How We Create Our Holy Congregation

Sermon Parshat Acharei Mot-Kedoshim 5783

With the advent of the internet and its daily overdose of information, nowadays you can learn how to do almost anything just from watching a YouTube video. 

Want to know how to erect a barbed wire fence?  Watch a YouTube video.  Need to build your own septic system?  Watch a YouTube video.  Trying to learn to dance the skanky leg?  Watch a YouTube video.  Want to make baked Alaska?  Watch a YouTube video.  Wish to sing opera?  Watch a YouTube video.  Seek to pilot a jet airplane?  Watch a YouTube video.  Have to deliver a baby in the back seat of an Uber ride?  You got it: watch a YouTube video.

But for one thing there is, as yet, no YouTube video available.  I know this because I looked for it this week.  There is no YouTube video for the commandment given at the very beginning of the second of our double Torah portion this week, Kedoshim.

Kedoshim begins memorably: “You shall be holy, because I the Lord your God am holy.  Kedoshim tih’yu, ki kadosh Adonai Eloheichem…”

But what does it mean to be holy?  And how are we to go about being it?

Frankly, that’s a good question, especially today. 

There are YouTube videos on how to light Shabbat candles, how to lead a Passover Seder, how to sing the blessing for the Omer, and even on how to chant Torah.  But there is no YouTube video that can teach you how to “Be holy because I, the Lord your God, am Holy.”

And so we 21st century Jews need to try to figure this out for ourselves. 

The first issue that arises is just who it is that gets to make things holy.  The obvious answer is that it is God who does so, for God is holy; as the prophet Isaiah said in a passage we sing every Shabbat and weekday morning in the Kedushah, the prayer of sanctification, “holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts; the whole earth is filled with God’s glory.”  But since we are not privileged to have God around pointing out what it is that we are supposed to personally do to be holy, we need to rely on our own devices to determine what in our own lives is truly sacred.  And not just on our electronic devices, not even the ones that are broadcasting this service right now, to do so.

In general, even in this secular age, we think that some things are intrinsically holy, that certain objects or people or places are especially imbued with the quality of sacredness.  I have journeyed literally around the world in search of holiness, seeking places of sacredness on six of the seven continents.  I have climbed many a sacred mountain, bathed in various holy waters, explored sanctified caves, toured wonderful churches, mosques, temples, stupas, shrines and great ruins of the highest holiness. All have been, and mostly still are, considered to be deeply sacred, exalted, exceptionally special.  Many have been sacred to a series of different religions and observant people over the centuries and millennia, changing hands and gods but always retaining the aura of holiness.  These places are holy, Kadosh, and being there feels like a fulfillment of some kind of Kedoshim. 

Ok, rabbi, brilliant.  So God is holy.  And certain specific places are especially filled with God’s holiness.  We have solved it!

Only not so fast.  At least not for Jews.  You see, the Hebrew word for holiness, kadosh, comes from the word hekdesh, something set apart.  That is, in our own tradition, there is nothing intrinsically holy about holy things.  We simply set apart ordinary objects and so touch them with sanctity. Kadosh, sacred or holy, comes from a root word that simply means “set-aside” or “distinct.”  In Biblical Hebrew, hekdeish was the part of the produce of the land reserved for the use of the priests in the days when the Temple stood in Jerusalem.  Hekdesh was grain, mostly, like the barley of our Omer offering in this period of the year, but it might be cattle or sheep or chickens or vegetables or fruit or oil or wine or any other natural product that has been officially dedicated for the sole use of the priests, either Levites or Kohanim, the regular or higher priests, and for the support of the Temple. 

The produce itself—the wheat or dove or grapes or ram—was actually identical to the rest of the produce of the field or farm or vineyard or herd that it came from.  It wasn’t intrinsically sacred.  It was just regular old stuff until the person giving it decided that this portion of his or her work was going to be given to the Temple and the priests.  It was the gift of giving it for the purpose of creating holiness that actually made it holy.  In fact, you could sell the produce and give money instead and it was still hekdesh, still kadosh, still sacred.

The magic, the spirituality, the sacredness, was not in the item—or even in the place—but in the way that the individual person worked to create holiness, the ways in which he or she deliberately solicited sanctity. 

Holiness in Judaism was, from the beginning, a shared process, a covenant we have with God to make things, and people, holier.  I’ll give you another little example, one of my favorites.  Is a sheepskin holy?  Well, no, not in and of itself.  You can make a coat out of it—particularly if you are an Australian—and use it to keep warm in winter.  If you are from California, as I am, then you know that the proper use of sheepskins is as seat covers for Mustang convertibles.  They keep the seat cool and protect the leather seat from the endless summer sun and the salt air of the coast.  Nice to sit on.  Nothing holy there. 

So a sheepskin is not a particularly holy object.  But if you take that same sheepskin and clean the wool off of it, and properly scrape it, pretty soon you have parchment.  Still not holy.  Many political treaties used to written on parchment, and soon violated, after all.  And some graduation certificates are still written on parchment, or will be when have public graduation ceremonies again.  Now, however, if you take that parchment, and using special ink made with a 1600 year-old formula and you reverently write upon it the words of the Torah, from Genesis through Deuteronomy, and if you take that sheepskin and sew it onto and roll it on two wooden handles, and cover it over with a special garment, a kind of ephod, pretty soon you have a Torah.  And now every Jew will agree—and it’s very hard to get every Jew to agree to anything—every Jew will agree that the sheepskin has somehow become a Torah, and now it is clearly holy.

In general, you see, the creation of holiness is a partnership, a kind of joint project, between human beings and God.  While God provides the inspiration, the ideal of holiness and perfection, we are the ones who choose to imbue certain objects, like Torahs, like candle tables and arks of the Torah and Torah podiums on bimas, with holiness.  And we are also the ones who help to choose the people who will become holy.

In this context, I was thinking about how a congregation becomes holy.  A formal name for a synagogue—any shul, of course, but certainly this special Congregation Beit Simcha—is called a Kehilah kedoshah, a holy congregation.  It is a holy congregation because we join together in this sanctuary for prayer, and to hear Torah and Bible, to do festival observances, and to sing sacred music and seek to elevate our spirits.  It is a holy congregation because we study Torah and become bar and bat mitzvah and are confirmed and grow in the depth and breadth of our learning.  It is a holy congregation because we educate and inspire our children here.  It is a holy congregation because we visit the sick, and comfort the bereaved, and bury the dead, and celebrate with brides and grooms and new parents and grandparents.  It is a holy congregation because we help the homeless and the hungry, counsel the confused and wounded, welcome the stranger and the refugee, lead the community in addressing its issues. 

