

Imagine if American political campaigns were required to focus on the strengths of their own candidate, her or his accomplishments and good qualities.  Imagine if they had to actually put out ads about the policies the candidate advocated, or the ideas that motivated the candidate to run in the first place, or his or her goals if he or she won the election, instead of merely saying awful things about the opponent.  Imagine a politics of the positive, instead of the mess we are in now.  What was that old song?  Accentuate the positive and eliminate the negative.  Wouldn’t that be a mechayeh for everyone?

The concepts of Lashon HaRa developed over many centuries, and that gives them a deep and thoughtful validity that could be applied today.  We can practice them in our own lives, if we choose to do so, and so improve our own ability to function as a successful congregation and community.  And we can choose to advocate for them in our society, too, because the way that political advertising and campaigns have gone in America over the past few election cycles cannot be the right way for a civilized society to go. 

You know, that was one of the central reasons we created Beit Simcha four years ago: to create a congregation built on joy and affirmation, in which we did not engage in the kind of negative attacks and petty recriminations that are so common—common in every sense of that word.

It’s too late to save the verbal standards of this 2022 election year.  But it’s not too late to begin to move towards civility, honesty and positivity in our society, and so in our own lives.  By choosing to embrace the standards of Lashon HaRa in our own conduct, and by refusing to pay attention to ugly ads that flood our lives in this election cycle, we can follow a course that leads to wholeness, honesty and positivity.  And then, perhaps the next election cycle, we will see real change in the way that words and images are used.  May this be God’s will—but mostly, ours.

Beginning Again

Sermon, Parshat Breisheet 5783

Rabbi Sam Cohon

We are now officially through the mother of all Jewish holiday seasons, our fall fiesta of festivals, which ran from Selichot in mid-September through Simchat Torah last Monday night, when we also dedicated our magnificent old/new Torah, Our Torah, with full festivities and great joy.  As wonderful as each and every Jewish holiday is in its own right, it remains something of a relief for rabbis and cantors and we few, proud hybrid-types that the long lingering line of celebrations is finally over. 

Of course, that also means that we now have to begin to catch up on all the other work we neglected in the run-up to the holidays and the Selichot, Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, Sukkot, Shemini Atzeret and Simchat Torah observances themselves.  And for that we have the new month of Cheshvan, which begins this coming week.  This Jewish calendar month is nicknamed Marcheshvan, literally “the bitter month” because it is the only one in the entire Jewish year during which we have no actual Jewish holidays; but following close on the heels of the festival frenzy of the Jewish month of Tishrei, that’s really not such a bad thing.

But before we leave the festival season in our rear-view mirror, I have one last Simchat Torah story.

This tale took place when I was a student at Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati, and I arrived there just before Simchat Torah evening services.  I was hired to be the cantor in the Chapel at HUC, but before assuming that role I had just conducted High Holy Days services in Vancouver, British Columbia.  New to Cincinnati and that campus of Hebrew Union College, I wanted to watch how things worked before leading any services myself.  To be honest, it was a pretty disappointing experience.  I sat through the first few Hakafot, the parades with the Torah, listening to the dull, boring songs they were doing and watching stiff, dutiful, lifeless processions around the sanctuary.  Finally I turned to the Dean of the College, Rabbi Ken Erlich, and asked him what was going on.  Like me, he is mostly descended from Eastern European Jews who do Simchas Torah by singing and dancing with great enthusiasm and energy—a nearly wanton celebration, like ours here at Beit Simcha last Monday night.  Dean Erlich explained to me that when he first came to Hebrew Union College the Torah hakafot for Simchat Torah were done in a slow, stately procession, accompanied by plodding organ music.  He himself had turned to a professor and asked "it's Simchas Torah--how come they are marching not dancing?"  And the professor answered "They are German Jews --they are dancing..." And apparently some of that heritage remained years later when I arrived in Cincinnati.

I guess marching is how Germans dance.

Anyway, speaking of Torah, now that the the final fall festival has passed we can return to concentrating on the Torah portions that begin our new cycle of readings.  These parshiyot are so remarkably rich and diverse that they invite investigation, probing and questioning.  Plus, they are genuinely fun to explore.

And this week, we begin with the very beginning, an exceptionally good place to start.

There is something exciting and new about starting over with Breisheet this Shabbat, rediscovering the tabula rasa, the Creation ex nihilo that commences our greatest textual creation as a people.  Genesis, at its inception, is all about the incredible promise and potential inherent in our universe.  It is a blank slate, a fresh page, a first kiss, the exciting start to a trip we will take together on a fresh, open road around an unturned corner.  It is discovering the world anew.

