What We’ve Learned Since October 7th

Israel Solidarity Shabbat Sermon, Shabbat Vayishlach 5784, Rabbi Sam Cohon

There is an ancient joke that seems applicable today, in this era of global warming.  Scientists have determined a huge flood will overtake the entire face of planet Earth in just three days.  Everything will be subsumed in a flood far more cataclysmic than that of Noah.  All will perish.

The religious responses come in immediately: The Pope issues a papal bull, saying “Catholics of the world, we have three days to repent and save our souls before Judgment Day.” 

The Chief Imam of Mecca tells all Muslims in the world, “We have three days to pray fervently to be accepted in paradise before our demise.” 

And the Chief Rabbi of Israel announces, “We have three days to learn to breathe under water.”

My friends, we have now been breathing under water for about eight weeks.  We are now in a new reality, ever since October 7th.  We have learned many things over the past two months, ever since that disastrous dark Shemini Atzeret/Simchat Torah/Shabbat day.  These have been painful, terrible, sad lessons, and some of them are going to be hard for many Jews to accept.  But if we have proven anything over the long course of Jewish history, it is this: we know how to adapt to new realities.  Here a few things we learned—many terribly negative, but some positive. 

We learned that the fabled Israeli intelligence agencies were fallible, and somehow did not accurately read what was happening just across the border in Gaza.  This was a disastrous failure, and the head of IDF military intelligence has already resigned and taken responsibility.

We learned that the long-term leadership of Bibi Netanyahu, based always on his avowed commitment to Bitachon, security, has not made Israel more secure; quite the contrary.  Israelis have quite likely never felt less secure since 1973, or perhaps 1967 or 1948.  Netanyahu’s political raison d’etre, his very reason for viability as a leader has been destroyed.

We learned that the IDF, the most powerful military in the Middle East, famed for the rapidity of its response time, was not so fast to respond to an epic disaster.

We learned that under the very eyes of Israeli, United States and Egyptian spies the evil terrorists of Hamas, believed to be vicious but incompetent, prepared a vastly sophisticated, complicated, coordinated and utterly horrifically evil plan to spread terror to all Israelis, and all Jews in the world, and succeeded in committing the worst atrocities since the Shoah.

We learned again just how little sympathy exists for the victims of brutality in this world if they are Jews. 

We learned the depth of the generation gap in America, Europe and around the world between those who support and respect Israel and those who believe it be evil.  It is older people, primarily, who understand the many outstanding qualities of Israel, its democratic institutions, its freedom of speech, press, religion and sexual orientation, the rule of law, the creativity and dynamic economy of a first-world nation created out of swamps and deserts.  But it is younger people, including many younger adults, who have learned instead to view Israel as an oppressive nation, and who idolize the Palestinian terrorists who seek to destroy Israel.  That generation gap has never been more evident, or more deeply disturbing than now.

We learned that the label of Progressive in American politics often includes not only anti-Israel attitudes, statements, and policies, but profoundly anti-Semitic attitudes, statements, policies and actions.  The rhyming cry of “From the river to the sea Palestine will be free” is a call for the destruction of the only Jewish state on earth, and it quickly transitioned into calls for the genocide of the Jews. 

We have learned that when Israel is at war, anti-Semitism will be unleashed all over the world.  That is true both when Israel shows vulnerability, as it did on October 7th, and when it shows great unity and military strength, as it has since then.  In other words: Antisemitism is catalyzed both when Israel loses and when it wins. 

We have learned that college campuses are no longer safe places to express your Judaism freely, and that while every other minority culture or identity is viewed as protected on US and Canadian campuses, Jewish students and their organizations are not.  Somehow, the most persecuted group of people in all human history, us, and one of the smaller ones in the world is now counted on the side of the majority population.

We learned that Israel’s true allies, especially the United States, do indeed stand with her, but even that support can be toyed with by the dysfunction of American governmental institutions today.

We learned yet again that the only time the world cares about any Arab life is when it is taken by a Jew.

We learned, yet again, that the UN never cares about the taking of Jewish lives.

We learned that international feminist organizations are powerfully responsive to every kind of sexual violence and exploitation in the world—except when the victims of that sexual violence are Jews.  Then, these same international and national feminist organizations become mute, or insist that the brutal, documented violence did not happen.  After all, only Jewish women were victimized.

We learned that in war, only Israel is required to live up to a much higher standard to protect civilians than that imposed on any other country—including not only Russia or Ukraine or Iran or Syria, but the United States.  This is apparently especially true of harm experienced by civilians whose own terrorist leaders virulently attack Israel and chose deliberately not to protect their own citizens, in fact hiding their weapons delivery systems and military command and control centers in hospitals, schools and mosques.  

We learned—again—that the mainstream media and its online and app-based replacements are incredibly irresponsible when it comes to reporting events in Israel and the Palestinian territories.  The coverage of October 7th shifted dramatically when the lie that Israel had bombed a hospital was blasted over all mainstream media and on the web just a few days after the worst attack on Jews since the Holocaust.  Suddenly, Israel was vividly portrayed as the irresponsible aggressor against innocents—when in fact it was an Islamic Jihad rocket that killed their own people.  As usual, the follow-up stories never caught up with the real narrative.  In current coverage, there is often not even an effort to be “balanced”—it is simply pro-Palestinian propaganda being passed off as news.

We learned that abducted, kidnapped Jewish hostages, women and children, can be kept in cages in tunnels under Gaza and only the Jewish world is outraged by it.  In fact, we learned that people would literally tear down the posters of hostages as some kind of sick solidarity gesture with the Palestinian terrorists who committed these crimes against humanity. 

We learned, in America and all over the world, that antisemites of all stripes were emboldened by Israel being at war.  The oldest form of racist hatred, Antisemitism, is alive and well and apparently can be publicly expressed, especially in America and on college campuses, at a level not seen in this nation in many decades.

We learned that Iran has proxy terrorist groups aiming at Israel not only from Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, and Syria but from Yemen… and that attacking US targets was part of the package, as long as the attacks weren’t actually effective.

And we learned that not having a plan for what happens after you destroy Hamas, or its military capacity in any case, is not a long-term solution that provides peace or r’guah or shalvah, peace or contentment for Israelis. 

OK.  That wasn’t much fun.  So, have we learned anything positive, rabbi?