But it is mostly—perhaps completely—a holy congregation because you make it so.  It is your participation and partnership in this covenantal relationship with God and Beit Simcha that make this extraordinary place truly holy. It is your contributions of talent and energy, of spirit and, yes, tangible gifts that create our holy home here, our sacred place and sanctified community.

It is you who help to fulfill the commandment, the mitzvah of Kedoshim.

On this Shabbat, may you be inspired to deepen your shared work of covenant.  May you try to create even more holiness here.

When we do these small acts of covenant, we are able to affirm that we have managed, in our own human ways, to be holy… as God is holy.  To affirm the covenant, the partnership that allows our lives to be touched with sanctity.  Here in our own Temple, through our own work.

Ken Yehi Ratson.  May this be God’s will.  But, mostly—may this be the way we do our own sacred work.

A Growing-Up Country

Sermon Shabbat Tazria-Metzora, Israel’s 75th Birthday

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

This week we celebrate Israel’s 75th Anniversary, a big birthday for a still-young country.  It’s probably only after a nation reaches 100 years old and still has the same system of government that you can truly stop talking about how young it is.  There are certain things a nation needs to work out over time, and no matter how quickly it develops and advances—and Israel has made astonishing progress in this fairly short period of 75 years—it’s only after the passage of a couple of full generations that things truly settle in.

Israel has changed dramatically over the seven and half decades of its existence as a modern nation.  The Israel of 1948 had about 600,000 residents.  That is fewer people than live in three of Israel’s metropolitan areas now, and the population has grown to 9.7 million people, including 7.2 million Jews, roughly half the Jewish population of the entire world.  The absorption of immigrant Jews from all over the world has been astonishing; in its three quarters of a century Israel has absorbed many more immigrants than it had as original citizens by a factor of 10.  If America in the 75 years since World War II had successfully integrated 300 million immigrants instead of the 30 million who have actually arrived here it would approximate Israel’s ability to accept immigrants.

In 1948, the new nation of Israel was, frankly, a poor country, and it remained so throughout the 1950s, 60s, 70s and even 80s.  It was a 2nd World kind of country well into the 1990s when the economy dramatically expanded, but today it is decidedly a first-world nation, similar to Italy or Spain in its living standards.  Israel’s status as “Start-Up Nation” is well earned, as the Israeli high-tech sector is acknowledged throughout the world as a center of innovation and economic development.  It is also on the leading edge of medical technologies and treatments, and Israel may be the world’s most advanced country in strategic and technological water resource use and development, as well as desert agriculture and solar power.  Israel has become a regional economic powerhouse, on the level of highly developed European nations.  It is the envy of its Middle Eastern neighbors.

Militarily, for three decades the nascent Jewish nation was under existential threat of destruction.  That was true from 1947’s UN Partition Plan until the Camp David Accords in the late 1970s, which meant that until then any war could be one that led to Israel’s annihilation and the murder of all the Jews living there—and there were four such wars, each of which ended with Israel victorious but always at a high price.  But with peace treaties with Egypt and eventually Jordan, and of course the incredible development of the Israeli military and intelligence organizations, as well as the various industries and government entities associated with them, Israel has never been more secure militarily that is now.  

Diplomatically, Israel was incredibly isolated throughout most of its early history.  The UN might have legally created the country—the first it ever voted to form, and still one of only a small handful that have been internationally invented by the UN—but Israel was a pawn in the Cold War battle between the US and Soviet Union for decades.  From the 1940s to the 1970s and 80s the Arab League boycott of Israel was in force, and it only lost its economic teeth during the Oslo Process of the 1990s.  Its disappearance certainly helped with the Israeli economic surge of the 1990s and 2000s, fueled by the new treaties with Arabs and the rapid pace of investment and development in Israel.   With the Abraham Accords just a couple of years ago Israel’s integration into the international community has never been more developed.  While far from completely welcomed diplomatically, Israel is more widely accepted and influential than it has ever been.

And one small fact that emerged from our Religious School learning about Israel: do you know how many Olympic Gold Medals Israelis have won?  That number is 3—not a huge number, but not bad for a tiny country that forms 1/10 of 1% of the world’s population.  But do you know how many Nobel Prizes Israelis have won?  13!  Any country where there are 13 Nobel Laureates and only 3 Olympic gold medalists certainly has at least most of its values in the right places.

Politically, how is Israel doing?  Isn’t it tearing itself apart over political and religious divisions now?  Isn’t it on the verge of a widely predicted civil war?

Well, no, not at all.  Israel is experiencing widespread peaceful protests over a key political issue, the independence of its judiciary and the limits on executive authority.  Like open, liberal, orderly societies it has a vibrant free press and great tradition of vigorous public debate and protest, and these are being exercised every day.  But it is nowhere near civil war, or anything like it.  For a 75 years-young nation it is doing just what it should do, hashing out important issues publicly and peacefully—if loudly.

Are there problems in Israel? Sure.  The Palestinian issue is not going away anytime soon, and after 55 years the West Bank is no more fully integrated into Israel than the Gaza Strip was before Israel walked away from it under Ariel Sharon.  There is growing economic inequality in a nation that started out socialist and egalitarian.  There is undoubtedly a religious-secular divide, and an ultra-Orthodox/Chareidi vs everyone else divide, too.  There is some political corruption—imagine that; we would never see that in the United States!—the cost of living is very high, and my goodness they have a traffic problem in all major cities. Terrorism is always a disturbing threat, although it directly impacts very few people, and the level of stress in Israeli society is just as high as you would expect in a Jewish country.  And Israeli politics is pretty crazy—which coming from an American in 2023 is saying something.

On balance?  Israel is doing amazingly well and should absolutely be celebrated!

Look, before we reached a century our own United States fought a brutal Civil War that killed 15% of all the young men in the country.  Brutal human slavery was legal, widespread and flourishing in America until we were nearly 90 years old.  And of course, when America turned 75 years old women still couldn’t vote or own property or hold public office—that lasted another 70 years—and the original owners of the continent, Native Americans, were being herded like cattle onto “reservations” and hunted, starved, and massacred.  As America turned 100 years old, Jim Crow laws were being established all across the South, turning Blacks into, at best, second-class citizens, while Chinese immigrants were ruthlessly exploited and brutalized.  When we turned 125 years old, strike-breaking in America usually resulted in the massacre of many striking workers, child labor was ubiquitous, and American cities were almost literally cesspools of congestion, pollution and disease. 

