Which Way Are You Going?

Rabbi Sam Cohon, Congregation Beit Simcha, Tucson, AZ

Kol Nidrei Eve Yom Kippur 5784

 I have a t-shirt that was given to me by someone with a fine sense of humor, my wife.  It reads “You can’t scare me; I have two daughters.”

I like wearing it for the great responses it elicits, the knowing comments from other parents of daughters.  And while I can’t be scared—the shirt says so—I can be educated.  This year, I have learned two great lessons from my daughters.

The first comes, perhaps improbably, from Ayelet Claire Cohon, the gift Sophie and I received from God in February, now seven and a half months old and the person everyone always wants to talk to right after services every Shabbat, and on festivals, too. 

As a new father, doing this again after a little break, this year I’ve had the privilege of watching our daughter begin life and start learning how to do everything.  As a Jewish child she is, of course, incredibly brilliant and precocious, naturally, but in one area she is still a little challenged.  She is learning to crawl and working extremely hard at it.  She tries desperately to reach objects in front of her. 

But so far, the only thing that she has managed to do is to crawl backwards.  That is, she lifts herself up on her hands, and then onto her knees or feet, rocks vigorously back and forth, but she can’t quite coordinate the effort, and as she struggles mightily she moves steadily backwards.  No matter how hard she tries to go forward, she always ends up backing up.  And then our little baby gets frustrated as the object or person she is trying to reach moves steadily away from her.  Distressed at this turn of events, eventually she flops down and simply cries until we scooch her forward.

That is, she tries extremely hard to go forward but ends up, inevitably, going backwards.

I wonder if we are all just a little bit like Ayelet.  We try very hard all year to become better people, to achieve improvement, but usually discover that our goal somehow keeps moving away from us, receding into the distance. And while we may not lie on the bed or floor and cry, we do, on Yom Kippur, come to shul and kvetch.  For the sins we have committed by failing yet again to achieve our objectives…

I mean, the whole point of Teshuvah is that we are trying hard to get back to being the best person we can.  And we know that we have spent at least some of the last 12 months—perhaps most of them—backsliding, going in reverse.  Just when you think you are making progress you realize… not so much.  Objects in your rear-view mirror may be closer than they appear… because you are actually backing up.

And that experience leads to the second piece of parentally-learned pedagogy this past period.

The second lesson comes from Ayelet’s older sister, my daughter Cipora, who is in her twenties now.  She spent the summer traveling around Europe with a couple of friends, moving between and working on organic farms.  The acronym is “WWOOF”ing, that is, “World Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms”, or perhaps more simply, working on organic farms.  Early in her summer peregrinations she was working on a farm in Norway and had an instructive experience. 

As you may know I am a confirmed cycling addict, but much to my embarassment, I never taught Cece how to ride a bike; al cheit shechatati lifanecha shelo limaditi otah lirchov al ofanayim, for the sin I have committed by failing to properly educate my daughter… in bike riding.  In any case, while working on this lovely organic farm, Cece became friendly with the farmers’ 8 year old daughter, Vilje, who took it upon herself to finally teach Cece how to ride a bicycle.  Vilje was very serious about this instruction, and Cece began to make progress; soon Cipora would get a good start on the bicycle, but… then struggle and fall off.  And so the 8 year old looked at her gravely, and gave her this advice: “You just have to act as though you are going to keep moving forward.”

Now that is great advice, not just for riding a bike but for life.  “You just have to act as though you are going to keep moving forward.”  That is, no matter what bumps there are in the road ahead—and there will be some—you adhere to your original plan, and act as though you are going to keep moving forward.  And if you can do that you will keep on keeping on, and stay on the bike and ride!

I’ve thought a lot about those two quite different lessons.  Now, these may seem to be diametrically opposed pieces of wisdom.  Yet I believe they are actually complimentary.  First, it’s simply true that no matter how hard we try in our own lives to go in a set direction we often find ourselves headed away from our objectives.  In spite of that, our goals should remain firm, our resolution to continue towards what we know to be the right destination undiminished by challenges.  Act as though you are going to keep moving forward, not backwards, and sooner or later you will indeed be able to ride that bike—or crawl forwards, or even walk forwards—and so reach your objective.

This is a lovely metaphor, or double metaphor, for this Day of Atonement.  On Yom Kippur we first acknowledge the ways we have gone in reverse, and seek to return to the better course.  And we do so knowing that if we simply direct our own hearts and minds towards living a better, more valuable life we will be able to do so.  Start by admitting failures, be candid, but don’t give up or give in to distress or frustration; turn towards the right objective again, and go.  It’s simple, but true.

Now both of these pieces of daughterly wisdom certainly apply to each of us individually, but they also apply to our remarkable congregation.  This past year at Beit Simcha was, um, complicated.  Just before the 5783 High Holy Days last year we were told we needed to move from our home of nearly three years on Ina Road, and that we had just thirty days to do it; we requested and received an additional 30 days, but that was it.  After an urgent and exhaustive search, we discovered that there weren’t a lot of locations in the Northwest or the Foothills either available or appropriate to relocate a growing synagogue, and we managed to set up classrooms and offices on Oracle Road near River and, through the gracious hospitality of our friends at Church of the Apostles, we began holding services here last November.  And of course, we also had to arrange storage in three different locations for our bimah, ark, Torah table, chairs, tables, library, bookcases, appliances, kitchen materials, holiday items, art, and so much more.  Only through the extraordinary voluntarism of Beit Simcha’s members and leadership could so much have been accomplished so quickly, under Carol Schiffman-Durham’s organizing expertise and supervision.  It was amazing.

We continued to conduct services, classes, and events all while preparing for this challenging move.  And when we landed in our various locations, it turned out that we were OK, still upright, as it were.  You just have to act as though you are going to keep moving forward, and forward you go.  

And of course, we found what we thought was an excellent new home in the perfect location that was put up for sale the same day we received our eviction notice.  We began serious negotiations on the property in October of 2023, nearly a year ago, and endured a complex process that appeared to be working its way towards a very positive conclusion. We agreed on a sales price in March and were told the owners wanted to turn over the building and property to us by June 30.  At least, that was what they said.  We worked hard to secure the material donations that would make it possible for us to have permanent home after four moves in less than five years, and received incredible support from you, our congregation and community.  It was truly amazing and incredibly gratifying, and we assembled a significant and impressive building fund that allowed us to fund the remainder of the purchase while we continued to develop our resources.

We were so excited to be able to create the synagogue temple center that the Northwest of Tucson needs, to share the joy of Judaism from our new location.  All by July 1st, right?

Unfortunately, after a huge effort by our side to complete the transaction, including agreements and inspections and financial and legal work and real estate efforts, the large out-of-state corporation that owned it simply changed its mind and decided not to sell the property, informing us of that dismal fact at the start of August, nearly a year after they listed it and four months after we had what we believed to be a solid agreement.

Sometimes, no matter how hard you try to reach your objective it seems to be getting farther away from you…

Now we here at Beit Simcha are a resilient congregation.  We have been called “scrappy”, as a compliment, by a past landlord, and it applies.  We have survived all those multiple moves, the COVID years, controversies over shutdowns and re-openings, conducting virtual services and blended ones, and, like our ancestors, being Wandering Jews in a very real sense. These beautiful services are our fourth High Holy Days together, now in our third location, not counting the Drive-In 2nd Night Rosh HaShanah Celebration we did outdoors on the Gaslight Theater Northwest’s stage a couple of years ago.  Somehow, we have grown, both in membership and depth of programming and leadership and caring, through it all.  Now that’s resilience.

How have we done that?  Perhaps it’s as simple as my older daughter Cipora’s eight-year-old cycling instructor told her, “You just have to act as though you are going to keep moving forward.”

Or it might be that victory lies, for us, in refusing to admit defeat and succeeding in spite of it.  Or, better, that we know that we can overcome obstacles so long as we continue to work together, remain focused on our goals, demonstrate the caring, respect and kindness that is essential for any real synagogue community, and dedicate ourselves to creating and participating in beautiful services, real Jewish learning for children and adults, and sharing the true joy and depth of Judaism.  Our congregation is a true labor of love, and it must remain so to succeed.  I promise that it will.

We are now working on purchasing land to build our own, new building, and have completed a comprehensive survey of what’s available in the Northwest.  We expect to have some decisions soon and, as always, we will let you know exactly what we are doing. 

On Yom Kippur we think and speak and sing about the Gates of Repentance, the sha’arei teshuvah, being opened for us to return to goodness and to God.  In fact, the last Reform Movement Machzor before this prayer book was called Gates of Repentance.  It’s true that we say that those gates are locked at the end of Ne’ilah tomorrow night, which literally means the locking of the gates.  But the truth is that immediately after that happens, we have a prayer for repentance in all three weekday services.  That is, the gates may close on last year—but they are wide open for us again in the new year.

Well, just as those gates of repentance are open now for us individually after the, um, lockdown, so the gates of opportunity are open, again, for Beit Simcha.  We will walk through them—or crawl, or bicycle perhaps—this coming year of 5784.

Perhaps the best way of connecting these two disparate lessons is by remembering the middle lesson not incorporated in them.  That lesson is described in words sent to me by Lee Kane, our wonderful Beit Simcha congregant from Cape Cod, and an indefatigable member of our fabulous Fundraising Committee.  It comes from the greatest sports coach in history, the late UCLA basketball wizard John Wooden.  He might have written this with us in mind: “Do not let what you cannot do interfere with what you can do.”  

Do not let what you cannot do interfere with what you can do.  I promise that will be true for our congregation.  And, more directly, may this prove to be true for each of us personally over this Yom Kippur.

My friends, on this Kol Nidrei Eve, we each can do a great deal to improve our own lives and our relationships with others.  We each have the capacity to move forward, and to do so in the spirit of Teshuvah, of return to the best that is within us.  May you be blessed on this Day of Atonement with the strength and courage to move truly forward in your teshuvah, and in your life. Gmar Chatimah Tovah. 

Statistics & Repentance

Shabbat Shuva/Ha’azinu 5784 

Shabbat Shalom, and L’Shanah Tovah.  This evening we are entered into the Shabbat of Return, of Repentance, between Rosh HaShanah and Yom Kippur.  I love the ironies of this particular Sabbath.  For one thing, it is called the Sabbath of Return—yet falling as it does immediately after Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur on Sunday and Monday, fewer people, inevitably, will be here over this Shabbat.  We might better call it the Sabbath of flight, or the Shabbat B’richah instead of Shabbat Shuvah—the Sabbath of Absence sometimes seems more appropriate than the Sabbath of Return.  It’s as though attendance at Temple is limited by some sort of natural measure, and T’shuvah, return, is suspended this weekend especially.

Of course, there is a danger in simply counting heads as a measure of achievement or accepting statistics as a means of spiritual success.  Repentance is measured one person at a time, and in the degree of return, rather than the number of returnees seated in the pews at any one moment.  Still, statistics can tell us something…  And what they tend to tell us, is that, for all the fervor and beauty of the Rosh HaShanah liturgy, for all the power of the music and the prayer, most of us have a pretty hard time making changes of great substance in our personal conduct.

Nobel Prize Winning poet Wislawa Szymborska, a favorite of mine, had a poem, 'A Contribution to Statistics'.  I think it illuminates, in a simple and not entirely subtle way, some essential truths about humanity—that is, us:

Out of a hundred people

those who always know better

-fifty-two [percent]

doubting every step

-nearly all the rest,

Glad to lend a hand

if it doesn't take too long

-as high as forty-nine [percent],

always good

because they can't be otherwise

-four, well maybe five [percent],

able to admire without envy

-eighteen [percent],

suffering illusions

induced by fleeting youth

-sixty [percent], give or take a few,

not to be taken lightly

-forty and four [percent],

living in constant fear

of someone or something

-seventy-seven [percent],

capable of happiness

-twenty-something tops,

harmless singly, savage in crowds

-half at least,

cruel

when forced by circumstances

-better not to know

even ballpark figures,

wise after the fact

-just a couple more

than wise before it,

taking only things from life

-thirty [percent]

(I wish I were wrong),

hunched in pain,

no flashlight in the dark

-eighty-three [percent]

sooner or later,

righteous

-thirty-five [percent], which is a lot,

righteous

and understanding

-three [percent],

worthy of compassion

-ninety-nine [percent],

mortal

-a hundred out of a hundred.

thus far this figure still remains unchanged.

You see, we are all clearly fallible, self-interested, self-justifying, mostly decent when untested, not so strong when tried, once in a while inspirational, often confused—and all of us have a limited shelf-life. 

It strikes me that the Torah portion for this Shabbat, HaAzinu, is just about perfect for people like that, for human beings trying to find a way to goodness and knowing, in a sort of dim way, our own limitations.  For this week we have the final song of Moses, a poem of soaring imagery but vivid self-justification, of love and frustration.  It is, in its own way, a revealing masterpiece of a great orator, Moses, singing of the greatness of God, of the plain fact that his was a generation of Jews who were “crooked and perverse”, who were “foolish and unwise”—a nation “devoid of counsel” with no understanding.  In other words, a fallible and self-interested group, not so much evil as ungrateful and not too bright.  Just like the people Szymborska is talking about; just like, well, more or less, us.

There is hope here, too, however, albeit in small doses: Remember, Moses says, the days of old, “Zchor Y’mot Olam”, ask your father and your elders and they will tell you what you should know—that God is Eternal, and we are the ones who will pass.  God will ultimately make expiation, atonement, for our people.

This passage is Moses’ valedictory speech, but it is also his own funeral oration—for Moses is singing of his own end here, and he knows that he, too, is mortal.  God has done so much for this ragged group of slaves, and now that they are on the very brink of entering the Promised Land he, Moses, will only be permitted to gaze on it from afar—ki mineged tireh et ha’arets—but he will not be permitted to go in.

Moses, our greatest teacher, our leading rabbi, perhaps the greatest figure in all Jewish history, can only come to the border of the Promised Land.  His lesson is one of both word and example: we, too, can come close but never quite enter the Promised Land.  Perhaps only at this last moment does Moses come to realize that the journey to the Promised Land was really all about the journey, not the arrival.  How he took the trip, how he passed along the way, was what mattered.

Often, this portion is not actually paired with Shabbat Shuvah, by the way—the lunar calendar is a regular but rather fickle mistress in the near term, and the Torah portions are sometimes matched with Haftarot other then the ones that our rabbis chose so carefully for them 1500 years ago.  So it is a special opportunity to have HaAzinu as our Shabbat Shuvah reading, matched with the beautiful passages from Hosea, Micah, and Joel that make up our selection tomorrow.  Shuvah Yisrael the prophets begin—return, Israel, to the Lord your God.  You have stumbled in your error and transgression.  Come back…

Return, we are told.  Overcome the odds.  Repent your mistakes and sins, and make your teshuvah.  Return to Me, God says, and I will bring you back to Me in love.  Do not fear.  Return.

Shabbat Shuvah is an invitation, but it is also a challenge.  For when we try to return we are often a little stymied by the potential—indeed the likelihood—of failure.  Sure, we can come back, but we know in some part of our hearts that we are unlikely to fully succeed.  Repentance means changing habits we shouldn’t have, making up with people we don’t like, remaking our character in ways that are painful and serious, even modifying some of the desires of our hearts—and that’s very hard to do, and we are, essentially, predestined to some degree of failure.  If teshuvah is the Promised Land of this part of the Jewish year, we are more than bit like Moses, already fully conscious of the fact that we ain’t really gonna’ get in.  We just might get to the border—mineged ha’Arets—but we will never really make it.  There is that statistical problem: we are, 100 percent of us, human and fallible. 

So if we aren’t able to make it, why bother to try?

The lesson of HaAzinu comes in the fact that we are still reading the great story of Moses, and finding inspiration from it.  Moses was a hot-head and, in his youth, a killer—and yet he brought not only himself but an argumentative people of great stubbornness— some things don’t change that much!—to the very border of the Promised Land.  He helped create Teshuvah for himself and for so many others.  If Moses could do it, can’t we? 

If we look at it properly—reasonably, I guess—the answer is yes.  For at this time of Teshuvah, our task is to return to the best that is within us, to come back part of the way to God and goodness--not all the way.  Full Teshuvah would be entering the Promised Land.  Our job is simply to make this journey our own, and undertake it with honesty and effort; to get to the border, if you will.

And the truth is that you, personally, are already on the right path.  You are here tonight, on this Shabbat Shuvah.  You have begun to return.  You are part of the good side of the statistics; you have defied the irony, on this night, and you bring some holiness with you by doing so.  You are why we have Shabbat Shuvah.

May your return over these Aseret Yemei Teshuvah be blessed with a measure of success at return and repentance.  And may you come to appreciate, and treasure, the journey—and so, even inadvertently, find the borders of the Promised Land.  Ken Yehi Ratson.

Kafka and Kindness

The Torah we read from this morning is special.  It is our Czech Memorial Scroll, saved from the destruction of the Jewish community of Czechoslovakia just before the Shoah, a reminder of the Jewish world that existed before the Holocaust, and it is a Torah which we use actively in the life of our vibrant congregation. 