Indeed we have.  We learned that an Israel apparently torn apart by massive protests against the government’s judicial coup could come together with lightning speed, unify, and fight the evil of Hamas’ Palestinian terrorism. 

We learned that Jewish communities all around the world would leap forward with support and solidarity for the only Jewish nation on earth.

We learned that the IDF, once set in motion, using all of its newest technology, was able to smash most of the Hamas forces and eliminate many of the Palestinian terrorists and their center of terror production.

We learned that we have many friends who do support Israel profoundly, and they come from all across the political and religious spectrum.  I have received wonderful support from Christian friends of various denominations, including especially our hosts here at Church of the Apostles.  It is heartwarming, and it helps.  I get stopped because I wear a kippah about twice a day; so far, everyone who has done so wants to tell me how much they support Israel and how much they care about it.

We learned that Jews all over the world, and all over America, care tremendously about Israel and are unified in our support for the Jewish State.  300,000 people came out for a rally in Washington, DC, even if the media kept artificially lowering it to “tens of thousands.”  Jews have been coming to services, wearing blue ribbons, writing op-eds, speaking on the news, making substantial donations to Israeli charities, attending rallies in cities that are more Jewishly active, like Los Angeles and New York and DC.   

We learned that the Arab states that have been working towards closer relations with Israel are continuing to do so, that October 7th failed if its goal was to torpedo the Saudi-Israeli relationship that has developed over the last several years, or that it would undermine Egyptian-Israeli relations or even Jordanian-Israeli relations, let alone the fledgling diplomatic normalcy with the Gulf States and Morocco. 

We learned that there can be consequences for supporting brutal terrorism and its advocacy on campus if you want to work for fancy law firms or hotshot business consulting groups when you graduate.  We learned that sometimes even academics can pay a price for their blind support of Palestinian murder, rape and torture of Jews.

We learned that Israel needs our help in getting its story out, and that it’s time for US Jews to use our media-savvy effectiveness to explain why Israel matters so much and just how much we all have at stake in this. 

We learned that some wise people—not everyone to be sure—understand that this was not just an attack on one Jewish nation, but an attack on all civilization, and that defeating it is essential for the future of the civilized world.

My friends, this is a special Shabbat.  It is the Shabbat when Jacob, the conniving heel of a brother, struggles his way into becoming Israel, the one who wrestles with God.  Vayishlach is here to remind us that we each personally have the opportunity to rise from our baser motives and more manipulative impulses to become something finer, higher, better.  But it is also a reminder of what we as a collective people, Am Yisrael, must seek to be.  It is what Israel means, and what being part of the nation of Israel means.

It is why the nation of Israel matters so much, too. 

If we are to be an Or LaGoyim, a light to the nations, we must survive as a nation.  If we are to be an Am Segulah, a special people, we must first be a people safe from the depredations of those motivated by profound and ancient evil who seek our destruction. 

But we must also strive, always, to find a way to shine a new light from Zion, an Or Chadah miTziyon, that can only then illuminate even this dark time. 

Hanukkah is coming up Thursday night for eight glorious nights.  We will add light to this time, and we will do so not only with candles but with the spirit with which we embrace our Jewish nation, and with the energy we put into our Jewish identities. 

We have learned many harsh lessons the last two months.  It is now up to us to use those lessons to motivate ourselves to greater energy, commitment and dedication to our people, our land, and our God.

Ken Yehi Ratson; may this be God’s will; but mostly, may it be ours.

Prayer for Democracy

Prayer for Democracy, Rabbi Samuel M. Cohon

Delivered at the Interfaith Prayer Service for Democracy at St. Philip’s in the Hills Church, Monday, November 20, 2023

When I think of democracy and Jews, I’m reminded of the old story of the rabbi who was ill and in the hospital and the president of the board of trustees visited him there and told him, “Rabbi, I’m sure you’ll be pleased to hear that the board has voted to wish you a speedy and complete recovery.  The vote was 9 to 8.”  Democracy in action.

If you had told me seven or eight years ago that we would need a prayer service tonight for democracy, I wouldn’t have believed you.  I don’t know how many of you would have believed it then either.

You know, as a boy I was fascinated by democracy.  The empowerment of people, the egalitarianism of knowing that every American adult had the opportunity to participate in choosing our own representatives.  It was nearly intoxicating.  What an amazing thing, that each of us could vote, could exercise our franchise, that every one of us counted, that together we chose who was going to lead us.  Choice. Free will.

Judaism is a religion of choice and free will.  We believe that no one is born good and no one is born evil, but that we personally choose our own course in life.  Nothing is predetermined about the kind of people we become.  If ever a religion and people existed to live in a democracy, it’s us Jews.  And don’t get me started on just how much we love the idea of freedom of speech… 

But I’d like to tell you a particular story about our democracy the reflects on that from a uniquely Jewish perspective.

It took place over 150 years ago.  On December 17, 1862, US Major General Ulysses S. Grant issued a most peculiar order.  Called General Order Number 11, it expelled all Jews from Grant’s military district, composed of parts of Tennessee, Kentucky, and Mississippi.  It read that “Jews as a class” had 24 hours to leave the district. Some had lived there for decades but they were all to be kicked out.

We aren’t sure why Grant made such an order.  It seems out of character.  Ulysses Grant did not demonstrate Anti-Semitic tendencies in other ways.  In fact, when the incredibly successful general later became President of the United States he appointed more Jews to high positions than any previous Chief Executive ever had, he protested anti-Jewish atrocities in Europe, and he and his entire cabinet attended the dedication of a synagogue in Washington, DC, the first president ever to attend a Jewish religious service. 

In any case this Order Number 11 was shocking and damaging. His ever-loyal chief of staff, John Rawlins, tried unsuccessfully to talk Grant out of it, but to no avail.

And so, the Jews who lived or did business near the army’s headquarters were expelled immediately.  One Jewish officer in Grant’s army resigned over the order.  30 Jewish families of Paducah, Kentucky, including pillars of that community, were roughly handled and forced out of their homes by Union soldiers and turned into refugees.  It was a bad scene, similar to the kind of thing that had happened to Jews all over Europe, indeed in many parts of the world, for many centuries. 