We grew up as a nation, and for all of our weirdness and social challenges, we fixed a lot of those horrible problems.  Israel will fix its problems, too, as they are nowhere near as hard as the problems it has already overcome so magnificently.

It’s an amazing country, and Jews everywhere should be proud of it, especially this week.  Frankly, all people today should be proud of it and aspire to achieve what Israel has created in just 75 years.

We are Jews; we will find things to both celebrate and criticize in everything, including Israel.  That’s as it should be; no one, and nothing, is perfect, and that’s certainly true of nations.  But this week, we should all take a moment to enjoy what the only Jewish nation on the planet has produced in just three-quarters of a century of extraordinary life: a positive gift to an often ungrateful world of a vibrant, super-energetic democracy, a scientific and creative arts center of vitality that continues to develop and mature.  Mazal Tov to our own Jewish country; may it continue to mature and grow up, with our love and support.

Silence and Action

Sermon Shemini 5783

 We Jews are talkers.  We are, in fact, among the most famous talkers in all of history. We are a people renowned for our words, and our leaders are legendary for their verbosity.  Even Moses, a man with a speech impediment who protests that he is a man of few words, manages to orate the entire Book of Deuteronomy, supposedly in one long sermon.

There is a reason we are lawyers, comedians, entertainers, and public speakers of all kinds.  We truly have a tremendous oral tradition.

Rabbis, of course, are no exception.  There is a classic Jewish joke.  One friend says to another, “My rabbi is so brilliant he can talk for an hour on any subject.”

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

But sometimes speech is actually an impediment.  Sometimes, even rabbis, and religious leaders, need not to speak.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But where words cannot help, sometimes actions can. 

When people in our own community are struggling, bereaved, ill, frightened, sad, there is something we can do.  When people are terrified by a new and deadly illness, there are times when simple silent presence is the best thing we can do.  Or something more.

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

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

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

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

Across 5 Passovers

Sermon Shabbat Passover 5783 

This is the 5th Passover we have experienced at Congregation Beit Simcha, and each has been unique, and extremely different from the preceding Pesach chagim.  This year, just two nights ago, we had 100 guests for a wonderful First Seder right here, with our incredibly gracious hosts from Church of the Apostles joining us for a truly extraordinary experience.  There were many highlights.  One of them came during the 4 Questions, when I asked people to say or chant them in various languages.  Shira Klayman asked if I had them in Arabic, the language of her Iraqi and Indian Jewish forebearers.  I have a book, given to me long ago by a good friend and congregant, Gladys Hanfling of blessed memory, that has the 4 Questions in 400 different languages.  Shira and I quickly scanned through the book, and eventually found them in Arabic—specifically, in Iraqi Jewish Arabic, and on the same page was a photo of her mother Rahel Musleah, an expert in Indian Jewish music.  She had given the authors the translation… amazing.  But perhaps the best moment for me came when Sidney Finkel, a 91-year-old Holocaust survivor from Poland, came up with his friends Bruce and Anastasha Lynn and told me, “This is the best Pesach Seder I have ever been to!”  Now that’s something: he is 91 years old and has been to many, many seders.  High praise indeed. 

Each Pesach in the life of our still-young congregation has been extremely different from the preceding one—and all the preceding ones.  Last year, in 2022, the first night of Passover happened to arrive on Friday night, while our lovely Congregational Seder was held Saturday night, Second night of Pesach.  It was in our Ina Road location, where we were located for nearly three years, but it was our first truly post-pandemic Pesach, with over 80 people attending.  That Seder occurred just two months after Putin’s invasion of the Ukraine, and Ukraine was on everyone’s mind, emphasizing as it did the fact that freedom often must be fought for.

Two years ago, in 2021, our Passover was arranged in the midst of the Coronavirus pandemic, when we celebrated “Apart/Together”, and set up pre-made Passover meals and seder elements and kosher wine that people could pick up, made by Louise Stone and Catalina Caterers, and then join us online for our fancy professionally pre-recorded Seder.  Like everything in pandemic times, it was complicated, but for us, that year, it worked. 

Three years ago, in 2020 we were forced to cancel our Beit Simcha Congregational Seder just two weeks before it was to be held; everyone had to cancel public seders that year when the orders came down from the White House to avoid any gathering with as many as 10 people in the midst of the pre-vaccination COVID-19 mess.  My dad and I created, in short order, a Facebook Seder that was one of the very first such offerings online, and about 1000 people attended.  Who knew then just how important these remote offerings would prove to be?

And four years ago, way back in 2019—remember those pre-pandemic days, so long ago?—we held our very first Beit Simcha Seder with 100 guests in attendance at our Skyline and Campbell location.  It was created out of love and with great energy, as we figured out how to do a Congregational Seder together for the very first time.  The Seder went well right up to the point where we sent the kids out to open the door for Eliyahu HaNavi, Elijah the Prophet—and there was a baby rattlesnake waiting.  We kept the doors shut, called a snake handler, and named the rattler Eliyahu haNachash, Elijah the Snake.  A Seder no one could possibly forget.

Somehow, no two Pesach Seders here at Beit Simcha have been at all alike, even though we had the same rabbi and used the same Haggadot… Each was held in a different location.  Each was truly a different night, as Seder is supposed to be.  After all, the purpose of a Pesach Seder is to make you question all the rituals and rites you are performing.  What could be more Jewish than doing that as the best way to learn the great lesson of liberation from slavery?

I must add that each of these Passovers, even the strained and rushed 2020 pandemic Pesach, has been a remarkable learning experience.  As we grow and mature as a congregation, we also have retained the incredible volunteer energy that is so central to our identity as a congregation. When we need help, and we ask for it, people come forward with enthusiasm and talent to create great things.

And now, as we truly look forward to a permanent home and no longer being wandering Jews in the desert, we are able to use the lessons we have learned about the best way to make Pesach resonate for every member of our congregation and community.  I believe we will always retain that spirit of dedication that has enabled our congregation to grow and develop in our four and a half years of history, and our Jewish people to survive and thrive for so many more years—and many centuries—of our history.

