Rebellion, The Primary Jewish Act

Sermon Parshat Ki Tisa 5783, Rabbi Samuel M. Cohon 

A Jewish friend of mine was telling me about his peculiar experience working for an organization that is run by the Quakers.  It seems that the way that Quaker groups work is that each and every decision has to be made by consensus.  If anyone disagrees, the whole group must wait until everyone comes to complete agreement.  The only way around this is for the person who disagrees to publicly proclaim that he or she stands aside.  Then the group can go ahead and make a unanimous, consensus decision.  No wonder they call each other Friends!

You can imagine what a culture shock this was to a Jewish leader to encounter such a process.  Transpose this to a Jewish setting and try to envision all the Jews in a group agreeing on any issue, let alone every issue. In Tevya’s words from Fiddler on the Roof—as sung by Topol, the great Israeli actor who passed way this last week: unheard of!  Unthinkable!  Absurd!

You know the stereotype: when you have two Jews you have three opinions, four synagogues, and five Jewish organizations.  It is clear we have a kind of national genius for disagreement.  Want to get into an argument in a Jewish setting?  It’s easy—voice an opinion, any opinion at all.  You are guaranteed that someone will disagree with you.

In the classic film “My Favorite Year” the protagonist tells his non-Jewish date, “Katherine, Jews know two things: suffering, and where to find great Chinese food.”  But the truth is that even more than these staples of Jewish life, we also really know arguing.  And we have been engaged in that process for many, many years.  Our greatest sacred literary text, the Talmud, is essentially 66 huge volumes recording one very long argument about, more or less, everything.  It is unheard of for a prominent sage to raise an issue in the Talmud and not to be immediately contradicted. 

The renowned scholar of Jewish life, Leo Rosten defined pilpul, the most elaborate argumentation in the Talmud, as "unproductive hair-splitting that is employed not so much to radiate clarity ... as to display one's own cleverness..."  And, always, to employ that technique in an argument.

This preference for contradiction not only seems to be in our very nature, it is also surely in our institutions.  Perhaps the best current demonstration of this is the Knesset, Israel’s parliament.  In its 75-year history it has never had an actual majority of the 120 members belong to one political party.  Never.  Not once!  Currently it has representatives of 12 different political parties as members—12!—and no single party holds more than 32 of the 120 seats.  This guarantees more or less continual disagreement on nearly every issue.  Everyone thinks the current government has a huge majority—that is, the current coalition of right-wing and religious parties makes up 64 seats—a giant majority, if you want to see it that way, of four entire seats, about a 3% margin. If four members of the government coalition, made up of 6 different political parties, change their mind on a single issue the government falls.  That’s not exactly a giant majority in my book.

I might add that in Israel, where consensus is required for the Knesset to serve out its full four-year term, not once in 70 years has a Knesset ever completed its full term before arguments and disagreements required a new, “early” election.  Plenty of disagreement to go around.  And if that’s true of the only Jewish nation in the world, how much more is it true of our own smaller organizations out here in the Diaspora?

Now you will hear many things about the huge protest movement that has swept Israel over the past eight weeks, trying to prevent the so-called “judicial reform” effort of the present government which would annihilate the independence of the Israeli judiciary.  You will hear that it is an existential crisis for democracy in Israel, that it represents either the greatest challenge to the very existence of the State or the most important reform ever enacted.  The conflict—which, thank God, has been peaceful so far—is important.  This recently elected government attacking the independence of the legal system is a terrible idea, and the wave of protests, and the polls that say 70% of Israelis are opposed to it, demonstrate that.  We are even being told repeatedly by American Jewish figures that it is time for American Jews to take sides, to fight against Israel’s government and this slide away from democracy.

It has all gotten a little overheated on this side of the world: this is an issue the Israeli public is well qualified to settle, in my opinion.  Israel has a vibrant, vital democracy, tons of free speech and free press and a far more active non-violent protest movement than we have in America.  Israelis are speaking out and seeking to prevent this effort to take over the judiciary in a way that Americans did not really do when it kind of happened here.  We can love Israel and not agree with some of her policies, just as we can love America and not agree with some—or many—of hers.

We don’t know which way this whole thing will go now, but the Israeli public is acting in stronger and stronger non-violent ways to protest the direction of its own government.  Let’s see how it ends up, shall we, before we declare that it’s up to American Jews to tell Israel how to run things?

And of course, some of you will definitely disagree with me, right?  

This Jewish tendency to argue is so well known that traditionally in the just-past Purim season we Jews even make fun of our incredible predilection for disagreement by creating another venue for public conflict.  It is customary around college campuses for learned professors to engage in annual Latkeh vs Hamantashen debates in which scholarly arguments are dredged up to demonstrate the culinary preferability of one unhealthy traditional food over the other.  Truly, argument for argument’s sake.

Why do you think there are so many Midrashim about people seeking harmony and good fellowship in their lives?  Because the very nature of Jewish community is conflict and discord.  The injunctions to love our neighbor as ourselves or to be like the disciples of Aaron, loving peace and pursuing peace, are there not because we do this so well, but because we don’t do it well at all.  I mean, you don’t spend a lot of time instructing people to do what they are already doing.  The issue is that we Jews are, frankly, atrocious at getting along peaceably.

As one comedian, Bob Mankoff, put it, ‘When I was first dating my wife, who is not Jewish, we were having what I thought was an ordinary conversation and she said, "Why are you arguing with me?" I replied, "I'm not arguing, I'm Jewish." I thought that was clever. She didn't.’  And yet they married, no doubt continuing the argument for years to come.  How Jewish.

So what is there in our very nature as Jews that makes us want to rebel?  Why is it that we instinctively, always, seek contrast and contradiction?  Why can’t we just… get along?

Perhaps there is a clue in this week’s Torah portion of Ki Tisa.  Things have been going too well for the Israelites of late.  After 400 years of slavery to Pharaoh in Egypt in a short period of time they have been freed gloriously, had the sea parted for them, watched their enemies get washed away, had manna fall from heaven to eat and been welcomed into the covenant of God at Mt. Sinai by actually hearing God speak.  They have food and water and freedom and leadership and organization.  Their basic needs have been attended to.  They have leisure time for the very first time in their lives. 

So naturally the first thing they do is start trouble.  They’ve already been complaining: the food was better in Egypt, they tell Moses.  They complain about the water.  When the Ten Commandments are given, the most dramatic and complete communication between God and humanity ever offered, the people hear God speak and ask Moses to lower the volume—it’s too loud, they say, turn it down… that’s also very Jewish.

Kvetching is normal, for Jews, and relatively benign.  And argument is in our nature, as we have seen.  But if it is left unchecked both lead to something worse.

Because all of that kvetching and argument it turns out was a mere prelude to the dramatic rebellion offered in this week’s parshah of Ki Tisa.  While Moses is up on Mt. Sinai communing with God, leaving his brother Aaron in charge, the people break the first commandment that actually can be positively broken.  The very first commandment is more of a statement, “I am the Lord your God who brought you out of Egypt and slavery.”  Nothing to break there.  So naturally, the Israelites decide to break the next commandment, the prohibition on worshipping idols or graven images, and demand Aaron violate it on their behalf.  Being Jewish himself, Aaron figures out a loophole: he makes not a graven image, something carved, but a molten image, formed by pouring gold into a mold.  It’s a calf, and the people sacrifice to it and then, Western-style, whoop and holler and go into full-on party mode. 

In a way, this echoes the Garden of Eden scenario, when Adam and Eve were given just one commandment--don’t eat the fruit of that specific tree!-- and then immediately break it.  Here the Israelites, our ancestors, are given 10 Commandments and break the first one they can.  It’s a talent, really.

You know the rest of the story.  Moses comes down the mountain, sees the rebellion, smashes the first set of tablets carved by God, and punishes the rebels, suppressing the revolt.  Eventually he’ll go back up the mountain and a new set of commandments will be carved, this time by him.  But the enduring issue of that rebellious spirit remains with the Israelites, their leader Moses and their God.  In fact, it still remains with us contemporary Israelites, the Jews, and all of our leaders—and, of course, with our God.

Whether it was the result of our oppression in Egyptian slavery or the long centuries of persecution following the ultimate Exile in Roman times, we Jews have retained that argumentative, even rebellious spirit.  It’s not really debatable—although I’m sure someone will debate me on that, this being a Jewish congregation.  But the need to contradict seems so ingrained now that realistically we have to see what it means, rather then how we might change it.  Because, let’s face it, we ain’t gonna to stop arguing.

And perhaps we shouldn’t.  That Jewish preference for argument and contrariness, that turbulent spirit, has served us well many times, and created great good in the world.  It allowed Jews to question accepted orthodoxies, like Newtonian physics, and produce an Albert Einstein.  It provided the spirit that motivated Sigmund Freud to uncover the unconscious mind, influenced Karl Marx to reinvent the concept of labor, spurred every labor organizer from Samuel Gomperts to Emma Goldman to work for the rights of the worker.  It is that argumentative, rebellious spirit that led some of my own ancestors to rebel against the Czar in the 19th century, led Zionists across oceans and continents to create a new country in an ancient land.  And it is the need we have to see things differently that helped create so many great Jewish economists, that pushes Jewish medical researchers to topple incorrect theories and probe new areas of healing, that drives Jewish internet entrepreneurs to create Facebook and Google and all those successful Israeli start-ups like Waze.  It is even what drives Jews to become writers in fresh, new ways and styles, and sometimes to win Nobel Prizes and Oscars. 

And in a moral sense, the need to question has long goaded Jews to fight injustice in every society in which we have lived, from the Jews of the Civil Rights movement to the Jews who brought case after case to the Supreme Court, and now sit on the Supreme Court, seeking greater honesty, transparency and justice.  And that contrary nature has created a viewpoint that makes it practically obligatory to be Jewish if you wish to make a living as a comedian, the ultimate contrarian profession.

So perhaps the need to argue, to kvetch, even to rebel is not quite the calamity it is presented as in Ki Tissa.  For after the Golden Calf what ultimately results is a new covenant, and a greater understanding of just what the people really need, a Ten Commandments written not by the hand of God but by the hand of humans.  This turbulent Jewish nation will not keep on track solely because of the grand spectacle of divine redemption, not remain good because of witnessing miracles or hearing loud proclamations.  We need the steadying hand of a practical code for life, the spiritually reassuring presence of regular ritual to keep us together.

The best statement on arguing comes, as it so often does, from Pirkei Avot, the Ethics of our Ancestors: every controversy for the sake of heaven will bring reward, we are told. Every machloket l’sheim Shamayim, every difference that is motivated for ethical and moral reasons, for the purpose of serving God, will help make the world a better place.  Of course, it adds, every argument, every machloket that is not for the sake of heaven, that is, that is for the sake of ego or self-aggrandizement, will damage the world.

Not that I have to tell you this, but I guess the moral is: keep arguing.  It’s Jewish, and it means we seek the highest level of truth attainable.  But do it not to impress others with your intellectual brilliance or your ability to disagree.  Argue instead for the purpose of truly improving the world, of improving justice, in order to make things better. 