This scroll is also dedicated to the memory of my own grandparents, Rabbi Samuel S. and A. Irma Cohon, through the generosity of my father, Rabbi Baruch Cohon, so it has additional meaning to me, personally, and my family.  This Torah was rescued from obscurity and decay in a Prague basement along with 1500 other Czech Torah scrolls in a long and complex odyssey in part through the efforts of Rabbi Harold Reinhart, my great uncle of blessed memory.  This scroll came to London in the 1960s, was repaired there and lived a second life serving a European congregation, was then returned to London and became Beit Simcha’s first Torah in the fall of 2018, when my son Boaz and I received it and we brought it back to Tucson.

This past year, through the munificence of our wonderful Beit Simcha congregation, we were able to augment our hard-working 125 year old Czech Memorial Scroll with the much younger Our Torah, the King Family Torah, dedicated last Simchat Torah.  But we have chosen on Rosh HaShanah, the Yom HaZikaron, this Day of Remembrance, to chant from this remarkable Holocaust scroll.  It is a way of re-telling a story from a scroll that has its own story to tell. 

In fact, when I first learned of the Holocaust scrolls many years ago, the tale told of their rescue was a different one than the narrative we know today. 

The original story was that these scrolls were collected by the Nazis when they destroyed the Jewish communities of Moravia and Bohemia.  Being Germans, they carefully noted and catalogued where each scroll had come from, planning to place them in a Museum of Extinct Peoples to be built in the historic synagogues of the Prague ghetto.  After the fall of the Third Reich, the scrolls lay untended for over 15 years, until a bulldozer building a parking garage broke into the underground storeroom where the Torah scrolls languished.  The then-Communist government of the then-nation of Czechoslovakia decided to sell them for much-needed hard currency.  After complex negotiations, they were purchased from the Czechs for a small amount of British pounds sterling by a wealthy congregant of the rabbi of a congregation that had just bought a large building in Westminster, York House, which had plenty of room to store the scrolls.  That was the old story and it was widely taught.  I learned it originally from the rabbi of a prominent Reform synagogue in London.

But many years later I learned the truth was somewhat different.  After the Nazis occupied Czechoslovakia in 1938 our Torah was sent to the Jewish Museum in Prague.  It was sent there for preservation by an endangered Jewish community in that overwhelmed country before it could be destroyed by the Germans.  At that time, the Jewish residents of cities and towns and villages all over Czechoslovakia saw what was coming and deliberately gave up their own Torahs and sent them to be preserved.  The people who kept careful records of these scrolls were not Nazis at all but the Jewish curators of the Jewish Museum of Prague, who had encouraged communities to save their Judaic treasures from the rapacious Fascists.  The neglecting of the scrolls was the result of the death of the curators at the hands of the Nazis, and of the 1948 Communist takeover and the Iron Curtain that descended then, rather than the scrolls becoming lost at the end of World War II.  The Czech Communist agency empowered to sell goods for hard currency saw these scrolls as useless but demanded to be paid $30,000 US dollars in 1964, perhaps $300,000 today—not a king’s ransom, exactly, but not a pittance, either.  In London, Rabbi Harold Reinhart supervised the cataloguing and refurbishment of the over 1500 Torahs until he passed away in 1969; when the scrolls arrived in 1964 they provided work for a scribe, David Brandon, for the rest of his life.  For Rabbi Reinhart and David Brandon and everyone associated with the Czech scrolls it was a labor of great love, and that labor continues to this day.  Our own congregation’s connection to an otherwise lost community is revived every time we chant from this Torah, as we did this morning.

Isn’t it interesting how these Czech Torah stories differ?  The more accurate, current version is better.  Not only is it more authentic, it restores agency to our people, since it was Jews saving the Torahs, rather than our enemies, as a way to preserve our own history for future Jewish generations. 

Which brings me to a very different Czech Jewish story, about one of the most famous of all Czech Jews, the great 20th century author Franz Kafka.  It is also a story about how we remember, and about love. And this story, too, has two versions.

The version I learned first goes like this: ‘At the age of 40, the author Franz Kafka, who never married and had no children, was walking through a park one day in Berlin when he met a girl who was crying because she had lost her favorite doll. She and Kafka searched for the doll unsuccessfully.

Kafka told her to meet him there the next day and they would come back to look again for the doll.

The next day, when they looked but had not found the doll, Kafka gave the girl a letter "written" by the doll saying "Please don't cry. I took a trip to see the world. I will write to you about my adventures."

Thus began a story which continued until the end of Kafka's life.

During their meetings, Kafka read the letters of the doll carefully written with adventures and conversations that the girl found adorable.

Finally, Kafka bought and brought the little girl a doll that had “returned” to Berlin.

"It doesn't look like my doll at all," said the little girl.

And Kafka handed her another letter in which the doll wrote: "My travels have changed me." The little girl hugged the new doll and brought the doll with her to her happy home.

A year later Kafka died at the age of 40, in 1924.

Many years later, the now-adult girl found a letter hidden inside the doll. In the tiny letter was written:

"Everything you love will probably be lost, but in the end, love will return in another way."

Everything you love will probably be lost, but in the end, love will return in another way.  A gentle story that teaches us about kindness.

Now, this is the version of the story that has been circulating on the internet for 15 years.  It’s a beautiful tale, and it’s in keeping with what we know of the generous character of Franz Kafka, the great Czech Jewish author of Metamorphosis and many other extraordinary works. 

It’s such a lovely story that it immediately made me run it by Snopes to see if it’s true.  It turns out that we don’t really know.  We do know that Kafka’s doll’s letters have never resurfaced, and there is no record of the girl ever finding one of them inside the doll years later, or even of the name or history of the girl.  Perhaps she later lost the doll or gave it away when she grew up; perhaps she was Jewish and died in the Holocaust.  We have no tangible corroboration of the tale.

On the other hand, Kafka’s partner for that final year of his life, Dora Dymant, was the person who originally shared a story about Franz Kafka and a doll, and she would have known.  Her own version of the story brings more depth and meaning to the little tale.  A little background on Kafka and Dora Dymant is helpful.  Literary critic Anthony Rudolf wrote:

“Dora Dymant met Franz Kafka at Miiritz on the Baltic coast of Germany in the summer of 1923. She was 25 years old and working in the kitchens of a children's holiday camp run by the Jewish People's Home of Berlin.  Kafka happened to be on holiday there with his sister and her children.

Dora first noticed him on the beach. A few days later, on July 13, ten days after his fortieth birthday, Kafka came with his sister for supper to the camp. Dora had thought the couple on the beach were husband and wife. She was delighted when she learned the truth.

Kafka continued visiting the camp — every evening for three weeks.  Dora told one story of a little boy in the camp who got up to leave the table one evening, and fell down, deeply embarrassed in front of his friends. Kafka said at once: "What a clever way to fall, and what a clever way to get up again." The child instantly became the hero of the moment, thanks to Kafka.

Franz Kafka made a deep impression on Dora: his looks, his sensibility, his culture, his generous spirit. She was an Eastern European Jew from a Chasidic background — she came from a small town not far from the Czechoslovak border. Dora's father was a follower of the Gerer Rebbe. Kafka, who rejected his parents' minimalist "Western" Judaism, was turning East for more authentic Jewish inspiration. Dora, who abandoned her father's Gerer-Chasidic Orthodoxy, was turning West for more modern Jewish inspiration. They found in each other not only personal happiness but a way of fulfilling their Jewish destiny.

After the Baltic holiday Kafka returned to Prague, but he soon moved to Berlin where he set up a home with Dora. He never tired of hearing Dora's Chasidic stories. She would sit with him while he wrote.

Fellow author and close friend Max Brod wrote that Dora "perfected" Kafka.  Released from his ghosts he was free to find himself, as a man, a writer, a Jew, through her. They studied at the famous Lehranst alt fur die Wissenschaft des Judentums, the Academy for the Scientific Study of Judaism in Berlin.  Dora, appropriately enough, was studying Halacha, Jewish law, while Kafka, equally appropriately, was studying Aggada, Jewish legends. They read the great Biblical commentator Rashi together at home in order to improve Kafka's Hebrew in case they ever reached Palestine, as they hoped to do.  Imagine that: together they read the 11th century Rhineland commentator on Torah to teach Kafka modern Hebrew!  Dora's own Hebrew was excellent, and she was a convinced Zionist. But in addition to potentially immigrating to the new Jewish homeland, they also discussed the possibility of going East to Poland where Kafka felt Jews were still authentic. Sadly, all this time Kafka was growing weaker from the lung ailment that would eventually kill him.

Dora wrote this about the famous doll story: “While we were in Berlin Franz often went to our local park. Sometimes I went with him. One day we met a little girl. She was weeping and appeared to be in complete despair. We spoke to her, Franz questioned her, and we learned that she had lost her doll. At once he invented a sufficiently plausible story to explain the disappearance of the doll: "Your doll has simply gone on a journey — I know because she's written me a letter." The little girl was a bit suspicious: "Have you got it on you?" "No, I left it at home by mistake, but I'll bring it with me tomorrow." Intrigued, the child had already almost forgotten what had made her so upset in the first place.' And Franz went home immediately to write the letter.

He set to work with the same seriousness he displayed when composing one of his own works, and in the same state of tension he always inhabited at his table, even when writing a postcard. It was a real labor, as essential as the others, since the child must at all costs not be cheated, but truly appeased, and since the lie must be transformed into the truth of reality by means of the truth of fiction.

The next day he ran with the letter to the little girl who was waiting for him in the park. As she did not know how to read, he read the letter out to her. The doll declared that she was tired of living in the same family all the time, expressed her longing for a change of air, wanted to go away from her —indeed, she loved the little girl, but from whom she had no choice but to separate. She promised that she would write every day. In fact, Kafka wrote a daily letter telling of new adventures, which evolved very rapidly, according to the special rhythm of the life of dolls.

After a few days the child had forgotten the loss of her real toy and had no thought for anything but the fiction she had been offered in exchange. Franz wrote every sentence of the epistolary novel with an attention to minutiae, with a precision full of humor, which rendered the situation completely acceptable. The doll grew up, went to school, got to know other people. She continued to assure the child of her love but made allusions to the complexity of her life, to other obligations, to other interests which made it impossible, for the time being, to live with her. The little girl was invited to reflect upon this and was made ready for the inevitable renunciation.

The game lasted at least three weeks. And Franz was in terrible distress at the thought of having to bring it to an end. For it was necessary that the end should be exactly right, capable of substituting order for the disorder brought about by the loss of the doll. He cast about for a long time and finally decided to marry off the doll. He described the young man, the engagement, the wedding preparations in the country, then, in great detail, the house of the young couple: “You yourself will understand, said the doll, we must give up seeing each other." Franz had resolved a child's conflict through art, the best method he possessed for bringing order into the world.”  And the little girl understood, with dignity and gravity, that it was time to let her doll go…

The whole tale is rather the opposite of Kafkaesque, isn’t it?  Instead of a hopeless scenario that gets ever more hopeless for those experiencing it, we have a gentle, thoughtful, sensitive story of respect and extraordinary kindness, of growth and maturity through kindness.

I like the second version better because it is so true to our own lived experience.  The beauty of life is never quite as simple as we would like to believe it to be.  The acts of kindness and goodness we do are sometimes complex and subtle, and require us to see how others view things differently than we do.   

It is a deeply touching tale, of course, because it shows us that kindness is incredibly important, and that it can be expressed in a variety of ways.  When we sing of the attributes of God, notzer chesed la’alofim, the Shlosh Esrai Midot, the thirteen attributes of God, we praise God’s kindness to the thousandth generation.  In Kabbalah, Jewish mysticism, chesed, kindness is a critical Sephirah, a central emanation of divine favor that represents the very best of the flow of holy energy that we can receive.

Kindness is so important to Judaism—to life.  It is easy in the flow of a human community to discount the great value kindness has.  How we treat one another, the ways we respect the innate dignity and the human needs of each other, is critical to the wellbeing of our lives and of those around us.  Kindness must be the basic requirement for any synagogue community.

The authentic Kafka story shows that kindness, even extraordinary kindness, is not always completely gentle.  The greatest act of kindness can be, as in Kafka’s doll letters, a way to gently teach important lessons about human decency and maturity.  Of course, the short version of the story is lovely.  On the web, a coda has been added to it: “Embrace change. It's inevitable for growth. Together we can shift pain into wonder and love, but it is up to us to consciously and intentionally create that connection.’”

A valuable lesson.  But not quite as valuable as the lesson Kafka taught in the more complete version.  For the truth is, it is kinder to gently help people grow in understanding, rather than to simply fool them to assuage their sadness, or your own discomfort.

My friends, I don’t know if love comes back to us in different ways, to remake our pain and loss into wonder and love.  But I do know that change often means both growth and pain, that experiencing the beautiful things in this world may require that we give up something else we hold dear.  And I know definitively that by being genuinely kind to each other we will continue to build our community in the ways that we wish it to grow, develop and flourish.

I can promise you that this new year, 5784, will bring surprises and disappointments, both blessings and, well, curses.  We will lose some things, and some people, that we love.  We will gain some new things, and some people, that we will learn to love.  But perhaps most important of all, we will learn new and valuable lessons.

Our prayer for 5784 is that this year we find it within ourselves to demonstrate true kindness to those around us, and to do so in ways that bring healing and blessing to the world.

LShana Tova Tikateivu v’Teichateimu

Parrots and Chatgpt on Rosh HaShanah

I don’t know how many of you are fans of the music of Jimmy Buffet, who died September 1st at the age of 76.  I have always enjoyed his easy-to-listen to, fun, relaxing songs that tell a story, and had the opportunity to see him a couple of times in concert. Jimmy Buffet was perhaps the most successful musician-turned-entrepreneur ever; he died a billionaire, which is particularly amazing when you realize he only had one top 10 song, “Margaritaville.”  But he certainly knew how to merchandise the tropics, when to get in and out of businesses, and he made valuable friends, including Warren Buffet—who was not related to him, but became a buddy and referred to him as “cousin Jimmy.”   

Jimmy Buffet was also a down-to-earth guy.  A friend of ours saw him working his children’s lemonade stand in front of his beachfront mansion one day, helping his kids sell lemonade for 50 cents a glass just like every other dad.  Jimmy Buffet was known for his generosity, his tremendous sense of humor and for a genuine ability to touch people in good ways. 

Now Jimmy Buffet fans were called parrot-heads, in part because the calypso-flavored tunes that Buffet and his Coral Reefers Band played reminded everyone of tropical climates and tropical birds, like, well, parrots.  Both the band and concertgoers wore Hawaiian shirts in parrot motifs and sang along to “Cheesburger in Paradise” or “Changes in Lattitude” or “Son of the Son of a Sailor” and it was just simple fun, instant summer vacation, even if you were in, say, Cincinnati in January, like I was once.  Buffet was also an author; while his first memoir was called “A Pirate Looks at 30” his second was called “A Parrot Looks at 40.”

All of which brings me to the improbable subject of, well, parrots.  My favorite all-time Rosh HaShanah story is not a new story, so please, don’t interrupt me when I tell it in order to correct how I’m telling it…

A Jewish man buys a talking parrot, and discovers the parrot’s previous owner was a Chazan, a cantor, and this is no ordinary bird. This parrot is spectacular: not only can he speak normal English, but he also knows the entire High Holy Days liturgy by heart in Hebrew, and he sings the prayers beautifully, all the time.  All day, every day, it's avinu malkeinu.  The new owner is very excited and begins telling the guys at daily minyan about this amazing bird who, he swears, will be able to daven the entire service on Rosh Hashanah.  Well, minyan guys being what they are, they all scoff, one thing leads to another, and pretty soon there's some serious money being laid down over whether the parrot can really daven for yomtov.  The parrot's owner figures he has a sure thing; he's heard the parrot's hin'ni, and knows just how great the bird is, and he takes every bet.  Within a few minutes he is covering thousands of dollars in wagers.

Rosh Hashanah morning rolls around, and the man brings his parrot into shul, sets him up on the bimah on a little parrot-sized podium, puts on his little parrot tallis, opens his little parrot machzor for him, and sits back.  The entire congregation waits—and waits and waits.  Nothing happens.  Nothing.  The parrot won't make a sound.  His owner cajoles him, tries to bribe him with pieces of apples and honey, begs him—but nothing.  Finally, in humiliation, the man admits defeat, roughly returns the parrot to his cage, and leaves the synagogue. 

As soon as he gets outside the man starts threatening the parrot. "I've never been so humiliated in my life.  You cost me thousands!  You miserable clot of feathers, I'm going to have you stuffed, I'm going to have you fricasseed, you'll wish you never double-crossed me..."

The parrot comes to life with a squawk: "Sha, already," it says.  "Think of the odds we'll get on Yom Kippur!"   

That’s my favorite Jewish parrot joke.  I know two other Jewish parrot jokes, but if you want the rest you’ll have to come back on Sukkot. 

