Justice, then Peace in Israel

Sermon on Solidarity Shabbat with Israel, Shabbat Breisheet 5784

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

This is a tough time for Jews everywhere, as it is a brutal time for Israel and Israelis, and for all who care about Israel and Jews, and, frankly, for all civilization. The horrific war crimes perpetrated last week by Hamas, the evil terrorist group that brings shame to the world, shocked and horrified everyone on this earth who has a conscience and the ability to tell right from wrong.  You have likely seen images, stories and videos documenting the brutality and evil of the civilian slaughter perpetrated by Hamas, and the Palestinian terrorist-posted social media showing their terrorists murdering children and the elderly, killing children in front of their parents and then murdering the parents, then using the parents’ cellphones to send videos of the atrocity to their family.  I’m sorry to speak about this at shul, but it happened less than a week ago to Jews: beheadings, children slaughtered, people burned alive.  This is pure evil.

There is no conceivable moral justification for these actions.  This is not warfare: it is war crimes, literally crimes against humanity, an attack on all civilization.  The people—and I use that word with regret—who did this are beyond redemption.  They must be brought to justice. 

The deliberate targeting of civilians to abduct—kidnap—them and take them into a chaotic captivity in the hellholes of Gaza, to rape and torture and commit murder are beyond anything related to any conceivable effort to quote-unquote-liberate anything.  These Palestinian terrorists took 3- and 5-year-old children, Holocaust survivors, and of course young women deliberately in order to threaten to do unspeakable things to them, to use them as human shields—isn’t that a horrible phrase—and of course to try to protect themselves from justice for their war crimes.  And some they murdered, and then dragged their naked bodies through the streets of Gaza as crowds shouted “Allahu Akhbar, God is great” and recorded and posted the atrocities on social media.

This was the worst pogrom since the Nazis, and as details of the heartrending slaughter continue to emerge, it is inevitable that Hamas will reap the whirlwind that it so thoroughly deserves.  Our prayers and thoughts are with the families of the murdered Israelis, Americans and other nation’s children who were brutally massacred, with the more than three thousand wounded in hospitals now in Israel, with the desperate families and friends of the 150 or more people stolen from their lives by these evil terrorists.

Let’s talk politics for a moment: My friends, Gaza has not been “occupied territory” for 18 years.  Israel pulled out under then Prime Minister Ariel Sharon in 2005—2005!—and has provided electricity and water and sewage control and what little productive economic activity exists in that strip of land with 2 million people for nearly two decades.  In exchange, the evil—and that word has never been more applicable than it is today—dictators of Hamas, who mostly live in rich settings in Arab capitals far from Gaza, have focused all that Iranian money and Qatarian money on murdering Jews.  And those innocent people of Gaza?  Hamas was elected to lead them by the people of Gaza in 2006, before making itself the religious Islamist dictators of the place and never again holding elections.  Perhaps these are the same innocent people that show up on the Hamas videos cheering while bloody, naked corpses of women are dragged through their streets? 

Remember, too, that Hamas would be elected to power in the West Bank if the Palestinian Authority’s Fatah faction had not suspended all elections since 2005. The Hamas charter calls for the total destruction of the State of Israel, and for killing Jews everywhere in the world; that is, this is not only a terrorist organization, but a profoundly anti-Semitic one dedicated to perpetrating genocide.

There is no proper response to this but unqualified condemnation of Hamas, and of any leaders in the world, including our own leaders, who do not join in that condemnation.  While much of the shocked world mourned with Israel, it’s notable who did not: the monster, Vladimir Putin; the mullahs of Iran, who paid for this brutality, provided the weapons that perpetrated it, and likely trained and organized the mass murderers; some Arab dictators—their leaders are pretty much all dictators, aren’t they?—including those working to improve relations with Israel; and of course, here at home, the morally empty Rashida Tlaib, until threatened with censure, and Harvard University’s president, who apparently can’t tell right from wrong; neither can the college student organizations around the US who “justify” Hamas atrocities.  There is never a justification for murdering babies and burning their bodies.  Never.  Never.  How dare they pretend that there can be?

My friends, we pray for peace in every Jewish religious service, multiple times.  But in order for there to be peace, there must first be justice.  Hamas and its terrorist sponsors and organizers must be brought to justice for their horrific, abominable crimes.  Only then can there be peace. 

This will be a very difficult war, and there is no other way it can be.  Israeli troops will have a hard fight, and there will be more casualties as they seek to remove Hamas from its nests and burrows and booby-trapped hideaways.  There will be no way to shield the civilians of Gaza from it.  Indeed, Hamas is using them to hide behind, as they will use the captive hostages to hide behind. 