Poet Stanly Barkan puts it well in his verse, “As Yet Unborn”:

Oh to be Adam

Again

With all his ribs

Yearning for a woman

As yet unborn,

Mouth free

Of the taste of apples,

Ears without the hiss of snakes,

Mindless of nakedness and shame,

In the garden of gentle creatures

Waiting for a name.

Most of us—perhaps all of us, certainly Max and his family—have read this text of Genesis before, and we know that this creation epic doesn’t end as well as it begins.  Humans will be created, we will immeidately make mistakes and transform this perfect creation into something much more recognizably flawed.  But still, there is something remarkably exciting, even thrilling, about the start of Breisheet, something extroardinarily energizing.  From nothing, something amazing is about to happen.  And that inherent, untapped potential makes this a narrative that has almost limitless ability to interest, inspire, confuse and tantalize the reader.

Take, for example, the first lines of Genesis, which describe the creation of light with God’s first words in the Torah, Yehi Or, Be, light!  We think of that as the great initial moment of singularity, the expansion of divine energy into a void that leads ultimately to the evolution of the universe we now know.  And it is that—but it is also an incredibly beautiful description of the holiness of beginning from one single, solitary point and moment.

It took a long time for contemporary cosmology to come to some level of agreement with Genesis on the conception of creation.  Only in the mid-20th century did physics produce the Big Bang theory—the scientific concept, not the TV show—and today it is among the most widely accepted ways to understand the creation of the universe.  In recent years the development of the Large Hadron Supercollider brought the possiblity of looking back to that moment ever closer, allowing us to see what happened just after the singularity, the moment creation took place, to observe the Big Bang, to voyeuristically gaze at Breisheet itself.  And this past summer the Webb super telescope sent back amazing, colorful images from almost the very beginning of time.

We are all interested, at least a little bit, in the beginning of everything, aren’t we? The dawn of creation.  The first single event in our universe’s history.  The instant of conception, or inception.  An amazing, holy moment.

The black zero of beginning.

From that inception point, in one singular event, everything starts.  According to physics, a great flash of energy expanded outwards.  One holy instant.  “Breisheet Bara Elohim… yehi or, at the beginning of God’s creating… there was energy.”

The power of that initial unity, what physicists call a “singularity,” is woven all through Judaism.  One beginning from God.  One source of morality and truth.  Oneness first, with rich diversity evolving from that initial Divine creative burst, born out of it to populate this gorgeous, complex world.

At the risk of overstating things, I also think of Breisheet, that moment of creation, when considering our young congregation, Beit Simcha.  We began almost exactly four years ago, although since we began in October 2018 with the Torah portion of Lech Lecha, which is coming up in two more weeks, technically this is only our third Breisheet Shabbat.  That makes this our third Shabbat of creation, if you will, which seems a most appropriate time to give thanks for what we have: the opportunity and the reality of having created a community of love, joy, warmth and support, a shul that nurtures Jewish life and seeks to have it truly flourish.  While we don’t pretend to have created Gan Eiden just yet, a Garden of Eden, Beit Simcha’s course has already proven to be a wonderful journey, filled with growth, creativity and generative events and moments. 

And even though, as you all know by now, we have to leave this building which has been our home for nearly three years, I trust that we will not have our Adam-and-Eve-expelled-from-the-Garden experience next.  No, the congregation we’ve been creating over these short years has proven to be many wonderful things, including resilient and resourceful.  I would hope that God approves of us and our work, and says about it in Genesis’ immortal lines, “It is good.”   And that our next chapter, which begins in a just a couple of weeks, will lead us to a permanent home filled with the same spirit of joy that we have worked to nurture here. 

In this week of beginning the Torah again, we celebrate with gratitude the many people we have welcomed here into our congregation and invite anyone who wishes to begin the joyous journey of membership as well. May we each find the wholeness, and holiness, that is an underlying truth present everywhere in the universe that God began to create in our Torah portion.  And may we seek, and find, good new beginnings in this post-holiday 5783 year, and great joy and creativity in the variegated patterns of our own lives.