That is, go ahead, argue: but make it for heaven’s sake…

Forgetting in Order to Remember

Sermon Shabbat Tetzaveh/Zachor 5783

It seems that the president of Iran is not feeling well and is concerned about his mortality. And so he goes to consult a psychic about the date of his death.

Closing her eyes and silently reaching into the realm of the future the psychic finds the answer: “You will die on a Jewish holiday.”

“Which one?’” he asks nervously.

“It doesn’t matter,” replies the psychic. “Whenever you die, it’ll be a Jewish holiday.”

If that’s the case, that holiday would certainly resemble Purim.  In fact, seeing that some view the leaders of modern-day Iran as kind of contemporary versions of Haman, the leading secular authority in today’s Persia and totally obsessed with destroying the Jews, that holiday might well turn out to be Purim.  It happened that way once in ancient Persia, so why not again?  And if you remember, it also happened that way in 1991, when the Gulf War, and the awful, anti-Israel regime of another leader obsessed with Israel, Saddam Hussein, ended on Purim day, stopping the rain of Scud missiles on Israeli homes and the reign of a tyrant who also had many Haman-like qualities. 

So, it goes with the season of Purim, when we Jews recall those who tried to destroy our people at this time of year in days gone by but failed to do so.  It is a related but rather different experience than all those other times of the year when we remember the enemies who sought to destroy us, and succeeded: Tisha B’Av, when we recall the destruction of both the First and Second Temples and the expulsion from Spain, or Yom HaShoah, when we remember the Holocaust victims, or Yom Kippur, when we recall all the martyrs of our long history.

But Purim falls into that sequence of festivals from Chanukah to Passover that can famously be summed up neatly in 9 words: they tried to kill us, we survived, let’s eat…

In a larger, more serious sense, memory is truly a central part of Judaism.  In the Ba’al Shem Tov’s memorable phrase, “Memory is the source of redemption; exile comes from forgetting.”

But sometimes memory is a very curious thing indeed, and the very desire to remember seems paradoxical, even perverse.

This Shabbat we observe Shabbat Zachor, the Sabbath of Remembrance in Jewish tradition.  By custom, after reading the weekly Torah portion that falls just beore Purim we add a short section of text that recalls the attack by the enemy nation Amalek on our Israelite stragglers as we escaped Egypt during the Exodus.  This attack, considered both vicious and cowardly by the commentators, is memorialized each year on the Shabbat prior to Purim.  This short maftir section both begins and ends with words of memory: Zachor et asher asa lecha Amalek, it begins, “remember what Amalek did to you,” and it concludes with the powerful statement timcheh et zecher Amalek mitachat Hashamayim; al tishkach, “Obliterate the memory of Amalek under heaven; don’t forget!”   

We always read this section the week before the holiday of Purim, the fabulous festival that we will enjoy tomorrow night and Monday, commemorating the great salvation of the Jews of Iran in Mordechai and Esther’s time, 2400 years ago, because Haman, the villain of the Purim story, is supposed to be a descendant of the Amalekites.  By some other traditions, all deep enemies of Judaism and Jews are linked to Amalek and Haman, including, in some peculiar readings, Torquemada and even Hitler.  Perhaps strangest of all, the Nazis seem to have embraced this association.  After all, they considered themselves true Aryans, and ancient Persia was an Aryan nation as well.

Adolf Hitler even banned the observance of Purim throughout German-controlled territory.  In a speech made on November 10, 1938, the day after Kristallnacht, the Nazi anti-Semitism chief Julius Streicher, creator of Der Sturmer, surmised that just as "the Jew butchered 75,000 Persians" in one night, the same fate would have befallen the German people had the Jews succeeded in inciting a war against Germany; the "Jews would have instituted a new Purim festival in Germany."  To avoid such a possibility, of course, the Nazis moved first…

Nazi attacks against Jews often coincided with Jewish festivals, especially Purim.  On Purim 1942, ten Jews were hanged in Zduńska Wola to avenge the hanging of Haman's ten sons.  In a similar incident in 1943, the Nazis shot ten Jews from the Piotrków ghetto.  On Purim eve that same year, over 100 Jewish doctors and their families were shot by the Nazis in Czestochowa. The following day, Jewish doctors were taken from Radom and shot nearby in Szydlowiec, and again a conscious linkage was made with Purim by the Nazis.

Most ironically, just before he was hanged, Julius Streicher, the Nazis’ arch propagandist, called out "Purim Fest 1946!"  And in a speech by Hitler himself on January 30, 1944, he said that if the Nazis were defeated, the Jews could celebrate "a second Purim".  We don’t, but of course in the Purim story very few Jews were actually murdered by the descendants of Amalek.  On the other hand, no one thinks celebration has much to do with any commemoration of the Holocaust.  

There are many curious customs associated with this mitzvah, the very specific commandment issued in Deuteronomy to “obliterate Amalek.”  Some Jewish communities, on Purim, write the name “Amalek” on their shoes and then rub it off on the floor during the Megillah reading.  And a traditional sofer, a Torah scribe, will begin to write a new Torah by inscribing the name “Amalek” on a piece of parchment and then crossing it out.  And since Haman was an “Agagite,” descended from the king of the Amalekites, the whole custom of graggers and noisemaking to blot out Haman’s name comes from this same commandment.

All of this raises a very good question.  Amalek was a minor people, more a tribe than a nation.  As a distinct political or ethnic entity, it has long disappeared from the earth.  In fact, if we really want to obliterate Amalek’s name from under heaven, the easiest way would be for us Jews to stop talking about it.  No one else would ever mention it again.  Poof, Amalek is gone, blotted out!

And yet, instead, we read this passage twice a year in synagogues around the world, once in Deuteronomy during the regular Torah reading cycle and once just before Purim on this Shabbat Zachor.  Why the elaborate need to remember a truly ancient wrong done to us?

Psychoanalysts could say that the profound emotional injury perpetrated on our people nearly at the very moment of redemption—we had just gotten out of Egypt after 400 years of slavery—was so painful that we Jews have never really gotten over it.  The catharsis of remembering and overcoming Amalek each and every year helps us move to a healthier, more holistically complete place.  We remember so that we can overcome.

Political scientists would look at this remembering differently.  They might suggest that the military and organizational weakness that allowed the straggling Amalek took advantage of must be remembered so that we avoid falling into that trap again.  Organization, preparation, a proper plan are all essential to being a real nation.

Others have seen this remembering as a motivation to action, a goad to prevent us from ever again allowing ourselves to fall under the power of hostile others.  As in the story of Amalek, and nearly so in the tale of Purim, Jewish weakness has allowed our enemies to attack, torture, and slaughter us throughout history.  Rabbi Yitz Greenberg has written movingly about the necessity for a contemporary, post-Holocaust ethic of Jewish power, the moral obligation for us to be prepared to have and utilize power to protect ourselves and our children in a world that has never respected our great Jewish religion or culture. 

And of course, when Iran—that is, today’s Persia—is in the news for its nuclear aspirations and vile hatred of Israel and all Jews, we do well to recall that we need the power to protect ourselves, and that in fact we Jews have a moral obligation to retain and, if necessary, use power for that purpose.  We pray that won’t be necessary ever again.  But we also know that we must retain that capacity or face the possibility of once again having the noose fitted over our necks.

This reminds me of the story that the Iranian president calls President Biden and tells him, “Joe, I had a wonderful dream last night. I could see America, the whole beautiful country, and on each house I saw a banner.”

“What did it say on the banners?” Biden asks.

The Iranian president replies, “The UNITED STATES OF IRAN.”

Biden says, “You know, I’m really happy you called because, believe it or not, last night I had a similar dream. I could see all of Tehran, and it was more beautiful than ever, and on each house flew an enormous banner.”

“What did it say on the banners?” the Iranian president asks.

“I don’t know,” replies Biden. “I can’t read Hebrew.”

So why else might we insist on remembering those we are simultaneously commanded to forcefully forget?  Moral experts, like those who learn and teach musar, might see this paradoxical need as a kind of davka experience: the commandment to exterminate actually forces us to remember our own failures, and thus our own failings.  If we recall Amalek, and Haman, and, I suppose, Antiochus and Titus and Hadrian and the Crusaders and Torquemada, and how close we often came to destruction, we can never become too confident of our own prowess or foresight and must remain humble. And then we will be able to personally improve. 

Or we can take this curious remembering in a different, sociological direction.  In order to rise, we must first bottom out.  You cannot realize your full potential unless you remember how far down you have been.  Only when we recall the near destruction we suffered at the hands of a small, hostile tribe, an attack that nearly derailed us before we got fairly started, can we rise to the spiritual greatness to which we aspire.

But we can also see this more simply.  Remembering might be the primary Jewish act of all.  We are commanded, using the same exact Hebrew word, zachor, to remember the Shabbat, an unalloyed good just as Amalek is considered an unadulterated evil.  Our existence as intelligent, informed, thoughtful people, as true Jews, is contingent on our ability to truly learn, to do Torah.  In order to do that well, we must exercise our memories vigorously and completely.  In remembering both the good and the bad we are achieving the highest level of serving b’tzelem Elohim, as imitators of God. 

By remembering we can learn. And in doing so, we can learn how to act now, and in the future, and for the future. 

Or maybe there is something else here.  The clue comes in another paradox, this one presented in an ancient commentary.

A Midrash comments on the fact that the same exact word is used in the commandment to remember Amalek and to remember Shabbat, that word “Zachor.”  In Pirkei d’Rabbi Eliezer it says, "Remember what Amalek did to you." How can one do that? The Torah says, "Remember the day of Shabbat." We can't remember both!

Ah, but perhaps we can.  For in order to observe a Shabbat of true rest, we must first remember.  And only after that memory has been served will be able to truly rest.

In all of this remembering we are obligating ourselves to understand that first we must recall, and then we may relax.

This is Shabbat Zachor, and tomorrow night and Monday we will celebrate the great victory of Purim.  May this be a Sabbath when we can relax, knowing our people not only will survive but thrive, and we can enjoy true spiritual rest.

Hope

Rodeo Shabbat Sermon, Parshat Terumah 5783

Back in cowboy days, a westbound wagon train is lost and low on food. No other humans have been seen for days when they see a Jewish peddler sitting under a tree. The leader rushes up to him and says, "We're lost and running out of food. Is there someplace ahead where we can get food?"

"Vell," the Jewish peddler says, "I vouldn't go up dat hill dere.  Somevun told me you'll run into a big bacon tree."

"A bacon tree?" asks the wagon train leader.  “We’re starving!”

"Yoh, ah bacon tree,” says the Jew.  “Trust me. For nuttin vud I lie."

The wagon train leader goes back and tells his people that if nothing else, they might be able to find food on the other side of the next ridge.

"So why did he say not to go there?" some pioneers ask.

"Oh, you know those Jews don't eat bacon."

So, the wagon train goes up the hill. Suddenly, Indians attack and massacre everyone except the leader, who manages to escape back to the peddler.

The near-dead man starts shouting. "You fool!  You sent us to our deaths! 
We followed your instructions, but there was no bacon tree. Just hundreds of Indians, who killed everyone."