Our role will be to continue to support Israel and to be vocal about it, as the enemies of civilization will be vocal in attacking Israel for the humanitarian destruction that Hamas has brought on.  It is important that we remember this and maintain our focus on restoring justice, and ending the possibility that such evil can again run free in a civilized nation.

I have long noted that the people who end up suffering the worst from the Palestinian people’s obsession with terrorism are the Palestinians themselves.  This week that wasn’t true; but I’m quite sure that it will soon again be.  Israel has been left with no choice but to destroy this evil that pretends to represent religion.  It is a great tragedy; a great tragedy.  And it must be done.

There are some stories that are hopeful, and it is these that we must remember.  Israelis have come together as one with astonishing speed.  And they are a unique people.

I read a report from a journalist who was trapped by Hamas in a safe room on a kibbutz near Gaza with his wife and two young daughters, 1 and 2 years old they had no water or food or electricity, but before the battery on his cellphone ran out he managed to call his father, a 62 year old retired general of the IDF.  His father and mother drove down in their ordinary car.  At one point his father, with nothing but a pistol, joined a fire fight assisting soldiers fighting terrorists who had ambushed them.  After killing the terrorists, his father and mother separated, and his mother drove two Israeli soldiers wounded in that fight to hospital, while his father found a 73 year- old retired officer who had a car, and the two of them drove to the kibbutz, now armed with the weapons given them by the wounded soldiers.  There they joined a special forces unit clearing terrorists out of the Kibbutz and saving those residents who were still alive and trapped.

At the end of the day they reached the journalist and his wife and children, and liberated them.

That’s a 62 year-old retired officer and a 73 year-old retired officer fighting gunbattles and saving Israelis from terrorists.

Hamas will never defeat or destroy this Jewish State.  It is unified by these horrors as it has not been unified in quite a while.  There will be a time, after the war, to assess what went so terribly wrong and why.  But now is the time to unite, to support Israel, to help others understand its centrality in our world, and to pray for its success.  For it must triumph now, for the good of the entire world.

It was in this week’s Torah portion of Breisheet, Genesis, that we human beings first learned to differentiate good from evil.  It is a shame that the world needs to relearn this so often, in every generation.   

A Multi-Faith Prayer for Israel Under Attack

by Rabbi Samuel Cohon, Congregation Beit Simcha

In this moment of heartbreak, all people of every truly religious conviction stand in full solidarity with Israelis. We remember the pain of being attacked by terrorists at home, and believe that all Americans across our country must stand united against these evil acts that have claimed so many innocent lives. 

We call on all civilized people to support Israel and its people in this traumatic time, and to defend the values of decency and human respect that are integral to human life on our shared planet.  This is a time to come together.  A carefully planned, massive assault on the innocent civilians of a civilized nation is an attack on all civilization, a crime against humanity.  Our religious values insist that we respect the integrity of human life and assert that those who attack it must be prevented from ever repeating this atrocity.

We religious leaders join together, in full unity across any perceived boundary lines of faith and religious tradition.  And so we pray:

We pray for the souls of more than 900 Israelis, Americans, Brazilians, Argentinians, and other nation’s citizens of all ages, from the very young to the elderly, brutally murdered by terrorists.  May their families find comfort in God, and may their hearts heal with time and with the help of the God who can bring consolation, from this awful destruction and heartbreaking loss.  Our prayers tonight are for them.

We pray for the thousands of wounded Israelis of all ages injured by the rockets, bullets, and grenades of terrorists.  May God help them heal completely, give their doctors and nurses skill and perseverance, and bring them to a complete healing of body, heart, and soul after this terrible trauma.  May they be comforted in their ordeal by the God who helps bring healing.  Our prayers tonight are for them.

We pray for the safe recovery of over 100 kidnapped hostages taken by these terrorists into Gaza, cruelly abducted to be used for evil purposes.  In their captivity and fear may they retain hope, and may their lives be spared by those who criminally forced them from their lives into this dark night of oppression.  We pray to God that they will be liberated speedily and soon, returned to safety and to their loved ones.  Our prayers tonight are for them.

We pray for the safety of those who are engaged in battling against the terrorists, who risk their lives to rescue those in danger and to prevent such atrocities from being perpetrated again.  We pray that they accomplish their objectives successfully as quickly as humanly possible and deny those who perpetrate evil any gains from their carefully planned actions against the innocent.  Our prayers tonight are for them.