We Are the Torah’s Voice

Rabbi Sam Cohon’s Talk for Our Torah Dedication 10 17 2022

Tonight, on the wonderful holiday of Simchat Torah, the celebration of Torah, we gather to dedicate our congregation’s own Torah.  The Torah, the best-preserved text in human history, is a sacred writing that has not changed in 2000 years and more, a teaching that is the source for nearly all of Western Civilization and continues to bring joy and passion and inspiration to us every week, indeed every day.  And it is entirely appropriate, and quite wonderful, to celebrate the Torah, and our own beginnings with our new scroll.  When we read the opening words of Genesis tonight, we will truly begin a new chapter, a new book, a new creation, a new Torah adventure together.

For the Torah is amazing, wonderful in a way that virtually nothing else ever can be.  Tonight as we dedicate a new/old Torah, this marvelous text can help us recover the fresh wonder, that holy creative spark that can grow into a flame in each of us.

It is an exceptional honor for our congregation Beit Simcha to fulfill this great 614th Mitzvah of creating a Torah of our own.  Well, in truth, we are rededicating this beautiful kosher scroll tonight, our very first Torah that we actually own as our own yerushah, our possession and inheritance, to help us fulfill and deepen our central responsibility: to learn and teach Torah to our community.

This Torah will serve us, and we pray many generations to come, and help us forge our own link in the Shalshelet haKabbalah, the sacred chain of tradition that has kept our people alive and strong and vital. 

By making this beautiful Torah, created in Israel near the date of the founding of the state, by making it the work of our entire congregation and community we are observing the words written late in the Book of Deuteronomy, which insist that this Torah “lo nfleit hee mimecha v’lo r’chokah hi—it’s not too amazing for you to understand, not is it far away from you.  It’s not in heaven… neither is it across the sea… rather it’s very close to you, in your mouths and in your hearts to observe it.”

This is the Torah whose words Leviticus tells us in Acharei Mot, v’chai bahem, we should live by them.

This is very much our Torah, the Torah that came down from Mt. Sinai in the Book of Exodus, Shmot, to live in our midst, the Torah that is the source of instruction and meaning in our personal lives, the centerpiece of our congregational life.  This will be our Torah to chant and read, to carry and to kiss, to dance with, to raise high and bring close to our hearts.  It will become our teacher and our children’s teacher and, God-willing the teacher of our descendants for many generations to come.  Its elegant writing, its beautiful Hebrew calligraphy will be indelibly inscribed in our vision and in our hearts throughout our days.

It has taken much effort to reach this wonderful evening.  I would like to personally thank our fabulous Fundraising Committee, who embraced this idea and ran with it.  This is now officially part of the DNA of Beit Simcha: before we even announced this project, before we had a specific scroll in mind, people clamored to support it and make it happen.  My deepest gratitude to Dr. Sloan King, Lee Kane, Emmet Zimberoff, MeMe Aguila, and Gary Abrahams, who meet with me weekly and have contributed time, talent, energy, love and, of course, their own generosity. And we are deeply grateful to all of you have given so much to bring this Torah to us, and to connect yourselves with it in a valuable and meaningful way.

But for all of the wonderful people who have worked and donated to make this beautiful scroll OUR TORAH, the next person is the most important in this experience.  Because the next great participant in this holy process is you. 

In medieval Jewish literature the consonants of the Hebrew Alef-Bet are compared to a body, and the vowels to a soul.  Yet a Torah scroll is an unvocalized text written only with consonants, no vowels.  In fact, a Torah scroll which has vowels written into it is not kosher, and would be unfit for use. 

You see, the Torah requires that each person, each us must supply the vowels, the vocalization, the voice, in order for it to become animate, alive, heard.  Without the person the sacred text of Torah remains mute.  When you add your own human voice to it, it comes alive.

Without you this Torah will remain just a book, a furled scroll in a cabinet, silent, useless.  But when you enter into the world of Torah, share its great wisdom, when you become its voice, then this Torah will come alive, and we will all be able to live by it, in light and joy and holiness. 

And so, we pray together, on page 3 of your booklets: Make the words of Your Torah sweet in our mouths and the mouths of Your people Israel, so that we and our children and the children of all the house of Israel may know You by studying Torah for its own sake. We bless You, God, who teaches Torah to our people Israel.

How You Live Your Days

Yizkor 5783

Rabbi Samuel M. Cohon, Congregation Beit Simcha

Yizkor is about remembering, and as we prepare to remember those people in our lives and in our congregation’s life who have meant so much to us I want to start with a bit of a diversion, and tell you the story of a woman named Jeanne-Louise Calment. Her story came up in our Numbers Project Class a couple of weeks go, when we were discussing the fact that Moses died at the age of 120.  You will see why.