The Jewish peddler holds up his hand and says "Oy, vait a minute, vait a minute…  Gevalt, I made myself ah big mistake.  It vuz not a bacon tree. It vuz a ham bush!"   Sorry.

While sometimes here in the southwest we can get a little testy about the stereotypes of deserts and cowboys, of cactus and overgrown cowtowns we tend to have foisted upon us, occasionally we actually seek out and embrace those stereotypes.  And this is one of those times.  How do you say Yipee ki yay in Yiddish?  Yipee oy vey?

Look, when you live in the heart of the west, not far from Tombstone in what was Apache country not much over a century ago, rodeo weekend is still, at least superficially, a pretty big deal.

In fact, the last act of the famous shootout at the OK Corral took place right here in the Tucson railyards when legendary OK Corral gunslinger and lawman Wyatt Earp gunned down the last of the gang that killed his brother. 

Wyatt Earp’s common-law wife—well, his last one, anyway—was a Jewish woman named Josephine Marcus, whom he met in Tombstone.  And although you might not immediately associate Jews and cowboys, there were quite a number of prominent Jews in the old west. There were many peddlers and merchants, but there were Jewish mayors of Tucson and Jewish sheriffs and even Jewish outlaws.  If you aren’t sure of that, go and visit Boot Hill’s Jewish cemetery in Tombstone itself; it’s not far from the main Boot Hill in Tombstone, where the victims of the OK Corral shootout are theoretically buried among other outlaws, and it has its own unique Jewish character and has both prominent Tombstone Jewish citizens and some clearly Jewish outlaws buried there, too.  

And of course, in addition to the west’s more colorful characters, there were Jewish merchants, including some of my own ancestors, the Reinharts, who had a store in the Gold Country near Auburn, California.  They sold various items including dungaree trousers there, especially the newly invented ones produced by a German Jewish entrepreneur named Levi Strauss.  I’m pretty sure some people still wear that brand.

Levi Strauss, a Jewish immigrant from Bavaria first came to the gold country in 1850.  He didn’t succeed in prospecting for gold, but he did succeed in co-inventing the denims that sat on all those saddles that blazed through the Wild West.  He and his partner, another Jewish tailor named Jacob Davis, who patented the rivets that hold on the pockets, made Levi’s the preferred pants of cowboy set.

In any case, I hope you are all enjoying this Rodeo Shabbat celebration of our superficial western-ness.  To me, Rodeo is a sign that spring has sprung here in Tucson, that we are ready to embrace a season of pleasant warmth and natural growth.  And I have to note that this year, while Southern California is experiencing blizzards—including some in San Diego—I’ll bet you never expected to hear that sentence—we are going to enjoy our usual excellent spring weather.

It reminds of our first Rodeo Shabbat as a congregation when we had our Rodeo Shabbat horseback ride and service, as we did the last couple of years.  It actually snowed the day before, and we had a magnificent panorama of white spread out around us as we rode along.  That made the Fireball Cinnamon whiskey at the kiddush after the Minchah service and ride all the more pleasurable…

Spring is, of course, the time when life seems new, fresh, dreamlike; in short, washed in the pastel shades of hope.  Now, while Rodeo is one signal of the arrival of hope-filled spring, there was another crucial one this very day.  Baseball spring training has officially begun, and with spring training comes the eternal rebirth of hope that is always associated with that blessed arrival. 

Baseball spring training camps are filled with 21 year old lefthanders dreaming of the big time and 40 year old relievers coming off arm surgery and hoping for one more shot.  Spring is the time when, for a few brief shining weeks, every youngster is a prospect, and every veteran is a star.  They say the marriage is the triumph of hope over experience, but I think it’s really spring training baseball that matches that description.

Now I suppose we could speak of the NCAA basketball tournament as the ultimate season of hope, but perhaps this year it’s better to ignore that subject altogether... except to say that every team in the 64 1/2 school field has some hope of at least going a couple of rounds deep into the tournament, maybe even of reaching the Promised Land of the Final Four.  But the winnowing out is so rapid in college basketball—within two days half the teams are gone.  No, it’s the slow-paced month of spring training that is the real tangible representation of hope in our society.

At the beginning of spring everyone is healthy and happy and poised to flourish.  And of course, every team has an excellent chance to win the World Series.  We know that over the long course of the season some of these predictions will vanish in the heat of summer, but hope springs eternal in the human being in this season, and that’s something we all need.  And baseball’s spring training is hope wrapped up in sunshine and flowers.

And we need hope.  We live, in a way, for hope: the hope and promise of joyous occasions, of simchas like the birth of new babies, like the pleasant notion that life will get only better, that things are improving.  Hope gets us through days of trial and pain, makes us accept that here in our own world there is the promise of blessing and goodness even when they are invisible.

But pringtime hope is more than just the dreams and prayers of well-paid and semi-amateur athletes.  On the subject of hope, I have to share a passage from this week’s Torah portion of Terumah.  It tells us that when God commanded Moses to construct the Tabernacle in the Wilderness, the original sanctuary for our people to worship, the very first temple, Moses put out a call for a building campaign.  The Israelites were asked to voluntarily donate gold and silver to create a magnificent new edifice that would become the center for prayer and assembly for our people, the first of its kind.  The word for such donations is Terumah, meaning voluntary gifts of the heart. 

And that original building campaign had a remarkable result: after a short while, there was too much gold and silver.  Moses had to tell the people to stop donating, because there was simply too much being given.

Now, you might take from this pivotal story the lesson that this had to be the only synagogue building campaign in all Jewish history to ever be oversubscribed… but there is a rather different lesson that we can take from it.  That is, that if we begin with hope, and if work and cherish that dream and not only preserve it but nurture it with love and support and care, well, we can in fact accomplish anything.    

What is that famous Kevin Costner movie phrase, set in Iowa, embodied in the baseball midsummer classic held each year now?  If you build it, He will come?  Well, it comes from this week’s Torah portion, really, and it’s a promise of hope.  Asu li mikdash v’shachanti b’tocham—we are told, build Me a sanctuary and I will dwell among you.

That’s truly hopeful, of course, not just a field of dreams, but a temple of them.  Remember, this wild west was once a wilderness, too.  And it was hope, and hard work, and dedication and commitment that transformed it into a place of growth and goodness where all flourish today.

On this springtime Shabbat of Rodeo and Terumah, may we all find ways to make the commitments that renew our own hopes, and bring about our dreams.

Mishpatim and Freedom

Sermon, Shabbat Mishpatim, February 17, 2023

The great 1960’s comedian, Alan Sherman, most famous for his song “Hello Muddah Hello Faddah”, once wrote a book about restrictions on human behavior. In it, he decided to invent a new religion, which would have only one commandment: Thou shalt not stuff 37 tennis balls down the toilet. In great excitement he went to a sign painter to create the tablet of this new covenant and asked him to make up a huge sign with that commandment on it. But the sign painter refused.

“Friend,” he said, “I’m going to do you a big favor. I’m not going to paint your sign. Because if I paint it, the day after the sign goes up, there will be a run on sporting goods stores. Tennis balls will sell like hotcakes, and plumbers will be working round the clock. The virtuous among us will only stuff 36 tennis balls down their toilets. Normal sinners will stuff 37 tennis balls down their toilets. And the truly wicked will stuff 38 tennis balls down their toilets. Friend, we human beings are many things; but we all of us are perverse.”

As we approach this week’s Torah portion of Mishpatim, we do well to remember that. The last few weeks we have seen magnificent Torah portion after magnificent Torah portion. Now, after B'shalach's great song of freedom, after the majesty of the Ten Commandments at Sinai, after the greatest events in the history of the Jewish people, we thump down to earth with a Torah portion full of laws, restrictions, norms and standards. In short, rules; and we progressive American Jews just don't like rules.

We do like the unabridged freedom of the Exodus story. Americans believe in freedom of thought, freedom of conscience, freedom of choice, freedom of and in every particular of our decision-making. We choose our own course in life, and vigorously resist anyone who tries to curtail our liberties. Nobody tells us what to think, or how to act. This is the land of the free, after all! A universal covenantal code? Antique laws decreed by an ancient autocratic god? Al achat kama v'chama, how much less will we like those! We refuse to be tied up by rules, because they bind us in like the tefillin we don't wear.  The idea that we are bound in leather straps to God, that we are supposed to say, as we wrap them around our arm and hand the prophet’s words, “I bind you to Me forever, I bind you to Me in justice and laws and kindness and mercy, I bind you to Me in faith so that you will know that I am God”—this is far too constricting for us.

And perhaps we have good reason to dislike rules. As contemporary Jews, we do not believe we are marionettes controlled by a heavenly puppeteer; we do believe that we are free actors in the magnificent improvisation of life. Religion can encourage social action, but it has no right to control social interactions.

So what do we make of Mishpatim? The first part of our portion is the famous “Book of the Covenant”, a listing of the laws that the people were supposed to observe. These are not chukim, religious laws describing our relationship with God, but person-to-person laws, mishpatlm, that affect our everyday, human interactions. According to some authorities these are so basic that they would exist even without the Torah.  In short, what we have are a bunch of rules, and the bottom line is, most people don't like rules.

But, as Alan Sherman’s sign-painter didn't say, the fact is that whether or not we like rules, we seem to need rules none the less. In our own lives we abide by all kinds of rules.  We drive our cars according to the Mishpatim of the motor vehicle department. We pay taxes at the command of the tax code. We use forks, spoons and knives at the behest of Emily Post. We listen to music from the Torah of Spotify or Apple Music, buy books and see movies according the rules of reviewers or the recommendations of Amazon, and have our social conduct governed by laws as intricate as any Jewish legal Halachic framework—send a thank-you note, call your mother or child, visit a friend who is ill, and don't wear jeans to services except on Rodeo Shabbat. Our cherished illusion of no norms, of unbounded freedom in our daily American lives, is really just that—an illusion.

Ah, but when it comes to religion it's a different matter. Or, rather, it's a different choice: you see, in our spiritual lives we are free, but it is the freedom to choose for ourselves whom we will serve and which laws, rules, and ideas are boundaries for our lives.

It's no accident that our sedra, the Torah portion of Mishpatim begins with the laws of servitude, the Hebrew indentured servant, the eved ivri. For the Israelites, "freedom" didn't mean the absence of control; it meant a free-will choice between serving god and serving pharaoh. In Bob Dylan’s immortal words, "you got to serve somebody”; we too, exist in a context. Our choice is whether to blindly accept society's norms, or choose our own, Jewish path. Do we adopt the cultural code of conduct, or do we engage our tradition actively—including those unattractive rules, these mishpatim?

There is an intriguing parallel here to game theory: you can't play a game if you don't accept that game's basic rules. You can't play baseball without foul lines; you can't play the Super Bowl without downs; you can't play chess if pawns can jump. As progressive Jews each of us has the personal power to decide what the rules are going to be for this crucial game of Judaism.

That is, we non-Orthodox Jews have the ability to decide what our own Judaism will be. So how exactly do we make decisions about our moral life? What mishpatim will we choose to observe, and why?