There is one theme of Pesach, the zman cheiruteinu, that I’d like to highlight tonight.  It’s not an obvious aspect of a holiday in which we celebrate liberation from oppression and seek freedom for all who remain oppressed in our world.  It might not occur to you that a festival of freedom, when we sing about throwing off the chains of bondage, would even contain this element.  And yet it is there from the beginning.

When Moses first approaches the Pharaoh and asks him, famously, to “Let my people go,” he has a specific request: God says, “Let My people go for a three-day festival in the desert to worship Me.”  That is, the initial ask is not for total freedom, but for the opportunity to go out into the wilderness and serve God.  In fact, the Hebrew word for religious service, avodah, is the same as the word for work.  God, through Moses, is asking the enslaving power to allow the Israelites to go and work for God.

Of course, Pharaoh refuses.  He sees any such loosening of the bonds of servitude to him as a threat; the Israelites will be serving a different master, God.  That simply cannot be permitted.  And indeed, it could prove to be a prelude to the ultimate liberation of the whole people of Israel.  Still, the initial challenge is simply that the Israelites will be serving another master.  It is not that they will be completely free of all responsibility.  It is that they will have acknowledged a greater authority than the pseudo-god-king of Egypt. 

Pharaoh’s refusal leads to the famous passage that underlies the entire structure of the Seder: the four promises of freedom in Exodus 13.  They are v’hotzaytee, I will bring you out of Egypt; v’heetzaltee, I will save you from the brutal bonds of slavery; v’go’altee, I will redeem you on the shores of the Red Sea; and finally, v’lakachti Li l’am I will take you to Me to be My people. 

Those first three promises are about liberation and salvation.  But the fourth promise is actually about entering into a form of service—a word that is closely linked to servitude—to God.  None of us is truly free of all responsibilities, nor are we free of the duties we owe to one another.  It is this element that transforms a simple message—“Let My People Go!”—into a religious one, a moral one, a meaningful one.  “Let My people go so that they may serve Me, God.”  Let My people be free of service to a human tyrant so that they may enter into a covenant of ethics, meaning and beauty.  So that they, the Israelites, the Jews, may fully be able to act with meaning and holiness in their daily lives.  That they may find in true service to God a higher purpose for their very existence.

What is it that Bob Dylan said?  You got to serve somebody.

Perhaps what these five Passovers have taught us here at Beit Simcha is that our role is to serve, to give of ourselves so that we may each value and appreciate this community we have created, and give our Judaism meaning, purpose and beauty.

Chag Samei’ach, my friends—may we all celebrate this Passover fully, and join together next year in another unique festival.

Getting Rid of the Chamets

 Sermon, Shabbat HaGadol

Some congregants would no doubt prefer that we used the Eastern European model of how the rabbis used to preach at Shabbat services. 

Where so many of our ancestors came from in the “Old Country,” it was not common for the rabbi to preach a sermon every week.  In fact, in most congregations the rabbi preached just two sermons a year: one on Shabbat Shuvah, between Rosh HaShanah and Yom Kippur, and one on Shabbat HaGadol, the Sabbath prior to Passover.  Being a traditional place, the subject of these two sermons was always fixed.  On Shabbat Shuvah the rabbi preached on repentance, Teshuvah, a highly appropriate subject for that time of year.  And on Shabbat HaGadol, this great Sabbath, he preached on the subject of chamets, the leavened products that must be removed from our homes this week in preparation for the celebration of the Passover that begins next Wednesday night.

It is easy to understand why a rabbi would preach about Teshuvah, the moral return that is so central to our entire being as Jews.  That subject of course remains focal for everyone who has ever erred in any part of his or her lives, which is basically all of us.  But the subject of chamets seems less referable today.

Chamets, in the technical sense, means any kind of bread-like product and anything that has been adulterated or contaminated with leavened materials. 

Removing chamets and making homes kosher for Pesach is a kind of annual agony for anyone who keeps even moderately kosher.  First you have to remove from your house all the obvious chamets, any food product that might be leavened or have leavening in it, or even any grain product at all that is not explicitly kosher for Passover.  Next you have to clean everything carefully, including all the nooks and crannies where any chamets might be hiding. Then you have to remove all dishes and cookware that are made of a porous material and which cannot be used for Passover, even though they are kosher for the rest of the year.  Then you have to clean where they were. They you have to clean the counters and stoves, and boil in hot water anything you might want to use on Passover that isn’t porous but might have come in contact with chamets.  And only then can you bring in all the Passover plates and cookware, and start the major preparations necessary for the Seder and the week of meals.   Just talking about it is making some people here uncomfortable, I am certain… including me.

Frankly, you can make a case that the entire reason Reform Judaism started was so people would not have to clean their homes for Passover.  Look, even devoutly Orthodox Jews have some resistance when the subject of Pesach cleaning comes up. 

There is an old story that illustrates this.

Once upon a time in a faraway land there lived a king who had a Jewish advisor. The king relied so much on the wisdom of his Jewish advisor that one day he decided to elevate him to head advisor. After it was announced, the other advisors objected. After all, "It was bad enough," the other advisors complained, "just to sit in counsel with a Jew". But to allow a Jew to lord it over them was just too much to bear.

Being a compassionate ruler, the King agreed with them, and ordered the Jew to convert. What could the Jew do? He had to obey his King.

As soon as the act was done, the Jew felt great remorse for this terrible decision. As days became weeks, his remorse turned to despondency, and as months passed, his mental depression took its toll on his physical health.

He became weaker and weaker. Finally, he could stand it no longer. His mind was made up. He burst in on the king and cried, "I was born a Jew and a Jew I must be. Do what you want with me, but I can no longer deny my faith."

The King was very surprised. He had no idea that the Jew felt so strongly about it. "Well, if that is how you feel," he said, "then the other advisors will just have to learn to live with it. Your counsel is much too important to me to do without. Go and be a Jew again!" he said.

The Jew felt elated. He hurried home to tell the good news to his family. He felt the strength surge back into his body as he ran, Finally, he burst into the house and called out to his wife. "Rifka, Rifka, we can be Jews again, we can be Jews again!"

His wife glared back at him angrily and said, "You couldn't wait until AFTER Pesach??"

In fact, some Jews dislike Passover preparations so much that they choose to go away for the holiday to an all-kosher institution to avoid this agony of observance.  

17 years ago this coming week, during a sabbatical year, most of my own family planned just such a Passover week.  I took my then three children, all still very young back then, with me and we flew to New York, and then drove up to the Catskill Mountains—once known as “the Jewish Alps”—to spend Passover at a resort there with my parents and siblings and their families. 