Madame Calment lived in Arles, France, and had a pleasant, mostly unstressed life.  Although her beloved husband died from food poisoning in his forties, and she never had children, she was a happy soul, and lived on for many years in her comfortable apartment, healthy and energetic and well-liked.

The best part of Madame Calment’s story is that when she was quite elderly, in her early 90s, a nephew who was an attorney offered her a deal: he wanted to live in central Arles, which had a severe shortage of nice apartments available.  This lawyer nephew figured that Madame Calment, who had a lovely place in just the right area, would pass away soon enough, and so he offered her a contract for her apartment. He would pay her a nice monthly subsidy for the rest of her life, and when she passed away she would leave him the place in her will.  It was all drawn up carefully and legally and filed officially.

The nephew began paying the monthly fees to Madame Jeanne-Louise Calment, and anticipated moving into his new place within a few years.  After all, Madame Calment was in her 90s, smoked, drank a couple of glasses of the local wine each day, and ate two pounds of chocolate each week.  Soon he would have his dream apartment in downtown Arles.

Only it didn’t turn out that way.  Because Madame Calment lived on. And on.  And on. 

She did finally quit smoking—at the age of 118—but her doctor figured it was not so much because of his medical advice as it was because her vision had faded and she was too vain to ask people to give her a light.

When she finally passed away at the age of 122 on August 4, 1997, she was the oldest person ever recorded in world history.

Her attorney nephew had passed away twenty years earlier, but Madame Calment enjoyed the revenue from that agreement—paid by the attorney’s family—for the rest of her long, long life.

Madame Calment’s name came up a few years ago in Los Angeles when a woman passed away named Gertrude Baines.  She was 115 years old—115!—and the oldest person in the world at that time, so far as they can tell, and naturally people compared her to the oldest person ever.  She didn’t quite make 122, but she was a marvel nonetheless.

When she died her physician noted, "I saw her two days ago, and she was just doing fine.  She was in excellent shape. She was mentally alert. She smiled frequently."  I wish you could say that about the rest of us…

Baines was born in Shellman, Ga., on April 6, 1894, when Grover Cleveland was in the White House, radio communication was still being developed and television was more than a half-century away.  She was 4 years old when the Spanish-American War broke out and 9 when the first World Series was played. She had already reached middle age by the time the U.S. entered World War II in 1941.

Throughout it all, Baines said last year, it was a life she thoroughly enjoyed.

"I'm glad I'm here. I don't care if I live a hundred more," she said with a hearty laugh after casting her vote for president. "I enjoy nothing but eating and sleeping." This centenarian, who worked as a maid at the Ohio State University dormitories until her retirement, outlived all of her family members.

In her final years, she passed her days watching reruns of her favorite TV program, "The Jerry Springer Show," and consuming her favorite foods: fried chicken and ice cream.

The title of world’s oldest living person brought with it a spotlight of attention, and Baines was asked frequently about the secret to a long life. She shrugged off such questions, telling people to ask God instead.

"She told me that she owes her longevity to the Lord, that she never did drink, she never did smoke and she never did fool around," her doctor said at a party marking her 115th birthday.

At that 115th birthday party, Baines sat quietly, paying little attention as she was presented with congratulatory notices from Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sen. Dianne Feinstein and others. But she laughed when told the Los Angeles Dodgers had given her a cooler filled with hot dogs.

What is the secret to such longevity?  Perhaps Ms. Baines was correct—only God knows.

It’s true, you know: no matter just how long you manage to keep going, someone else will always have been around longer.  Or almost always, anyway.

Perhaps what really matters is not longevity.  We can certainly hope that this is true, for this year we have experienced painful losses in our congregational family. Some died in the fullness of years, having lived fully and completely, and departed without regret.  Some died at the height of their powers, before their time.   

But what is striking to me is that when I sit with the families to remember those who have died, when we share memories and laughter and tears, what families and friends speak about is not the length of their lives at all.  It is the quality of their lives.

You see, as it turns out, it’s not how long you live—it is how you live. 

Simple arithmetic demonstrates that fact.  There are, in a week, 168 hours—7 days times 24 hours.  Of that time, we spend about 63 hours a week, 9 hours a day sleeping or taking care of our basic bodily needs.  For those of us who are employed, we spend anywhere from 40 to 70 hours a week at work, plus the time we spend commuting to work and dealing with work-related stuff.  That leaves somewhere between 30 and 60 hours a week for everything else: errands, household chores, grocery shopping, eating, cleaning up from eating, emailing, Facebook, reading or watching the news, stupid TikTok videos, repairing things that break, getting our cars serviced, paying bills, shlepping kids somewhere, going to doctor’s appointments, sitting in shul on Yom Kippur, and so on.  That sounds like a lot of time, 30-60 hours of discretionary time—but the truth is that it goes pretty fast.  When you factor in all the things we need to do just to keep things going, we aren’t left with very much time at all. 