Only this time, some of the expelled Jews sent telegrams to Washington, DC.  When word reached the capital and made its way to Grant’s superior, President Abraham Lincoln, Lincoln directed that Grant’s Order Number 11 be immediately revoked.  The General in Chief of the Union Army, Henry Halleck, sent Grant a telegram that read, “A paper purporting to be General Orders, No. 11, issued by you December 17, has been presented here. By its terms, it expels all Jews from your department. If such an order has been issued, it will be immediately revoked.”

Grant revoked the order, less than three weeks after it was issued.

What is remarkable about this story is not that it happened.  What is remarkable is that it is the only time in American history our national government or any of its representatives officially issued an Antisemitic order or law or regulation aimed solely at Jews.  And it was revoked and repudiated as instantly as it could have possibly been.  Grant even came perilously close to being censured in the House of Representatives.

That is, American democracy worked.  Because we live in a nation in which our leaders are elected by the people, and must be responsible to both those people and to the Constitution of our nation and the laws in effect.  And those laws affirm that all American citizens, regardless of religion or race or personal convictions are able to vote, are protected equally under those laws, and have the right to pray and live as they choose.

And the revocation of that order, and that it has never been repeated, makes the United States one of two countries on the entire globe never to have issued an Antisemitic statute or directive. 

Now that distinction about America is extremely important.  Because only in our American democracy, which separates church from state and which gives every citizen the right to vote, can this be guaranteed.  Only in a nation in which the fact that enough people truly care about ideas like respect, tolerance, diversity, and integrity can enough public sentiment be motivated—and feared by its politicians—to prevent such laws from being enacted.  There is a reason this kind of thing only ever happened once, and that it was almost instantly reversed.

There is something incredibly precious about American democracy, and we Jews, in particular, appreciate that.  We have long experience of autocracy, having lived under, and been brutalized by, so many autocracies in so many parts of the world over so many centuries.  We know that only under democracies can civil rights and true liberty be experienced, expected, and protected.

And so, tonight, we pray: Eloheinu vEilohei Avoteinu, our God and God of our ancestors, may we summon the strength to preserve this sacred trust we have been given, this American democracy.  May the rule of law and the honesty of open elections be respected, preserved, and maintained.  And may we come to live without hatred and bigotry in our democracy, with free elections and honest leaders who will fight to protect the rights of all Americans.  May this be Your will, God—and mostly, may it be ours.    

Thanksgiving and the Jews

Sermon, Shabbat Toldot 5784

It’s Thanksgiving this week, a holiday that used to be just about the least controversial one of the whole year, but has moved somewhat into the realm of the controversial recently.  Allow me to explain.

When I was growing up, the shared American holidays were New Year’s, Lincoln’s and Washington’s Birthdays, Memorial Day, the 4th of July, Labor Day, Thanksgiving and Christmas.  Almost all of those had some complications associated with them.  New Year’s Eve inevitably was filled with drunk-driving deaths and arrests and police checkpoints to prevent that.  Lincoln’s Birthday was not celebrated south of the Mason-Dixon line.  Washington’s Birthday was later combined with Lincoln’s to make it a “Presidents’ Day” three-day weekend—in fact, all the holidays were kind of manipulated to create three or four day weekends—while Memorial Day was a peculiar early beginning to the summer for most of us who didn’t have relatives who died in America’s wars—and growing up in California we then went back to school for three more weeks. 

During the Vietnam War and throughout the 1970s and into the 1980s the 4th of July became a flashpoint for dueling views of America among Americans.  Labor Day was a celebration of unionization, which was uncontroversial initially in my time but became hotly debated in the anti-union decades that followed.  Christmas was very nice for Christians, but the build-up in particular was challenging for non-Christians—you know, like Jews—who were forced to sing Christmas carols about the birth of a savior we don’t share if we wanted to be in chorus or madrigals; just saying.  Plus, months of ads for stuff and carols playing everywhere… 

Only Thanksgiving seemed to fly above controversy, unless you were a turkey. 

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

Now other holidays in my lifetime appeared while some disappeared: Martin Luther King, Jr. Day was finally added in 1983 after 15 years of activism, including by singer Stevie Wonder, but it took an additional 17 years to be added in all states, including Arizona, which didn’t approve it until a public referendum in 1992.  Two states still don’t celebrate it fully; Alabama and Mississippi combine it with Robert E. Lee Day—now that’s cognitive dissonance—to have “King-Lee Day”. 

Veteran’s Day was a legal holiday for the government and for banks—of course—but not generally celebrated by most people if they weren’t military veterans or relatives.  While less controversial since it was essentially a celebration of the end of World War I, it never had the broad appeal of other holidays, and seemed to echo Memorial Day half a year later.

Columbus Day used to be a day off of school and sometimes from work while banks were closed—banks still are closed then; they take every chance they get, don’t they?—but Columbus’ very mixed personal record, and Columbus Day’s direct association with the annihilation of Native American populations and the usurpation of their lands has not endeared it to recent generations. 

But Thanksgiving seemed above all of that.  A day to show gratitude for the food we have to eat and enjoy, a day to spend with family and friends and to invite guests to share our table.  A day based, in theory, on the harvest festival of Sukkot in the Bible, the feast of Tabernacles and gratitude.  A day not tied to military triumph or a particular individual, not directly connected to any current religious practice when we can say thank you for whatever we do have. What could be controversial about that?   

I’ve always called Thanksgiving truly a Jewish holiday: what else can you call a holiday when you invite over all your relatives, including the ones you don’t like, and overeat?  Definitely a Jewish holiday!

Legally, Thanksgiving became an established national holiday consistently observed in America in 1863, in the midst of the brutal American Civil War, when Abraham Lincoln proclaimed it as such.  With a brief interruption during the late Depression it has remained the last Thursday of November ever since.  A great holiday to eat, drink, enjoy family and friends, watch football, and then go see a movie.

Yet when I sent out a typical Thanksgiving message to my congregation and community a couple of years ago, I discovered that some people with an indigenous heritage found Thanksgiving offensive; in fact, very offensive.  It harkened back to the white settlement of the Americas, the destruction of native peoples and cultures and the colonization of their lands by whites.

Now, the story we like to tell about the origins of Thanksgiving is, in fact, reflective of this.  Those Puritan pilgrims landing on Cape Cod and being saved from starvation by the local Native American Wampanoag tribe, and the white survivors celebrating their friendship with the tribe in October after the first semi-successful harvest in a giant feast—it sounds great, and as though they built bridges of lasting friendship across the racial, cultural and religious lines that could have divided them.  Swell.  But the darker truth is that half a century later, during King Philip’s War, the white settlers and the native tribes in New England fought a brutal war of extermination that ended with the near total destruction of the native Americans in the region, and their essential replacement by white European—primarily English, Scotch and Irish—settlers.  The Wampanoag tribe itself, the one that saved the settlers from dying that first winter and spring, was wiped out.