You see, there are tour groups that take over a resort property for the holiday of Pesach and make it completely kosher for the festival.  For these Passover retreats, the tour operators bring in an entire team of mashgiachs, rabbis trained in supervising food preparation, and basically turn the resort into a kind of Kosher for Passover cruise ship, with all the elaborate preparations of Pesach done for you by the tour group.  You can see these “let us make Passover for you!” ads featuring places in Phoenix, New York, and even Italy.

If you have ever made a house kosher for Passover you know how appealing it would be to have someone—anyone—else do it for you, no matter how expensive or how far you would have to travel.

Being on sabbatical that year meant that it was one of the few Passovers of my life when I could actually let someone else do it all for me, and experience this Pesach-resort phenomenon first-hand.  When my parents graciously invited us to go to the Catskills that year, we accepted.  And there was one truly unique and highly exciting part of the whole experience. 

To set the scene, ‘twas the night before the seder and all through the house—er, sorry.  It was the night before Seder and we had just settled into our clearly kosher hotel room and completed my children’s bedtime rituals when the hotel fire alarm went off.  I called the front desk to see if this was a test or some kind of malfunction, and they told me to evacuate immediately.  So I got the kids into shoes and coats, grabbed my cellphone and car keys, and we all headed out into the hotel corridor, where people were running towards the exits.  We walked out one exit door that a-7- year-old Gabe opened and saw flames shooting up into the air from the building’s roof—clearly not a false alarm or a drill going on now!—turned around and went back through the building to another exit and got out the front, along with lots of other guests, and headed to the parking lot—it’s the safest place to be in a fire, a large concrete space with no burnable elements.  And then we watched the fire, which had begun in the bakery, spread throughout the main building. 

Eventually, 40 fire trucks arrived from all over Sullivan County, New York.  They couldn’t do much but contain the fire to the central building, but all the elaborate preparations were clearly not going to result in a kosher for Passover resort, or a seder the next night—or, for that matter, a place for us to sleep that night.  So, I took my family to a motel in the nearby town of Liberty wearing the clothes on our back and carrying nothing in our hands.  We came back the next morning to find that our stuff had been packed up by hotel employees and was all safe and sound, and we carried that away in plastic bags.

The tour operator, meantime, having been first told of the fire by my dad after I called him in Los Angeles on my cellphone, rearranged everything by mid-morning, and we guests were relocated to another hotel, the Nevele, about 40 minutes away, where the same program was in place.  I collected our baggage from the ruins of the Villa Roma, and ultimately we arrived as refugees at the new hotel a little tired but in one piece, with all of our stuff, and no one too much the worse for the experience.  Thank God that no one was hurt in the fire.  Had it taken place the next night, when the hotel would have been packed and its main dining rooms crowded for seder, it would have been truly catastrophic.  But it turned out OK.

I guess that was the greatest example of serious burning of chamets ever…

I have to admit that this wild night could not have been timed more thematically for any Jew, let alone a rabbi, to experience.  After all, what is Passover but the remembrance of leaving in a rush in the middle of the night with nothing but the clothes on your back?  And what could be a more explicit Pesach experience than to feel like a refugee, carrying your bags on your shoulder as you lead your children by the hand? 

And what could have possibly been a more appropriate place to spend the night before the beginning of the Festival of Freedom than a town called, I kid you not, Liberty?

Sometimes we need a major shock like that to bring us to the realization of what matters most in life, to allow us to remove the overlay of stuff that we accumulate over time and which prevents us from realizing just what is most important.  When we are confronted with a true emergency, we come to understand what matters in our lives: family, physical safety, and freedom, for example.

Emergencies help us understand what is truly chamets in our lives, and what isn’t.  Emergencies like fires the night before Pesach. 

I heard a fine sermon once on chamets, from a professor of mine at Hebrew Union College in Los Angeles, the inimitable Talmud teacher Steve Pasamenek, alav hashalom.  Professor Pasamanek was a character—in addition to teaching Talmud he worked as a volunteer at the Sheriff’s Department talking potential suicides off roofs, and he would sometimes bring his County-issued gun to class with him, an unusual decoration in a very liberal and anti-gun Reform rabbinical seminary.

Anyway, just before Passover Dr. Pasamanek’s sermon was on chamets—the need to remove it from our homes, cleaning up the mess that we sometimes allow to accumulate over the year.  But his greater message was that we also need to be vigilant about the way chamets infects and ameliorates our ideals and goals.  We start out in life with ideas about what we stand for, and before too long we find that what we stand for becomes adulterated with the complex infections and adulterations and ameliorations of the world around us—chamets.  Our job at the time of Pesach is to remove that chamets from our lives, allowing us to return to the finest and most ethical versions of ourselves that we can be.

To cut out all the adulteration, to cleanse our homes and our souls of the contamination that has so insidiously insinuated itself into our lives.

And to rediscover what truly matters in life: freedom, family, safety from harm.  It is these which we also must value at this traumatic time of challenge right now, these which we must balance against one another at times, sacrificing some personal freedom for the greater good of safety from harm, all of us seeking to protect our families.  And one more value: the value of faith and belief, of commitment to those beliefs, of living life every day in a way that demonstrates our ideals.

It is these values that Passover reminds us of annually.  And, paradoxically perhaps, it is that removal of chamets that allows us to celebrate a truly great Shabbat, and a wonderful festival of Pesach.

May you be blessed, on this Shabbat HaGadol with the ability to remove chamets from your own lives.  And may this lead, next week, to a Passover of freedom and of true peace.

What We Live For

Shabbat Vayikra 5783

As a senior rabbinic student, approaching ordination, I remember delivering a sermon at Hebrew Union College on this week’s portion.  At that time, I was really beginning to wonder just what would happen to us after semichah the formal process of being ordained, still practiced today, in which an older, experienced rabbi lays his or her hands on the head of the student who is now becoming a rabbi and conveys authority on him or her. 

This week's Torah portion gave us rabbinical students our first clue.  In the beginning of Vayikra we are told how the process would work: first, the prospective musmach, the designee, is brought to the door of the sanctuary, up close before God; next the highest religious authority, the High Priest, the Chancellor of the seminary, if you will, of the Torah, samach yado al rosh, ceremonially lays one of his hands upon the head, and performs s'michah, the laying on of hands.  And then, immediately afterwards, he whips out a razor-sharp knife v'shachat oto—and ritually slaughters it.  Right here in Vayikra, the clouds obscuring our future had been parted: First ordination-- then, kaddish.