Now, this year I, like many of you, was curious about the wonders of Chatgpt, the new open-source artificial intelligence application that allows you to put in a prompt and receive a fully written essay on any subject.  It has caused a sensation, allowing otherwise less-than literate people to suddenly write reasonably and well.  It has certainly caused issues with written work submitted for high school and college classes, I can tell you.  So, knowing this great story, I decided to see what Chatgpt would come up with if I asked it about Rosh HaShanah and parrots.  I mean, some people think that Chatgpt is just a kind of talking parrot anyway, right?

Well, to be honest, Chatgpt delivered, although not quite in the way I expected.

After the prompt on Rosh HaShanah and parrots Chatgpt immediately delivered the following essay: “A parrot on Rosh Hashanah could be seen as a symbol of vibrant and lively energy entering the new year. Just like the parrot's colorful plumage, may your year be filled with brightness, positivity, and beautiful moments.

“Let the parrot remind us to use our voices wisely, to speak kind words and offer blessings to those around us. May it also encourage us to sing songs of gratitude and praise for the gifts of life and the opportunities that lie ahead.

“As you celebrate Rosh Hashanah, may the presence of this lively bird serve as a joyful reminder to embrace the new year with enthusiasm, hope, and a spirit of renewal.”

Except for the fact that parrots squawk and don’t actually sing, and that a parrot is a completely ridiculous Rosh HaShanah metaphor unless you belong to a synagogue in Costa Rica or Puerto Rico, there you have it: on this 5784 Rosh HaShanah, may our Jewish New Year parrot be a harbinger of a fruitful life in the year to come, or at least of a life filled with fruit—isn’t that what they eat?  And since we eat apples and honey on Rosh HaShanah… OK, that’s way too much on parrots, even if it does remind most of us of at least one pleasant summer vacation spent under palm trees on a beach.

Now since we are discussing the tropics, I thought I would share a couple of thoughts about our own recent trip to Hawaii.  As I have said a couple of times recently, a funny thing happened to my family on our summer vacation…  Only really, it wasn’t so funny, of course.  It was sad and challenging.

I’m sure that most of you know about the catastrophic firestorm that consumed Lahaina, the capital of Maui in August.  Sophie, Ayelet and I had a first-hand view of it, since we were staying in Kaanapali Beach, just a couple of miles from Lahaina.  We had been on Front Street in Lahaina the day before, eating shave ice under the iconic banyan tree, and then again drove through that very morning, finally driving back through about two hours before the fire hit, essentially wiping it from the map.  Our hearts go out to the victims of the disastrous wildfire—really, a firestorm—that destroyed the historical capital of Hawaii and killed so many people.  The families who lost relatives and homes are permanently traumatized, and that part of Maui, including Lahaina’s iconic Front Street and the banyan tree, were annihilated.  The historic structures of Lahaina, first capital of Hawaii under Kamehameha, are gone.  Identifying the human remains is an incredibly painful, awful process that will continue for a long time to come.

Our own experience was trivial in comparison to what these people are suffering through, and I encourage everyone to contribute to funds that assist survivors, in particular the Hawaii Community Foundation’s Maui Strong Fund, which is providing direct help, on the ground, without taking an administrative cut of the charity.  I support it, and urge everyone to do so now, when it helps the most.

There is nothing so capricious as a wildfire.  When we were finally permitted to leave the area of Kaanapali, about 2½ miles north of Lahaina, we drove through neighborhoods burned to ash, cars still smoldering, right next to a house that appeared untouched, with utter destruction on the other side of the standing home.  The overall reality was devastating.  We were incredibly fortunate the fire did not turn north towards us, as we sheltered in place a couple of miles away; and it was horrible that the fire’s direction turned so suddenly towards the many people of Lahaina town.  We are told the firestorm, driven by 60 to 80 mile an hour winds, raced forward at a mile a minute.

What caused this awful tragedy?  Well, first, the hillsides on that side of Maui are covered with a low, dry grass—not a native plant but an invasive accidental imported species that has taken over for the native vegetation.  Then, there has been a bit of drought on that side of the island.  And the sudden and unexpected winds struck hard, knocking trees into powerlines—and all preparations on the island for emergencies had focused on hurricanes and tsunamis, not fires.  Oh, and Maui had a grand total of six fire engines on the whole island, perhaps two on that side, not nearly enough to deal with a horrific firestorm.  And the power company focused on restoring power, not shutting it down so it didn’t spark a conflagration.  And in Hawaii, to be honest, fast responses are not exactly part of their DNA.

In the weeks since that tragedy there have been two more awful natural disasters worldwide, a horrific earthquake in Morocco that destroyed much of the old city of Marrakech and killed several thousand people, and then disastrous floods in Libya that drowned over ten thousand people.  In fact, there have been a series of catastrophic floods all around the world in the last few weeks that have victimized people in Greece, Turkey, Brazil, Spain, China, Hong Kong and the US. 

As the prayer in the Unetaneh Tokef section of our service tomorrow, B’rosh HaShanah, says about the year to come, Mi yichyeh umi yamut—who will live and who will die; mi va’eish umi vamayim, who by fire and who by flood.  Indeed.

There are many who believe that global warming is the cause of the increase in natural disasters taking place on our planet.  The evidence is mounting that the extremes of weather we have been seeing—Phoenix setting records for the number of days over 110 degrees in a row this summer, 31 days, followed by breaking its overall record with its 54th day over 110 degrees just last week—are indeed the result of global warming, the ways in which we consistently mistreat the remarkable planet that God blessed us with.  Yes, there have always been natural disasters—but not at this level of frequency, and not compounded by the impact of human damage to the ecosystem.

Rosh HaShanah is known as HaYom Harat Olam, the birthday of the world, and our collective abuse of the globe that God gifted us is leading to changes we truly do not control.  The earth is crying out to us, and it’s time to act.

And while we can’t directly control when or even where such disasters occur, there are a few things we can do in this 5784 year to try to address the ways in which we contribute to these damages.  I mean, even Chapgpt came up with 13 different ways that we individual human beings can help address this in our own lives.  And none of them involved parrots, although some might save a few parrots along the way.

Look, if artificial intelligence can figure out that many things we can do, well, we actually intelligent people can figure out more things, and perhaps more important ones.  We can, of course, seek to recycle more objects and items.  We can move towards using automobiles that don’t burn fossil fuels.  We can embrace the reality that we each, in our own small ways, can change our lifestyles to consume less damaging items, foods that don’t damage the world in their production, building materials that are sustainable, clothing made from renewable products. 

We can even prioritize our own choices of candidates for office on the basis of whether they actually are trying to solve this devastating problem, to address this literally global challenge, instead of those candidates who are mired in denial or have been purchased by special interests opposed to productive change.   

And when we build our own synagogue building for Beit Simcha—and that’s what we are working hard on now—we plan to make it contribute to limiting global warming as much we can.  After all, if we are preaching something we have to do it ourselves, now don’t we?  Isn’t that the point of Judaism?

We hope that changing the way we treat our planet will avoid the dramatic increase in the natural disasters that are impacting our world right now.  At the least, it should limit the severity of future disasters. 

There is a passage in the prayerbook that is read every morning, and which we will read tomorrow morning, thanking God for creating the natural world, and for recreating it every single day: b’chol yom tamid oseh ma’asei v’reisheet.  That is, we are grateful for the continuing dynamic work of the natural processes that God began and which renew the world daily for our own habitation.

As we enter this new year of 5784, may we each choose to work every day to restore the natural world that God has gifted us, to imitate God’s effort at creation through our lives and habits.  And then, whether we use the parrot as our motif for this shiny new year or not, may we welcome a fruitful and joyous life in these coming days.

L'Shana Tovah Umetukah—may you be blessed with a good, sweet year!

Imperfect and Eternal

Sermon, Parshat Nitzavim/Vayelech 5783

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

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

This is the last Shabbat of the year, the final d’var Torah of 5780.  What a great Torah portion to send us off into the Yamim Nora’im!  The rabbis who arranged our current reading cycle had a pretty good idea of what they were about.  Our final parashah of the shanah, our last taste of Torah before the year changes, is a message of personal responsibility and commitment—and it includes a truly long-term contract. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The true brit here is probably encapsulated in another verse of today’s portion: Hanistarot lAdonai Eloheinu, v’haniglot lanu ulvaneinu ad olam, la’asot et kol divrai haTorah hazot.  The hidden things belong to the Lord our God, but the revealed truths are ours and our children’s forever… to do the words of this Torah… The reason we are allowed choice is hidden, but we possess it.  And thus perfection in our lives is not possible, but real virtue is.

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

Hard Work Serves God

5783 Shabbat Ki Tavo

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

We are celebrating Labor Day this weekend, which in many parts of the country means used to mean, before the pandemic, the last hurrah of the summer, barbecues and beach time and a final celebration of the season of relaxation and indolence.  For us here in the Sonoran Desert Labor Day has more typically been just a brief interruption in a fully busy schedule.  We started public school nearly a month ago, after all, and Religious and Hebrew school are going now.  Selichot is next Saturday, and Rosh HaShannah is now just two weeks away.  Aside from Labor Day sales, there isn’t usually much to recommend this as a relaxing three-day weekend.  In fact, in Tucson, Labor Day is more typically like a quick breath before plunging into the deep end of the swimming pool of hectic fall activity.

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

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

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

We Jews have always believed labor has moral quality.  One of the great sentences in Pirkei Avot in the Mishna, completed in the year 225, the Ethics of our Ancestors, says “Al shlosha devarim ha’olam omeid: al hatorah, v’al ha’avodah, v’al gemilut chasadim: the world is based on three things: on Torah, on work, and on acts of selfless kindness.  Some people take the Hebrew word Avodah, labor, to mean religious service—but it is just as appropriate when applied to more practical and prosaic work, and it is likely that the connection of labor to Divine service is intentional.  In other words, honest work is a form of prayer.  This exaltation of basic labor as a foundation of society—and a way to serve God—is consistent throughout Jewish tradition. 

You might not know that until quite recently being a rabbi wasn’t a paying profession.  Most of the great rabbis and scholars in Jewish history had day jobs to make a living, from Rabbi Yosi Hasandlar, a sandal or shoemaker in the days of the Talmud, to Rashi, a wine merchant in 11th century France, to Maimonides, a physician in 12th century Spain and Egypt, to the rabbis of Eastern Europe who made a living in the lumber trade or by working as butchers.  For Jews, not only has there never been any shame in hard work there has been a kind of exaltation of it.  

When I lived in Jerusalem my daily walk to study at Hebrew Union College took me past a small shoemaker’s shop built into a wall in the neighborhood of Rechaviah.  We greeted each other daily, and eventually he repaired my Israeli sandals—then the best in the world—several times.  Gradually we became friends—he was an 80-year old immigrant to Israel from Eastern Europe, where he had been a schuster, a shoemaker.  His courtly, Old-World manners and knowledge of Bible and midrash, as well as world literature and classical music, were somehow perfectly consistent with his daily hard work of making leather bend to practical purpose.  An educated, sophisticated shoemaker: this is very much the Jewish understanding of the working class.  I never met my great-grandfather, Solomon—but in the Old Country he was a shoemaker.  I wonder if he was a bit like that courtly old Jewish gentleman in my neighborhood in Jerusalem… 

It should come as no surprise, then, that some of the great organizers of labor in history have been Jews, and that a movement based on exalting work, the Labor Zionists, created the State of Israel, and formed much of its early culture.   Most of the original members of Aliyah Aleph and Bet, the first major immigrations of Jews coming back to Israel, were idealistically motivated Labor Zionists—what we would think of as socialists, which they proudly called themselves.  They helped create the essential elements of the modern state of Israel, including the Histadrut, the labor union-based organization that still has enormous influence in Israeli life.  Until the mid-1970’s every Prime Minister of Israel came from the Labor Party, and while its influence in the Knesset has eroded steadily since then—in the last election it won, I believe, two seats—the mythos and culture of Israel are deeply imbued with many elements that exalt labor and work.  Most of the early Zionist songs, chestnuts like Zum Gali Gali, include lines like “heChaluts l’ma’an Avodah, Avodah l’ma’an heChaluts”—the pioneer lives for the sake of work, and work is there for the sake of the pioneer.

And of course, that philosophy was the foundation of one of the great old institutions of Israeli life, the Kibbutz, which did more to shape the nature, character, and reputation of Israel than virtually anything else.

Here in America many important names in labor, from Samuel Gompers to Emma Goldman, were Jewish.  Samuel Gompers deserves a special comment.  He was one of the first great labor organizers in American history, founder and longtime president of the American Federation of Labor, the AFL part of the AFL-CIO.  Gompers said of our holiday this weekend that "Labor Day differs in every essential way from the other holidays of the year in any country.  All other holidays are in a more or less degree connected with conflicts and battles of man's prowess over man, of strife and discord for greed and power, of glories achieved by one nation over another. Labor Day... is devoted to no man, living or dead, to no sect, race, or nation."

In other words, labor is truly an international movement, and celebrating labor as a virtue, exalting hard but honest work as the backbone of society, is an extraordinarily good thing. 

Sam Gompers created the first major association of workers, and heavily influenced international policy and politics for nearly forty years.  But his parents were poor immigrant Jews from Holland, who moved first to England and then to New York.

A personal note on the subject of labor: my own grandparents on my mother’s side, my Zaidie Lou and Bubbie Dora, were members of a group called the Workmen’s Circle—the arbitering, Socialists who didn’t much believe in God but certainly believed in Jewish life and the value of labor and workers.  I used to do a Passover Seder for the Arbiterring every year in Los Angeles that somehow managed to make no mention of God, but was otherwise about as traditional as you can imagine—except that in their Haggadah Moses came off as a union organizer, Aaron was the spokesman for an important local and Pharaoh was a wicked, conniving boss.

In today’s American society, and certainly here in Arizona, Labor Day has lost its sense of purpose in American life.  However, the understanding of the inherent value of labor has lost even more.  For the past forty years the strength of the labor movement has declined, in many cases precipitously.  Similarly, protection for workers in our society has diminished as well.  The percentage of workers belonging to a union in the United States peaked in 1954—just after the anti-Union Taft-Hartley Act passed—at almost 35% of the working population, while the total number of union members peaked in 1979 at 21 million. Union membership has declined ever since, with private sector union membership beginning a steady process of steeper and steeper erosion that continues today, when just 7% of private sector employees belong to a union. Public sector unions have grown steadily, and public sector jobs have become more attractive as a result.  But generally speaking, unions have faded badly.

It is notable that on average, union members make about 25% more money, have better benefits, and have more job security than non-unionized workers.

Compared to other developed countries, the US has been de-unionizing for decades.  Today only 11% of workers overall in the U.S. belong to a union, while it’s 19% in Germany, 27% in Canada, and over 50% in Scandinavia, including a high of 70% in Finland.  It is not a surprise that, generally speaking, workers do better in all of these countries than they do in America. 

On a higher level, our Torah portion of Ki Tavo has a thing or two to say about labor, and hard work, as well.  In a beautiful series of blessings, it promises us that if we follow God’s ways, and work hard—if we make even our daily labor into a kind of prayer to God, and if we protect the rights of workers—then we will receive great gifts:

“Blessed shall you be in the city and blessed shall you be in the country.

Blessed shall be the issue of your womb, the produce of your soil, and the offspring of your cattle, the calving of your herd and the lambing of your flock.

Blessed shall be your basket and your kneading bowl.

Blessed shall you be in your comings and blessed shall you be in your goings.”

On this Labor Day weekend Shabbat, may we be reminded of the great value of work, and the foundational quality of labor in creating society, and in serving God.  And may our own hard work be dedicated to creating a better society, and a better world, each day.

Chase Justice

Sermon Shabbat Shoftim 5783

Rabbi Sam Cohon, Congregation Beit Simcha, Tucson, AZ

Now that Sophie and Ayelet and I are back from Maui, where we had a little too close of a call with the terrible Lahaina fires, I’m rediscovering what it’s like to recover from a personal encounter with a disaster.  It’s a strange and complicated process.

First, our hearts go out to the victims of the disastrous wildfire—really, a firestorm—that destroyed the historical capital of Hawaii and killed so many people.  The families who lost relatives and homes are permanently traumatized, and that part of Maui, including Lahaina’s iconic Front Street and banyan tree, are unlikely to recover fully.  We were there the day before the fire, drove through that morning and then back again early that afternoon.  The historic structures of Lahaina are gone, and many of the missing have still not been located.  Identifying human remains is a painful, awful process that will continue for a long time to come.

Our own experience was trivial in comparison to what these people are suffering through, and I encourage everyone to contribute to funds that assist survivors.  I particularly like the Hawaii Community Foundation’s Maui Strong Fund, which is providing direct help, on the ground, without taking an administrative cut of the charity.  I support it, and urge everyone to do so now, when it helps the most.

I guess for Sophie and me the challenge is putting the events of the past weeks in the context of transforming uncertainty and fear and deep sadness, not to mention exhaustion, into something positive and valuable.  We are of course incredibly grateful for having avoided any serious physical harm. 