And we pray for the Jewish people, and for all good people of every religion and culture who support Israel and its right to exist in security and safety.  May they remain strong and steadfast in their convictions and dedicated to the freedom of the only Jewish state in the world, and may their actions and words help it through this time of great trauma and tragedy.  Our prayers tonight are for them.

Finally, may we come again, ultimately, to a time when in the words of the great prophet Isaiah, all shall “sit under their vine and fig tree and none shall make them afraid.”  So may it be.

Flying Cars and Ne’ilah

Flying Cars and Ne’ilah

Rabbi Sam Cohon, Congregation Beit Simcha, Tucson, Yom Kippur 5784

And now, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang is on the way.  I don’t know how many of you saw the news article this past summer.  It said that the Alef Flying Car has received pre-approval from the FAA, the Federal Aviation Administration.  It is now possible to preorder the Alef Flying Car on their website for delivery in… 2025? 2026? 2030, perhaps?  Who knows, exactly?

Apparently, this car can be driven on streets like a regular car, but if you encounter serious traffic, you can literally take off straight up and fly over it.  No one online seems to know why it is called the Alef car—well, we can guess; there aren’t a lot of Bet or Gimmel flying cars out there yet, now are there?—but if you wish to put in a pre-order for this fabulous new vehicle, you can do so and be part of what the website says is the “general queue” for only $150; if you insist on being in the “priority queue” it will set you back $1500.

Oh, Brave New World that has such inventions in it…  It’s almost as though there is something divine in the technology.  Soon, perhaps, or maybe not so soon, we will all be able to soar high in the sky in our very own Alef cars, rise above our congested city streets and be pilots of our own destiny.

I’m not convinced that this will occur as soon as the investors in the Alef Aeronautics company are, but I do hope to see it.  It sounds fantastic, at least right up until the first time two people in their Jetsons-style flying cars turn into each other and crash down to earth…

But as we approach Ne’ilah that vision of being able to fly upwards in our very own cars is quite attractive.  I mean, we have been praying and fasting and singing and beating our breasts for 23 hours or so now, seeking forgiveness for all we have done wrong and hoping to be better people going forward.  Our stomachs are empty, but if we have managed to do this well then perhaps our hearts are full, and we are achieving a level of spiritual elevation, reaching up towards the Shechinah, the divine presence, in the quest of a full teshuvah gemurah, a true repentance.  It’s a little like having our own personal vehicles to rise above our normal state and accomplish all that we have sought throughout these yamim nora’im, these High Holy Days.   

I have sometimes thought about Ne’ilah as a kind of flying experience, when you let all you have left in you out to God.  I always imagined Ne’ilah as a bird, a tzipor, rising in this late hour of the day towards the heavens, as we wish our prayers and our repentance to elevate our own souls towards God.  But why not a flying car?  Because God knows we need all the elevation we can get at this final hour of the Day of Atonement.

There is a famous story about the Ba’al Shem Tov, the founder of Chasidism.  One Yom Kippur, the Baal Shem Tov was praying together with his students, and he had a worrying sense that the prayers were not getting through, and the harsh Heavenly Decree against the Jewish people was not being overturned.  He felt as though the synagogue building itself was becoming crowded with the unanswered prayers of the congregation.  As Ne’ilah approached, and with it the final opportunity for the Jewish people to avert this harsh judgement, he and his students increased their fervor and passion in their prayers, but to no avail.

As the chazzan began the Ne’ilah service a simple shepherd boy wandered into shul to pray. But he could barely read the letters of the Aleph-Beit, let alone say all the words in the machzor. Feeling helpless, he opened the first page of his siddur and recited: aleph, beit, veit, gimmel, daled. He said to God in his heart: “This is all I can do. God, You know how the prayers should be pronounced. Please, arrange the letters in the proper way.”

Louder and louder, with more and more intensity he recited the letters. Hey, vav, zayin, chet… the people around him began to mutter, complaining he was disturbing their prayers. But the Baal Shem Tov immediately silenced them, and declared for everyone to hear that “because of this boy’s prayers the gates to heaven are wedged open for the last few minutes of Yom Kippur, allowing our prayers in.” So it was on that Yom Kippur, that the simple, genuine prayers of a young shepherd boy who couldn’t read, resounded powerfully within the Heavenly court, and saved the Jewish people. 

My friends, if you can or can’t read the Hebrew perfectly, whether or not you know the nigun, the nusach for Ne’ilah, if have the strength and health to stand or must sit, if you cannot fast or fasted completely, you can still receive the magical elevation intrinsic to Ne’ilah.  Put your minds and hearts and grumbling stomachs to one final task, now: to allow your souls to take flight in this beautiful service of Ne’ilah, the last effort before the Gates of Repentance metaphoric close for this Yom Kippur.