5Orthodoxy has always held up a model from our very own Torah portion: na 'aseh v'nishma, we will do the commandments and then we will hear them. Reform Judaism in the past has said "nishma—we will hear; and then we’ll see."  Some of us engage the tradition actively, with knowledge, insight, and the commitment of kabbalat ol malchut shama yim b'ahavah, receiving the yoke of the kingdom of heaven in love. But many of us think we are being good Jews when we choose lo nishma v'lo na'aseh, we will neither learn nor act, a sub-minimalist Judaism that jumps completely off the game board.

You will hear it said that being a good Jew means being a good person. This confuses a 3800-year-old tradition with the Boy Scouts of America; an outstanding organization, but not a religion. Judaism is a particular magnificently moral religious tradition. Our own ability to engage it, to work at our Jewish identity, is what defines whether we will be Jews who make a difference, who carry on our faith for our children, or Jews who allow it to slip away.

My grandfather, Rabbi Samuel S. Cohon, was one of the great ideologues of classical Reform Judaism. The Foundation named for him and his wife will give an award next week to those who work for the good of the entire people of Israel, klal Yisrael.  Over sixty-five years ago he wrote: "a religion that does not seek to lead and to correct, that asks for nothing, that is soft and yielding, that is all things to all people, is in reality nothing to anybody in particular and of doubtful value to mankind." To paraphrase Hillel, if we have no standards, what are we?

So where do we find those standards? The great ideas of the Ten Commandments alone are not enough, and the Torah sees this immediately. That's why we have these mishpatim, these norms. It's not sufficient to say, "you shall not steal"; we must also say "don't keep Your neighbor's ox."  Today, we need to say, “you shall not engage in a Ponzi Scheme” and “you shall not do insider trading" and, "You shall not defraud a big company on a contract" and “You shall not cheat or stiff your subcontractors.”  It's not enough to say, "You shall have no other Gods before Me"; we must say "if you wish to be Jewish, or for your children to be Jewish, you must make your house an active, religious Jewish home" and “You must support your synagogue materially so it can be a home and source for real Judaism.”

Progressive Judaism is flexible, but flexibility is not fluidity; to be flexible you must first have shape. It is our individual job to define that shape, and the way we use these mishpatim can guide us.

This has been a cold winter in Israel, with much snow in Jerusalem, and images of Jerusalem with snow always reminds me of an experience I had in Yerushalayim on New Year's Eve 1992, now over 25 years ago. That night the greatest snowfall in recorded history drifted gently but steadily down onto streets, roofs and treetops. Those magnificent Jerusalem pine trees, all those great trees in Israel that we paid the Jewish National Fund to plant through those blue and white pushkes—all those now magnificent pine trees had never been pruned, and they had grown and spread out over most of the city. As we watched from our mirpeset, our balcony, the soft snow accumulated, and then the pine branches began to snap loudly and collapse onto the power lines below, severing the lines. Within hours all electricity was gone, and a dark, frozen Jerusalem returned to the 19th century.

Those beautiful JNF trees, which bordered all of our paths, which gave us shade in the summer and shelter in the winter, which gave our lives beauty and fragrance and comfort—if only they had been pruned! Now they would be cut down and removed completely.

Halacha, Jewish law, is often compared to a living tree, an etz chayim, and over time it grew luxuriantly, even out of control. In the 19th and 20th centuries Reform Judaism pruned that tree back, so that we might have the light of modernity. We know that trees grow higher, straighter and truer when they are carefully pruned, and that the best fruit grows on the new branches. But to grow new branches, to nourish new shoots, we still need the roots of that tree. And those roots are in the mishpatim, the norms and rules of human interaction and religious commitment.

In Hebrew, the word for root is ikkar, which also means essence. Our job as Jews today is to find the ikkar, to see that the tree we nourish grows from essential Jewish tradition. Our inner lives flourish and grow only if we are firmly planted in the soil of that tradition, if we fertilize and weed and trim and care for the flowering of our own and our family's religion and morality. A regular, practical examination of what we do for our Judaism, how we incorporate it into our daily lives, how we choose to support it, a voluntary binding of our own lives to rules that have meaning and a basis in tradition—that is what will determine the ultimate quality of our existence, that is what will make our lives, and our Judaism, flourish.

We must begin to put together our own Jewish world, and we can only do it one practical little law, one mishpat at a time. Paradoxically, perhaps, that is where we will find our true freedom. To quote poet Adrienne Rich:

"These atoms filmed by ordinary dust

that common life…

Freedom.

It isn't once to walk out under the Milky Way,

feeling the rivers of light, the fields of dark—

freedom is daily, prose-bound, routine remembering.

Putting together, inch by inch

the starry worlds

from all the lost collections."

It is ultimately through these simple Mishpatim that we will come, freely, to reach God, and to know God; and to be bound to God in intimacy, forever. And then, inch-by-inch, this world may truly come to be a vision of justice, of peace, and of God's presence.  So may it be, bimheira v'yameinu, speedily in our day; kein yehi ratson.

Commanded

Sermon on Parshat Yitro 5783

There is a famous scene in Mel Brooks’ movie “The History of the World Part I.”  It shows Moses bringing three tablets of the commandments down from Mt. Sinai, and proudly announcing, “The Lord had given you these fifteen commandments”—and then he drops one of the tablets which shatters, he says “Oy”, and without missing a beat follows that by announcing, “The Lord has given these Ten Commandments to you.”

Or perhaps you prefer this version:

Moses has been up on the mountain for a long time. The People of Israel are getting nervous. Where is he? The tension continues to build until finally a man is seen making his way down the mountain carrying something.

The people gather at the foot of the mountain. Moses reaches the bottom and faces the crowd.

“My people, I have good news and I have bad news. The good news is I have negotiated with the Lord and brought him down from twenty to ten. The bad news is adultery is still in.”

Reasonably funny shticks, but they also highlight a problem we have been dealing with for a long time.  How many commandments are there, and what are the truly important ones?

But first, a more basic question: just what is a commandment? 

In effect, “commandment” is an elaborate word for a rule that requires you to do something, or prevents you from doing something.  We call these “laws” when they are established by normal human beings.  When we believe they come from a higher source, we call them commandments.  It sounds better and more impressive, doesn’t it?

This Shabbat we read the Ten Commandments in our weekly Torah portion of Yitro, one of the most famous written passages in all human history.  The Ten Commandments are composed of just 13 sentences, but they are at the heart of all Western religion.  But what do they actually say?  And what do they really mean?  And what did it mean to receive them on Mt. Sinai—as Moses supposedly did?

It’s appropriate to begin with a simpler question: just how many commandments are there in Judaism?  Most people would answer “Ten”, based on these Ten Commandments, stars of stage and screen.  After all, when inscribed on two stone tablets they form the second most famous Jewish image of all, just after the so-called “Jewish star” the magein David. 

In truth, in Judaism there are not just these 10 but actually some 613 commandments, taryag mitzvot, far more than can fit on two tablets or even an entire Imax screen.  Of course, many of these 613 mitzvot are not even applicable anymore, as they have to do with the rites and rituals of the days of the Temple in Jerusalem. 

Which raises a further question: what exactly is a mitzvah, a commandment, in the first place?

First, we must understand that Jewish morality, and therefore Jewish law, is based on a system of responsibilities, not rights.  In America we speak often of our rights, which convey particular protections and even privileges, but far more rarely of our responsibilities, which bring with them acts that we must complete ourselves.  The comparison can be summed up in a sentence: a citizen has rights.  A mensch has responsibilities.

This is something we might remind the US Congress about from time to time, especially when we consider the Federal deficit and the National debt…

In casual speech a mitzvah is usually translated as “a good deed”, as in “he did a mitzvah”; but the fact is that it means not a nice or pleasant act but a commandment, a law that is to be observed, and the doing of a mitzvah is a good deed precisely because it entails fulfilling a commandment to do it.  For a 13 year-old, becoming “bar mitzvah” or “bat mitzvah” means you are now responsible to fulfill these commandments.  In the Orthodox world, one who has fulfilled a particular commandment is said to be yotzei, to have completed that religious responsibility.  And according to Halakhah, Jewish law, all mitzvot are morally binding and important. 

So, if there are 613 commandments in Judaism, what is there about these 10 that makes them so special?

Next, according to our Torah and tradition, of all the many commandments only these 10 were actually spoken aloud by God to us at Mt. Sinai.  The rest of the commandments—and there is no perfect list of the other 603, by the way, since we are talking about Jews here and getting us to agree on anything requires a miracle—the rest of the commandments are given by God to Moses and then taught to the people of Israel, or extrapolated by our scholars from the commandments we have already received from God.  But the Ten we get in this week’s portion are supposed to have been revealed to us at Sinai—what is called the ma’amad har Sinai, literally the standing at Sinai—and done so very publicly to everyone.

What does this list of ten consist of?  The Hebrew name for them is Aseret haDibrot, which literally means the Ten Statements, not the Ten Commandments.  If you count them up you will discover that there are really more than 10 specific commands issued in these 13 sentences, and that some of the sentences aren’t really commands at all.

The first of these, for example, is one that is not a commandment at all.  Instead it is a faith statement: “I am the Lord your God who brought you out of Egypt, out of slavery.”  While central to Judaism—the belief in one God is the foundation of the faith, and the Exodus in many ways our most powerful collective memory—you are not actually supposed to do anything because of it. 

The other nine commandments come down to four commandments that reflect on the relationship between us and God—bein adam laMakom in Hebrew—and five that reflect on the relationship between human beings themselves, bein adam lachaveiro, that is between us alone, without God being directly involved.  If the first commandment is a faith statement, only two of the remaining nine are clearly positive, proactive commandments, things we are supposed to do: the commandment to remember and keep the Sabbath, and the commandment to honor our fathers and mothers.  The other six are things we are ordered not to do: don’t worship idols and false gods, don’t swear falsely in God’s name, don’t murder, don’t commit adultery, don’t steal, don’t commit perjury against another person, don’t covet another’s spouse or possessions. 

All of these surely are important parts of the religious, moral order being established by the Torah.  Each one of these commandments is later extended in various ways by the Torah and the Talmud in order to further the great Jewish missions of clarifying the purpose of our lives and creating ethical boundaries for our conduct.  And in some Midrashim, any one of these commandments can actually serve as the basis of the other Ten.

You can make a case that these Ten Commandments, given in fire and smoke and drama on Mt. Sinai, are not even the most important of the teachings of the Torah.  It is in Leviticus that we learn that we must be holy for God is holy, and that we must love our neighbors as we love ourselves.  It is in Deuteronomy that we are taught that God has set before us blessing and curse, good and evil, and that is up to us to choose life and goodness, and to pursue justice. 

But these Ten Commandments begin our journey towards placing ethical conduct at the center of our religion, and our lives.  In their own way, they are just so Jewish: moral, pragmatic, sensible, and yet idealistic.  And when we study them regularly, with commentary, we fulfill an additional mitzvah of seeking to find out what it is God really wants from us, and how we can choose to make our lives holy.

May we so choose on this Shabbat of commandment to really think about and apply our hearts and minds to these mitzvot.  And may we learn to do so on every other Shabbat of the year—and every other day, too.