Perhaps, on average, two hours a day of actual time we might spend however we wish. 

It is those two hours a day, it turns out, that matter the most.  That is the time we can choose to devote to our families.  That is the time we can dedicate to our friends.  That is the time we can explore our spiritual lives.

About two hours a day that really make a difference.

When I sit with families after a death is not the hours of work that people remember, or the reliability with which mom or dad or sis or Zaidie did errands or chores.  It is those couple of uninterrupted hours that he spent with those people who loved him best, those dedicated moments when she showed her humor and caring and dedication.

It was the way they lived, especially those small, focused amounts of time, that everyone remembers.

Because it is not how long we live that matters, but the way we live.  It is not our occupation or pastimes or money that count most to those we love: it is the stories we create with them, the way we show our love to them.

As we approach our Yizkor memorial prayers on this Yom Kippur afternoon, I ask you to take a few moments and remember just how your loved ones, who have died, lived their lives.  How they proved this simple fact.  How they showed you that they loved you.  How they demonstrated their caring.

How they lived.

Because in the way they lived, they taught you a great deal about how to live.

May we remember those lessons again now, and in the many days of our lives that are yet to come.

Jonah and the Koufax Curse

Jonah and the Koufax Curse

Rabbi Sam Cohon, Congregation Beit Simcha, Yom Kippur 5783

There is a funny urban legend going around the internet these days—or perhaps I should call it a divine conspiracy theory.  It is called the Sandy Koufax curse, based on the famous story of the great Dodgers pitcher who sat out the first game of the World Series rather than pitch on Yom Kippur.  Koufax got a statue put up of him at Dodgers Stadium this year, although it wasn’t for sitting out on Yom Kippur; maybe it should have been.  In any case, Koufax was following in the tradition of Hank Greenberg, by the way, and Shawn Green later did a similar thing, but every Jewish baseball fan knows the Koufax story, so it’s called the Koufax Curse.

The Koufax Curse says that any Jewish major leaguer who plays on Yom Kippur, either Kol Nidrei Eve or Yom Kippur Day, pitcher or position player, is destined to fail.  That is, God punishes Jewish ballplayers for going to work as usual on Yom Kippur, playing a child’s game for money when they should be repenting their sins.  If you go to the park on Yom Kippur you are going to be the goat, and I don’t mean the Yom Kippur goat sent out to Azazel.  If you are pitcher you will get hit all over the park.  If you are a position player you will strike out or make a crucial error.  You should have followed Koufax’s example!

Well, one enterprising researchers, Howard Wasserman, whose actual job is being a law professor and associate dean of a law school, put in serious time and effort figuring out if this Koufax Curse really exists.  He literally found and studied every Jewish ballplayer since 1965, when Sandy Koufax famously sat out that World Series game, ran the stats and analyzed them at a Talmudic level to see if this curse really exists.

And, lo and behold, at the individual level, the answer appears to be no. As a group, Yom Kippur numbers for position players outstrip their career averages; they hit for higher average, if limited power and run production. Pitcher performances have been mixed, with some poor games balanced by several good starts and a few good relief appearances.  In other words, playing on either Kol Nidrei Eve or Yom Kippur Day or even that Ne’ilah time at the end doesn’t seem to impact the individual statistics for Jewish players.

Ah, but at the team level, however, something strange happens. All the teams with Jewish players on them that play on Yom Kippur are 12 games under .500 in Yom Kippur games, projecting to a worse record than they have in their non-Yom Kippur games.  And when a Jewish player plays?  It’s much worse.  Their teams are the equivalent of a 73-89 team, a seriously losing ballclub.

In other words, any Koufax curse appears to target not Jewish players, but their non-Jewish teammates, with consequences that befall the team as a whole. Perhaps this warrants a new approach to Yom Kippur — teams should welcome and encourage Jewish players to sit these games out. The media can retire the historic narrative of a Koufax dilemma between team and faith, or of a player letting his teammates down by missing one game that could decide the season. The story would be that the Jewish player helps his team and supports his teammates by not playing, at least for one or two games. The player becomes a hero to Jewish fans, offers the team an ironically better chance at victory—proven by statistical analysis—and appeases God.