May your own prayers help you to fly high in this coming hour; and may you be sealed in the Book of Life, blessing and peace.

King David and a Good Death

Yizkor 5784, Rabbi Sam Cohon, Congregation Beit Simcha, Tucson, AZ 

I’ve been thinking lately about King David, a remarkable figure in the Tanakh, the Hebrew Bible, and an even more potent person in Jewish rabbinic lore and legend.  David began life as a shepherd and the youngest son of a huge family of mostly older brothers—he was either the 7th or 8th boy, and he had two sisters—and of course rose to prominence after boldly and shockingly killing the giant Philistine, Goliath in the Vale of Elah.  He soon became the court musician to King Saul.  A good-looking guy—maybe very good-looking; red hair and perhaps blue eyes works well in this regard—he was a rock-star in Israel.  His songs, the Psalms, became wildly popular, sung throughout the land and used to this day.  After great success as a warrior, too, he ended up on the outs with the temperamental, jealous, and slightly insane King Saul.  Fleeing Saul, David turned into an outlaw, leading a mercenary band of outcasts as a kind of Iron Age Butch Cassidy or Jesse James.  Through chance, skill, chutzpah, and a remarkable gift for good luck, he ended up rising to become King of Israel, Saul’s replacement after the battlefield deaths of the old king and his sons. 

That meteoric rise alone would have been remarkable but David’s story was far from done.  As king he led the Israelites to greater power and military success than they had ever enjoyed, including the conquest of Jerusalem, David’s new capital.  He built a great royal palace there and planned to build the First Temple, only to be told by God that he had a little too much blood on his hands to do so.  David transformed Israel from a minor, tribally fractious region into a true nation with a powerful army.  And at every point in his life David was deeply committed to his belief in God, and demonstrated that monotheism throughout all 70 years of his life.

David’s private life was more complicated than a Kardashian’s: he had 7 or 8 wives—accounts differ—and at least 18 children, and his sons caused him a great deal of tzoris, either through their personal misconduct or by rebelling against David as they tried to depose him and make themselves king.  

One of David’s most famous acts was an adulterous one, in which he seduced—or perhaps, was seduced by—Batsheva, and when he learned she was pregnant he deviously sent her husband to certain death in battle so he, himself could marry her.  His life should have made a great biopic, but sadly the movies based on David’s life do not do it justice.  He was charisma and color personified, for better and worse.

In later Jewish lore David is treated as the ideal warrior-king, and the royal line he established considered to be the source of the only true kings of Israel.  In Midrash David’s manipulative and immoral acts are reinterpreted to show amazing virtue instead, and he is white-washed into a great noble figure.  Tradition even moves him into the role of the ancestor of the Messiah, mashiach ben David, and places the return to prominence and success for the people of Israel as his ultimate legacy.  David’s influence continues to be demonstrated by the fact that David is far and away the most popular Jewish boys’ name today, 3,000 years after his death.

Christianity takes David even further, seeing him as foreshadowing Jesus’s life.  I’ve always found this a curious connection.  While David was born in Bethlehem, almost literally a stone’s throw from Jerusalem, by all logic Jesus must have been from the Galilee, and the unlikely story of his birth in a stable far from his parents’ home only makes sense when you see the later literary need for a Davidic connection for the “King of the Jews.”  It’s also rather hard to see much of David’s persona in Jesus: Jesus composes no music and plays no instruments, nor does he pick up sword and spear, don armor and charge out to battle—let alone marry 8 different women, father a brood of children, or build and rule a nation.

In any case, I come today, on Yom Kippur, not to praise David, but to bury him.  Or, to put it more directly, I want to talk about David’s death. 

For all of his incredible talent, charisma, looks, and accomplishments, David has a rough going-away party in the Bible.  As he ages he declines—we all do, don’t we?—and his sons see him as weakened from the great warrior he was and ripe for replacement.  First his beloved, spoiled oldest son Absalom rebels, initially leaves David in distress but is ultimately defeated and killed; then another favorite son, Adonijah does the same with the same result.  Some of his most faithful warriors desert him to support various rebels.  It’s not pretty. 

As David, this great paragon king of Israel, is drawing near to death, he gives a last statement to his courtiers and aids, and especially to his youngest son Solomon, who will now succeed him.  We would like to report that David dies with grace and ease, with tranquility at the end of an impressive life. 

But he does not.