There is nothing so capricious as a wildfire.  When we were finally permitted to leave the area of Kaanapali, about 2½  miles north of Lahaina, we drove through neighborhoods burned to ash, cars still smoldering, right next to houses that appeared untouched, with utter destruction on the other side of the standing homes.  The overall reality was devastating.  We were incredibly fortunate that the fire did not turn north towards us, as we sheltered in place a couple of miles away; and it was horrible that the fire’s direction turned so suddenly towards the many people of Lahaina town.  We are told the firestorm, driven by 60 to 70 mile an hour winds, raced forward at a mile a minute.

So, we are grateful to be OK, and especially that our six-month old daughter Ayelet is just fine.  We offer a prayer of thanksgiving, a birkat HaGomel, on escaping such a danger:

בָּרוּךְ אַתָּה ה’ אֱלֹהֵינוּ מֶלֶךְ הָעוֹלָם הַגּוֹמֵל לְחַיָּבִים טוֹבוֹת שֶׁגְּמָלַנִי כָּל טוֹב

Blessed are You, Lord our God, Ruler of the universe, who rewards the undeserving with good, and has rewarded us with goodness.

My friends, gratitude is a wonderful feeling, but it’s also incredibly hard to hold onto.  We may offer thanks for good things in our lives, yet simultaneously be aware of just what we don’t have or what is currently irritating us.  Holding onto feelings of profound thanksgiving is no small feat.  I’m not sure I’ve mastered this.  In fact, I’m pretty sure I haven’t mastered it.   

In Mussar, Jewish ethical and spiritual self-improvement teaching, gratitude, hoda’ah, is a powerful midah an important skill to cultivate, a personality trait to nurture.  It’s not an easy thing to do, to focus on what you have and are fortunate to have and not on what you don’t have and wish you did—or on what you do have and wish you didn’t.

The truth is that we are entering into a period of the year that reflects deeply on how we assess our own lives and experience, and to seek to cultivate gratitude for all that is good in our own lives.  As we enter this month of Elul, the final month of the Hebrew calendar year, I hope we can all come to appreciate all the good we do experience, and feel that sense of gratitude to a greater degree.

I also want to explore, for a moment, how much the concept of justice interacts with the emotion of gratitude.  For it’s much easier to feel grateful when we feel that the world is fair and just.  It is much harder to be content and give thanks when we believe there is an underlying element of injustice in the way that things are working.

I have a question for you: what is the most unjust thing that ever happened to you?  What unjust thing in your life truly upset your belief that the world is fair, or that our systems of justice, in any area of life, actually work the way that they are supposed to? 

I suspect that if you really think back over your life you will find incidents and events, even entire processes, that were unfair to you.  You no doubt can think of people who wronged you in your personal life, institutions or people you counted on that were unfair to you, situations that got out of hand and in which you were the loser for no very good reason.  These kinds of things happen to everyone.

Did those situations, those unjust occurrences, affect you?  Did they damage your belief in the justice of the world?  Did they even make you feel hopeless, perhaps, or as though things were never going to work out? If so, I must tell you, it’s exactly that sort of sensibility that our portion of Shoftim is trying to address.  Because as much as we admire justice, Shoftim is trying to prevent injustice, seeking to create a society and a world in which right will actually prevail in matters of human living and civilization.

So what does Judaism have to say about justice, in the abstract, in the practical sense, and in the personal?

One of my favorite passages in the whole Torah comes from Genesis, in the episode of Sodom and Gomorrah.  God informs Abraham that God is about to destroy these two bastions of evil, the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah, the Las Vegas and Atlantic City of the ancient world, places where sin was cultivated and virtue punished.  Abraham objects and asks if God will destroy the cities if 50 righteous people can be found.  “Far be it from You to kill the righteous with the wicked,” Abraham says, “Chas v’challilah, chalilah l’cha.”  So, God agrees not to destroy the cities if 50 righteous live there.  Then Abraham negotiates.  What if there are only 45 righteous people, will God destroy the cities for the lack of a mere 5 righteous people?  Again, God agrees, and in a wonderful, spirited narrative God is bargained down to 10 righteous people being enough to save the city from destruction.  It is ultimately one of the bases for why we require 10 adults to form a minyan, a minimum number for a full prayer service and Torah reading and Kaddish.  10 righteous people are enough to save a city.

But what I love best about this famous section is the line where Abraham summons up the courage—you might say the Chutzpah—to proclaim to God, “HaShofeit kol ha’aretz lo ya’aseh mishpat?  Will the Judge of the whole world not act justly?”  It is a powerful argument, and it works, and God gives in.  Of course, you don’t find a minyan of righteous people in Sodom, and eventually the cities are destroyed.  But still, that phrase is spectacular: shall the judge of the whole earth not act with justice?  It proves beyond question that justice lies at the very heart, as the very essence of the Jewish understanding of God.

And yet, justice must be applied.  High principles only matter when they are actually employed in the real world.  And sometimes that’s quite a complicated process.

All Jews, whether Orthodox, Conservative, Reform, Reconstructionist, Renewal or something else, come originally from a religious culture shaped by a complex process of applying divine law to a very human, fallible, earthbound population. Our heritage is based on the kind of thinking that takes great, idealistic proclamations designed to further morality and applies them to mundane daily life with sometimes fascinating results.

A core ideal of Judaism is to work to create a society based on justice, which will lead, ultimately, to peace and goodness.  But it is justice that is always the focus, which is embodied in the Torah portion we read this Shabbat, Shoftim, “Judges,” filled with the concept of justice.

Tzedek tzedek tirdof, we are commanded here: pursue true justice!  It is a powerful and remarkable ideal.  Our societies must strive for absolute fairness, must be just in every way.  But justice is more than high ideals.  It is applying sacred principles to the mundane reality of daily life, including rules of ritual observance.  Judaism makes no distinction between ethical and ritual laws.  All are part of creating a society based on justice.

in Shoftim we are charged not only with being just but pursuing justice.  The Hebrew word used for pursuit, rodef, is the same word used for an atempted murderer pursuing his prey. It is the strongest possible use: don’t just act for justice, chase it down!  That means, in pragmatic Jewish terms, that we must find a way not only make personal choices about how we live ritually or even in ethical terms, but we also must work to make our organizations, like our synagogue, and especially our society more just.  It is this great injunction that underlies the Jewish commitment to religious action and social justice, the need we Jews have to try to make our synagogue, but also our city, our state, our country and our world into something that more closely mirrors our own conception of justice.

When our own society strays from justice, it is no surprise when many of those who protest the injustice are always Jewish.  Because for us justice is not just an idea.  It must be made the basis for any society that wishes to believe itself based in good. 

Justice is very likely the highest Jewish ideal.  Is justice more important than peace?  Ultimately, yes, because without justice peace cannot truly be maintained.  Is justice more important than charity?  Yes, because the very idea of tzedakah, charity, is based in the same word, tzedek, justice.  Charity is derived from the need for justice.  Is justice more important than happiness?  Yes, because real happiness depends upon the trust that things are fair and just for each of us.  Is justice more important than love?  Ultimately, again, yes, because for love to truly exist we must be in a relationship that is based in respect and fairness, which are the essence of any deep love.

And of course, in order to feel true gratitude we must believe that there in an underlay of justice in our society and in our lives.

Remember that it is always how we apply principles of justice that matters most.  Because ideals alone don’t really matter in Judaism; you must put them into practice.  If you believe an aspect of our society is unjust, it is the imperative command of Shoftim that you, yourself, seek to rectify that by your own actions.  Pursue justice, we are taught.  Chase it.  Make it real.

May this be a Shabbat of ever-increasing justice for each of us.  And may we find our own ways of seeking to improve the justice of this often unjust human world around us.

Covenant, Commandment & You

Sermon Parshat Ekev 5783, Rabbi Samuel M. Cohon

There is a famous joke.  Abraham stands looking up at the heavens and says, “God, let me get this straight.  You say we’re the Chosen People, and you want us to cut off the tips of what?”  Of course, berit or bris is usually understood to mean circumcision, but it actually means covenant.  And that concept plays a major role not only in our Torah portion of Ekev but in the whole of the Book of Deuteronomy, and indeed all Judaism. 

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

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

If you do good things, do you expect a reward?  When you act badly do you anticipate punishment coming from above?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I believe that we do so by reframing the discussion. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

May this be our will.  And God’s.

Israel, Constitutions and Listening

Shabbat Va’etchanan/Nachamu 5783 

Perhaps the most classic of all synagogue jokes tells the story of the rabbi who takes a new pulpit, and discovers that the congregation has a difference of opinion on how you are supposed to say the Shema.  When they come to the central prayer of monotheism, half the congregation stands, while the other half sits.  The first week that’s fine, but the next week people begin to argue when they come to the Shema about whether to sit or stand, the following week they actually start to come to blows.  The new rabbi is desperate to resolve this situation before it gets any worse, so he asks for the name of the oldest member of the congregation, the one who’s been there the longest.  “That’s Mr. Goldberg,” he is told, “He is 102 years old, and he lives in the Jewish Home for the Aged.  But he was here at the beginning.”  The rabbi goes to visit Mr. Goldberg.

“Mr. Goldberg, tell me,” says the new rabbi, “When you first started the shul, did everyone stand for the Shema?”

Goldberg answers, “That, that I don’t remember.”

“Ah,” says the rabbi, “We are getting somewhere!  So the congregation all sat for the Shema?”

But Goldberg answers, “That, that I don’t remember.”

“Oy,” says the rabbi, “Mr. Goldberg, please try to remember!  It’s very important.  Whenever we come to the Shema half the people sit and half the people stand.  And then they start shouting at each other, and even fighting!”

And Goldberg replies, “That—that, I remember!”

I thought about that joke as I prepared for this Shabbat, not only because this is Shabbat Va’etchanan, when we have the text of the Shema in our Torah reading, but also because of what’s happening now in Israel.  My friends, ever since the beginning of the effort the Netanyahu government had been making to cut the powers of the judiciary in Israel, and the rise of the huge protest movement in response, I have been telling you that things were not as dire as they seemed in the press, and that Israel would find a compromise way out of this mess.  I regret that the passing this past week of the first stage of that quote-unquote “Judicial Reform” process leads me now to believe otherwise.

To recap, as soon as the right-wing Likud-led Netanyahu government took power in December of 2022, Bibi Netanyahu announced a sweeping program of what he called “judicial reform” that would nearly eliminate the power of the Israeli Supreme Court to limit or reverse illegal actions taken by the Knesset, the Israeli parliament, or the government ministries.  This balance of power, the only structural aspect of balance in the Israeli governmental system, had existed since the founding of the State of Israel in 1948.  Since Israel has no formal Constitution, the Supreme Court provided the checks-and-balances integral to a democratic state.

Now, when Netanyahu was running for Prime Minister—again—last year he made no mention of “judicial reform” as a key aspect of his incoming program.  In fact, the close election that brought him back to power, and the narrow coalition of right-wing and religious parties that gave the government its 62-58 margin of support, was primarily based on the usual Israeli public’s concern over security, bitachon.  Netanyahu is always seen as a safe option when Israel feels threatened, either by terrorist attacks from Gaza or the West Bank, or by foreign powers, such as Iran’s nuclear aspirations.  During Israel’s sixth national election in five years there was nothing in Likud rhetoric to suggest that attacking the judiciary was a principal motivation of the coalition, or that creating a national political crisis was a goal.

Virtually as soon as he returned to the Prime Minister’s office—Netanyahu had previously been in power twice, for a couple of years in the late 1990s and then for 12 straight years—in the last days of 2022 Bibi suddenly proposed sweeping changes to the Israeli governing system.  Those bills, which he produced all at once, would gut the system of judicial review, severely limit the power of the Supreme Court to invalidate any laws, and essentially end any systemic checks-and-balances and any limitations on the power of the executive to do whatever it wanted.

How would that work?  It goes back, in part, to the issue of a Constitution.

I apologize for the lesson in civics, but a constitution is a document that mandates the system used for governing a nation.  It can be modified over time, an important but difficult process, but most of the time it sets up the way laws are made, enforced and reviewed.  In some countries, like the US, there are two separate, elected bodies that vote on legislation—that’s called bicameral—while in other nations, like France, there is just one, usually called a Parliament, a system known as unicameral.  There is always an executive, headed by an elected President or Prime Minister, who leads a bureaucracy that implements and enforces the laws made by the legislature.  Foreign policy is typically more in the hands of the executive branch, but the legislative branch has significant input over this as well, particularly because it has to vote on most or all expenditures.

Every democratic nation has some sort of judicial oversight of the process of making and enforcing laws.  That is, as a way of making certain the ideals and rules in the constitution or other governing documents of the nation are implemented properly and not violated, a set of courts has the authority to rule a law passed by the legislature is not legal, or to stop the executive from acting in ways that violate the Constitution.  We are familiar with this process in America, and it works a bit differently in every other democracy, but there is always this three-part process: the legislature makes the law, the executive implements the law, and the judiciary reviews and oversees the whole process to make sure it’s all, well, kosher.

Now, most democracies have a constitution: the US has one, France has one, Italy has one, Australia has one, and so on, and that’s helpful in this process.  The highest court—usually the Supreme Court—has the power to say that laws or actions by the president or prime minister don’t follow the constitution and are invalid and are thrown out.  Having a constitution does not guarantee you have a democracy, however: many autocracies have beautiful constitutions, including dictatorial regimes like Russia, Cuba, China, Iran, and Syria.  A lovely written constitution that isn’t implemented to protect human rights isn’t worth the parchment its written on.

Now in a democratic nation without a constitution the process of governing is quite similar to a nation with a constitution; it’s just that the basic laws that oversee everything are not in one codified document.  Israel, perhaps unfortunately, doesn’t have a constitution.  That doesn’t make it undemocratic.  There are a number of important democracies that don’t have a written constitution: England, Canada, New Zealand and Sweden are among them, and democracy works quite well in all of them, thank you very much, without a constitution.

However—and it’s a big however—because Israel has what are called Basic Laws and does not have a constitution, the judiciary’s ability to oversee the legality of the actions of the government are not enshrined in a semi-sacred document.  That means that when the government wants to change the rules of how the nation is governed it’s not as difficult as challenging a constitution.  And because the Prime Minister, in Israel’s parliamentary system, is the head of a coalition of parties that have the majority of seats in the Knesset, the executive and legislative functions are more or less in the hands of one guy.

Here in America, if President Biden decided he wanted to pack the Supreme Court to stop it from invalidating things he supported, he’d need a Constitutional Amendment to do it—that is, he’d have to change the Constitution, which requires not just a majority vote of both houses of Congress but a two-thirds vote of both, followed by a ratification process that would have three fourths of the state legislatures voting separately to approve the Amendment.  Any US Constitutional Amendment therefore needs massive public support to pass.

But in Israel, where the Basic Laws are the standing version of a constitution, in order to change something as foundational as the oversight of the Supreme Court over laws and policies, you just need a majority of the Knesset—61 votes out of 120.  That means that once your coalition government is formed after the election you can, theoretically, put through massive changes without much of a majority at all. 

In the current situation, Netanyahu’s government coalition has a narrow majority of the Knesset; just 64-56, but a majority.  However, the election that brought them to power just eight months ago did not contain a whiff of the idea of remaking Israel’s basic governing system so that the Prime Minister would have far more control and the Supreme Court far less control.  When Bibi Netanyahu proposed sweeping changes he catalyzed a huge protest movement in Israel that has only grown stronger over time.  Polls in Israel show a large majority of the population oppose the so-called judicial reform plan: just 25% of Israelis support it, while if an election were to be held today the Likud coalition would drop from its current 64 seats, a majority, to just 52 seats, a clear minority.  Netanyahu’s approval ratings have fallen to 38% positive. 

If you don’t believe polls, the massive, persistent, nation-wide demonstrations against judicial reform testify to huge public disapproval of the direction all this is taking.

Last week, the first phase of “judicial reform”, the coup against the Supreme Court, passed the Knesset.  The vote was 64-0, reflecting the fact that all of Netanyahu’s coalition held together and the unified opposition boycotted the vote as an undemocratic assault on the system of Israeli democracy.  Interestingly, the Supreme Court itself could invalidate the new law limiting its own powers, but seems unlikely to do more than narrowly limit parts of it.  After all, the Supreme Court is a legal body that reflects the values and ethics of all of Israel’s laws and traditions.  It is likely to act with typical restraint—unlike Netanyahu’s Knesset coalition.

In the wake of the passage of this first law there was international consternation among other democratic nations, including the US.  Perhaps more crucially, Moody’s immediately downgraded Israel’s credit rating, and the Tel Aviv stock market plunged. 

Judicial reform, aka the coup d’etas against the Israeli Supreme Court, is bad for Israel on many levels: it creates an undemocratic image of a highly democratic country, equating Netanyahu with dictators like Orban in Hungary and Edrogan in Turkey.  It is bad for Israel’s economy, creating the impression that democracy itself is being destroyed and that’s bad for business.  It is bad for Israel’s security, as a mass refusal of reservists to serve is causing readiness issues for the Air Force and the IDF in general.  And it is terrible for Israel’s public climate of respect and Jewish unity.