Challah and Pharaoh

Shabbat Va’eira 5783

Rabbi Sam Cohon, Congregation Beit Simcha, Tucson, AZ 

We are blessed here at Beit Simcha with a homemade challah each and every week for our congregation to enjoy.  Now, I don’t know how much you know about challah itself.  Yes, yes, of course, challah is braided egg bread—you knead it, you let it rise twice, add some seeds, you bake it, and—boom, you’ve got challah.  But I’m talking here about more than a simple twisted egg bread; I’m speaking of real challah. I’m talking about the finest accomplishment of the baker’s art, the apex of the ovenmeister’s craft, the ambrosia of the cereal family.  This is a challah that brings tears of joy to your eyes, that warms the heart and the fills the stomach and tantalizes the palate, that makes you feel loved and cared for and delighted, that brings new meaning to the words “Oneg Shabbat”.  This is a challah that makes manna look like a poor cousin.  This is a challah that makes you understand the fate of Marie Antoinette—for if your regular bread was true homemade challah, and someone told you that you had to eat cake—well, by God, you would revolt too, and the guillotine would seem like a splendid fate for such an infidel!

Well it’s not so easy to find a good challah at a bakery in Tucson, Arizona, which is why MeMe, Ilene, Sandy and Lynn do such a splendid job of creating delicious challah for us every week.  Which reminds me of an experience some years ago that happened at the beginning of December.  I found an almost-as-good-as-homemade challah in, of all places, Albertson’s market, not usually known for its high quality Jewish food.  For several weeks my family reveled in this challah at home: my kids loved it, I loved it, everyone loved it.  And then in early January we went into Albertson’s intending to buy several loaves of this challah, and discovered that there wasn’t a challah in the whole place.  There wasn’t a challah.  Finally we went up to the bakery counter and asked, “Where is that wonderful twisted egg bread you have had for the last several weeks?” 

“That’s a seasonal bread,” we were told.  “We only have it for Christmas!”

Just when we think we are welcomed and comfortable as Jews, in fact a fully accepted culture in Tucson, we are reminded yet again that there is a need, on a constant basis, to stretch and strain, to knead if you will, to continually affirm our identity in this place where we are in fact not the majority.

You know, there is an interesting parallel in this little challah tale.  It goes to the notion of exercise.  We are told that in order to keep muscles alive we must strain a little.  When things are too easy for us, when we have a smooth and even path to tread muscles atrophy, our abilities disappear, we no longer need to work to be who we are, and so we become something less.  So it is, I think, with being a Jew in Tucson, or anywhere in the Diaspora.  As soon as we think that we have it easy—we’ve found a genuinely good bagel, we have a place to buy thin sliced lox, we live with other people who know what Chanukah is—we’re slapped in the face, as it were, with Christmas challah.

This week we’re in the Torah portion of Va’era, which shines a very harsh and unforgiving light on a person who gets a terrible rap in Jewish history.  Pharaoh was the ultimate bad guy.  All you have to do is remember Yul Brenner in Ten Commandments: Pharaoh is not only a bad actor—arguably, played by a bad actor, too—but he is really the great villain, not only of our Pesach story but of most of the first half of the book of Exodus.  He’s the one who enslaves our people, who decides to kill our children, who threatens to destroy our entire future. 

But I think Pharaoh gets a bad rap, because, in fact, without Pharaoh you have no Judaism.  Without that important and, if you will, negative and pernicious influence you have nothing to stretch against, nothing to push against, nothing, in fact, to exercise those Jewish muscles. A little lesson about how important Egypt is in our own people’s history, in our minds, in the entire culture of Judaism.  In the Kiddush we chanted earlier tonight, we said something very interesting about Shabbat.  We said that we were doing this Shabbat Kiddush, doing the blessing over the wine because Shabbat is Zecher l’tziyat Mitzrayim, a remembrance of the Exodus from Egypt.  Now Shabbat is many things: a day of peace and rest, a day that commemorates God breaking from the work of creation to refresh and reinvigorate.  It is a time when we remember to be with our families, to worship God, and not to work.  But nowhere in any of the history of Shabbat does it tell us anything about Egypt. Zecher l’tziyat Mitzrayim it is not.  Passover is the holiday when we remember the Exodus from Egypt, but every Shabbat we are constantly reminded in the Kiddush and in several other prayers that even this Sabbath of rest is supposed to be a remembrance of Egypt. 

And then, on every single holiday, we also sing this phrase, Zecher l’tziyat Mitzrayim.  On Shavu’ot, which commemorates receiving the Torah at Sinai, we are told that we do this festival as a remembrance of the Exodus from slavery in Egypt.  On Sukkot, when we celebrate the feast of tabernacle and the harvest festival and give thanksgiving: Zecher l’tziyat Mitzrayim, a remembrance of the Exodus from Egypt.  Even on Rosh Hashanah when we look at our souls and begin a new year, we celebrate Zecher l’tziyat Mitzrayim, we say, as a remembrance of the Exodus from Egypt, as a resistance to this great and terrible Pharaoh, the one who stood against us, who enforced hard and unfair labor upon us, who in fact was our great antagonist in ancient history.

You could come to believe—and you would be right—that virtually everything in Jewish culture is a remembrance not only of the Exodus from Egypt, but as a response to this terrible tyrant.  In fact, without Pharaoh you have not only no Passover, but you have no Shavu’ot and no Ten Commandments, no Shabbat and no Judaism.  Only in the presence of this kind of resistance, of something that forces us to constantly reexamine our commitment to Judaism to push ourselves, to show our beliefs and to demonstrate our practice; only in the presence of this kind of resistance do we truly become Jews.

You know, we struggle frequently with the injustice of certain specifics in this Egypt story.  We are told that God hardened Pharaoh’s heart.  Pharaoh can harden his own heart but when God hardens it, how is that fair?  Why should God punish the people of Egypt in this way?  These are issues.  But I think the central issue of this Egypt story, the reason that Pharaoh matters so much to us, is because without that resistance we don’t truly come to know who we are.  Without endeavoring, without pushing, without working those spiritual muscles, we don’t genuinely choose to be Jews and we don’t remain committed Jews.  If we live in a place in which Albertson’s knows that challah is for Shabbat and not just for December, well, perhaps that makes it just a little too easy to be Jewish.  Maybe we don’t need to belong to a synagogue, maybe we don’t need to actualize, to live our Judaism, to experience our commitment through study and prayer and practice. 

It is Jews like Rabbi Jacob Rothschild, the father of last week’s speaker Rabbi Bill Rothschild, who fought for integration in the South when it was incredibly unpopular and dangerous to do so.  It was Jews like next week’s Cohon Memorial Foundation honoree, Rabbi Seth Farber, who works through an incredibly challenging system to get Jews fully accepted by a bureaucracy and a reactionary ultra-Orthodox rabbinate in Israel that pushes back constantly, who remind us what it means to be Jews.   It is Jews right here in Tucson who work hard—and often push uphill—to create a warm, loving, successful synagogue in the Northwest of Tucson.

My friends, this is not just a parable about Jewish history or the lives of our people or even the lives of our Jewish community of Tucson.  It is, rather, an injunction for each of us individually to embrace our ability to be different in a positive way, and to choose to be something more and something special.   It’s a time in which we can look to our commitments and on this Shabbat of Va’era, look to those in our past that stood up to the Pharaohs, who saw the resistance in their own lives and chose to commit themselves at a deeper and more profound level to Jewish action, to Jewish life, to Jewish celebrations.

On this Shabbat may you enjoy our homemade challah at Beit Simcha, and may you, too, find a level of commitment to equal those our people have found throughout our history.

To See

Vayechi וַיְחִי  Sermon 5783

Rabbi Sam Cohon, Congregation Beit Simcha, Tucson, Arizona

I hope you all had an enjoyable secular New Year’s Eve and day last weekend.  I know, I know—no tuxedo and bowtie tonight.  It’s quite a comedown from last Shabbat…

While this isn’t Rosh HaShanah, with its emphasis on personal reflection, it is inevitable as we begin a new calendar year that we look forward to the coming secular year, hope it brings new blessings and promise that the old year did not quite fulfill, and try to figure out just what the last 12 months really signified.  Was 2022 a good year or a bad one?  Were the changes we saw in our society meaningful or unimportant?  Will the stock market recover?  Will the war in Ukraine come to a conclusion?  Has COVID really declined into a kind of bad flu, or are we likely to see danger in its periodic resurgences?  Will the House of Representatives ever elect a new speaker?  And who really cares what happens to Twitter anyway?

It's hard to figure out just what an entire year in the life of our nation and our world meant.  But that’s not all that’s challenging this week.  Our Torah portion of Vayechi concludes the great book of Genesis, Breisheet.  And while Vayechi is interesting in itself, the fact that we are concluding the first book of the Torah right after completing a calendar year is just too tempting a coincidence to miss.  At this new-secular-year time we have the opportunity to do the same thing for the first of the five books of the Torah.

Genesis, Breisheet, the formative book of all Western religions, ranges in its scope from the creation of the world to the development of human beings, from the first natural disaster to the first murder, from the first city to the first war, from God’s initial covenant with Abraham to the tumultuous events that led to the creation of the children of Israel, from wandering nomadism to the entry into settled civilization, from Babylon to Canaan to Egypt.  Its stories and themes of faith and family, conflict and resolution, love and hatred, universal truth and simple beauty resonate today.  The triumphs and failures of the individual human lives portrayed in Genesis remain fresh and fascinating.  You can spend your life reading and exploring these tales and learn new lessons each and every time.   

First, there are the great theological messages of Genesis: there is only one God; we are engaged in a covenantal relationship with that God; each of us has the ability, and sometimes the obligation, to argue and wrestle with God over the right course in life; there is a greater plan than we can fathom at work, yet we have the free will to choose a good and moral course in life. All of this is central to everything that Judaism ultimately becomes. 

But even beyond the great religious mission of Breisheet, there is the wonderfully human dimension of this book.  The characters we meet, from fallible Adam and Eve to stolid Noah to the complex and exceedingly human patriarchs and matriarchs all the way to the remarkable figure of Joseph, remind us that the greatest of our ancestors, so many generations ago, were essentially just like us.  They show courage and cowardice, are honest and manipulative, fail and succeed.  After all that happens in this rich narrative we find that in so many ways we are just like them, and can learn from their accomplishments, and learn more from their many mistakes.

Each year teaches us lessons, both positive and negative.  The Torah, and its Book of Genesis, is unique in the way this single text teaches us new lessons continually.

This week’s portion of Vayechi is somewhat anticlimactic.  The 12 Israelite brothers, the true B’nai Yisrael, have all been reunited, our great ancestor Jacob finally passes from the scene, as Carol’s drash told us, and the whole family journeys to Canaan to bury Jacob with his ancestors in the cave of Machpeilah.  It is at this time that we are given the opportunity to try to glimpse the future.  And a wonderful Midrash gives us insight into the best way to do just that.

Rabbi Ron Shulman comments on this moment, and ponders the different perspectives with which we see our lives. He says, “Some people look at life and see only the facts. Others are able to look at life and see the meaning…” He compares the differing perspective of Joseph and of his brothers.