As David approaches death, weakened by illness and age and unable even to connect with Avishag, the last of his women, he instructs Solomon this way:

“I am about to go the way of all the earth. Be strong, be manly, and keep the charge of the Lord your God, walking in God’s ways and keeping God’s statutes, commandments, ordinances, and testimonies, as written in the Torah of Moses, so that you may prosper in all you do and wherever you turn. Then the Lord will establish his word that God spoke concerning me: ‘If your descendants take heed to their way, to walk before me in truth with all their heart and with all their soul, your line on the throne of Israel will never end.”

So far, so good.  If David stopped his final statement there we’d have nothing but praise for a good end to a complicated but heroic figure.  But he didn’t.  David kept going:

“Further, you know what Joab son of Zeruiah did to me, what he did to the two commanders of Israel’s forces, Abner son of Ner and Amasa son of Jether: he killed them, shedding blood of war in peacetime, staining the cloak of his loins and the sandals on his feet with blood of war.  So, act in accordance with your wisdom, and see that his white hair does not go down to the grave in peace.”    And now, on his deathbed, he makes Solomon swear to execute him.

But wait, there’s more:

“You must also deal with Shimei son of Gera... He insulted me outrageously when I was on my way to Mahanaim; but he came down to meet me at the Jordan, and I swore to him by GOD: ‘I will not put you to the sword.’  So do not let him go unpunished; for you are a shrewd man and you will know how to deal with him and send his gray hair down to Sheol in blood.” 

It's rough.  This great paragon, David, ends his days by dumping on his son Solomon the responsibility to take revenge on two of David’s old enemies—one of whom was actually David’s close friend and battlefield commander for much of his career, responsible for many of his victories, including capturing Jerusalem.  His very last words are commands to enact brutal revenge, executions that David swore not to perform in his own lifetime—"But now that I’m going to die,” he appears to say, “let’s see if I can get them eliminated by my successor without violating that oath.”

It's an ugly ending, isn’t it?  Talk about visiting the sins of the parents on the children for the third and fourth generations…  Or at least the second and third generations.  It’s disappointing that after apparently having finally ended all the feuding in his family, reaching the end of his long life and reign, David returns to the theme of vengeance and brutal punishment.  It’s just another reason I can’t quite wrap my head around the extreme idolization of David in Midrashim and in Zohar, where he mostly appears as an ideal king, warrior, poet, and unsullied hero.  David was great at a lot of things, but that’s not enough reason to forgive him his egregious acts.

Not least of them is this failure to let go of all those resentments at the end.

Sometimes great examples from our tradition teach us to do what they did not.

My friends, unlike King David we don’t always know how or when we are going to die.  We can’t always know the time or place.  But there are certainly different ways to act as we prepare to die, and we each make choices as we near the end. 

There are people who, like David, never really let go of the tzoris they experienced in their lives.  They may not call for the murder of their enemies when they pass away—God forbid—but they remain embittered by their frustrations and even defeats, unable to release that bile from their bodies and souls.  They do not die well.

Because there are those people who choose to end their lives in a state of tranquility, who seek to resolve old grudges or resentments before they go.  These people die in a state of calm and harmony, and the way they handle themselves before they go is a gift to their surviving family and friends. 

I have had the privilege this year of officiating at the funerals of people who made their peace with the world and its inhabitants before they died.  These funerals and shivas are indeed sometimes sad, but they also have the feeling of a gentle release.  That makes for, I would suggest, a truly good death.

When we remember the people who died at peace with their family and friends, but also at peace with the world, there is always a sense of peace, of shalom, of shleimut, wholeness in those memories.  There is a quality of sanctity to remembering those we loved who died in this way.

In the Tractate Shabbat in the Babylonian Talmud there is a particularly relevant passage.  Rabbi Eliezer says: "Repent one day before your death."

His disciples ask him, "Do a person know on what day he will die?"

"All the more reason he should repent today, lest he die tomorrow."

That idea should also be applied to forgiveness as well.  For if we are to make peace, to prepare to die well, we must forgive those who have wronged us.  And if we are to live well, the examples of those who have died well, at peace with the world, should remind us of this essential act.

Yizkor is a time not only of remembering, of memorializing those we love who are gone.  It is also a time to forgive any resentments or bitterness we have retained about them—and perhaps about anyone in our lives now.  It is a service with the capacity to bring us back to shleimut, to wholeness.

May your Yizkor prayers and thoughts help you to achieve this state of blessing and peace.