No less a figure than Mark Twain put it this way: 

Thanksgiving Day, a function which originated in New England two or three centuries ago when those people recognized that they really had something to be thankful for — annually, not oftener — if they had succeeded in exterminating their neighbors, the Indians, during the previous twelve months, instead of getting exterminated by their neighbors, the Indians. Thanksgiving Day became a habit, for the reason that in the course of time, as the years drifted on, it was perceived that the exterminating had ceased to be mutual and was all on the white man's side, consequently on the Lord's side; hence it was proper to thank the Lord for it and extend the usual compliments.

Whew.  I guess I understand the native problem with Thanksgiving. 

Now it is also worth mentioning that we Jews have experienced more persecution, over a longer period of time—millenia, in fact—than any other people in the history of humanity.  We know from persecution and communal suffering.  And we had nothing to do with the brutal conquest of the indigenous Native Americans either in South or North America.  In fact, while they were taking it on the chin from European settlers we were suffering in ghettos and Judenstrasse and from brutal pogroms all over Europe.  Or we were second-class citizens in the mellahs and Jewish quarters of North Africa and the Middle East.

So when we Jewish Americans celebrate a festival of gratitude in the autumn we aren’t actually rejoicing in the triumph over indigenous peoples; we are just enjoying a great meal with family and friends and being in a nation that, in general, has been an incredible haven of freedom of religion and identity. 

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

At a time of shocking Antisemitism right here in America, it’s extremely important to share not just the negative, but the positive that can emerge from such challenges.  It’s why we need, especially now, to reach out—as we will next week in two interfaith and multifaith services—to others who share the desire to build community and create good in our society.  It’s how we can create bonds of support and love that we canM feel especially grateful for.

Because, my friends, we need holidays of gratitude, times to give thanks.  It’s much too easy to take all that we have for granted, and to simply complain about what we do not possess and miss what we do.  Holidays often have murky origins, to be honest, and the way they come to be celebrated may not be closely tied to where they come from.  St. Valentine, namesake of Valentine’s Day, was a virulently anti-Semitic pope.  Christmas was originally a pagan winter solstice celebration.  Passover, while very ancient, is connected to much older spring celebrations held throughout the world.  How a holiday starts is not necessarily how it eventually turns out.

We need a time to offer gratitude for what we have.  We need a day to focus on family and friends.  We need to make the effort to bring guests to our tables to share in our bounty. 

So, in my view, enjoy your turkey, cranberry sauce, stuffing, sweet potatoes and pies, and particularly enjoy your family and friends this Thursday.  And come to these interfaith services that we are offering—free of charge—to demonstrate that we appreciate the friendship, love and support we are receiving. 

Then we can, in this time of challenge and threat, have a holiday of true thanksgiving.

Responsible Now, for the Jewish Future

Sermon Shabbat Chayei Sarah 5784

I have been trying to explain to people recently what it has been like to be a congregational rabbi active in the Jewish community the last five weeks.  The folks who have asked are religious community colleagues—including priests, ministers, Mormon stake bishops and presidents, and preachers—and it has been a fascinating challenge to successfully describe the experience. 

For one thing, this is the fifth weekly sermon I’ve given since October 7th—and these have been among the most difficult I’ve ever had to write in my entire career.  Tonight, I was not supposed to be delivering a sermon, but since our confirmed guest cancelled just yesterday, it became my responsibility one more time.  And I must admit, I take no pleasure in speaking about the events of this past week yet feel compelled to do so.

As someone who has firmly believed, and perhaps still does, that any permanent solution to the Palestinian problem requires that they end up with some kind of state, or more likely, two states—remember, the West Bank and Gaza are separate entities, non-contiguous, with very different geographic and population situations—the last five weeks have been extremely painful.  The horrific, evil murders, systematic torture and premeditated rape and arson perpetrated by Hamas’ Palestinian terrorists on October 7th and their glorification of this kind of brutal extreme violence against civilians, children, women, men, babies, and the elderly—marks it as one of the worst atrocities in the past 75 years.

While the initial public response was shock and sympathy for Israel and Israelis, the backlash, including a nearly worldwide celebration of sadistic violence against Jews going on now on American college campuses and in Europe and South America and Africa and, of course, throughout the Arab and Iranian world is horrifying.  Some people are now denying that the murder of 1400 people in Israel even took place—in spite of the fact Hamas posted its own sick brutality in videos online while they were committing these very crimes against humanity.  The inability to believe something vividly and arrogantly documented by the perpetrators is just another demonstration of the virulent antisemitism hiding just below the surface of what passes for civilization. 

Last week was the 85th anniversary of Krystallnacht, usually understood to be the beginning of the Holocaust.  Clearly, what is happening around the world now is not that.  But it isn’t so great, and the people involved in protesting for more of the same are certainly much like the early Nazis in their evident antisemitism.  

Depressingly, a lot of this antisemitism is coming from the so-called Progressive Left, which has embraced the cause of Palestinian terrorism.  There is some effort being made to distinguish between supporting Hamas—a vicious Palestinian terrorist organization of Islamists who use civilians to protect their terrorists, hide all of their rocket factories and launchers in schools and under hospitals, and built exactly zero bombshelters for their civilians before attacking Israel—and supporting the cause of a Palestinian state. But then protestors chant “From the river to the sea, Palestine shall be free,” advocating the genocide of Israelis and the destruction of the only Jewish state in the world, that is not a political statement in favor of liberty.  It is a public endorsement of genocide of Jews.     

As a rabbi, I surely understand that logical arguments have limitations, and my own will likely fail to reach those who need persuading.  But there is nothing “progressive” about Hamas, which has controlled Gaza for 17 years.  Gaza has not been occupied by Israel since 2005, and in consequence of that Israeli unilateral withdrawal, and Hamas being elected by the people of Gaza—OK, in one vote 17 years ago, Hamas never held another election—an area, Gaa, that has excellent potential for economic success has been turned into a civilian human shield for an underground network of terrorist tunnels larger than the New York subway system.  For closing in on two decades Gaza has been a launching pad for rockets shot at Israeli civilians regularly, each rocket a war crime by the way. And as the Israeli military is discovering, the underground terrorist network is intimately linked to the civilian homes and population aboveground in a tight, symbiotic way. 