Now this same sequence occurs eight different times in our parshah, and each time it works identically.  Semicha is followed immediately by sh'chitah-- first, hands are put on the head, and then-- bloodbath! Instant slaughter, vayismach oto-- v'shachat oto; a form of Biblical fatal attraction.  It's like one of those horror movies with Jason in it where you just know the teenager shouldn't go into that dark room.  In walks the candidate, the hand goes on the head, and—you know it’s coming, the priest knows its coming, Jason knows its coming, only the poor musmach doesn't see the razor-sharp knife in the other hand.

Of course, Vayikra is talking about laying hands on animal sacrifices, not rabbinic students.  While there are similarities—the same powerlessness, the same confusion, the same glazed look in the eye—the differences are more significant.  This is not the exalted, symbolic ordination ritual of rabbis, passing the shalshelet hakabbalah, the religious tradition from one generation to another.  This is butchering animals.  Obviously, semichah came to mean rabbinic ordination much, much later; in the Torah it has nothing to do with it!  What a ludicrous comparison!

But is it?  Samach means to place a hand upon, to support, and to uphold.  In fact, the word samach implies that the musmach is now able to uphold others, to lift them up.  In the gevurot that we chant in every Amidah we bless God as somech noflim, one who lifts up the fallen.  In the Torah itself, in Devarim, Joshua is said to be filled with the spirit of wisdom ki samach Moshe et yadav alav; because Moses placed his hand upon him, he was raised to wisdom; ibn Ezra even says that smichah conveys the ru'ach Adonai, the very spirit of God.  Yet here in Vayikra this fine, supportive word is linked in strange combination with slaughter and death.  The tie between upholding and killing, between supporting and slaughtering, is real, and it is disturbing.  If the word semichah always led to sh'chitah, why was it used later for rabbinic ordination?  What do holiness and death have to do with each other? 

Clearly, our ancestors, both priests and people, took animal sacrifice most seriously.  This was, quite simply, a matter of life and death.  Getting close to God, touching the hem of God's holiness, standing in the very presence of this awesome God who could kill or heal in a nanosecond-- this is not casual religion.  They believed profoundly, deeply, passionately that God was right here, that their lives depended on God's acceptance of their offering.  Death was always a distinct possibility, and every detail mattered: the clothing, the timing, the words, the offering—the laying on of hands.  Samach also means connection; our ancestors were intimately connected with the most frightening, awesome power that ever was, and what they did made all the difference.

In sacrifice and death they truly connected to the Source of all life.  What an incredible idea!  Even the Hebrew words are from the same root: yakriv—karov—Korban: to come close to God we must ritually kill.

This is not just true in Vayikra.  In fact, death and God are interwoven in the tapestry of Jewish tradition.  Death and holiness interlock, embrace, intimately intertwine.  Sacrifice becomes saintliness.  In the eileh ezkereh Martyrology on Yom Kippur we speak of the great rabbis slaughtered by the Romans with sacrificial words like zevach and olah, sacrificial words from Leviticus.  When we pray for the souls of the martyrs of our people, we poetically describe them as korbanot, sacrifices to God.  We proclaim that they died al kidush hashem, for the sanctification of the sacred Name.  Death becomes holiness, and holiness leads to death. 

We have no Jewish dia de los muertos, no Day of the Dead, no Dance of Death.  But at the center of our Torah, in the middle of the concentric circles of Genesis and Deuteronomy, of Exodus and Numbers, right smack in the thematic ground zero of our holiest text is the instruction of the kohanim and priests explaining all about the sacrifices.  Here at the living heart of the Torah we talk mostly about administering death.

Now, to contemporary Jews there is something sinister and crude in all this gore and sacrifice.  Industrial society has removed us from daily encounter with blood or death.  Chicken comes wrapped in plastic; Cows are an entirely different entity from steak.  We don't know from butchering and sh'chitah, and this makes us a little squeamish about blood, you and I.  We can handle all the pseudo-gore contained in the ketchup packets of ultraviolent Quentin Tarantino films but tell us about pulling the gizzard out of a chicken or how to cut out and burn the lobe of a sheep's liver, and we become distinctly uncomfortable.

Worse than that, these korbanot are profoundly irrelevant to us and to the way we worship our deity, sitting solemnly in rooms full of "sacred space", with our carefully updated liturgies and our climate-controlled comfort.  Even more so when we are watching Shabbat services on our laptops on Facebook or Zoom from the comfort of our homes.  Religion has become a brief, antiseptic, social congregating, a hermetically sealed moment of safely spiritual experience.  And perhaps in virtual experience, less even than that: a background video program to watch or ignore as we do other things.

But that's not what it was to our ancestors; and, if we take Leviticus seriously, if we get the message of this central book Vayikra, it cannot remain so for us, either.  

It's that linkage of death and holiness that we need to look at, to stare straight into its unpleasant face.  In modern society the idea that you would die for a belief is bizarre, even insane.  Even the notion that you would die for any other person is pretty repugnant in a therapeutic world.  But Vayikra raises the question anyway: what would you die for?  For what reason or purpose or person or idea would you be willing to give up your life?

Unlike the centuries of our ancestors for whom this was an everyday dilemma, we don't really think it will ever come down to dying for our beliefs.  We all pray that we will never have to join the Jewish martyrs of the millennia.  But my question is not an introduction to Holocaust memories or Antisemitic stories.  I'm asking because, as Jewish philosopher Steven Schwarzschild said, until we know what we would die for we cannot truly know what it is that we live for. 

So just what would you die for?  How can we truly know what it is that calls to our souls, that stakes its claim upon our very existence? 

The opening word of our portion tells us: Vayikra, and God called.  In the Torah, it is God's call that brings us out of our own confusion and loneliness; it is God's call that brings us to stare our mortality in the face, to touch and feel it, to release a little bit of ourselves, our denial of mortality, and gain a great gift: to know through that encounter what it is we care about and what it is we live for. 

This Leviticus story is not just about priests or even rabbis.  In Exodus, semichah is done by the kohanim, but our text here is addressed to adam, to every single human being.  Each and every one of us, male and female, has the responsibility of getting up close and personal with our God, staring death in the face, determining what really matters to us, and choosing to live for that.  No one else may do this for us, not priest nor rabbi, not parent or teacher. 