So why is all this happening?  In part, because Bibi Netanyahu does not want to go to jail for corruption.  In part, because extreme right-wing settlers want to be able to co-opt land and build settlements on Arab property.  In part, because groups in the current Israeli government with a preference for authoritarianism, religious and otherwise, and a distrust and even hatred of republican processes and liberal democracy are pushing for more control and domination.

We can’t control events in Israel from here.  Please understand that Israelis are, at heart, a highly pragmatic people.  They are Jews who get things done in their own idiosyncratic way.  But this judicial coup is genuinely bad for the country in every way.

My hope—I mean, Hatikvah means “the hope”—is that this protest movement will genuinely galvanize a new consensus in Israeli politics that changes the country into a better, healthier, more authentic expression of Jewish values.  That’s how democracy, at its best, works: by giving the highest hopes and dreams of people the opportunity to thrive, to be nurtured into fruition, not thwarted and stomped on by authoritarians.

We will wait and see what happens next.  But we are personally worried about the current direction of politics, and policies, in Israel.

Now, the fact that this first stage in dismantling the judiciary’s authority came the day before Tisha B’Av demonstrates that the current Israeli government has no appreciation for irony.  But that this Shabbat is Shabbat Nachamu, the Sabbath of consolation or comfort might give us some hope.

Our people has surely seen much worse events in the course of our long history than this first bill undermining the Supreme Court’s authority in Israel.  And we have a remarkable ability to rise from difficult times to find a new, better path.  Our prayers on this Shabbat Nachamu are that the Israeli public, and its government, find a way out of this mess speedily and soon.  After all, they are smart, practical people.  If they could overcome Arab armies, and boycotts, and economic distress to become the successful modern nation they are today, they can surely overcome their government’s mistakes.  And they can learn to listen to their own people.

Soup and the Promised Land

Sermon Shabbat Hazon 5783 Parshat Devarim

Rabbi Samuel M. Cohon

There is a famous old soup joke that we Jews tell. A restaurant customer calls over the waiter and says to him, “Waiter, taste my soup.”  The waiter says, “Look sir, is there something wrong with it?  Is it cold?”  And the customer says, “Taste the soup.”  The waiter says, “Is it too salty, perhaps?”   And the customer says, “Taste the soup.”  The waiter says, “Is it too watery?”  And the customer says, “Taste the soup.” The waiter is now getting a little annoyed.  “Is the flavor off?  What’s wrong with the soup?”  But the customer just says, “Taste the soup.”  Finally, in frustration the waiter says, “Alright already, fine, sir, I’ll taste the soup.”  The waiter looks around the table and says, “So where’s the spoon?”  And the customer says, “Aha!”

It’s a great joke, a true classic.  But my favorite soup joke goes like this: a customer is ordering food in a kosher restaurant, and he asks for the borscht.  But the waiter says, “No, don’t get that; order something else, that’s so awful even the flies won't go near it.”  So, the customer says, “What do you recommend?”  And the waiter says, “Get the chicken soup with matzah balls.” And when the chicken soup with matzah balls arrives the man assures the waiter that it’s delicious.

A customer at the next table hears this conversation between the waiter and the guy who tried to order the borscht, and when it’s his turn he orders the split pea soup.  But the waiter gives him the same story, “Don’t order that, it’s terrible, even the flies won’t go near it.”  So, this customer, too, asks the waiter to recommend something else, and he says, “Get the barley soup.” But when the barley soup arrives it’s terrible, chaloshes.

"Hey, waiter,” the customer demands, “Why didn't you tell me to order the chicken soup?"

"Because," the waiter replies, "you didn't order the borscht."

I love this story, one of the classic Jewish jokes that probably only works in our culture and might just be better in Yiddish.  It reminds me of the ways in which we so often find ourselves missing the mark and even failing at things through a kind of process of disconnection. 

Without seeking too much wisdom in an old joke, the problem lies in what we seek as opposed to what we need, or more accurately what we ask for as opposed to what we really want.  You see, if that customer had only known that if he ordered the borscht—which was terrible—instead of the pea soup—which was also terrible—he would have gotten the matzah ball soup, which was great, instead of the barley soup, which was terrible.  In other words, if he had only asked for the right wrong thing he would have gotten the right right thing.  Or something like that.

To make it a little clearer, think about Moses at the beginning of this week’s Torah portion of Devarim, the start of the Book of Deuteronomy.  He has spent the past 40 years trying to get the people of Israel into the Promised Land, and to honest about it, trying to get himself into the Promised Land.  And now he knows he simply isn’t going to be allowed to get in.  God has decreed that he will be able to bring this fractious group of Jews right up to the border, and they will be allowed to enter and conquer and inherit this beautiful land of Israel.  But he himself will have to lay down his burden on the mountains at the boundary of the land. 

And so, Moses launches into a long set of speeches that compose the Book of Devarim, Deuteronomy.  He reminds the people of their last 40 years of travels, trials and travails.  He urges them to remember “the days of old,” challenges them with their failings, urges them to follow the commandments.  Moses tells them—not for the first time and certainly not for the last time—that he himself can’t go into the Promised Land in large part because their inability to be good finally goaded him into the mistake that made him ineligible for entry into Canaan.

And as Deuteronomy works its way out over the next few weeks, Moses will make it clear that all he really wants at this point in his life is to go into Canaan, to see with his own eyes his people inherit their own beautiful land.  He wants to know that his legacy is secure, that the yerushah, the inheritance of his people, is established.  He wants to see it with his own aged eyes.

In other words, Moses keeps asking for what he cannot have.  And he keeps kvetching about not having it.

But the funny part about all of this is that if Moses is concerned about his legacy, well, it is already well established.  He is actually seeking something that he will never achieve, entry into the Promised Land—but if only he asked for what he really wants, even needs, which is the regard of posterity, the establishment of the people of Israel in the land of Israel, his own status as the most important Jew in all of history, well then, he would realize that he already has what he really needs.

It’s like this: if instead of asking for the barley soup he would just ask for the borscht, he would end up with what he really needs, which turns out to be chicken soup with matzah balls…

Now to leave soup completely—“Finally,” you say, “rabbi; enough with the soup… it’s too hot for soup now anyway!”—what Deuteronomy will ultimately teach us is something remarkable.  We often seek what we think we want when what we really need is close at hand.

As the Rolling Stones once put it, you can’t always get what you want but you just might find you get what you need…

Moses never will enter the Promised Land.  But in reality, he has been traveling in the promised land for a long time.  It is the quality of the journey, the sacredness of the transit, that he never quite learns to appreciate.  He has had an unprecedented and unequalled career as leader.  He has accomplished so much!  We just wish he realized that, and that it was enough for him.

We may be able to learn something critical from Moses, and from God, over the weeks to come when we will be reading this amazing book.  Often, we seek things we don’t have simply because others have them.  And as we seek them, we neglect what we already have, and what we should value for its own qualities.  The blessings we enjoy now are always so much easier to forget than the things we think we desire.

It's ingrained in our American culture, of course.  If you have a nice house, you are told that you should wish you had a better one.  If you own a good car, you are convinced by advertising that there is a fancier, more advanced, preferable one out there.  The articles on your news feed teach that you can always be thinner, better looking, happier if you only purchase another item, try another diet, move to a better place, adopt a new program of behaviors.  Everyone on Facebook looks like they are having a better time than you are, and you should try to be more like them… 

Of course, that’s not true in any objective sense; none of it is real.  We each have many things in our own lives that we should learn to appreciate, to celebrate, to enjoy while we have them.  We have people who love us, friends who respect us, lives worth living. 

Look, Moses was, quite literally, the greatest Jewish leader in history.  Wouldn’t it be nice if he realized that was, indeed, enough of a life’s accomplishment?  He brought our people from abject slavery to religious and political success.  Would it be so hard for him to just sit back and enjoy it?

This Shabbat is called Shabbat Hazon, which means “the Sabbath of Vision” and its name is taken from the Haftarah for tomorrow.  It always precedes the commemoration of Tisha B’Av, the 9th of Av, a mournful day of remembrance of destruction and loss.  Certainly, in Jewish history, there is plenty of loss to recall. 

But perhaps we can see this Sabbath of Vision through a different lens tonight.  You see, we live in a country in which we exercise our Judaism freely and openly.  It’s hot outside now, but we also live in a beautiful place here in Tucson that we can enjoy even in the middle of summer.  We each have goodness in our lives to appreciate and celebrate. We have people to embrace, a congregation to participate in, love to give and receive.      

My friends, try to discern, over these coming weeks in which we will read the great book of Deuteronomy, what it is you really need, and what it will take for you to realize just how precious this world can be for you as it is now, without magical thinking or radical changes in your own life.  Whether or not you get the right kind of soup.

Because then, unlike Moses, you may come to recognize your own Promised Land in the life you have now.

Is Life a Highway, Really?

Sermon Shabbat Matot-Masei 5783

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

On a superficial examination the people of Israel have made enormous progress over the 40 years covered in these books.  Early in Exodus our people are enslaved and remain human chattel for many generations.  The traditional count is 400 years of slavery, near the end of which a genocidal program is advanced by the Egyptian king to destroy us.  Moses is called by God and emerges as an effective revolutionary leader, assisted by his brother Aaron, and through God’s power the people of Israel are redeemed from slavery and given the gift of freedom.  After surviving an attempt to re-enslave them, the Israelites enter a covenant, a contract with God at Mt. Sinai, and are taught a way of life structured by moral law and ethical action, mitzvot.  They are progressively organized into a structured, mobile community, are given social rules for successful human society, taught how to centralize religious worship in a unifying way, and forged into a growing young national group, and directed towards their own homeland.

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

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

It is an unusual choice for our tradition to make.  It is as if we were taught the story of the Declaration of Independence and the American Revolutionary War but never were told who won the war.  It is like following the entire World Cup soccer tournament, discovering the final was between the Argentina and France, and never learning who won the crown.

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

The easy answer is a familiar one: the journey is the destination.  Like Moses, we don’t enter the Promised Land because we need to learn that it’s not the arriving that counts, but journeying, not what we find when we get there but how we travel along the way.  This transit of the Sinai Desert is a metaphor for our own lives, an object lesson on just what it is that truly matters.  As a familiar poem by Rabbi Alvin Fine puts it: “Birth is a beginning/And death a destination/ But life is a journey:/From childhood to maturity and youth to age… /looking backward or ahead we see that victory lies/ Not at some high place along the way/ But in having made the journey, stage by stage/ a sacred pilgrimage.”

Like the Israelites, we are all on a journey, a life voyage, and how we grow and change and learn and develop, the adventures we experience along the way, are far more important than what seem on the surface to be our ultimate accomplishments.  We will never enter the Promised Land at all.  We are not supposed to do so.  What we are supposed to do, what we are taught by our Torah, here in Matot-Masei and elsewhere, is that the adventure is the journey itself, that our goals and accomplishments are in advancing that expedition.

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

This is not exactly a new message.  In fact, it might be the essential message of all honest religious traditions: how we live, how we get there is far more important than where we are going.  Life is a highway, as it were, and we are going to ride it all life-long… and who we really are is much more a function of the way that we travel that highway than where we garage our car.

Or something like that.  I mean, that is the point, right?  It doesn’t really matter where we end up, but how we get there, no?

To be honest, sometimes I’m not so sure about that.  I don’t know how many of you enjoy attending graduation ceremonies, but I once had the unenviable responsibility of attending, in a one-week period, nine different graduation ceremonies.  Let me rephrase that: one year I had the delightful privilege of attending, in a one-week period, nine different graduation ceremonies.  I believe my favorite moment in all of them was hearing a fine high school musician sing a medley of all the favorite graduation tunes of recent years as though they were, essentially, one song.  “Another fork stuck in the road/ as we go on we remember all the times we had together/ I’ll remember you/you’ll never walk alone/kiss today goodbye and point me towards tomorrow/I hope you had the time of your life” and so on.  It highlighted the essential cliché, true but trite, of the fact that when we arrive at moments of great accomplishment what we realize is how precious the journey has been, how much we love our friends who have travelled with us, how we have grown and changed over the time we have been journeying.  Etc.  Yaddah yaddah yaddah…

Look, it’s true that, as Matot-Masei makes clear, the journey shaped us as a people, for better and for worse.  How we get there makes us who we are.

But doesn’t it also matter a great deal what we do when we get to the Promised Land?  I mean, what if we manage to reach our goal, and we’ve had a great trip and all, but we don’t act in good ways that build holiness into our lives and our world?  What if we fail to take the steps we need to take to create a better, holier life? 

Certainly, the journey matters, and in particular, how we act and treat each other along the way. And whenever we get to what we perceive of as our own promised land, the work we do when get where we want to be is just as important.  The goal is not to rest on our laurels, to congratulate ourselves on how well we have done getting there.  The ultimate purpose, which our ancestors ultimately come to understand, is to move into that Promised Land and create a life, and institutions, that best express our values and ideals.

You see, life may well be a highway.  But it’s not just how we get there—it’s what we do after we get there that also really counts.  The message is to travel well: but also to make it matter when you get there.

So, over this final Shabbat of Numbers, may we think not only about how we have progressed to this point in our lives, but how we can make the place we are now into something truly special, good, and holy.

From Portugal to Here

Sermon Parshat Pinchas 5783

As many of you know, I’ve just returned from a visit to Portugal, a country that was new to me.  At last count, I’ve traveled to some 50 different countries over the years, a small number compared to some people but still, that’s a lot of places.  But until now I’ve never been to Portugal before. A close friend got married last weekend on the island of Madeira, in the Atlantic Ocean off the coast, and since it was necessary to fly to Lisbon to get to Madeira it provided a good excuse to explore an interesting new country.

While it may have been new to me, Portugal is not a new country for my family, or at least not for some of my long-ago ancestors.  You see, one branch of my dad’s side of the family lived in Portugal, and probably Spain before that.  Their name was del Banco.  In the year 1496, under pressure from the King and Queen of Spain, who had expelled all Spanish Jews in 1492, King Manuel I expelled all Jews from Portugal.  The new law of 1496 required all Jews either to convert to Christianity or leave the country, and so my ancestors the del Bancos emigrated from Lisbon, going first to the Italian peninsula.  They later moved from there to the Rhineland area of Germany where they married into a German Jewish family, the Reinharts.  Both the Reinharts and the del Bancos eventually immigrated to America in the 1840s, the Reinharts settling first in Portland, Oregon, and later mostly moving to Cincinnati, Ohio, while the del Bancos went first to Ohio.  Three del Bancos, my distant cousins, served in the Union Army during the Civil War; one of them, one of the first Jewish chaplains permitted in the US military, died when the steamship he was on was torpedoed returning from occupied Vicksburg, where he had led High Holy Day services in 1864.  And then, like so many other immigrant Jewish families, our family spread out all over the United States.

All of that personal history means that when I explored Portugal it was in fact returning to a country in which some of my ancestors lived over 500 years ago. Admittedly, I am probably only about 1/64th Sephardic Jew—the Portugese Jews were Sephardim of course—but that small part of me originated in Portugal.  So while it was not exactly a homecoming as such, it was interesting to see just how it felt to wander around Lisbon and Porto that corner of the Iberian Peninsula.

You know, I once did one of those commercial genetic DNA tests that are supposed to tell you your biological origins, where your ancestors came from in great detail.  It was the kind of test that tells you that you are 43% Irish, 12% Scottish, 28% from Ghana, 4% Neanderthal and so on.  I was hoping for some detailed conclusions about exactly where my people came from originally.  But when my DNA test came back it gave only the conclusion that I am “100% European Jewish.”  Great.  As if that was something we didn’t already know... 

Still, it was interesting to see just where some of my antecedents lived over five centuries ago, before again becoming wandering Jews.

In any event, Portugal in 2023 is a lovely country, and Lisbon a particularly attractive and enjoyable city.  They tell you often that it is the second oldest European capital city, after only Athens, and was founded centuries before Rome.  Portugal has been Phoenician, Carthaginian, Roman, Goth, Muslim, and Catholic, controlled by dukes, emperors, caliphs, kings, dictators, and presidents. 

While there were likely Jews present in the urban landscape occupied today by Lisbon, and elsewhere in what later became Portugal, the most significant Jewish community in Portugal’s history arrived with, or shortly after the Muslim conquest of el-Andalus in the Middle Ages.  From the 8th century until the Christian Reconquista forced out the last Muslims in the late 15th century Jews mostly flourished in the area of Portugal.  In particular, during the great age of Portugese exploration that resulted in the first global colonial empire, Jews were actively engaged in the commerce that made Portugal incredibly successful and wealthy, particularly the spice trade with Africa, India and the Far East.  Jews were active in the textile industry of the day—we might call it the shmattah business—and helped finance and insure the voyages of the great Portugese navigators and explorers, who sailed with commerce on their minds.