That means that more Gaza civilians will be killed as Hamas and Islamic Jihad terrorist pop out of tunnels in houses, apartments, schools, restaurants and hospitals to fire at Israeli troops.  And as one Israeli general puts it, every Palestinian who is killed is a public relations benefit to Hamas, and energizes those pro-Palestinian protestors. 

A rabbi I worked with long ago put it well, way back in the 1980s: why is it that Arab lives only matter when a Jew takes them?  How is it that the world did not protest Syrian dictator Asad’s genocidal murder of large parts of his own rebellious people?  Or ISIS’s actual genocide of the Yazidi people?

Israel has been forced to respond to the worst attack on its civilians in its entire history.  In doing so it asked the people in the northern half of Gaza to leave, since Hamas has concentrated its terrorists there.  Hamas told them to stay; that is, Israel sought to protect Gazan civilians.  Hamas wanted them to stay in place and die in the crossfire because it helped their own propaganda.  As a Hamas spokesman said, “We are not responsible for the Palestinian civilians.  That’s for the UN and the Israelis to worry about.”  Again, the IDF, the Israel Defense Forces, strives to protect Israel’s civilians.  Hamas uses civilians to protect its terrorists.

Now in these pro-Palestine rallies I have seen some startling signs; for example, Progressives for Gaza. Progressives for Gaza?  Well, Hamas-controlled Gaza guarantees exactly no civil rights to its inhabitants.  Being gay or lesbian is punishable by execution.  No one has the right to speak out against Hamas.  There are no elections of any kind—just that one, 17 years ago—and corruption is so rampant that it has been calculated that of every NGO and EU aid dollar sent to Gaza, Hamas steals about 80 cents to use in its terrorism and to line the pockets of its leaders, who live in luxury in Qatar and the Arab Emirates.  It thrives on extortion and brutality.  How is it possible that people who profess to believe in human rights can support such a regime?  Perhaps because it’s a regime that brutally attacks Jews, it must be OK, right?

Now, I don’t want to sound too negative or paranoid here.  Israel is not powerless—this is not 1942—and while I have seen awful things done and said all around the world against Jews the last month, I have also had unsolicited phone calls, emails and letters of support for Israel and Jews in the same period.  There are many people who understand just how cowardly and brutal the Palestinian terrorists are, how corrupt and evil their own regime is.  And who understand that Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East, and that this was an attack on all of western civilization, and that Israel must win this war.  In fact, US forces have been attacked throughout the region by Iranian proxies, and the US bombed Iranian bases in Syria this past week.  And the quite substantial American forces now deployed throughout the region send a clear message to Iran and Hezbollah and the Houthis and the other terrorists funded by those violent mullahs that Israel is not alone.

Still, it’s a rough time.  Much worse for those fighting the Palestinian terrorists of Hamas in Gaza, trying to control the Hamas terrorists in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, and all of those in Israel enduring air raid warnings, school closings, relatives and friends dying and hospitalized, as well as friends and relatives in the military engaged in fighting.

I believe that it will be particularly important for Israel to have more of an endgame in all of this than the destruction of Hamas.  Something more successful must be created out of this disaster, or it will only be a precursor to more of the same.  No sane person can desire that.  If there will be any silver lining in these dark clouds, it will prove to be a non-Islamist entity that actually cares about its own people’s wellbeing taking charge in Gaza. 

I think to some degree our challenge as Jewish leaders is to find a way to continue to celebrate the greatness of Judaism while showing solidarity and support for Israel in this time of profound challenge.  This year both Thanksgiving and Hanukkah will seem, well, different.  Undoubtedly, we will make both holidays meaningful in a different way during this time of war and antisemitism.

In our Torah portion of Chayei Sarah, our first ancestor, Abraham, does some remarkable things to assure the future of his vision of monotheism, of belief in one God and to assure that he will have progeny and truly become the father of a people.  In doing so, he establishes a pattern that has helped us, as Jews, survive in so many places that were actively hostile to us. 

In particular, Abraham makes certain that his perhaps estranged son Isaac will father children, and further the cause of God and ethics in the world.  He also makes certain that the land that, he, Abraham has purchased in the Promised Land—in Hevron, in fact—will be the first entry confirming our permanent presence in place that today we call Israel. 

Our responsibility to continue that work, to assure our Jewish future and our future in security in Israel remains.  We may do so by other means than our patriarch used, but it will continue to be a central part of our congregation’s commitment to our people and our land, to Am Yisrael and Erets Yisrael, in the face of war and falsehoods.  It must also frame our steady, engaged dedication that will ensure the success of these goals.

Abraham succeeded because he was, well, stubbornly committed to his goals.  Israel, too, will succeed because it, too, must remain committed to its goals.  And we must be committed to continuing to support the future of our people in our own land.

You Shall Be a Blessing

Sermon Shabbat Vayeira 5783

I thought of this ancient, painful joke this past week.  It goes like this: 

Two hundred years ago in Russia, a town’s Jews were in a panic: a Christian girl had been found murdered, and the Jews were worried they’d be blamed for the crime and a blood libel pogrom would take place.

The town’s rabbi called everyone to the shul to discuss the situation. Just as they all arrived and sat down, the shammes, the assistant at the temple, ran into the hall. “I have wonderful news!” he told the gathering. “The murdered girl was Jewish!”

As Anti-Semitism spiked all around the world, to a level we haven’t seen perhaps in my lifetime, it became clear that the gloves that some have been wearing for years were coming off.  You could say anything terrible about Jews the last few weeks without serious fear of repercussions, especially, perhaps on college campuses in the US and Canada.  And you could seek to perpetrate violent actions against Jews and synagogues in Europe or South America or Australia and the police would have to stop you from getting away with it.

I was also reminded of another antique joke, which ironically feels current again.  When God was creating the world, God told the angels God was going to create an extra-special place called Israel. God described the beautiful hills, the verdant fields, the wonderful springs and rivers God planned to create. Then God described how the people who lived there would be smart and resourceful, and would create great cities, wonderful art, and amazing scientific innovations.