He cites this Midrash in Tanchuma which recounts that when Joseph is returning from his father’s burial in the Cave of Machpelah, he passes the very pit into which his brothers had cast him, and he looks into it. Based on this Midrash, Rabbi Shulman speculates what Joseph might have been thinking as he peered into the crater. He wonders, “How did he remember that moment in his life? What future could he imagine with his brothers, those who had threatened to kill him?”

The Midrash answers, “Joseph stood up and prayed, “Blessed is God Who performed a miracle for me in this place!”  There, gazing into a barren pit, the place of his greatest danger and fear, Joseph looks back and sees the wonder, mystery, and graciousness present in his life. In personal terms, such belief and understanding are what we might describe as a consciousness of God.

The brothers assume and fear that as he stands there staring into the very place of his original captivity, he is dwelling on the evil that they perpetrated against him, and now that Jacob is dead, Joseph will finally take revenge. So, they send him a message—which they fabricate—with the Jacob’s concubine Bilhah, saying that Jacob had urged Joseph not to take revenge.  Joseph weeps, says the Midrash, because his brothers have so little trust in his affection. When they appear, bowing abjectly, he speaks to them gently and puts their fears at rest. “Ten stars,” he tells them, “Could do nothing against one star, how much less could one star do against ten? How could I lay a hand on those whom both God and my father have blessed?”

Joseph sees so much farther than his brothers, here.  He sees that internal hostility, divisiveness, negativity and fraternal rivalry are not the way to act.  His brothers see only danger and potential revenge, and are willing to lie and mislead in order to save their own skins from imagined evil.

Joseph, in these final chapters of Genesis, uses this moment of perspective, this opportunity to assess and understand the past and look to the future, to bring healing and reassurance. 

It is a great lesson for us.  May we, too, learn to capitalize on this secular new year’s gift of perspective, conveyed artificially or otherwise, to see how to heal the wounds in our own society, and to move from division to unity. And may our efforts as we conclude Genesis help us move towards creating a society that shows concern, care, respect and understanding to all of its people.

In Praise of Chutzpah

Sermon, Shabbat Vayigash 5783

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We owe our very existence to chutzpah.

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

But the truth is that what many people call fate or destiny is often the result of the determination of those who most need it to make something positive happen.  Our chutzpah needs to directed toward positive goals like feeding the hungry, housing the homeless, fighting injustice.  Even growing our congregation and finding a permanent home.

In an interesting way, how much chutzpah we display can be the most accurate measure of our own Jewish commitment and energy, the truest measure of how serious we are about our Judaism.  So how much chutzpah are you willing to demonstrate for a good cause?  Are you willing to be chutzpadik to make the world a better, holier place?  To seek justice where it is absent?  To build meaningful Jewish lives, and valuable Jewish institutions?

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

Do You Believe in Miracles?

Sermon, Parshat Mikets, Shabbat Hanukkah 5783, Rabbi Sam Cohon

As many of you may know, my dad and I have been doing a virtual Hanukkah Menorah lighting each and every night of Hanukkah on our Beit Simcha Facebook page.  We started doing this two years ago, during the pandemic of Coronavirus, and have continued the practice each Hanukkah since then.  We enjoy having the opportunity to share this wonderful festival of light and dedication with an online community, and since I have over 100 Hanukkiot—and more each year—there is never a shortage of menorahs to light. 

There is nothing like adding light in a time of darkness, singing a few Hanukkah songs, and bringing our love of Judaism to a wider audience.  But there is one challenge to it: each day I have to come up with both a couple of songs I haven’t sung already, and an even greater challenge, a story or interesting narrative that tells something about Hanukkah that I haven’t already told.  That’s eight days of new material—or, rather, new-old material, since the events that we commemorate took place 2200 years ago.  It’s not the easiest of tasks even on a festival as rich in tradition as this one.

Now, you would think that, having done this Facebook broadcasting on Hanukkah for three years now, I would have written down what I spoke about in the past, and I could just recycle the same old stories and historical nuggets eight times.  Sadly, I am not always that well-organized.  Which means that each evening there is a certain cross between excitement and panic as 5 o’clock grows closer.  What exactly am I going to share about Hanukkah today that I didn’t share yesterday, or the day before, or the day before that?  What new information can I possibly impart about a holiday we have been celebrating as a people for more than two millennia, since Rome was a republic and public Jewish worship consisted of slaughtering and roasting animals on a stone altar?

Of course, the first night of Hanukkah it’s pretty easy: tell the basic story of the Hasmonean Revolt against the Seleucid Empire, and show off a menorah or two.  The second night I can talk about the “miracle of the oil”, and how, although it doesn’t show up in any records until the Talmud, some 600 years after the Maccabean rebellion, it has become the prevailing rationale for so much of our celebration of this festival.  By the third night I am talking about the different ways Hanukkiot, Hanukkah menorahs are made, and the ways that they have changed and grown more interesting and colorful over the years.  By the fourth night I am discussing dreidels, usually, explaining how they illustrate the centrality of learning in Judaism, the teaching to Torah that was banned by the Syrian-Greeks, and how this little game has become a great excuse for fun and games on Hanukkah—even though the original game is pretty, well, lame, and requires spicing up to make it more interesting and challenging.  By the fifth night of Hanukkah I’m on to oil, what it meant in the rituals of the Temple, the 7 branches of the original menorah—which just means lamp—and how it indicated God’s presence in the Beit HaMikdash, the holy Temple, both the First and Second Temples on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem.  By night six I can discuss the word Hanukkah as the source in Hebrew not only of dedication but also Chinuch, education, how pivotal that proved to be in motivating the people of Judea to fight for their right, not to party, but to learn, to grow, to develop as human beings and believing Jews, and why the right to study ideas is at the heart of true religious freedom.  On the seventh night?  I might be down to discussing Hanukkah gelt, how gift-giving on the holiday developed out of the tradition of giving just a little extra to the local teachers at this time in the Old Country, the Pale of Settlement, when coal was expensive and teachers, then as now, were badly paid.

By the eighth night I’m probably at the point where I need to talk about how to clean wax off of menorahs and get grease out of aprons after Hanukkah is over—or why my menorah collection has grown to unreasonable numbers.

Or maybe I’ll just talk about miracles, since we claim that this is a great holiday of miracles, when the few defeated the many, the weak defeated the strong, the believers beat the idolators.  Nes Gadol Haya Sham, we say, a great miracle happened there, in Judea, in Israel long ago. 

Which brings me to the actual subject of tonight’s Hanukkah and Mikets sermon…

It is fascinating that the central prayer we say on Hanukkah, al hanisim, praises God for the miracles that were wrought for our ancestors in those days long ago.  In truth, those miracles were really a simple matter of a more deeply committed people fighting for their homes and their beliefs and culture against a larger, numerically stronger enemy that had better military equipment. 

You know: what we would call a guerilla war today.  Only it was the Maccabees, the Hasmonean Jews who invented that idea, or at least who were, so far as we know, the first successful practitioners of that mode of battle and warfare.  Of course, there are now many examples of such successful wars taking place in history: it might have been the Maccabean Jews who started it, but it has happened again and again since then, an occupying power forced out by the passionate defense of a native people.  It happened, eventually, right here in America back in the American revolution; it happened to America in Vietnam, for that matter; it happened in Israel in 1948, nearly 75 years ago, and it appears to be happening in Ukraine now.  There are lots and lots more examples.

These guerilla wars, while they don’t always succeed, are important.  But scarcely miraculous, are they?  We know that they can work if enough members of the conquered people are unhappy enough to rebel with force and commitment.  That’s simply human solidarity in the face of brutal oppression, which is powerful and heartening but necessarily miraculous.  No, the miracle for the Maccabees may not have been the military victory, but the fact that enough Jews got along well enough, and agreed with each other enough, to fight long enough to expel the Syrian Greeks.  How often does that happen?     

Or perhaps the Hanukkah miracle is that a strange idea, the notion that there is only one true God, and we have the right to worship that God as we see fit, the fact that incredible idea survived in spite of powerful oppression.  Because lots of great truths can be suppressed when enough effort is exerted against them.

One thing is certain: if the leaders of the Maccabean revolt—Mattathias, Judah, Jonathan, and the rest—hadn’t seized the opportunity when it presented itself, if they hadn’t used the very geography of Israel to their military advantage, if the people hadn’t been ready to rebel, and yes, if the Romans hadn’t weakened the Seleucid Empire by defeating them in war.  Perhaps miracles only work when people are ready to take advantage of them.

You know, we always celebrate Hanukkah around the time of year when we chant the Torah portion of Mikets, which happened to be my daughter Cipora’s bat mitzvah portion.  It is a very long portion, by the way, and actually has more sentences in it than any other weekly Torah portion—and since my daughter chanted the whole portion, she has never stopped reminding me of that fact.  Mikets, as Ed has told you so beautifully, is about Joseph, and this week we get the heart of the extraordinary Joseph narrative that fills the last four weekly Torah portions in Genesis.  And it is, in its own way, a true miracle story, too.  As we begin the story, Joseph is at the lowest point of his life, and it would be the lowest point of nearly anyone’s life. Betrayed into slavery by his brothers, betrayed by his owner’s wife into prison, he is forgotten even by the fellow prisoner he has helped. 

But then the miracles start to happen.  From Joseph’s perspective, he is dragged out of prison, cleaned up, brought to Pharaoh, and after he interprets a couple of dreams he is catapulted to the heights of power and fame.  From the bottom he shoots to the very top.

Now that’s truly a miracle.  One moment you are an inmate, with perhaps a death sentence to be handed down soon.  And just a few moments later, literally less than a chapter of Torah, you are the second most powerful man in the country, and perhaps the world.

Of course, even this miracle story wouldn’t have happened if Joseph, an abandoned Hebrew inmate, hadn’t been ready to seize his opportunity and rise to the occasion.  He did so magnificently, was rewarded for it, and we call it, well, a miracle.

I’m not saying miracles don’t ever occur.  But surely the lesson of both Hanukkah and the Joseph story is that it is best not to count on miracles, but simply to be ready to take advantage of them if they do actually occur.

What was it that David Ben-Gurion, the first prime minister of Israel, said long ago about miracles?  “In Israel, in order to be a realist, you must believe in miracles.”  But you also must be ready to take advantage of them.

In our own way, our Congregation Beit Simcha and its success have been a kind of miracle—but a miracle made possible because people were ready to work and show dedication and make what otherwise would have been impossible into reality.

That is, above all, the great Jewish lesson.  May it continue to be true for each of you, for our congregation, and for our people, on this holiday, and always.

Identity and You

Sermon Shabbat Vayishlach 5783

I am not sure that wrestling is an especially Jewish sport.  Then again, I’m not exactly certain that any sport can be called especially Jewish these days.  In the 1930s, when tough Jews were coming up from the tenements and slums of the Lower East Side and elsewhere, there were many great Jewish boxers.  In the late 1940s basketball—believe it or not—was dominated by Jews.  And there have always been a few standout Jewish baseball players, swimmers, tennis players, gymnasts, and even football players.  But wrestling?  Goldberg notwithstanding—if you remember him—is wrestling any kind of a sport for nice Jewish boys?