This revised narrative should remind us all of the story of Jonah, which, fittingly, we will read on Yom Kippur—in fact, in just a moment this afternoon. Facing a storm certain to wreck the ship and kill all on board, Jonah urges his shipmates to throw him overboard, because God’s anger at Jonah caused the storm. The crew refuses at first, insisting that he play—re, pray—and try to get his God to end the storm.  But finally, the team—er, crew—of the ship reluctantly throws Jonah overboard, after which the “sea ceased its raging.”  By casting their Jewish teammates into the sea of a day off, the storm of defeat will cease from raging that day, and all will again be well.

But you know, in this fascinating story of Jonah, it isn’t as simple as that.  My friends, you are here on this Yom Kippur afternoon.  You are not playing in major league game, or at work, or preparing for your break-the-fast, or insisting that it is against your tradition to go to temple Yom Kippur afternoon.  You are committed to your teshuvah—unlike Jonah.  And of course, unlike many others.  It is hard to stay all through Yom Kippur.  It is challenging to fast, and to spend the entire day dedicated to atonement.  As one of our newer Religious School students said, “Yom Kippur doesn’t sound so great.” 

That’s kind of what Jonah thought when given the thankless task of going to Nineveh, the capital of the evil empire of Assyria, to demand that everyone change their ways and suddenly be good, of God would destroy the whole place.  That’s worse than losing a ballgame on Yom Kippur…  Here’s how it looked to Jonah: either the people of Nineveh would attack and kill him immediately.  Of they would repent, and not be destroyed, and he would look like a false prophet.  It was a no-win scenario.  So Jonah invented a third option: he would simply avoid the whole scenario and, um, run away.

That’s not like sitting out on Yom Kippur.  That’s pretending Yom Kippur, and God, don’t exist.

So what do we learn from this book, whose entire story we read here on Yom Kippur afternoon?  What does Jonah teach us?

Perhaps only this.  That we may, indeed, feel just like Jonah, and want to avoid our responsibility to do Teshuvah.  We may not wish to apologize to those we have harmed.  We probably don’t want to forgive those who have wronged us.  And we may not have a ship’s crew to throw us overboard to a conveniently large-mouthed fish.

What we do have instead is an indication that if we persist, if we stay with our dedication to improve and change, to make things right with God and our family and friends and even our antagonists, if we make the choice to observe Yom Kippur fully—and not, um, play ball, as it were—there is hope.  And that hope is not only for return and repair, but even for redemption.

So may it be, on this Yom Kippur afternoon.

Standing, with Attention

Introduction to the Torah Service, Yom Kippur Morning 5783

Rabbi Samuel M. Cohon

Atem Nitzavim Hayom, you stand here today, all of you, our Torah reading begins his morning. And you, who are all here now—standing or sitting—represent the Israelites to whom this great teaching is addressed.  It is intended for every generation of Jew, now and always, as the text makes explicit.  But what does it really mean when it says that we all stand here today before God?

The Hebrew word Nitzavim has the unusual root, for the Bible, of matzav, to stand firmly, to be grounded; it is related to many important modern Hebrew words, including HaMatzav, the situation—this usually describes Israeli politics and means, of course, a difficult situation—mutzav, a military post, and matzevet, a standing headstone on a grave.  It’s a serious and powerful word, used as well when Jacob dreams of the ladder going up to heaven.

Here in our reading, nitzavim means you aren’t just standing in an ordinary way.  That word would be omeid, which is used much more commonly throughout the Torah and the Tanakh, the Bible.  It means you are standing here and you stand at attention—that is, you pay full attention.  You are actively listening.  You are focused on the experience of Teshuvah.  You are vested in what happens today. 

It means that you—that I—that all of us—are fully present. 

I wonder, in our so heavily distracted lives today, how often we can say that we are fully present?  I wonder how often our phones are off, our devices muted, our attention truly focused on what we are supposed to be doing?  On those we care about?

I know it’s a challenge for me.  I suspect it’s a challenge for many of us.

Yom Kippur—by removing so many distractions from our lives, food, water, TV, and so on—gives us the rare opportunity to truly be fully present.  For God.  For our families.  For our friends. 

The Torah reading this morning climaxes with the great words, “I, God, set before you today a choice: life and blessing, or death and curses.  Choose life.” 

That’s a choice we must pay particular attention to.  May we all find our focus on this Yom Kippur, and nitzavim, stand, fully present, for teshuvah and life.

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.