“Won’t the rest of the world be jealous, God, putting so many wonderful things inside Israel?” the angels fretted.

“Don’t worry,” said God, “wait until the world sees the neighbors I’m giving them!”

Ah yes.  The neighbors.

Look, one brief word about current events in Israel tonight.  I wonder: if the Allies in World War II during the invasion of Nazi Germany had been told they needed to agree to a cease-fire, or a humanitarian pause in order to allow Germans to receive aid, would they have done so?  While the Nazis kept shooting exploding rockets at London?  I think not.

I’d like to go back to our first, indigenous connection to the land of Israel, and our deep relationship to it.

When we study the Torah, especially Genesis, Breisheet, earliest record of our first ancestors, we discover that God made a series of promises to Abraham.  In the early covenants established in last week’s Torah portion of Lech Lecha and this week’s portion of Veyeira, God pledges to bring Abraham to a land flowing with milk and honey, erets zavat chalav ud’vash, to give him and his descendants the place then known as Canaan as an eternal, everlasting inheritance for all time.  In subsequent Torah portions that covenant will be reaffirmed with each of the subsequent patriarchs, Isaac and especially Jacob, and in Exodus it will again be established as a berit, a covenantal promise to land and success with Moses and his generation of Israelites and their descendants. 

There is no word in these covenants of rockets fired from Gaza landing in this Promised Land, by the way, nor of sadistic terrorists massacring future Israelites or carrying them off into captivity. 

But then, neither are the borders of the future land to be known as Israel specified in the Torah precisely.  In fact, the Biblical description of the land and its boundaries ranges widely.  In one place, the Hebrews’ nation ranges from the Nile River to the Euphrates, which encompasses most of the modern Middle East; in another place, the land promised to Abraham’s descendants is not much more than a couple of hilltops near Jerusalem.  And for those literalists who believe that every inch of the Biblical Land of Israel should be modern Israel today because we have a God-given right to it, we must note that the would require that modern Israel trade nearly its entire coastal region for the barren hills of Judea and Samaria, exchanging Tel Aviv, Herzliyah, Caesarea and Haifa, where 70% of Israelis actually live, for a bunch of rocky, barren, wind-swept West Bank mountains and a whole lot of pretty hostile Arab inhabitants.   

In any case, whatever the exact, adjusted boundaries eventually prove to be, it’s in these Torah portions of Lech Lecha and Vayeira that the Jewish claim to Israel is established.  And it’s quite notable that there is no attempt in the Torah to say that the lands are uninhabited.  While the various Canaanite tribes that filled the territory of today’s State Israel in Abraham and Sarah’s days, the Girgashites, Perrizites, Hivites, Hittites, and Jebusites, are not in any way related to today’s Palestinians, they clearly pre-date the Hebrews in living in the Promised Land.  According to the tradition, it was God’s right to give us that land, but with the proviso that we must continue to fulfill our covenantal relationship responsibilities to God.

Which brings me to a lesser-known and rarely quoted phrase that is also central to these narratives in Genesis.  God tells Abraham this repeatedly, and reiterates it to Jacob: v’nivrchu v’cha uvizarecha kol mishpechot ha’adamah—through you and your descendants will all the families of the earth be blessed.  That is, a large part of the Divine promise given to us in the Torah is that we, as a people, will bring goodness and blessing to the whole world.  In a way, this may be the more important promise: lots of different peoples in this world have a homeland—pretty much all of them, in fact—but how many can say that they have the responsibility to bring blessing to the whole world?

What does this mean, exactly?  What precisely is the blessing that our people has conveyed to this entire planet?  Is it the belief in monotheism, the oneness of God, the concept that if you have only one deity you therefore can have only one source for morality, one locus for truth and meaning? Or is it something else?  Or a few something’s else?

About 25 years ago Tom Cahill wrote a book called, “The Gifts of the Jews: How a Tribe of Desert Nomads Changed the Way Everyone Thinks and Feels.”  Cahill, best known for his book about the Irish saving civilization, explored the sources of western civilization and its beginning in the story of Abraham and his embrace of the belief in one God, a truly radical concept that changed everything.  Well, it didn’t change it immediately, of course.  After all, when Abraham came along absolutely no one believed that there was only one God.  And today, if you survey the various beliefs of many religions and those who believe in none of them, you will find that the majority of the world still doesn’t believe in one and only one God.  But eventually, over time, the concept of one God began to transform the way many people thought about the world and our human place in it. 

As important as it is, is the greatest blessing of Judaism and Jews perhaps something beyond the Shema, the oneness of God?  Is it our deep commitment to constantly trying to learn more, to extend the boundaries of knowledge and education?  Is it our insistence on feeling a kinship with the downtrodden, the forgotten members of society, our ways of actualizing tikun olam?  Is it the Jewish commitment to trying to be a “kingdom of priests and a holy people,” the goal of living to a higher standard, as that old hot dog commercial asserted about Hebrew National?

Or is it some combination of all of these, plus much more?

It is my very sincere conviction that Judaism, properly experienced, is an incredible way to enhance life, that it adds deep meaning, spirituality, intellectual stimulation, ethics and great joy to each of our lives.  It is always fascinating to me how many of us American Jews don’t realize how great our own religious tradition is, how much beauty and excellence it adds to what can otherwise be our rather pedestrian existence.

Part of the pleasure of serving as a congregational rabbi is that I have the opportunity to explore pretty much anything and everything about our religion and culture in a sermon every seven days, and somehow, having done this for many years, there is always something new and fascinating to discover.  That’s partly because we Jews have been around for 3800 years or so and have lived and had active Jewish communities in essentially every country on the planet at one time or another.  That diversity is a wonderful strength expressed in Jewish prayer, thought, music, food, art, clothing, humor—even in temperament.  And I love exploring the incredible range of Jewish life across the world, visiting different Jewish communities, learning and sharing their music and customs.  In the incredible variety of experience is a great richness indeed.

There are also many fascinating and not so well-known aspects of Judaism to investigate, many different areas of spiritual and intellectual excellence to explore.  Our Zohar Study Groups—two of them, in different books of the Zohar provide the opportunity to explore Kabbalah, Jewish mysticism in a meaningful way weekly.  Even covering familiar ground in a new way, such as our Deuteronomy Project course is doing weekly now, is surprisingly inspiring and exciting.  The highly intelligent and sophisticated class members take us in unexpected and valuable directions with their curiosity, broad knowledge and sharp observations. 