We each must make this commitment personally; and this commitment applies to every aspect of life, not just the ritual moments.  It is true for the intimacy of our private lives, for the offerings of the heart and self that emerge from our own, personal choice to come near to God. 

The great medieval poet and philosopher Judah Halevi describes the sacrifices as an olam katan, a world in miniature; for us, it is these decisions that make our lives, and our personal relationships, into a sacred olam katan of our families, our friendships, and our chosen paths.

Deciding what it is that truly matters to us can be a daunting prospect.  Thinking about our own death, and valuing something beyond our own, finite, life, forces us to admit that our existence is not the most important thing in the world.  It means surrendering a portion of our ego, allowing that there is a greater value in the world even than our own survival. 

There are many beautiful interpretations of why the last letter of the first word of our portion, Vayikra, is written with a small alef.  The Chasidic rebbe, Simcha Bunem, explains that it highlights the modesty of Moses: though called to come up closer to God than any other human being, Moses retained his humility.  The alef of his ani remained small, diminished.  It was his modesty that left room, within his soul, for God.  I think that the humility of the small alef is also a clue; change the last letter of vayikra to the next Hebrew letter, bet, and you arrive at vayikrav, and he came near; change the vocalization and it becomes vayakriv, and he sacrificed.  It is all one; through God's call we are brought near, sacrifice our independence from commitment, and learn the purpose of our lives.  Vayikra, God's call, is to a life lived fully, completely, modestly.

And that, I believe, is what Vayikra is trying to get at all along: all this talk of referred death, of substitute sacrifice, is designed to force us to place full value on our own lives.  It's a way to force to consciousness just what it is that really matters in our lives.  What is sacrificed before the altar here, what we must bring before God willingly and kill with our own hand, is our liberty to lead an unexamined life.  Vayikra insists that it is not enough to float through life without knowing why; in exchange for the sacrifice of that false freedom, it offers meaning and value and holiness.

As Samson Raphael Hirsch says, "the Sanctuary of God's Torah demands the full complete life with nothing left out, nothing missing, and promises in exchange a rich, full life in which even death and pain lose their sting."  It is within that commitment, to your God, to your mate, to your lover, to your children, that you will find that the samach has been changed to same'ach, that the hand upon your head has become joy within your heart.  Today, we pray, God, that you bring us to face our mortality, to sacrifice our empty isolation, and to commit to lives dedicated to sanctifying what we love.  For when we know what we might die for, we know how we must choose to live.

Why Do We Need a Sanctuary?

Sermon Vayakhel-Pekudei 5783

Rabbi Sam Cohon, Congregation Beit Simcha

Ayelet Claire Cohon’s Babynaming

What a special night this is for our family, and for our congregation, and I am so grateful for all the many gifts that we have received from all of you.  It is such a blessing to have my father Rabbi Baruch and son Boaz and grandson Ezra, Boaz’s family Catherine and Valentina and Isaac, and through the magic of Facebook broadcasting our son Gabriel and daughter Cipora, and my siblings, Rachel the amazingly helpful Deborah, as well as friends spread about the country here tonight online as well.  My friend Alan Lieban, who has shared so many life-cycle events with me over our friendship since high school days is here from Los Angeles, too.  Such a simcha here at Beit Simcha!

I am also so grateful to Sophie’s wonderful family, and the way they have jumped in completely helpfully during Ayelet’s early life: Kathy and SD Khalsa, and Ester and Jay Leutenberg have been rocks in our sometimes unsteady and definitely unslept weeks. 

The only objection I have is that in spite of my many invitations they have chosen to skip coming over for the 2am-6am shifts at night…

Speaking of late nights, I haven’t done this in a while, but I was watching Saturday Night Live during one of Ayelet Claire’s late evening, um, concerts recently.  Saturday Night Live has become one of the longest-running television shows in American history, headed for its 50th Anniversary soon.  That’s remarkable to think about, since it began as a subversive, counter-cultural comedic program that aired in the middle of the night when no one was supposed to be watching.  Lorne Michaels, who created it, of course is Jewish, and he’s still producing it as the conclusion of season 48 comes up. 

While Saturday Night Live hasn’t always been great, a few of its routines have become part of our permanent cultural memory.  Weekend Update’s smarmy take on the week’s news, John Belushi’s various Samurai routines, Eddie Murphy’s Mr. Robinson’s Neighborhood, and Adam Sandler’s Operaman sketch—and of course his Hanukkah Song started on SNL.  And, in keeping with the theme of babynaming tonight, can anyone who saw it ever forget the amazing fake commercial for a car whose ride was so smooth that a mohel was brought in to perform a bris in the back seat while it was rolling along?  A great moment in popular culture as Jews became more and more mainstream in America. 

Now I recall, in particular, a comedic routine from a fake Catholic priest on SNL, the remarkable Father Guido Sarducci, that he called the five-minute university. The idea, he said, was to teach you in five minutes what the average college graduate remembers five years after he or she graduates.  For example, at the 5 minute university if you studied Spanish he would teach you the question, “Como Esta Usted?” and the answer was “Muy Bien.”  As he said, if you took two years of college Spanish that’s all you’d remember five years later.

For Economics, he would teach you the phrase, “Supply and Demand.”  That’s it, all you’d remember five years after you graduate.

And of course, fake Priest Guido Sarducci’s Five Minute University would have a Theology Department.  There he would teach the answer to the question: Where is God?  The answer: “God is everywhere.”  Why?  Because “God likes You.”  A combination of religious theology and Disney.

Now that routine comes to mind whenever we read a Torah portion focused on the creation of a central shrine for worshipping God.  I mean, if God is truly everywhere, why do we need a Tabernacle at all?

I mean if God is everywhere, which all monotheistic religions believe, why is it better to come to some building or shrine to offer up our prayers?  Why can’t we just go for a hike or walk on a beach or just say what we need to say wherever we happen to be?

It’s a valid question.  The truth is, we can of course pray to God anywhere we are, and at any time of day or night.  If God exists, and God is listening, what premium is placed on going to a temple, shul or synagogue and offering up prayers there instead of in our kitchen or den or in our cars?

The answer is that of course we can pray to God anywhere and at any time.  The purpose of a sanctuary, a place dedicated to prayer and service to God, is to provide a beautiful, unique location for the community to gather in prayer.  It is also the way we give those who wish to seek God, and holiness a special place to join their voices with others who are also looking for meaning and purpose. 