Finding God Today

Yom Kippur Morning Sermon 5784

There I was, dressed in all pink, wondering why the other theatergoers seemed to be avoiding me… when I realized that I misread the Facebook posts and Tweets directing me how to prepare to attend the biggest summer blockbusters.  I thought that was the proper attire for watching Oppenheimer.  Oops.

So there were two huge movie releases this summer, and they couldn’t have been more different. The Barbie Movie drew enormous crowds dressed in pink to cheer on their imaginary heroine as she went on an adventure of growth, a plastic protagonist’s journey of discovery.  The second film, Oppenheimer, drew huge—not quite as enormous—crowds to watch a three-hour IMAX biopic about the father of the atomic bomb. I must admit to not having seen the Barbie movie yet, but I’ve been exposed to its previews, music, merchandising and social media, as has every human being in America and on most of the planet.  I did, however, go to see the Oppenheimer film, although not really dressed in pink.   

First, I must make my chronic complaint about how Jews in films and TV series these days are typically portrayed by non-Jewish actors.  Look, if you are making a film about brilliant 20th century physicists, you are essentially making a movie about Jews, right?  And in this excellent film Robert Oppenheimer, Albert Einstein, Oppenheimer’s adversary, Louis Strauss, and Oppenheimer’s brother and lover, who were all Jews, are played by non-Jewish actors.  There are two token Jews in the lead cast, David Krumholtz who plays Isaac Rabi, and Benny Safdie who plays Edward Teller, both Jewish and playing Jews.  Otherwise, it’s non-Jews pretending to be Jews.  If Jews control Hollywood, we are doing a pretty poor job of promoting our own kind…

This is a minor quibble; I mean if Mrs. Maisel and both of her parents can be played brilliantly by non-Jewish actors, I suppose that it’s all fair game.

In any case, the film presents Robert Oppenheimer as a brilliant physicist given the most important, most expensive, and most preposterously difficult development and production task of the entire 2nd World War in spite of never having run anything more complicated than a graduate seminar.  And he succeeded.  Oppenheimer is presented, warts and all, as a hero—arrogant, impatient, imperious, unfaithful, but still, in what he accomplished for our nation, a hero.

And then his heroism is challenged on two fronts.  First, he realizes from the beginning that he is creating a weapon and giving human beings a power that can destroy the whole world.  His challenge is that he simply must create it before the Nazis do.  But after successfully shepherding the Manhattan Project to its goal, he is tormented by his own responsibility for the mass deaths that result from using the bomb.  And second, now of only academic interest, Oppenheimer’s early political involvement with the Communist Party comes back to derail his career at its very apex. 

When the atomic bomb exploded at the first test, Oppenheimer famously thought of the quotation from the Bhagavad Gita, the Hindu scriptures, “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.”  In a way, he had.  And anyone with access to that button, or later that nuclear football, also became a potential destroyer of this world.

The Oppenheimer movie gives us a foretaste of the human potential to destroy the world.  What is fascinating is that unlocking the mystery of one of the smallest building blocks of the universe, the atom, that unleashed this powerful potential to annihilate.  What is even more fascinating is that since that time, scientific exploration of the tiniest aspects of our physical world has revealed creative truths more meaningful than the mere capacity for destruction.  In fact, it was a scientific accomplishment in physics that has given us the greatest glimpse into the origin of everything, and let us have perhaps the closest view of God we have ever had.  Allow me to explain.

We have known for a while that there are smaller elements in the universe than the atom, what are referred to as subatomic particles.  Theoretical and then experimental physics has been exploring these particles for quite some time, and they work in weird and wonderful ways.

That is why there was a great deal of publicity a few years back about the discovery in physics labs and supercolliders of a new result, called in the media the discovery of “The God Particle.”  For a few days this God Particle story was trending at number one on Yahoo and Google search engines, and even had its own Twitter handle--@Godparticle, hashtag #Genesis, believe it or not.  It was particularly surprising to see the story of a physics discovery with exactly no practical applications penetrate the consciousness of our over-stimulated, information-addicted society, albeit briefly.  It even excited physicists, quite possibly the least excitable of all human beings. 

The God Particle story described the confirmation of something with the unappetizing name of the Higgs-Boson particle.  So what exactly is a Higgs Boson, or God Particle?  And what does it have to do with God, or us?

It turns out that the name “The God Particle” comes from a 1993 book by Nobel Prize-winning physicist Leon Lederman—he is, of course, Jewish; he’ll probably be played by a non-Jewish actor if they ever make the movie, though—called, The God Particle: If the Universe Is the Answer, What Is the Question?  The idea is that through over 40 years of experimental tests what is called the Standard Model of particle physics has been proven to correctly explain the elementary particles and forces of nature.  It explains nearly everything about how the universe works, and even how it came into being and thus far has all been proven to be true by experimental physics—with one exception.  It cannot explain how most of these particles acquire their mass, a key ingredient in the formation of our universe.  Without mass there is no universe.  So what gives these fundamental building blocks of creation their mass?