I must also note that the remarkable range of experience that the huge storehouse of Jewish life makes available to us is balanced by powerful, shared common elements of identity and character.  For we Jews, no matter how divergent our backgrounds, share many values: a deep dedication to family, reverence for the importance of education and learning, a profound connection to the Land of Israel, a vital commitment to the greater notion of klal Yisrael, the great, shared peoplehood of all Jews everywhere.  We are deeply committed to the greatest of Jewish ideals, the concept of justice, preserving it, seeking to see it in action in our world; we give tzedakah, the charity that goes towards righting the wrongs we see, and we work to help the downtrodden and the needy in our civilization.  Nearly all of us relate in very special ways to the wonderful, varied and fabulous Jewish holidays, and almost all of us celebrate a Seder or light Hanukkah menorahs or come to hear the shofar on Rosh HaShanah. 

And even when we celebrate the Sabbath to different degrees and in different ways, we retain an understanding of the meaning, beauty and purpose of this extraordinary Jewish invention, the day of rest and sanctity, of family, food and song.   

I am often asked to describe just what Judaism is.  You know, it’s not simple to explain what Judaism is, or why it unifies us through all of our amazing diversity.  But it is a combination of these things, really, that connect us and help us fulfill that great Jewish goal of seeking to perfect the world under God’s rule—and this is a world that clearly needs some fixing, no?  

It is perhaps not a surprise that I cannot truly imagine Jews choosing to live life outside the realm of a supremely accessible religious tradition that inspires us to seek so many great ideals, and does so by insisting that we create practical means to make those ideals real in our own lives every day.

Now, of course, I am a rabbi and therefore somewhat biased towards appreciating the wonders of Judaism, and living out those ideals in my own life, and encouraging everyone to do so in his or her own life as well.  But in an America in which there are so many incredible ways to experience high-quality Jewish prayer, study, social action, music, food and humor, among many other possibilities, I would say that it’s incumbent upon every American Jew to take advantage of the amazing things that are offered—at our own synagogue, Congregation Beit Simcha, of course, but also throughout our community, and in every active Jewish community we visit. 

In 2023, Judaism offers hope, energy, beauty and meaning, as well as creativity, idealism and joy.  Isn’t that a great blessing, for us and the world? 

The Jewish Indigenous Homeland

Sermon Shabbat Lech Lecha 5784 Downtown Shabbat

Rabbi Sam Cohon, Congregation Beit Simcha

Do you know what the oldest claim on any land in the world is?  That is, the longest-lasting deed of promise to the ownership of land in the entirety of history is?  Well, we will read it tomorrow morning in Torah Study at Beit Simcha, and chant it during services.  It is the promise given in the Torah to a wanderer from Ur of the Chaldees named Avram.  It is, according to the ancient text we possess, the divine commitment given by God to Abram that his descendants will inherit the land of Canaan, later, of course, to be called Israel.

I’ve often thought about and preached about Lech Lecha, this amazing call that comes to a man who has not made much of an impression prior to this in the Torah.  Lech lecha meiartzecha umimoladeticha umibeit avicha, go, leave everything you have ever known and go to the land I’ll show you.  When the portion begins all we really know about Avram is that he was born in the Babylonian city-state of Ur, and moved with his father, brother, nephew and wife to Haran.  Haran is still there, a very old city, located in southeastern Turkey about 20 kilometers from the Syrian border.  I’ve personally been in Haran, which is located between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, in the cradle of civilization, near Sanliurfa, Turkey.  It is on a crossroads of highways going both east and west and north and south.  When I was there, there were many refugees from ISIS, Islamists much like Hamas.  I hope they have been able to return safely to their homes in Syria by now.

I’ve often wondered about the human experience of this call that Avram hears.  God tells him to leave his homeland, his birthplace, his father’s house, and go the land that God will show him, asher areka.  It’s certainly life-changing, but also super-ambiguous.  I can just visualize him going home to Sarai, his wife, and telling her the plan.  That conversation could not have gone well.

Avram tells Sarai: “God told us to leave here, right now, pack up and take everything.”

Sarai asks, “God told you?  Which God?”  

And Avram says “A God you have never heard of and can’t see.” 

So, Sarai answers, “Uh huh.  And where are we going?”

And Avram says, “I don’t know.”

Fortunately for all of us, they do leave Haran and head for Canaan.  Once they arrive, God tells Avram, “I promise this land to you and your descendants.”     

Now, I don’t care how literally or metaphorically you take this tale, or how you evaluate the later promises to the land of Canaan that God makes to Isaac and Jacob.  But there is no doubt that whenever the Torah was created, and it is not less than 2500 years old in written form and parts of it are surely 3000 years old, we descendants of Avraham and Yitzhak and Ya’akov believed that the land of Israel was our homeland. 

And there is also no doubt that from about 1200 BCE, 3200 years ago, we had a nation-state—and much of that time two nation-states—in the land of Israel.  That is, we had a Jewish nation from about 1200 BCE to about 70 CE, roughly 1300 years, with only one interruption of about 50 years.  And while we were forced into exile twice, by the Babylonians in 586 BCE and by the Romans in 70 CE and again in 135 CE, we retained not only a powerful, permanent connection to that land of Israel but always had a Jewish community living, working, studying, and praying there. 

This phenomenal Torah portion includes the first promise God gives our people to eretz Yisrael, the land of Israel. Our land.  Our only homeland on the planet.  The only country where Jews are actually in control, no matter what the crazed conspiracy theorists say.

Let’s be clear: Israel is not some western nation’s colony planted in the Middle East.  It is, and has been for thousands of years, our Jewish indigenous homeland.  Israel is not just an insignificant part of the quite large Arab world, but the place that has been our Jewish ancestral country for over three thousand years.  A place of return.  The one tiny part of the planet that we Jews have for our own.

It is stunningly anti-historical to say that we Jews somehow are colonizing our own land, that territory purchased at a high price, legally and in cash payments, was somehow stolen; to say that land that earlier Arab terrorists sought to steal from its rightful Jewish owners by brutality and military conquest, land that was fought for and died for and protected from destruction somehow should belong to those who desire it simply because they say so and have the capacity to murder some of its citizens.  This is not historically true or in any other way honest.  It is not the way the world does things anywhere else on the globe.  Only Jews are told that we must disappear from our own homeland, that it is moral to destroy a modern, vibrant, vital, democratic nation so that vicious Palestinian terrorists can be accommodated and establish a brutal Islamist theocracy, as they have in Gaza.