Near the beginning of our Torah portion of Vayishlach this week, Jacob has his name changed.  At the end of the great wrestling match that forms a central aspect of our story, the angel or human opponent gives Jacob a new name.  No longer will be he known as Ya’akov, the heel, but instead as Yisrael, “the one who wrestles with God.”  That name, of course, has a double place in our heritage.  It becomes the name of both the great people who is descended directly from Jacob, the B’nai Yisrael, the children of Israel; and it is attached to the land we will ultimately inherit as an eternal possession, the Land of Israel.  Both play a crucial role in the life of our people and in our identity:  Am Yisrael, the peoplehood of Israel; and Erets Yisrael, the land of Israel. 

I am often asked to briefly explain what Judaism is.  Since I’m a rabbi, most people assume that should be a pretty straightforward thing to do.  After all, it’s relatively easy to explain that Christianity or Islam or Hinduism or Buddhism are religions and have belief systems; it’s not even all that difficult to clarify the differences between, say, Roman Catholicism and Protestant Christianity.  But it’s far more difficult to explain just what Judaism is. 

The question becomes is Judaism a religion, a nationality, an ethnicity, an ethical philosophy, a world-view, a culture or a civilization?  The simple answer is yes… that is, Judaism is all of these things, and perhaps, for some Jews, mixtures of some or all of them.  But it’s a complex question, for Jewish identity is forged out of a combination of each of these elements, and can change for us over the course of our lives.

First, let us be clear: there is no doubt Judaism is certainly a religion, likely the oldest continually practiced religion on the planet.  There are variations between the different streams of Judaism—Orthodox, Conservative, Reform, Progressive, Reconstructionist, Renewal—but Judaism is surely a religion, and every denomination of Judaism has recognizable beliefs, liturgy, and rituals, as all religions do.

There is also no question that Judaism is a nationality, since Israel is the only officially Jewish country in the world, the first nation with a Jewish majority population in over 1800 years, and the only country where being Jewish is a crucial aspect of national identity.  That means that, for Israelis, being Jewish is a huge part of who they are, even if it’s just because they are from the Jewish State or were born there.

Judaism is also a kind of ethnicity, or more accurately, ethnicities, since Jews come from every continent on the globe except Antarctica: there are Ashkenazic Jews of Eastern European heritage from America and Europe and Australia and South Africa, there are Sephardic Jews of North African or Spanish or Portugese, or Balkan heritage, there are Iranian Jews of Persian Jewish ethnicity, North African Jews from Morocco, Tunisia and Algeria, Yemenite Jews of Arabian Jewish ethnic heritage, Italian Jews of Romaniyot background, ethnic Jews from the Caucasus of Russia—truly Caucasian Jews—black Jews from Ethiopia and Uganda and Kenya, and Iraqi Jews, Damascus and Aleppo Jews, Greek Jews and Jews from India and Argentina and Brazil and on and on…  and for many of these Jews their ethnic Jewish identity is a big part of who they are.

And certainly, Judaism has serious claims to being an ethical world-view and philosophical system, a monotheistic approach to justice and morality that has helped shape all of Western Civilization and the modern world. It is often that quality that attracts people interested in converting to Judaism, the focus on truth, ethics and meaning in a confusing world in which those central concepts are so crucial and are often challenged.

Now Jewish culture, or really cultures, encompasses holiday celebrations, food, music, art, literature, theater, film, dance, ritual objects, architecture, archeology, clothing, philanthropy and more.  And each of these varied Jewish cultural expressions is distinct, extraordinary and remarkable.

Finally, you can make a good case that all these elements come together to forge Jewish civilization, a constantly evolving creation of the Jewish people throughout our long, complicated history.  

So, given all of this, I am always curious about the way we are defined.  When I served as a rabbi in Shanghai, China a few years ago I discovered that Judaism is not one of only five recognized religions in China.  The Jewish communities there are considered ethnic-cultural groups, and can’t be open about their religious expressions, although they do hold regular services and holiday observances.  In general, they are also closely associated with Israel as a national identity for the Jews who live there, even if they are from France, Australia, South Africa, Canada, or the US.    

Recently in America there has been some, shall we say, confusion as to whether Jews here should associate our national identity with Israel or not.  That is, we have been told that politicians who are strongly pro-Israel should be inoculated against associating with virulent Anti-Semites because of all that they have done for the Israel-US relationship.  While many of us see Israel as an essential aspect of our Jewish identity, and I strongly encourage connection to Israel among our congregation and our students, I doubt that most American Jews would prefer to be defined as primarily loyal to Israel for national reasons.  We are American Jews, loyal and dedicated to our own nation, seeking to see it live to the highest national standards, however we conceive of them.  We love Israel, but we are not Israelis.  We live here, vote here, and generally speaking expect our own children ultimately to live here, too.  If we have served in the armed forces, we have done so in the US armed forces, not the IDF. 

That is, most of us don’t really perceive our Judaism as essentially nationalist in nature.  We are part of the nation of Israel, in the largest sense, but we see it much more as a function of our place in Klal Yisrael, the peoplehood of Israel, rather than as citizens in absentia of Erets Yisrael, the land of Israel. 

So, I wonder—how do you see your own Jewish identity?  Is it purely religious, based on beliefs, prayers and practices?  Is it primarily based around devotion to Israel?  Is it ethnic, in the sense of being connected to traditions, holidays, food and music?  Is it based on admiration for and dedication to Jewish ideals such as justice, ethics, religious action, caring and compassion?  Is it focused on your connection to other Jews, either by culture or past experience? 

I think you will find that it’s somewhat different for each of us here tonight—and for most Jews you meet anywhere in the world.  Judaism has stubbornly resisted easy categorization by anyone for a long time, and I seriously doubt that will change.  Which is as it should be.  In fact, it is the eternal strength of our extraordinarily flexible and organically vital tradition, and very likely just why Judaism has continued to be a meaningful and important religion for thousands of years.

So, my friends, on this Shabbat when Israel was first named, and in a period when our Jewish identity is often framed solely for its connection to the modern state of Israel, I encourage you to continue to develop your own Jewish identities in every way.  I hope that you, like me, will always explore ways of deepening each of those aspects—indeed, all of those aspects—that make Judaism so vital and evolutionary.  Because we ain’t just one thing—and that’s definitely for good.

May we all find ways to deepen our own Jewish identities in every good way, on this wrestling Shabbat, and always.

Beating the Oldest Conspiracy Theory of All

Sermon Shabbat Vayeitzei 5783 

This morning I was interviewed by KGUN-9 about all the increased Ant-Semitism today.  It is not the first time I have been tasked with speaking about an unpleasant topic in the media, and it will not be the last.

When I began The Too Jewish Radio Show over 20 years ago, one of my first guests was Professor Leonard Dinnerstein, alav haShalom, the founder of the Judaic Studies Program at the University of Arizona and the author of what was then the authoritative book on the subject, entitled, AntiSemitism in America.  Len Dinnerstein was, quite literally, the authority on the subject, and his words were important for everyone to hear.  And what he said back then, two decades ago, was the Anti-Semitism was in severe decline in America, which was certainly true by any and every measure. 

Even after 9/11—and this was just a year after that terrible event—you could certainly make a very strong case that Anti-Semitic acts and attitudes had been fading dramatically for decades.  The ADL and other organizations began recording and totaling Anti-Semitic acts in the 1930s, and had continued to do so.  What they found was that each decade—indeed, nearly every year—saw lower and lower rates of Anti-Semitism in our country.  If you had included the early part of the 20th century, which hadn’t been carefully measured but included horrifying Anti-Semitic acts like the lynching of Leo Frank, you would surely have found the same thing to be true.

But that long downward trend in anti-Jewish attitudes and actions has now dramatically changed for the worse.  And both in word and deed Anti-Semitic violence and open hostility have grown to the extent that attitudes we hadn’t seen, at least on the surface, have again become normalized and circulated.

My guest on The Too Jewish Radio Show this coming Sunday morning is a woman named Rita Katz, an expert on terrorism and violent forms of Anti-Semitism who founded an organization called SITE.  She herself was an undercover anti-terrorist operative for the US government, and her story is fascinating.  An Iraqi Jew born in Basra, she moved to Israel with her family and then, after serving in the IDF and getting her degrees in international relations and Middle East studies, she moved with her husband and children to the DC area.  She was recruited to become an operative against Islamists, including Al-Qaida and ISIS, and eventually moved over to working against domestic terrorists—who suddenly were predominantly Neo-Nazis and white supremacists, and viciously Anti-Semitic.  In her view, they are far more dangerous now than Islamic terrorists.  She said that she now is so concerned about violence from ultra-right Anti-Semites that for the first time in her life she no longer keeps a mezuzah on her front door.

So, what is behind Anti-Semitism?  Well, that’s a class I have taught and probably need to teach again.  To be honest, for most of my rabbinic career I avoided teaching that class; why would I want to delve into the horrifying and deeply painful centuries of tragedy and torment?  But when I began to study the subject in order to teach it, it turned out to be fascinating in a perverse sort of way.  “Traditional” Anti-Semitism was based in both the fear and hatred of anyone who appears to be truly “other”—different skin color, different customs, different holidays, different sexual orientation, different foods and so on—combined with a genuine religious theological problem unique to Christianity.  It is a serious and important subject, but it is perhaps more than I can cover in one December sermon.

But this new rise in Anti-Semitism in America is a horrifying and disturbing form of hatred that comes from a somewhat different place.  It has no basis in reason or respect, of course.  Notably, it creates its unique form of evil from small biases and bigotries that it inflates insanely, and it is based as much in the intellectual and social insecurities of its creators as in anything else.  This new American Anti-Semitism makes something terrible out of small human differences of belief and practice, and then actualizes that hatred into violence.  And boy, does it embrace the culture of violence.

Crucially, it starts with small items and blows them up into a rage based on very little at all but nonetheless bordering on the pathological.

I’m reminded of the old children’s stone soup story—do you know it?  It goes like this.  A stranger comes to a small town in the Old Country and in the marketplace there announces that he can create soup out of a stone.  The local shtetl residents are highly skeptical, and the stranger says he will show them.  He says he is ready to make the soup, but all he requires is a pot, which a villager provides. Oh, and maybe a little water, which comes quickly.  And perhaps a stick or two of firewood, and again a shtetl resident brings it.  And maybe a potato or two, and a carrot… soon the shtetl residents have provided everything he needs to actually make the soup.  Amazing—he has made soup out of a stone!

Similarly, today’s American Anti-Semitism—much of it online in social media and in various chat forums—takes the smallest of items and transforms them into conspiracies.  When you think about it, Anti-Semitism is the oldest and most persistently virulent form of conspiracy theory in human history.  And like all conspiracy theories it feeds on tiny bits of information—true or false—as kindling that then inflames the built-in rage that unhappy people choose to exhale as violent destruction.

The normalization of Anti-Semitism by prominent people, right and left, is deeply disturbing.  I thought we had grown out of that idiocy decades ago, and so did many experts.  But when those people we have raised to high office, or prominence in the arts or sports, choose to show respect and share meals with virulent Anti-Semites, we are going down the wrong path. We have to object strongly when those we agree with do such insane things, not only when those we dislike.  We are only effective when we are willing to hold our friends to the proper standards, not just our perceived enemies.