That’s where the God Particle comes in. 

Back in 1964 scientists proposed the existence of this new particle, now known as the Higgs Boson, whose coupling with other particles would determine their mass.  In other words, every particle would have to interact with this “God Particle” to give it mass.  It’s a bit like the story of Noah naming the animals, but it all happened 14 billion years ago: each particle would couple with the God particle which gave it its mass, and then expansion explosively began.

If this God Particle really exists, it is the one element in the universe that determines what all other elements become. 

It’s a kind of wild idea, but people much brighter than I am believe it describes just how our universe came to be.  The only problem was actually proving it’s true, which required finding this Higgs Boson, this God Particle.  That quest became the Moby Dick of contemporary physics: deeply desired but very hard to capture.

Experiments at the two most important and expensive supercolliders in the world, the one in Switzerland and the Tevatron collider at the Department of Energy's Fermilab outside Chicago both looked for the Higgs boson for years, but it eluded discovery.  To search for this God particle the Europeans just took apart their giant supercollider and rebuilt it much bigger and better, creating the Large Hadron Collider, which came on-line about 15 years ago.  Finally, after decades of developments in accelerator and detector technology and computing, scientists reached the moment of knowing whether the Higgs Boson, the God Particle, was the right solution to this problem.  And it was!

That is, most physicists now are convinced that the Higgs boson, the God Particle, explains how we, and the rest of the universe, exist. It explains why all matter created in the Big Bang has mass, and is able to coalesce. Without that, as a background paper to the experiment explains, "the universe would be a very different place… no ordinary matter as we know it, no chemistry, no biology, and no people." All energy, all everything, was present in that initial creation, and the God particle shaped every part of it.

Does that mean that seeing this boson, or scientific evidence of it, is like seeing panim-el-panim, the face of God?  I mean if this is the God Particle, is its confirmation scientific proof of the existence of God?

Well, that kind of depends on what you mean by God. 

If by God you mean the classic idea of a super-human being who looks like us, or speaks in audible words, and sits on a white cloud up above Mt. Everest, maybe not.  But perhaps that’s not really what God is at all.

So I ask you to sit back now, and listen in a state of relaxed attention, truly listening.  And allow me to describe creation in somewhat different terms.

Breisheet Barah Elohim… In the beginning there was the belief that God was an Old Man with a long white beard seated upon a cloud, hovering over the face of the universe that He—for God was male—had created.  And the Lord God was all-powerful and all knowing, transcendent, very, very big and very, very old, and he spoke in Elizabethan English with many Thous and Thines, and was called the Lord of Hosts and the Holy King and the Lord God. And this paternal Lord was the font of all truth and right. 

And this God created the whole world, and the universe, and knew everything that happened before it occurred.  And human beings, man and woman, God’s greatest and most challenging creations, filled the world God created and were supposed to carry out God’s will.  And when they didn’t they were punished.  And this conception of God worked for many people for quite a long time. 

Then things began to change.  New ideas popped up: emancipation; rationalism; science; atheism; psychology; sociology; the transitory isms of communism, fascism, and socialism.  World War shattered the idealistic rationalism of progress, and another World War and a Holocaust annihilated the shards.  Slowly and then suddenly, that all-powerful, all-knowing, all-good God with the white beard on the high cloud seemed more fantasy than reality.

In fact, in the face of this unending assault of ideas and circumstances, God the Old Man was in danger of just fading away.  He seemed not even to be He anymore, and perhaps just flat out irrelevant.  At least not relevant in the way so many people had thought about Him—Her? It?—for so very long.

But it turned out that just as God was disappearing from the world that God created, new ways of understanding God, and the universe God set in motion, were developing.  And those new ideas ranged over the broad span of collective human creativity, the magnificent ways in which human minds could act b’tzelem Elohim, in the image of God. 

Sometimes those new ideas coincided in surprising ways with the discoveries of science, and the realities of the world that we know from our own observation.   And then, even more surprisingly, those ideas about belief and God and science and creation all came together.

That is what’s happening today.  We are seeing a kind of harmonic convergence, a new and deeper understanding of God in the universe around us.