Initially, King Manuel, an effective and enlightened monarch for his day, tried to shield the Jews of Portugal from the forced conversions and expulsions his Spanish big brother neighbors were brutally enforcing on their own Jews.  In fact, in 1495 he liberalized many of the laws the restricted and limited Jewish participation in society.  But then he wanted to marry a Castilian princess and cement an alliance with Spain—and part of the price of the arrangement was that he had to expel or convert all of Portugal’s Jews.  He had no desire to lose the productive, literate, and loyal Jewish community that formed perhaps 20% of his population.  And so, in a blanket move, he decreed that all Jews in Portugal were officially converted to Catholicism, whether they liked it or not.  Many Jews went along with this superficial conversion.  Others could not stomach the hypocrisy, and left for other lands: the Ottoman Empire, Italy, even the New World.

But while my distant ancestors fled conversion in 1496, many Jews remained behind and publicly pretended to be Catholics while practicing their Judaism in secret.  The Inquisition sought to expose, torture, and execute these “New Christians,” but the persecution was not universally successful.  That meant that even more brutal methods were tried.  In April 1506, during a period of drought and famine and following a horrifying anti-Jewish sermon on a Sunday in the Church of Sao Domingos, someone said they had seen a miraculous light shining from a statue of Jesus.  The crowd began to agitate against the New Christians, a few were caught and horribly killed, and then mobs began to search for, locate, torture and murder New Christians, who were widely suspected of being secret Jews.  No doubt many were. 

In the end, thousands of New Christians were murdered. 

King Manuel was furious at the breakdown in public order, perhaps more so than the destruction of the New Christians and secret Jews.  He enforced extreme punishment on the rioters, closed the church for a while, and executed the Dominican friars who had encouraged the massacre.

But the damage was done, and many more New Christians—conversos, Marranos, choose your term—fled Portugal.  Essentially, within a decade or two, the great Jewish community of Portugal was gone, reinvented in places like Amsterdam, Curacao, Recife, and North America, where Portugese Sephardic synagogues flourished, and some still remain.

Today there is a monument outside that church in Lisbon, Sao Domingos, remembering the great sin of the Massacre of Lisbon.  Locals say that the later disasters that afflicted that church—its collapse during Sunday services in the great earthquake of 1755, killing most of its worshippers, a terrible fire again on a Sunday in 1959—were punishment for the Massacre of Lisbon.

You can still see signs of Jewish life in the past in Lisbon—a Rua Judiaria, a Jew street next to what used to be the major synagogue of the Jewish Quarter which was taken over and turned into another Catholic Church after 1496. 

There are remarkable stories about prominent Portugese Jews who managed their way around the persecutions of the Inquisition and expulsions, including the exceptional Dona Gracia Mendes in the 1500s.  A wealthy New Christian widow protected many Jews from persecution and lived regally, but peripatetically in Lisbon, Antwerp, Venice, Ferrara and finally Constantinople, always a step ahead of the Inquisition.   Truly a wandering Jew.  And the success of the Portugese age of exploration, the so-called Golden Age of a small country on the farthest western edge of the European continent conquering an enormous empire and becoming fabulously wealthy doing so, was do in no small part to its energetic and supremely competent Jewish minority.

But those intriguing signs of Jewish influence from a distant past, while evocative, do not testify to a vibrant Jewish life today.  Yes, there are many Jewish expats living in Portugal now, and enjoying it.  I met some from England and Israel and America.  But this is not a recapturing of the great Sephardic heritage of the past, nor is it an affirmation of a vital Jewish community there today.  Rather, it is a small taste of what was once a great part of the Jewish world.

The truth is that the Jewish communities that matter today are those that offer warm congregations of Jewish prayer and learning, where children are educated and reach maturity, where new and exciting learning and growth are taking place right now.  You can travel around the world and find fascinating and wonderful aspects of Jewish life nearly anywhere.  But what you discover, over time and distance, is that the most compelling Jewish stories are being written now, in the ways in which we build our own communities of prayer, study, social justice and practice.

Just so our portion of Pinchas reminds us to observe our Shabbatot and holidays with meaning and beauty, in the places where we are not persecuted, and where we have the freedom to be Jews openly and with devotion today.

May we always remember to do so.

Bald Truths: How Rebellion Teaches us About Leadership

Rabbi Samuel M. Cohon’s Sermon on Korach 5783

Korach chronicles the greatest rebellion in the entire Torah, the palace revolt of the Levite Korach and his 400 followers against the divinely ordained leadership of his fellow Levites, Moses and Aaron.  As so often seems to be the case, we Jews are our own worst enemies.  The result of this insurrection is disastrous, at least for the rebels.  The earth opens and Korach and all of his misguided followers are swallowed up, never to be heard from again. 

By tradition, the rebellion of Korach is the absolute worst revolt of its sort in Jewish history.  But this is hardly the first rebellion of the Israelites against Moses’ leadership, and it is certainly also not the last.  In a couple of weeks, the Torah portion of Pinchas will conclude yet another episode of an insider revolution, that one solved by the point of a spear.  And the rebellions against Moses and God have been pretty continuous: the criticism on the very shore of the Red Sea, the Golden Calf episode, the intense unhappiness of the Children of Israel throughout their peregrinations in the desert right up to last week’s story of the failed spies in Shlach L’cha.  Our ancestors had a very bad habit of constantly being dissatisfied and continuously trying to overthrow the proper order of things.  Whoever was in charge always got the brunt of the criticism and the lion’s share of the hostility.

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

Since Korach is considered to be the worst of all of these, I wondered if there is any clue in the Hebrew of his name.  The Hebrew root, the Korach, has a few other meanings.  One is to cut or shear things, to slice.  Certainly rebellion is intended as a cutting gesture.  Another meaning of Kuf reish chet is ice or cold, like Kerach—to chill or freeze, again a kind of reflection of emotional distance and hostility.  Put those together, to cut and to make cold and you come up with… well, cold cuts.  Very Jewish. 

Rabbi Samuel M. Cohon’s Sermon on Korach 5783

Korach chronicles the greatest rebellion in the entire Torah, the palace revolt of the Levite Korach and his 400 followers against the divinely ordained leadership of his fellow Levites, Moses and Aaron.  As so often seems to be the case, we Jews are our own worst enemies.  The result of this insurrection is disastrous, at least for the rebels.  The earth opens and Korach and all of his misguided followers are swallowed up, never to be heard from again. 

By tradition, the rebellion of Korach is the absolute worst revolt of its sort in Jewish history.  But this is hardly the first rebellion of the Israelites against Moses’ leadership, and it is certainly also not the last.  In a couple of weeks, the Torah portion of Pinchas will conclude yet another episode of an insider revolution, that one solved by the point of a spear.  And the rebellions against Moses and God have been pretty continuous: the criticism on the very shore of the Red Sea, the Golden Calf episode, the intense unhappiness of the Children of Israel throughout their peregrinations in the desert right up to last week’s story of the failed spies in Shlach L’cha.  Our ancestors had a very bad habit of constantly being dissatisfied and continuously trying to overthrow the proper order of things.  Whoever was in charge always got the brunt of the criticism and the lion’s share of the hostility.

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

Since Korach is considered to be the worst of all of these, I wondered if there is any clue in the Hebrew of his name.  The Hebrew root, the Korach, has a few other meanings.  One is to cut or shear things, to slice.  Certainly rebellion is intended as a cutting gesture.  Another meaning of Kuf reish chet is ice or cold, like Kerach—to chill or freeze, again a kind of reflection of emotional distance and hostility.  Put those together, to cut and to make cold and you come up with… well, cold cuts.  Very Jewish. 

My favorite korach translation of the Hebrew is that it has the meaning, “baldness, Karei’ach” which seems to indicate that a lack of hair is potentially untrustworthy… my apologies, on behalf of the Hebrew language, to all bald people who resent this assertion.  In defense, I must say that some of my best friends are bald.  And my father.

There is no word about whether this relates to comb-overs, or to bad hairpieces marking their possessors as being intrinsically duplicitous.  Perhaps.

Midrash gives us another kind of clue.  Korach is considered to have been a very wealthy man, a kind of Jewish Croesus, the Rothschild, the Bill Gates, the Mark Zuckerberg, the Elon Musk of the Sinai Desert Israelites.  There is a Hebrew slang term, otzrot Korach, the treasures of Korach, which basically means someone is filthy rich.  Somehow his wealth is associated with the tendency to revel in rebellion.  Super-rich people as uber-powerful revolutionaries, believing they are infallible and the smartest people in every room, seeking to overturn the established order and put themselves in charge?  Sounds a little bit familiar, doesn’t it? 

So, let’s see now: the word Korach teachs us that rebellion against God’s appointed leaders comes from a coldness of heart and a desire to cut, reflects a paucity of the insulating calm of hair—or perhaps just bad hair—and it is inflamed by the financial means to support true rebellion.  Odd and very interesting.

The truth is that leading the Jewish people has never been an easy task—important, rewarding, ethically essential, but never, ever easy.  If it is true that it is shver tzu zain a Yid, hard to be a Jew, it is even harder to be a Jewish leader.  And so I wonder: why would intelligent, caring, reasonable Jews wish to take on this responsibility?  What is there about the opportunity to make this commitment that attracts talented people with other things to do in life to spend time and effort in this contentious arena?  Why would someone wish to engage in the constant give and take, the automatic Jewish flow of criticism and critique that aims itself at any and every leader of substance and integrity?

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

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

If we are true Jews of principle, we will have legitimate disagreements, and confront serious challenges.  It is our ability to accept those differences, sometimes lose the arguments, and nonetheless continue to work together to serve God with commitment and passion, and further the destiny of our communities and our people.

So whether or not we have hair, whether or not we have cold or warm personalities, whether we are sharp or dull, even, and whether or not we completely agree, if we are to be true followers of Moses, and God, we always must find a way to work together for the greater good.  It’s a fabulous lesson.

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

There is no word about whether this relates to comb-overs, or to bad hairpieces marking their possessors as being intrinsically duplicitous.  Perhaps.

Midrash gives us another kind of clue.  Korach is considered to have been a very wealthy man, a kind of Jewish Croesus, the Rothschild, the Bill Gates, the Mark Zuckerberg, the Elon Musk of the Sinai Desert Israelites.  There is a Hebrew slang term, otzrot Korach, the treasures of Korach, which basically means someone is filthy rich.  Somehow his wealth is associated with the tendency to revel in rebellion.  Super-rich people as uber-powerful revolutionaries, believing they are infallible and the smartest people in every room, seeking to overturn the established order and put themselves in charge?  Sounds a little bit familiar, doesn’t it? 

So, let’s see now: the word Korach teachs us that rebellion against God’s appointed leaders comes from a coldness of heart and a desire to cut, reflects a paucity of the insulating calm of hair—or perhaps just bad hair—and it is inflamed by the financial means to support true rebellion.  Odd and very interesting.

The truth is that leading the Jewish people has never been an easy task—important, rewarding, ethically essential, but never, ever easy.  If it is true that it is shver tzu zain a Yid, hard to be a Jew, it is even harder to be a Jewish leader.  And so I wonder: why would intelligent, caring, reasonable Jews wish to take on this responsibility?  What is there about the opportunity to make this commitment that attracts talented people with other things to do in life to spend time and effort in this contentious arena?  Why would someone wish to engage in the constant give and take, the automatic Jewish flow of criticism and critique that aims itself at any and every leader of substance and integrity?

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

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

If we are true Jews of principle, we will have legitimate disagreements, and confront serious challenges.  It is our ability to accept those differences, sometimes lose the arguments, and nonetheless continue to work together to serve God with commitment and passion, and further the destiny of our communities and our people.

So whether or not we have hair, whether or not we have cold or warm personalities, whether we are sharp or dull, even, and whether or not we completely agree, if we are to be true followers of Moses, and God, we always must find a way to work together for the greater good.  It’s a fabulous lesson.

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

The Right Kind of Spy

Sermon for Shlach Lecha 5783

June 16, 2023

Rabbi Samuel M. Cohon

In competitive rowing there are nine people in the boat, including the captain of the shell, who is called a coxswain or cox and gives the stroke commands.

The story goes that the Chabad House at Oxford challenged the Oxford University oarsmen to a rowing contest, but quickly discovered that the Oxford crew was twice as fast as they were.  So the Lubavitch captain sent a spy across to Oxford to find out why and how. A few hours later the spy returned.  “Nuh,” said the Chabad captain, “tell us everything.”

“Well,” said the spy, “They do everything the other way round to us.”

“Explain,” demanded the captain.

“It's simple,” said the spy, “They've got eight men rowing and one man shouting!”

This little joke has relevance for this week’s Torah portion of Shelach Lecha, for two reasons.  First, the need for more people to row, and fewer to shout, is always important in Jewish circles.  But secondly, and more importantly, the question of what makes for a good spy and just where you find the professional qualities necessary for doing espionage work are central to our parshah and can teach us important things about ourselves and our own quest for meaning. 

I’m sure that there are all kinds of tests available today for determining who makes a good subject for intelligence work and who just can’t pull it off.   In spite of the oft-repeated slander that the definition of an oxymoron is “military intelligence,” both the armed services and the civilian agencies entrusted with espionage have lots of ways of figuring out who is good at this stuff and who isn’t. 

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

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

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

What do you think of when you picture a spy?  If your beau ideal of a spy is James Bond or Mata Hari, glamorous, dramatic types, then this is the group for you.  Twelve dashing young men, leaders of their people, princes of the blood, a virtual Rat Pack of glamorous types, an Ocean’s 12 of the best and brightest.  These men—all men, naturally, in those days—are identified by name and reputation.  The most famous of them, Hosea, is actually Moses’ top aid.  The others come from illustrious families and hold high office.  To add to the drama of the coming mission, Moses even changes the name of their most prominent member, Hosea, to Joshua.  Name changes always signify something portentous in the Torah.  This is no exception; his new name means, “God will save.” 

These illustrious young gentlemen are no doubt feeling pretty full of themselves for having been selected for this important mission.  It’s all very exciting.  What an opportunity!  How thrilling!

And then Moses gives instructions which are practical and thorough.  “Go up and see the Negev Desert and the mountains, see what kind of country it is; Are the people strong or weak, few or many?  Is the country they live in good or bad, are the cities open or fortified with walls?  Is the land productive and rich, or is it barren and thin?  Be sure to bring back some of its fruit.”

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

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

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

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

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

In fact, that’s exactly what Joshua himself does a generation later in the Haftarah that we will chant tomorrow.  The two spies Joshua chooses aren’t even named in the Bible, and instead of going off as a kind of expeditionary force they slip unannounced into the major city of their enemies and go directly to the house of Rahab the harlot.  That’s how you find out the real facts about the situation.

Armies are always discovering this in wartime, by the way.  Back in the American Civil War the Union had a genuinely terrible time with its intelligence work for most of the war.  They kept sending out tall, handsome, well-educated, nicely groomed, sophisticated young men to scout the land, men like the sons of admirals and generals and Senators – one of them, Ulrich Dahglren, was the darling of Washington society and was said to have manners as “soft as a cat’s”—and the southerners kept catching them and hanging them.  After a few years of this they finally caught on, and by the later stages of the war they were sending out undersized, anonymous, scrawny little cavalrymen who brought back all kinds of secrets. 

My good friend Harold Bongarten, of blessed memory, did this kind of work during World War II, slipping behind German lines and pretending to be a returning German soldier wandering around France.  Harold was not tall or dramatic looking, had an easy smile and a kind manner, and he was constantly underestimated, which he counted on and exploited with great charm.  He spoke German fluently, and he sent back a series of reports that helped the Allies know whom to trust and whom to arrest in each town as they recaptured it.  And then he quietly and anonymously moved on ahead of the armies to the next town.  And he was never caught.

So why is this relevant in a religious sense? 

You see, the lessons of this story of the spies is complex and rich.  But surely one lesson is about how we must approach things ourselves as Jews.  For the original m’raglim came to their mission with pride and a certain sense of arrogance.  They were the princes of the people, after all.  They had high standing and knew the best way to do things.  And, of course, they failed miserably.

We modern, sophisticated, educated adults come to our mission as Jews in a rather similar way.  We, too, consider ourselves to be pretty important.  We know all sorts of things, and we have achievements in the world that testify to our accomplishments and abilities.  We have self-pride and confidence.  If we seek to find God and holiness from this perspective, we, too, will fail.

I think that is what I love most about our congregation, Beit Simcha.  No one, in my experience here, thinks that they are too important to help move chairs, or pack and carry boxes, or pitch in doing whatever needs doing.  This is true from the oldest to the youngest, and from the president to the newest member.  Whatever our status is outside of our shul, here we all seem to approach doing things with genuine humility.

And that is more than appropriate for Jews.  In fact, it is perhaps the essential lesson of Shlach Lecha, and pivotal to our religion.

For it is not out of confidence or arrogance that we must approach the Divine; it is out of humility and simplicity.  What God needs is not the pedigrees of the elite, but the hearts of the humble.  What Judaism requires is not the stature of the elect but the open honesty of the ordinary woman and man.  What allows us to reach towards heaven and connect with God is the ability to come to terms with our own limits, our humanity, our humility.  To drop pretenses, and approach God without our badges of rank or pretentions of importance.