Assemble the people, Moses is told in our Torah portion of Vayakhel-Pekudei, gather them together so that they might worship Me.  And so it happens.  

You know, that first Tabernacle in the Wilderness, we are told, was built from the Terumah, the freewill offerings of the multitude of Israelites, gifts they gave in order to create a magnificently special place for God’s spirit to connect with us.  Both the First and Second Temple in Jerusalem were regarded as the most fabulous buildings that existed in their day in the world.  But what made them so special was not the gold and silver, not the elegantly embroidered fabrics, not the giant bronze and copper basins or the magnificent altar or the huge pillars.  What made these sanctuaries central to the life of our people was the simple fact that in these holy places, created through the best efforts of the most talented carpenters, jewelers, metalworkers, artists, craftspeople and weavers to create a gorgeous place, what made them special after all that incredible work was that the divine presence, the Shechinah, the literal sense of God being there, was clear to all. 

This was where you could find God most intensely, and most consistently.  This was the place to connect to the holy One, to unify with what is eternal and sacred and ineffably magnificent.  This was where you went to apologize for your mistakes, to celebrate wonderful festivals, to join in true community with other people like you, and unlike you, in holiness and purpose.

Of course, you could talk to God in your kitchen, or barn, or in the fields or orchards, or on a city street somewhere.  But if you really wanted to sense God’s presence the Temple was where you needed to be.

That same truth exists for us today.  Yes, we can pray to God anywhere—at home, at work, in a restaurant, in a car, on a bus or plane or even on a bicycle.  But if we want to feel that presence of God, to experience true holiness, we must do so in community in a sacred place. 

And the very best of these places help raise our hearts and minds and lives to a newer, higher level.  That’s what a great synagogue can do, at its best.  And its best is what we must always strive for—our ancestors certainly did, as we see in the Torah portions.  But it’s also what we must do, for now it’s on us to try to accomplish what they did.

Asu li mikdash v’shachanti b’tocham we were told recently in the Torah portion of Terumah, build Me a sanctuary and I will dwell among you—that’s a pledge that things can always be made good, that we are always able to come into grace and blessing, if we build that temple.  God will be in our midst, always, and that we can find God best in community in a holy place.  In our own temple, our sanctuary, our place for the Shechinah to dwell.

Of course, God is everywhere; thank you, Father Sarducci.  But if you want to access the spirit of Divine blessing, if you have the desire to experience true community of purpose, and prayer, to reach to the highest level that exists—well then you need a true sanctuary.  To pray together; to mourn together; to learn together; and perhaps most of all, to join together in life-cycle celebrations like tonight.

As our Torah portions affirm, and as the long sweep of Jewish history attests, and as we hope to be able to confirm soon for our own congregation: we need a temple of our own. 

May we find that place of holiness and blessing, and join together there, always, in community and in prayers of thanksgiving and peace and, especially, great joy.

Ken Yehi Ratson.

Swords into Plowshares

Swords into Plowshares, Multi-Faith Service March 16, 2023

At the NW Celebration of Unity and Prayer

Rabbi Samuel M. Cohon, Congregation Beit Simcha

There are a number of beautiful blessings in Judaism highlighting the incredible value and virtue of peace.  In our evening prayers we say the paragraph Shalom Rav, which calls God the great Monarch of peace; in the morning we say Sim Shalom, please God give peace, goodness and blessing, compassion and forgiveness to us and all Your people.  In our afternoon prayers, depending on which Jews you are talking about—after all, we are known for our ability to argue—we say one or the other of those prayers, while at the end of every central devotional experience, our Amidah, our standing personal prayers, we say, “Make peace on earth, God, as You do in the heavens, Oseh Shalom, great Maker of peace.”

A wonderful blessing in our tradition reads, “Peace to all, those near and far, complete peace, peace forever.”  It is an incredibly powerful, hopeful benediction.

Unfortunately, looking at the long, bloodstained history of humanity might lead a person to conclude that as a species we homo sapiens are actually incredibly bad at peace, and we are simply unable to avoid violent conflict.  No wonder we pray so often and so hard for God to give us peace; we are unable to create it for ourselves.

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

Tonight, as we gather to proclaim our shared belief that we should follow the words of the great prophet First Isaiah and beat our swords into plowshares, our spears into pruning hooks, our Abrams tanks and armored vehicles into riding lawnmowers, our AKs and ARs into rakes and hoes, we know how distant that vision must seem.  We cannot miss that a terrible, brutal war is grinding on in Putin’s war of aggression against Ukraine, that there are civil wars and distinctly uncivil wars in Nogorno-Karabakh and in Myanmar and in Yemen and in Ethiopia and Somalia and Eritrea.  If we are going to actually accomplish this great goal of eliminating all the swords, well, we have a long way to go.  And heaven knows, we will need all the help from God we can get.

Ah, but as another great Jewish teaching tells us, it is not up to us to finish this essential work—nor are we free to desist from doing it.  Because if we are ever going to reach that magnificent ideal, an ideal of a world in which peace truly reigns over all of us, then we are going to have to start by beating a few swords into plowshares, by ending some of the conflicts and distancings that separate us from our fellow human beings, and eventually bring us into the kind of violent conflicts that do so much to damage our world.

You see, it’s not to say that we have the chutzpah to believe that we alone can fulfill these words of Isaiah’s; it’s that we must have the chutzpah, the courage and gall to say that it is possible to make changes, to beat at least a few spears into gardening implements, to stop shooting each other and to choose to seek to know one another and embrace each other instead.

It is notable that right after Isaiah says that bit about beating swords into plowshares and so on, he says, “Come let us walk in the light of the Lord; let us reason together.”  That’s really our task: to move from conflict and anger towards understanding and respect, to choose to walk together in openness and honesty, without hostility towards difference.

You know, plows and pruning hooks and even riding lawnmowers are not about doing things the easy way. They require hard work, and the gardens we cultivate using them need to constantly be maintained.  So it is with peace.  We must make the choice to act for peace, and do so in the spirit of a tradition that asks God to grant us not just the gift of peace, but the strength, fortitude and endurance to work for peace.

And then, one day—may it only happen in our own day—if we work that garden using our new implements, we may perhaps be able to truly say, Shalom Shalom, lerachok v’lekarov: peace, peace, to those far and near.

May it be Your will, God—and more importantly, may it be ours.

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.