The Jewish way of thinking about God has always included a subtle, subversive understanding that is quite different from the transcendent concept of an old man with a white beard on a cloud.  That is the 2500 year-old mystical conception of God.  And that view of God, and our place in the universe, harmonizes beautifully with the scientific understanding of the universe that continues to develop.  Right now, in the year 5784, we have reached a kind of nexus between scientific discovery and mystical belief that is both intellectually convincing and extraordinarily beautiful.

It is the Kabbalistic conception of the world that most closely aligns with our scientific understanding of the universe today.  It is that mystical approach, long considered esoteric, elitist, and, well, flaky, that offers us the best ability to accept the presence of the divine in ways that have contemporary meaning.  Specifically, it is viewing God as the Shekhinah, the divine presence in Jewish mysticism, that allows us to understand God and the universe with intellectual integrity and spiritual meaning.

The very word Kabbalah has become both popular and controversial, of course.  Kabbalah literally means receiving, and it is a more contemplative, accepting, subtler way of finding God than many of us are used to.  I am not talking here about the kind of Kabbalah practiced by Madonna, or Ariana Grande, but the rich tradition found in the deep discipline and profound texts of the Zohar, masterpiece of Jewish mysticism.  In the Zohar, Shekhinah is simply the name given to the indwelling presence of the divine in this world, the essential holiness that can be sought and that seeks us, if we only become aware of it in our lives.

In essence, Shechinah is God in the natural forces of the universe, in the laws that govern our world and its processes, and in every creature in this world of ours whose creation we celebrate today.  The mystical God is both creator of the natural laws that govern our universe and the paradoxical, quantum presence that provides creative energy and animating life to all beings in that universe. The Shechinah is everywhere at once, and our ability to sense that presence, and to cultivate that sensitivity, is what is required to actually find God today.

And with some confidence we can now say that our scientific understanding of the world not only allows for such a creative essence, a Shechinah that motivates and forms all existence, but nearly requires it.

In the Zohar, a text written 700 years ago, creation, and the essential divine quality, are described this way: "A spark of impenetrable darkness flashed within the concealed of the concealed, from the head of Infinity—a cluster of vapor forming in formlessness, thrust in a ring, not white, not black, not red, not green, no color at all. As a cord surveyed, it yielded radiant colors. Deep within the spark gushed a flow, splaying colors below, concealed within the concealed of the mystery of Ein Sof."

In trying to comprehend what is meant by “The God Particle,” I came across this passage: “In the Standard Model of physics, the Higgs boson is a type of particle that allows multiple identical particles to exist in the same place in the same quantum state. It has no spin, no electric charge, no color charge. It is also very unstable, decaying into other particles almost immediately.”  And from that decay, that differentiation of the essential unity, comes all creation.

I would never contend that that Moses de Leon, writing the Zohar in Spain in the 13th century, understood contemporary particle physics as of September 2023.  But I can say that the parallels are often eerily fascinating.  And that the Kabbalistic approach to understanding God is both spiritually fulfilling and has intellectual integrity.  For when we become aware of the extraordinary beauty and elegance of that initial creation and understand the presence from that moment of a divine guiding element, we can and will find holiness, resonance, harmony, and energy in every element of this beautiful, sacred universe.

[Physical science researchers have reminded us that that we were each present at that initial creation, as energy shaped and formed by a greater power—just as today we are partners, with God, in the process of creation.  Junior partners, perhaps, but partners nonetheless.]

According to physicists, that moment of creation was an instant of unparalleled, unrepeatable release of energy.  It was that enormously creative expansion that began everything knowable in the universe.  From the birth moments of creation came everything that matters, including matter itself.  Fascinatingly, our own energy was present at that creation, and remains present.  Everything began in the same way, at nearly the same time.  And everything in this universe is therefore connected.

The interrelatedness of all being is a fact of life: a mystical insight, but also good common sense, and pure science besides.  We can trust that we are part of a vast web of existence constantly expanding and evolving.

As Zohar scholar Danny Matt puts it, “By attuning ourselves to the divine pulse animating all life, we can overcome our estrangement from nature. By exploring and contemplating the origin of the universe, we discover that our evolution is a step in a cosmic dance. Engaging the world spiritually, we realize there is no sharp line between the here and now and the ultimate. Looking for the spark, we find that what is ordinary is spectacular.”

As Matt concludes, “God is not somewhere else, hidden from us. God is right here, hidden from us. We’ve lost our sense of wonder in the fast pace of life. God is right here, in this very moment, fresh and unexpected, taking you by surprise.”

Our task in this new 5784 year is to become aware that God’s presence, the divine spark, really is everywhere.  And to relearn a sense of wonder at that amazing reality.

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.