We see that in the Haftarah for this week’s portion, the story of the spies that Joshua sent into the land of Canaan when the Israelites finally succeeded in conquering the Holy Land in the next generation.  They were crucial players in that victory.  But we don’t even learn their names in the Bible.  They are just guys, anonymous Jews who made possible our entry into Israel.

You see, we too must approach God, our own promised land, with simplicity and humility, as honest, unassuming human beings.  If we can do that, then the secret fastness of the divine spirit may be revealed and opened to us.  And then our own mission, as Jews, will be fulfilled for our good, and everyone’s good. May this become our will, and thus our blessing.  Ken Yehi Ratson.

Blessings

Blessings

Sermon Shabbat Naso 5783, Rabbi Samuel M. Cohon

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And yet…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The real purpose of it is to remind us that we are all part of a sacred inheritance, that we each are members of the true royal family, each can, and should, wear the keter kehuna the crown of priesthood.  We truly are the inheritors, spiritually, of this mamlechet kohanim v’goy kadosh, the kingdom of priests, members of the holy people.

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

50 Words for Learning

Sermon Shabbat Shavu’ot 5783

There is a popular myth that Eskimos have 50 different names for snow.  British singer Kate Bush even titled one of her albums, “50 Words for Snow.”  In fact, there are many words in Aleut, Inuit and other Eskimo languages for snow, reasonable considering their environment; it certainly snows a lot up there in the still-frozen north.  Even more dramatically, the native peoples of Norway, Sweden and Finland, the Sami peoples, use languages that have perhaps 180 snow- and ice-related words and as many as 300 different words for types of snow.  Each of the words for snow has a somewhat different meaning, distinguishing differences in the type, intensity and even the shape of the ice crystals in the snow.  Most of us hot weather habitués would not be able to delineate even a fraction of those distinctions.

But based on the weather predictions for the next week, we probably should have at least 50 words for “hot” here in Tucson…

If Eskimos and Samis know snow, we Jews, instead, have a plethora of words for education, and nearly all of our sacred texts are named for a variation of learning or teaching. The word Torah means, literally, instruction.  The words for the great texts of Jewish law, the Mishnah and Gemara and the Talmud that encompasses them, mean, respectively, memorized learning, completed learning, and just, well, learning.  The name for the great text of Jewish mysticism, the Zohar, means, “to enlighten.”   The term “rabbi” translates to master teacher.  The word for parents, Horim, means instructors.  Knowledge is Da’at, from the word Yadah, knowing.  Seichel means intelligence, used for both learning and teaching.  A meivin is one who understands and can therefore teach others.  Even the holiday of Chanukah comes from the word chinuch, which means education.  And so on.  Learning and teaching are the essential concepts of our tradition.

We see this in folk wisdom as well.  There is an old Jewish joke from the days when the Rothschild family was the standard for wealth in the world.  The Rothschilds were the Warren Buffets, the Bill Gates, the Jeff Bezos’ of the world for 200 years.  A guy says to his friend, “If I were Rothschild, I’d be richer than Rothschild.”  And his friend says, “Richer than Rothschild?  How would you be richer than Rothschild?”  And he answers, “Because I’d do a little teaching on the side.”

While the stereotype for a Jewish professional today is doctor or lawyer or accountant, the truth is that the most Jewish job of all is teacher.  Since learning in Judaism is so central, the job of teaching is critically important, the paradigmatic Jewish activity.

Which makes this holiday of Shavu’ot a unique opportunity to explore just what it means to do Jewish learning.  Last night we set out lots of cheesecake and other goodies to eat, brewed coffee, conducted a short Shvu’os festival evening service and then started studying.  The Tikun Leil Shavu’ot, the study session the night of Shvu’os is a Jewish education marathon. The idea is Torah Lishma, learning truly for its own sake because in Judaism learning in and of itself is virtuous.

And of course, in a Jewish family, children are supposed to all excel in school.  When I was a kid if I brought home a report card with 5 A’s and one A-, or God-forbid a B+, the first thing my mom or dad would say was, “What happened with the A-?”  I was the third child out of four in my family.  By the time I came along the formula was simple: if you got all A’s you were taken for a special meal with mom and dad.  If not, no special meal.  Not only learning, but excelling at learning was expected.  I suspect many of you had similar experiences growing up.

But why is that true?  What is there about knowledge that makes it so inherently valuable to Jews?

This may seem so obvious that it can easily be parodied—in the movie Animal House what was the motto of Faber College?  “Knowledge is Good?”—but actually it’s not really so obvious as all that, nor is the idea that learning is the central value a universally shared concept, either in other religious traditions or in politics or society.  In Christianity, for example, the central principle and highest value is faith, not knowledge. In Islam the greatest goal is submission to the will of God.  In Buddhism enlightenment can just as surely come from experience as knowledge.  Even among the Chasidim, like Chabad, the appeal is to the simple story and the basic act, the mitzvah and the maiseh, rather than the great depth of the learning.

Although many religious traditions emphasize the virtue of scholarship, there have been plenty of times when religions actually suppressed literacy in the interest of heightening faith.  Do you know why medieval cathedrals had such fabulous stained-glass windows?  It’s because those images told the stories of the Bible in ways the illiterate population, rich and poor alike, could understand, since they couldn’t actually read the text of the Bible for themselves.  There were extremely important kings and emperors who were totally illiterate: Charlemagne, for example, and Genghis Khan.  In fact, in America for a long-time schooling was considered an extravagance, a foppish concern of the wealthy that distracted from farming or ranching or being a mechanic or settling and expanding the nation.  Abraham Lincoln had perhaps three years of organized schooling in his whole life; his father certainly didn’t believe in it when he was growing up, and so he became an auto-didact, a self-taught scholar of great accomplishment.  But it wasn’t because his society encouraged that direction; not at all. 

Even today there are many people, even those in very high places, who don’t think of education or knowledge as inherently valuable. Our American society demonstrates its appreciation for professions by rewarding them financially.  Yet teachers are among the most poorly paid of all professions, aren’t they?  So perhaps education isn’t so wonderful after all.

Another way of looking at it is that there are other values than education.  While this would be a hard sell to make to most Jewish parents—I grew up thinking college was like high school, you automatically went after 12th grade—there are many virtues in the world, and lots of them don’t come out of a classroom or book or even a website.  Faith, loyalty, honesty, integrity, courage, generosity, love, altruism, initiative, persistence, kindness, patience, fairness, justice, even creativity—it is not at all clear that these can be taught by a teacher in an academic setting.     

Immanuel Kant said, "Virtue is the moral strength of the will in obeying the dictates of duty.”  But the people that have virtue don’t usually think about Kant when they are doing good, and may not even know who Kant was.  But in truth that doesn’t matter, does it?  They are virtuous anyway.  And of course, while learning can advance society and civilization tremendously, sometimes it just doesn’t. The best-educated country in world in the 1930s, with the greatest institutions of higher learning, was Germany.  Nazi Germany.

If this is all true, why do we Jews love learning so very much, and push our kids so hard to become scholars?  And why do we treasure libraries full of books and constantly teach, and have a Tikun Leil Shavu’ot to prove that even learning can be taken to excess?

The answer comes from two areas.  The first is the way that we Jews learn.  The ideal of course is not what is happening right now: it is not sitting here listening while the rabbi, or anyone instructs you on what to do.  Our model is not the lecture, nor even the sermon.  It is hands-on, interactive and dynamic.  It is learning by engagement: reading, thinking, analyzing and probing, and then arguing about a subject until we feel that we know it, it has become ours, and we have explored its possible interpretations fully.  Only by using our minds actively, by wrestling with a subject the way that Jacob wrestled with God in becoming Israel, only then are we really doing Jewish learning properly.  That is what Torah LiShma really means: literally learning for its own sake, but figuratively learning for our own sake, learning to sharpen and hone our minds and spirits.  This kind of education helps us to become engaged, intelligent, aware critical thinkers.  That, in itself, is considered a virtue in Judaism. 

But although we love to focus on learning, the truth is that it is not enough to learn.  There are other virtues of equal or perhaps greater importance, believe it or not, in our religion.  And Judaism addresses these as well.

In the morning prayer just before the Shema, the Ahavah Rabbah, there is a passage that explains what we are commanded to do with the Torah, this learning document and teaching impetus, with which God has gifted us.  What are we supposed to do with the words of Torah? Lilmod ul’lameid, lishmor v’la’asot the prayer reads.  We are commanded to learn and to teach, to observe and to do. 

That is, we learn and we teach, of course, but we do so in order to observe and preserve, to keep the structure of Judaism.  And we learn and teach in order to be able to do the mitzvot.  First, because until you know what the mitzvot are, you cannot possibly do them, which means you have to learn them and see how they are applied.  And secondly, because the good that comes from Torah, and from learning Torah, only comes when you actually do the things the Torah asks of you.

And so on this festival of Shavu’ot, this z’man matan torateinu, the time when we were given our great teaching, we unite in study, in learning and teaching.  We do so in order to unite as a community.  And we do so to allow those imperatives of Torah, those commandments, those mitzvot, to guide and shape our lives in good and meaningful ways.

It is those words of Torah that drive us to help refugees; it is those words of Torah that teach us to care for the earth; it is those words of Torah that help us see the people around us, here, tonight as a community based in learning and compassion and love.  It is those words of Torah that lead us to care for the sick, help the bereaved, celebrate with the bride and groom and bar and bat mitzvah.  It is those words that we learn that remind us to give Tzedakah, to help with the needs of the synagogue and the community.  It is those words that, yes, bring us early to the house of study.  And it is those words of Torah that lead us to seek to perfect the world through this sacred learning.

May your study of Torah always be sweet, rich and good and may your insights into our tradition continue to be fresh and inspired.  And may we all be blessed with lives of great Jewish learning, and of deeds inspired by that learning.

Dream Dreams

Graduation Address, Marana High School 2023, Rabbi Sam Cohon

Congregation Beit Simcha

To the impressive graduates of Marana High School’s 2023 Class, your dedicated teachers, your conscientious administrators, and your very proud parents, grandparents, siblings and friends, I offer a mazal tov, the Hebrew words for congratulations.  Mazal Tov is something we Jews say at all moments of accomplishment in life, and graduating from high school is surely one of the signal times to offer it to deserving baccalaureate recipients, to commencement-tarians.  So, again, mazal tov!      

Literally, mazal tov means “good luck”, or “may you be gifted with good fortune,” or perhaps even “May you be graced with God’s favor.”  And while you have each worked hard to reach this great day of achievement, it never hurts to have a little good luck or good fortune, or even Divine help given to you.  So, indeed, mazal tov!    

It was a while ago, of course, but I vividly remember speaking at my own high school graduation.  I even recall the beginning of that speech: “Four years ago I entered high school a nervous, insecure 9th grader, with no real idea of what direction I wanted to go in life.  Today I stand before you as a nervous, insecure 12th grader, with no real idea of what direction I want to go in life.”

Look, I’m sure that there are some of you here who believe that you know exactly where you are going and what you are going to do in the future, and I hope that you find that predetermined course in life to be both fulfilling and valuable.  It’s never bad to have a plan for your life, and even better when it works out. 

But I am also sure that most of you, no matter how bright and successful you have been so far, no matter how much energy or ambition you have, most of you still don’t really know what you want to accomplish in life.  That is also fine—and perhaps realistic.  For you can love a subject or a profession at the age of 18 and still find that there is a great deal out there in the world to discover.  It’s OK—in fact, normal, and healthy—to choose and change your professional and even personal goals a few times when you are young. 

I mean, isn’t that the point of being young?  Having the opportunity to explore this amazing world, to encounter new and different ideas and cultures, and integrate those experiences into your own lives in a positive way.  Youth is a time to dream, to travel, to journey to see just what you might become and how you can find your own place in society.  It is when you try-on various versions of your dreams, when you see which ones fit and which ones you may need to discard so that you can pursue other, better dreams. 

You will be told today not to let go of your dreams, because dreams matter.  In truth, dreams matter most when we turn them into reality.  That means we have to be pursuing the right dreams, doesn’t it?  So, on this wonderful day of celebration, I encourage you to do a little dream chasing—and do so until you find out which dreams really should belong to you.  As the founder of modern Zionism, Theodore Herzl, said, “If you will it, it is no dream.”  But that’s only true if you pursue dreams that both fit you and that you can fulfill.  And that means trying some on that don’t turn out to be the right ones.  So keep working on those dreams—and when you find the right ones, make them into reality.  Judaism is a religion of pragmatic idealism: dream, but find ways to make the best of those dreams happen. 

My friends, your graduation marks both an ending, and a beginning, the completion of your high school education and school life, and the commencement of a new part of your life, when you are truly young adults.  It is the hope of all of us here today, we older adults, that this is not the end of your education, but just a way-station on a lifelong journey of learning.

In our Jewish tradition, there is a tremendous emphasis on education, which is called Torah.  Education is highly valued and considered a fundamental pillar of our faith.  We Jews place great emphasis on the pursuit of knowledge and understanding as a path towards personal growth, wisdom, and the betterment of the world, helping us seek to perfect this often imperfect and endangered planet.  Throughout your high school years, you have been fortunate to receive an education that empowers you with knowledge, critical thinking skills, and the ability to shape your own futures.  It has prepared you for higher education, for continuing to gain in professional skills and broadening your understanding.

However, education is not solely about acquiring facts and figures. It is about nurturing your character, values, and compassion. Judaism teaches us the importance of Tikkun Olam, the concept of repairing and healing the world. It reminds us of our responsibility to make a positive impact, to stand up for justice, to advocate for those who cannot speak for themselves. As you leave the structure of high school, Judaism encourages you to strive always to seek to create a world that is more just, compassionate, and inclusive.

To be honest, real education is very much about learning what you don’t know.  I have a confession to make: When I was 18 years old, the age of most of you, I was quite sure that I knew, well, everything. Every year since then I have come to realize that I know less and less. 

This is what education turns out to really be about: learning what you don’t know.  And understanding that living a valuable and meaningful life does not require knowing everything.  It means knowing how to learn, how to work hard, and how to grow in those areas that will help you fulfill the best and most valuable of those dreams.

Your graduation is a time to celebrate your achievements and look forward to the future.  Enjoy the moment, embrace the excitement, and be proud of all that you have accomplished.  And remember that the world needs you to be open to continuing to grow, and learn, always, so that you can fulfill those dreams.

There is a blessing we use in Judaism for every joyous new occasion of accomplishment.  It is called the Shehecheyanu, and it goes like this:

Baruch Ata Adonai Eloheinu Melech ha’Olam, Shehecheyanu v’Kiyimanu v’Higiyanu lazman hazeh: We bless You, God, Ruler of the universe, who gives us life, sustains us, and brings us to this wonderful time.

And so, to all you graduates of 2023: Congratulations and Mazal Tov! 

Jewish Accounting for God

Shabbat Bamidbar 5783 Sermon

Shabbat Shalom.  You all may remember the late, great comedian Jackie Mason’s description of what every Jewish mother wants for her son: to become a doctor, of course.  If he’s not too bright—a lawyer.  If he’s really not gifted intellectually—an accountant.  Well, this week’s Torah portion is designed for just that eventuality.  It’s a sedrah only a CPA could truly love.

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

On closer examination, it looks—well, even less intriguing.  More details about the arrangement of the camp.  More minutiae relating to the census.  Nothing with the vaguest whiff of interest or challenge or meaning. 

In fact, when you come right down to it, it looks a whole lot like the regulations for the establishment of a census.  Count each and every person carefully, total them up, move on to the next area or region.  Each and every single individual is tallied.  A good process for the statisticians, but what can it possibly mean to us?  Does the annual reading of Bamidbar explain why there are so many Jewish CPA’s?

In an interesting sidelight of history, one of the first duties of the United States government under the new Constitution—the one we still use—was to take a census of the population, by state.  Every qualified individual in the entire country was to be counted once very decade.  Each person had to be recorded and tallied regularly.  This is still done, of course, and the results of the decennial census help determine everything from congressional representation to the allocation of federal funding.  Each American is counted regularly, most recently in 2020.  This tradition is so strong that even when more efficient means of tabulating populations are developed—scientific sampling, for example—the resistance is fierce.  We actually prefer to be counted in the old, archaic way.  And don’t miss your own census request for information—they'll come looking for you!

So how much does one human life matter?  There are so many of us here on earth today, perhaps 8 billion people on this planet.  How much could one human life really matter?  There are philosophies afoot today that assert that people only matter in the collective.  They used to be called Socialism or Marxism; nowadays there are other variations, such as the Communitarianism of Amitai Etzioni.  But Judaism has always believed that each and every human life has meaning, is holy, because each of us can truly change the world.

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

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

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

That is a particularly powerful idea, knowing that each individual has meaning, that everyone’s individual achievements matter.  Because whether or not we reach our fullest potential, we need to know that we each matter to our families, to our communities, to our world.

Bamidbar teaches this lesson in a much more basic way.  Because this system of counting, reminds us that we each matter to our people, our nation, and, most importantly, to our God.  Just as each and every member has meaning to our congregation; just as each citizen, every living being created in the image of God, must matter in our society. 