Anti-Semitism is a vile form of racism.  It is the oldest form of racism.  It is conspiracy theory writ large.  It is wrong, always, when expressed against any Jews of any movement or denomination.

Look, I don’t mean to frighten anyone tonight.  In truth, America is not Czarist Russia or Nazi Germany or even the Soviet Union or the Arab countries after the birth of the State of Israel.  We Jews continue to enjoy a golden age right here in America in 2022, living and praying freely and openly, accomplishing great things in every area of endeavor.  But this pernicious scourge is afoot, and we need to be both aware of it and devise effective ways of combating it.

In my view, the primary way to fight Anti-Semitism is to build bridges with those people of good faith of other religions and cultures.  My own experiences have certainly testified to that: when Jews are attacked, we need to reach out to all people of good faith and create strong bonds of real community. 

The greatest example of that, in my rabbinate, took place at this very time of year when I served as the student rabbi in Billings, Montana.  I flew in every two weeks to lead services and teach students, as was the pattern for student rabbis in smaller communities that did not have enough congregants to support a full-time rabbi.  I took the pulpit to get out of the midwestern grey of Cincinnati, figuring I’d learn how to fly fish and get some skiing in.  As it turned out, that wasn’t what made the year so unusual.

My student pulpit experience in Billings was extraordinary, and uniquely challenging.  Temple Beth Aaron was a historic congregation of about 50 families at the time.  During the fall of 1993 several minor but troubling anti-Semitic incidents occurred, and just before Hanukkah two very active member families had their windows, decorated for Hanukkah, smashed.  In one case a glass storm door was smashed by a brick; in the second a concrete block was thrown through a boy's bedroom window.  While no one was injured the shock was great.  Anti-Semitic acts had been essentially unknown before this in Billings, the largest city in Montana but only about 90,000 people then.

Within a day or so of the second attack the story was on the front page of the Billings Gazette, and there was huge local publicity.  Since the family in the second attack was very active in the Montana Human Rights Network, they organized the local churches to pass out pictures of menorahs that Sunday, and soon homes all over Billings had menorahs in their windows.  A local convenience store chain did the same, and a sporting goods store put up a marquee sign that read "NOT IN OUR TOWN."  The positive response to these evil acts was spreading like wildfire.  Oddly, some Christians who put up the menorahs even had their Christmas decorations vandalized.  The story was picked up quickly by national news outlets, and they descended on Billings.

I was contacted by the Human Rights Network and local ministers who wished to show support for the Jewish community by attending our Hanukkah Shabbat.  Our sanctuary, in a pinch, could have held perhaps 100 people, including standing room.  We arranged to do a candlelight rally across the street before services, and then to have the windows open during the service so the many people who came could hear and participate in the service. 

The rally drew 450 people, and we spoke from a truck bed using a portable sound system.  It was a remarkable experience, and very powerful one, seeing and hearing all the support of the Billings community.  The Police Chief, Wayne Inman, provided support and protection.  I still have the photo of the president of the congregation, David Myers, lighting the menorah with me.  The service that followed was beautiful--we had prepared a musical ensemble and choir for the occasion--and when I spoke about Joseph and the Maccabees and the danger of hiding Jewish identity I knew that it would be controversial.  The sanctuary was ringed outside with people holding candles and sharing the service through the open windows, making certain that no one disturbed our worship.

After Hanukkah we quickly organized a strong interfaith clergy group in Billings, and the rest of the year evolved to include a series of interfaith events, including an interfaith-inclusive Passover Seder for about 250 people at the Catholic Church that filled up so quickly they had to turn away many people, and a concert at the American Lutheran Church of Jewish cantorial music that I performed that drew close to 500 people.  At Passover as well an author came to town and the book she created became "The Christmas Menorahs", still a popular children's book. 

It was an amazing example of the way that creating solidarity with people with strong religious and community values makes all the difference in the world in responding to Anti-Semitism, and to racism and hatred of all kinds.  In other words, the best way to respond to Anti-Semitism is to demonstrate that the responses to it will actually create greater respect for others in society, more understanding and far stronger bonds of community that cross all the lines of religion, race and identity.

May we remember this great lesson, and apply to the strange and challenging times we are living in today.  And may we all work to demonstrate that understanding and respect can and will triumph over hate and conspiracy theories this time, and every time.

Tzoris and Thanksgiving

Sermon Shabbat Toldot 5783

I have often contended that Thanksgiving is truly a Jewish holiday.  What else do you call a festival focused on overeating, in which you must invite all of your relatives, including the ones you don’t like, for a giant meal?  A Jewish holiday!  No doubt!

I’ll never forget the complexity of the seating arrangements at my house growing up, and the delicacy of deciding who could sit next to whom and who could not be placed in hearing distance of which relative.  For example, my mother and her brother Max, who had never gotten along their entire lives, had to be placed pretty far apart, but Max, a successful pharmacist and TV personality but a socialist by politics and an atheist in belief, also had to be placed far from his cousin Bernie, a successful OBGYN to the stars—he had been Marilyn Monroe’s gynecologist, believe it or not—who was much more conservative politically than Max and loved to goad him.  My Bubbie Irma needed to be away from the philistine commentary of cousin Bernie, too, for she was Victorian in social outlook.  My twenty-something cousin Gary might or might not show and would certainly be late and so always had to be placed at a seat that would be accessible once the dining room was immovably full of people crammed around the various linked tables arranged to accommodate everyone in a dining room quite a bit too small.  Of course, my mom’s friend Roche´ would talk nonstop, so she had to be near someone who didn’t mind that, or, preferably, was hard of hearing.  And don’t forget that there are two side seats for each guest, and you don’t want to separate husbands and wives, and some people take up more room, and kids have friends, too.

In truth, only my mom and eventually my sister Deborah had the combination of personal knowledge and human perception to successfully arrange our seating for a peaceable Thanksgiving dinner.  In my view, the only thing more difficult in my house growing up than figuring out the seating at Thanksgiving was doing so for Passover Seder...

And let us not forget that my mom and sisters had to be available to help run back and forth to the kitchen bringing immense platters of food and clearing dishes.  Kitchen work was unapologetically sexist in those days, except that when I got old enough to help, my mom drafted me, too, regardless of gender. 

I genuinely hope that your own Thanksgiving dinner guest experience was simpler than mine as a child, and that you have good reason to give thanks this year for all that you have. 

Incidentally, or not so incidentally, the inspiration for the original American Thanksgiving dinner was the Biblical festival of Sukkot, the feast of Booths or Tabernacles in the Tanakh, the Hebrew Bible.  Sukkot was also the source for the upcoming festival of Hanukkah, an eight-day and night celebration established by the Hasmonean Maccabees as a way to give thanks for their victory over the oppressor Syrians and the rededication of the Temple in Jerusalem.  The emotion of gratitude and thanksgiving plays a major role in so much of what we ought to experience about religion and our world.

Last year at this time I had the challenging experience of debating someone, by text and Facebook messages, who felt that associating a holiday so often based on the white conquest of Native Americans in North America with anything Jewish demonstrated the privilege that I must feel as a white male in our society.  In fact, on my ical today is not Black Friday at all, but Native American Heritage day, which is certainly a better theme than “let’s see how much we can run up the credit cards the day after Thanksgiving.”

Now the argument that I ended up in last year was serious and emotional.  I had sent out a general email that said, essentially, “Have a happy Thanksgiving, enjoy your family, Thanksgiving is based in Jewish ideas of a holiday of gratitude, etc.”  This bright and highly educated person took serious issue with my rather bland and generic happy holiday message, and said that the genocide of Native peoples in this Hemisphere as nothing to celebrate.  I responded that a holiday of gratitude for what we have should be non-political, that thanksgiving is a universal religious motivation, etc.—and that went exactly nowhere, as this person, partly native in her heritage, believed firmly that Thanksgiving was, at least symbolically, really about the brutal eradication of the Native American way of life on two continents, North and South America.  And they then consistently accused me of living in a world of white male privilege and being unable to understand native trauma.  No matter what I said, it only seemed to make it worse.

The argument only softened when my lovely wife Sophia suggested I note that my own ancestors were persecuted, tortured, expelled and slaughtered for two thousand years on several continents.  We Jews truly bore no responsibility for the destruction of Native American cultures.  We surely have been the victims of historical persecution for longer than anyone on earth, and the horrific attacks we have experienced have come perilously close to genocide on more than one occasion.

At that, the argument turned, and we somehow ended up almost on the same side.  But I must admit: I decided not to send out a “Happy Thanksgiving” message this year…  Discretion may yet prove to be the better part of valor.

This whole discussion brings up an interesting and serious problem that is finally being examined in more serious ways these days.  Jews in the west often have white skins, and aren’t so obviously distinguishable from majority cultures in North America or Europe, and through hard work and education we have climbed the social ladder to great success in many walks of life, but, frankly, we are not actually, um, “white” to many people.  And, generally speaking, we often don’t think the same way that people who grow up fully accepted by the larger society do.   

And there is good reason for this.  There have been many examples of the renewed normalization of Anti-Semitism in our society in recent years.  On the left, Anti-Semitism typically isn’t even viewed as racism at all; after all, Jews don’t have black or brown skins—never mind that many Jews do, of course—and hating Israel and denying the Jewish right to a state aren’t viewed as racist attitudes but often as “progressive ones.”  Which makes it possible, and popular, on the left to voice frankly hateful Anti-Semitic views with impunity.  On the political right, a recurrent, ugly and at times deadly Anti-Semitic subculture has embraced neo-Nazi conspiracy theories first ginned up centuries ago about Jewish control of the world.  Jews are demonized as the progressive liberals who are allowing immigrants to flood our cities or permitting woke perspectives to destroy our social morality.  Both views can’t be true, of course. In fact, neither are true at all. 

You see, of course, we can’t win here, apparently not even during Thanksgiving weekend.  But maybe winning is not the point at all.

Because we can learn some valuable lessons from all of this.  In this week’s portion of Toldot, Isaac ends up in a series of disputes about water, as Sophie’s Drash said.  Water policy in arid lands has been a major issue for many centuries, and it remains so today right here in Arizona.  Back then, Isaac, in a series of conflicts that mirror some his father Abraham had in the previous generation, had a choice.  He could contest the issue, or he could move on, avoid the conflict and build a life and a future beyond the conflict.  He moves to a new location, digs more wells, and continues the growth of his family and destiny.  It is a positive response to a negative stimulus, and in the end, Isaac has much to be grateful for.

In recent years the rising tide of Anti-Semitism has become a focus for far too much of our Jewish world and its myriad organizations.  That is not to say that it doesn’t matter.  But it is to say that there is so much in Judaism that is joyous, meaningful and incredibly positive, that celebrates simcha, as our own Congregation Beit Simcha does, that we ultimately need to look there for our own sources of goodness and blessing.

We Jews have known suffering over our long history.  Now, in our own period, at a time when the challenges we face are so much less threatening than the ones our ancestors experienced, we have much to celebrate.  And certainly a great deal to be thankful for, this weekend and always.

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.