And just as Bamidbar teaches us that we each matter to God, every one of us.

In the Jewish view of the world it is the individual who can make the greatest difference, who has the capacity to change the world, to create goodness and sanctity.  It the single person, each one of us, who can bring blessing.  And every one of us brings his or her own blessings, has her or his own accomplishments.

On this Shabbat, may we find our own way to recognize holiness in each person we encounter.  And may we seek to build a society dedicated to recognizing that sacredness and providing universal respect for every one of us.

Mountains and Congregations

Rabbi Samuel M. Cohon’s Sermon, Shabbat BeHar-Bechukotai 5783

A little old lady from Brooklyn, Mrs. Goldberg, calls her travel agent and asks to book a flight to a small village high in the mountains of Nepal.

“Oh,” the travel agent says. “That’s much too difficult a journey for you. Why don’t I arrange a week for you at a nice beach resort in Florida?”

“No,” says the woman, “It has to be to the highest mountains of Nepal.”

So the travel agent books her a flight to Kathmandu. When she arrives and tells the authorities she intends to visit the small village in the mountains, they also try to talk her out of it. “You’ll need to hire a Sherpa crew to get you there, and the climb is very treacherous.”

“No, I must go there. There’s a holy man I need to see.”

So, shaking their heads, they stamp her passport and let her in, and she hires a Sherpa crew. The Sherpas are dubious but climb high in the mountains with Mrs. Goldberg, and finally get her to the village where the holy man lives. There’s a long line outside in the snow waiting to see the holy man.

The little old lady takes her place in line, and the others waiting beseech her to go back home. “It takes days of standing in this cold and windy line before you get to see the holy man,” they explain. “And then when you get to see him, you are allowed to say only three words.”

“That’s OK,” she replied. “I must see him.”

She perseveres and lasts three days and nights before entering the holy man’s hut. He asks her why she has come, and says she may only reply using three words. And so, finally, she stands before him and says, in a loud voice: “Sheldon, come home!”

I love that joke, and what it implies about how far we may go, and how high in the mountains, only to discover that we are still who we always were... And that it may not be the mountain that matters after all.

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This particular Shabbat, Behar, the Torah portion named for a mountain, reminds us that there is something sacred about a kehillah, a congregation gathered together in Jewish prayer. Synagogues are a unique affirmation of community, and true community has unfortunately become an unusual occurrence in our American society these days. Perhaps because we seem to have become such a fractious, polarized country it is more necessary than it has ever been to gather across all boundary lines and join in prayer, song, study and most importantly community. When we participate together in services at Beit Simcha, work together to improve our society through religious action, study Torah and create a shul that teaches and inspires our children and challenges us to live to our highest ideals, we are doing holy work that defies easy categorization. It is hard to explain precisely what we mean by Jewish community—but we know it when we experience it, and we know that it is extraordinarily important.

And we also know that it is just what we Jews have been doing for over two thousand years, and why we have been able to continue as an eternal people. It has allowed us not only to survive but to thrive, evolve and grow everywhere and anywhere in the world. Including, of course, in these foothills below the Catalina Mountains.

Every synagogue, every Jewish community is different, of course. Yet there is a common denominator for each and every one. And that is what our Torah portion this week addresses, although it does so in a curious way.

Behar begins with the statement “Vayidaber Adonai el Moshe beHar Sinai, God spoke to Moses at Mt. Sinai,” an apparently unambiguous phrase: God, through Moses, gave all these commandments to us at Mt. Sinai. Well and good. These rules of holiness and personal conduct must have all been commanded at Mt. Sinai.

Yet earlier in Leviticus the text makes it clear that God actually gave most of these commandments not at Mt. Sinai itself, but in the Tabernacle in the Wilderness, the Ohel Mo’eid, the Tent of Meeting, as the people wandered around the Sinai Desert. In fact, according to the evidence of the Torah itself, the whole book of Leviticus was given after we left Sinai and began our journey to the Promised Land. Never mind that most Bible scholars believe Leviticus was composed several centuries later, when there was

already a Temple in Jerusalem and a priesthood serving it regularly—on a mountain, indeed the Temple Mount, but not Mt. Sinai. Either way, much later.

Clearly, as our portion begins the Israelites aren’t still at Mt. Sinai at all and haven’t been there for a while. What gives? Why say that the mitzvot, the commandments were all given to us by God at Sinai when it isn’t factually true? Is this just an issue of alternative interpretations—dare I say it, alternative facts?

This question troubles the rabbinic commentators, who believe that the Torah never wastes a phrase, and certainly never makes a mistake. The rabbis’ rather brilliant answer teaches us a profound truth about ourselves, our synagogues and our communities—and maybe even a bit about mountains.

According to the commentators, all the commandments theoretically given b’Har Sinai, at Mt. Sinai, are actually given miSinai, from Sinai—with the metaphoric authority of Sinai. That is, Mt. Sinai is not just a geographical location, no matter how important, and it is not a simple matter of a place at all. It is much more than that, something both broader and deeper.

Mt. Sinai is a sacred idea, a holy concept. For wherever we learn and do mitzvot, whenever we complete good acts, do tzedakah, observe religious rituals with sanctity and meaning, study Torah, pray together with sincerity and work to perfect the world through tikun olam, wherever and whenever we strive to make the world a holier, more Jewish place—well, then we are standing at Mt. Sinai.

Almost literally, as committed Jews we take Mt. Sinai with us into our communities, our congregations, and so bring God’s very presence into the world. It’s a powerful message indeed. And that is just as true whether we are standing at the foot of Mt. Sinai or in the foothills of the Catalinas. As long as we gather in a congregation, as long as we are creating true Jewish community of study, prayer and religious action we are standing at Sinai.

In other words, it’s like the old Yiddish proverb: “Mountains do not come together. People do.” It’s not the mountain that matters; it’s us.

But before we conclude that way, a word about mountains. I must admit, I like mountains very much, and have spent time among them, sometimes hiking up them, sometimes skiing down them, occasionally first one and then the other. And mountains have always held an important place in Jewish tradition. We sang a Psalm earlier tonight, Psalm 121, Esa ainai el heharim, I lift up my eyes to the mountains from where my help comes, one of many Psalms and prayers that center on the mountains. Various mountains feature prominently throughout Biblical and ancient Jewish history. Among the many heights ascended in the Tanakh are two mountains that rise above all others spiritually and are truly central to Jewish tradition: the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, which remains both focal and controversial today, and Mt. Sinai. We’ll talk about the Temple Mount another time. But tonight, a little more about Mt. Sinai.

I have a personal story about visiting Mt. Sinai.  Six years ago, during a sabbatical, I traveled on a journey to all of the holiest places on earth in a bit less than three months, visiting the greatest sacred sites of every major religion. Perhaps the most important place I wanted to see, on a personal level, was Mt. Sinai, or at least the place most people believe was the traditional location of Mt. Sinai. It’s 140 miles from Sharm el Sheikh in the southeastern part of the Sinai Desert, in Egypt, a place called Jebel Musa in Arabic. I decided I would hike up Mt. Sinai on the Shabbat when we traditionally read the Ten Commandments in synagogue, Shabbat Yitro, and ascending it overnight I would chant those Ten Statements in Hebrew at dawn.

The full story of my journey to the mountaintop that day included nearly as many twists and turns as the Biblical narrative of our ancestors’ travels to the same place. As it turned out, it involved a convoy of military vehicles escorting our mini-bus—and others—to protect us from terrorist attack, long delays and confusing instructions, lack of water and organization and the oddities and insecurities that can accompany travel in the Middle East. Eventually, very short of sleep and water and food, tired from the climb up the 7500-foot peak, I had the rare experience of standing in what is truly an awesome place, the top of Mt. Sinai, watching rose-fingered dawn spread from jagged peak to peak across that stark and amazing wilderness. And I chanted the Ten Commandments in Hebrew—from my iphone app, of course—while around me people were reciting the Koran or singing Christian hymns or meditating. It was weird, and gorgeous, and moving, a once-in-lifetime experience.

And yet, the truth is that as intense as that memory is, as extraordinary as it felt at the time, that wasn’t really the most powerful part of Jewish religious experience. In our tradition, being at what might actually have been Mt. Sinai was not as significant as being here tonight, in community, kehillah, seeking God and Torah and holiness and justice in a synagogue. This experience matters more because it requires the daily action that brings Judaism into the world in practical, meaningful ways.

But just what is this amorphous thing, community, kehillah, and what does Judaism teach us about that? And what does it have to do with Sinai?

As you know, we are now in the period of the Counting of the Omer, the time between Passover and Shavu’ot when we remember the ways our ancestors prepared themselves to experience receiving the Ten Commandments, and in a larger sense, the Torah at Mt. Sinai. These seven weeks between the festival of freedom and the holiday of covenant are a time in the ritual calendar when we look at our own lives and see how we might better reflect our own Jewish values in our daily experience. It is a time when we have the opportunity to see if our institutions can become better, stronger and more vital, can bring us together in more meaningful and holier ways.

In other words, this is the time to think about how we build further on our strong community, how we develop our synagogue in ways that create greater learning, spirituality and justice. It is here that we seek to bring the feeling of that sacred mountain into our daily lives in real, practical ways. Because it is here where we have the opportunity to decide how we are to make our lives and our actions reflect the values given to us so long ago, symbolically at least, on that mountain.

The Kotzker Rebbe was once asked: “Why is Shavuot called z’man matan Torah 'The Time that the Torah was Given,' rather than 'The time the Torah was Received?’” He answered: “The giving took place on one day, but the receiving takes place at all times.” Receiving Torah—that is up to us, on this Shabbat and every day.

You see, Mt. Sinai was only great once. But the tradition that was created, and the synagogue, the institution responsible for teaching and making real that tradition, for creating true community based upon it—that can be great any time. Any time we gather together for sincere prayer. Any time we learn together, teach together, create justice together, seek to heal the world together. When we create our own home for Torah, meaning, holiness.

On this Shabbat of Behar-Bechukotai, may we learn that extraordinary lesson, and continue to live it in our synagogue. Ken Yehi Ratson. So may it be God’s will—and more importantly, ours. Shabbat Shalom.

Rabbi Baruch J. Cohon’s Sermon Parshat Emor 5783 on the Occasion of his 97th Birthday

Shabbat Shalom, and my thanks to you my friends at Beit Simcha for the honor of this evening.

This week we read the Sedrah entitled "Emor" --  where Moses is commanded to "Tell the sons of Aaron."  What is he to tell them?  Their duties as Cohanim, priests, which include offering ritual sacrifices, and also their family relations and daily conduct.  And the section "Emor" includes basic events and principles of Jewish life that apply to all of us.  Like the days we celebrate.

Maybe you heard about the fellow who decided to become an atheist.  He left his family's house of worship and turned his back on religion.  But then a few weeks later, he came back.

"You changed your mind?" they asked him. "How come?"

"Atheists have no holidays."

Our Torah reading outlines the Jewish calendar, which provides our annual cycle of holidays both serious and upbeat, and all sanctified by faith.  Indeed Judaism as a way of life is closely connected with the calendar.  That connection goes back to our origins.  Moses reminded us that we left Egypt in the spring month.  Count 49 days -- 7 weeks from the Exodus, and on the 50th day we reach Mt. Sinai to receive the Torah -- our Constitution -- and we become a nation.   Here in Chapter 23 of Leviticus we find the dates of Rosh Hashana, Yom Kippur and Succoth -- New Year, Day of Atonement, and the Harvest Festival, all in the fall.

And why is New Year's Day observed on the first day of the seventh month?  Precisely because Nisan, the month that includes Passover, is the month of freedom, and is specifically designated as the first month of the year in the very account of the Exodus.  The Talmud's tractate Rosh Hashana lists four "New Year’s days" every year: one for kings, one for numbering years, one for planting trees, and one for tithes.  In our urban culture, of course, we limit our ceremonial New Year to the first of Tishri, the 7th month.  That is the day we change the number of the year.

As we all know, the Jewish calendar, like the Chinese, is based on the moon.  354 days per year on average, instead of the 365 of the solar calendar.  That causes considerable variety in how Jewish holidays compare with those of our neighbors.  For example, in 2011 and 2019 Hanukkah coincided with Christmas.  In 2013 it coincided with Thanksgiving.

Seven times in every 19 years, the Jewish calendar adds a month during the spring, forming a leap year that resolves the lunar-solar difference.  An ancient scholar named Shmuel, who headed the academy is a Babylonian town called Nehardeya, was responsible for developing much of the calendar used today.  The Talmud describes Shmuel as a man who knew the orbits of the planets as well as he knew the streets of Nehardeya.  This self-taught astronomer laid the groundwork for a system that gives Jews the world over the opportunity to celebrate their holidays at the same time.  In the days of much slower communications, they had to add a day to the holiday if they lived outside of Israel, to make sure they were all observing the occasion together.   Hence we still have a Second Day of many festivals, in traditional Diaspora communities but not in Israel.  A notable exception to this rule is Rosh Hashana itself, the New Year, which is observed for two days in Israel too.  There, the second day is not called Yom tov sheyni shel goluyos -- "second holiday of exile", but the two days are called Yoma arikhta -- "one long day.”  One more opportunity to hear the call of the Shofar!

With all its complex history, the Jewish calendar constitutes a sacred schedule giving us colorful special days that add meaning to all the grey weekdays of our lives.

Personally, of course, I feel a special connection to "Emor" because I chanted this section at my own Bar Mitzvah.  That was a long time ago, but the message of this reading rings just as strongly in my ears today as it  did in 1939.  That was the year of my Bar Mitzvah in Red Bank, New Jersey.  For many of us, Bar Mitzvah is still a great occasion.  Caden Dunn, who took part in services here tonight, will celebrate his Bar Mitzvah next week.  We all look forward to that.  And why is it important?  Is it the day of full maturity -- at age 13?  No.  But it is the day when we accept responsibility as Jetiws, for the Mitzvos.  Mitvos are usually translated "commandments."  How many commandments to we have?  Not 10.  What we call the "10 Commandments" are not called Mitzvos in Hebrew.   They are called Aseres haDibros -- the Ten Statements, the solemn principles of human conduct that inspire all the hundreds of specific Mitzvos in Jewish life. This reading, Emor, introduces us to some of them.

Two short sentences give all the laws their basis.  At the end of Chapter 22, verse 31 says: "Keep My commandments and do them; I am G-d."  And verse 32 adds: "Do not profane My holy name, and I will be sanctified among the Israelites; I am G-d who sanctifies you."  Here are Divinely inspired rules that, if we follow, enable us to achieve Kiddush haShem -- sanctifying the Divine name.  Violating those rules amounts to Khilllul haShem -- profaning that name.  

Violations can take many forms, some more obvious than others.  For example, our Torah instructs us to use true measurements -- of weight, length, value of coins -- all must be accurate.  Prevent cheating.  In legal disputes, we are cautioned to "do just justly."  Tricking a witness in a trial, or manufacturing evidence against a litigant -- even if you deeply believe him guilty -- is unfair and therefore prohibited.  In family affairs, acceptable conduct has countless Mitzvos to be observed, including the rights and duties of wife and husband to each other, and of all to the care of ill and dead family members.

Crime and punishment get dealt with in this section too.  "One who wounds or kills your animal shall pay for the damage.  One who kills a human shall die."  But a capital conviction takes two reliable eyewitnesses, who warned the killer.

Violating a principle of conduct in business, particularly when dealing with Gentiles, can bring serious trouble to the entire community.  Our enemies come up with plenty of false charges to support their actions against us.  We must not provide them with legitimate cause.  In this connection, the Hertz commentary quotes the story of the fellow in the boat drilling a hole under his seat.  It's only under his seat, but all will drown.  A Jewish crook can give an open door to anti-Semites.  That is definitely Khillul haShem -- profaning the Divine name.

And what about the opposite?  Suppose we are doing right?  Inquisitors demanded "Convert or die."  Nazis and jihadis offer no alternative: "Kill the Jews!"  Their victims are mourned with the righteous.  

All important is not death but life.  Living in a way that sanctifies the name of the G-d we worship involves fulfilling Mitzvos, from observing the occasions of our calendar to how we interact with other human beings both Jewish and Gentile.  How we live our daily lives makes us aware of our Mitzvos.  Carrying them out builds our character.  Do we deal honestly in business?  Do we respect our elders?  Do we teach our children Torah?  Do we help the poor?  Do we support just causes?  That kind of life brings  Kiddush haShem -- sanctifying G-d's name.  That behavior can bring Kiddush hakhayyim -- sanctifying life.  Torah offers us practical help to sanctify our lives.

The Psalm that closes our morning prayers on Sunday, the first weekday, asks: "Who will climb G-d's mountain and stand in that holy place?  One who has clean hands and a pure heart....and has not sworn deceitfully."  

Today and every day, this week and every week, let the words of Emor remind us of our choice: profane life or sanctify it.  Let’s live the mitzvos, and bring joy and holiness to our lives and those around us.  Let’s all try to sanctify it!