You know, my favorite banners in the last two weeks were “Gays for Gaza” and “Lesbians for Palestinian liberation”.  Do you know where the largest Gay Pride events in the entire Middle East take place?  Israel.  I’ve been in Tel Aviv for two Gay Pride parades, totally by coincidence.  They were spectacular.  People from all over Europe, from all over the world come to Israel because it is a free society where people can own their own identities openly. 

Now, do you know how gays, lesbians, queer and transgender people are treated in Hamas-controlled Gaza, and in the Fatah-controlled West Bank?  They are harassed, attacked, tortured, and murdered.  They are brutalized for being who they are.  Yet people in America and Europe marched last week, just ten days after the horrific murders of children, women, and men all across Southern Israel, carrying signs that said, “Queers in solidarity with Palestine.”

I want to stress again: Israel is our indigenous Jewish homeland.  It is where our ancestors lived and died and our Jewish relatives created an extraordinary, amazing country.  There was no “Palestine” as a nation, or even a nationality, before Yasser Arafat invented that identity in blood in the early 1960s.  The true Palestinian desire is not for a two-state solution; it is “River to the Sea,” which is not very different from the old Arab vow to drive all the Jews into the Sea.  It is, simply put, genocidal. 

Make no mistake: those who march on college campuses in support of “Free Palestine” are marching in support of the genocide of Jews.  They are rallying to seek to destroy the only true democracy in the Middle East.  They are chanting in favor of Islamist murderers who would kill every Jew in Israel if they could, who shoot rockets regularly at civilian populations to kill and terrorize.  They are supporting vile terrorists who kidnapped 230 civilians to use them as hostages, who murdered families and recorded their crimes on video and posted them on the web.  These young people who rally for Palestine are thrilled that young people exactly like them at an all-night concert for peace were brutally gunned down and shot with rpgs and hand grenades.  That some of the murdered young people’s bodies still cannot be identified because of the brutal way they were slaughtered.

I’d like to talk about Israel’s response to October 7th, and the difficulty we should have in believing anything that Hamas and its spokesmen say.

There are certainly civilians in Gaza who are suffering, and more will suffer. This is deeply sad and a terrible and unavoidable outcome of war.  Now, we also know from the four hostages who were released that in the spiderweb of tunnels built by Hamas underneath the Gaza Strip that their terrorists are unaffected by the bombardment above, and that they seem to have plenty of food, water, and fuel.  Mind you, they do not share any of it with their Palestinian brothers and sisters in the terrorized population aboveground.  And if humanitarian aid is allowed to pour in, expect Hamas to commandeer most or all of it.  Three weeks ago, when Hamas began this long-planned and horrifically brutal pogrom, that same Gazan population was fine, had food and fuel and water and working sewer lines, all provided by Israel—that is, by the Jews.  The reason Gaza is in distress now is that its leadership determined that, once again, murdering, raping, wounding, and torturing Jews was more important that helping its own people.

I feel for the victims of all wars.  We must also realize that among the terrorists who poured into Southern Israel on that black October 7th were ordinary people, civilians who were not officially part of the Hamas terrorist army.  They came to murder babies and the elderly with axes and hoes, to burn the homes of families.  They were ordinary Gazans; civilians.  Some of them carried back Jewish hostages into Gaza.  Not all of these civilians are so innocent.

We also now know that a fairly high percentage of the rockets that Hamas and Islamic Jihad fire at Israel misfire, and hit Gazans.  The big lie that Israel bombed a hospital damaged diplomacy badly, and intentionally, when President Biden was in the Middle East.  It was later demonstrated, indeed proven, that the rocket that hit the parking structure next to the hospital was aimed at Israel’s civilians, and that it failed and killed Gazans.  It must be fairly terrible to be stuck in Gaza now.  That is deeply sad.  But to call a cease fire and allow the Hamas terrorists to survive is impossible.  Their sole goal is genocide of the Jews.  They cannot remain in power.

Just as clearly, there must be a plan for what happens after Hamas.  You cannot simply destroy the enemy; if you must live with them, and Israel must, based on geography, you must also have a way to eventually work out a solution that is more than “mowing the grass.”  I believe that ultimately there will be a two-state, or even three state solution: Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza.  But the time to determine that is not now.

I don’t know where this war will go.  Frankly, I’m surprised that it has taken the Israeli military this long to enter Gaza.  I believe they know far more than I or anyone here in America knows about the true situation of the hostages, the pressure they are receiving diplomatically, and the real dangers of attacking such a vicious enemy which is so well-supplied with armaments by Iran and trained by them as well.

But I do know one important fact: Israel is the Jewish homeland.  We are not surrendering it, ever again.  She needs our support and help now as much as she ever has.   

Let’s return to Avram, now in the later sections of Lech Lecha changed into Avraham, the father of nations.  That promise of a land also is the promise that we will be a blessing to all the peoples of the world.  In fact, we have been exactly that in the manifold contributions that Jewish people have made in every area of human endeavor. That, of course, is not the perception of Anti-Semites.  But that doesn’t change the fact that it is true.

This land of Israel is our homeland.  It belongs to all Jews.  It must be defended against enemies, and it must succeed.  The promise to Avraham remains, the indigenous connection to the land of Israel remains, the need to create security and safety for its people is acute.

And our duty as Jews is, in this time of crisis and pain, to provide support and to advocate for our only homeland on earth.  May we follow, ultimately, in Avraham’s footsteps… Ken Yehi Ratson

Basic Decency - the First Covenant

Shabbat No’ach, Rabbi Sam Cohon, Congregation Beit Simcha, Tucson, AZ

This week we chant No’ach, of course, one of the most famous of all Torah portions and the original great sea story of a truly ancient mariner.  At the end of the mabul, the flood, when Noah gets to leave the ark and go out on dry land, God gives a promise, the very first berit, the first covenant or contract that in Jewish tradition God makes with humanity.  The Creator vows never again to destroy the earth by water—we are able to do so, by the way, through, say, global warming, but not God—and we human beings are entered into a compact with seven specific rules. 

This Noahide covenant, the prime rainbow connection, has seven specific rules in it.  Mind you, these are not rules for Jews, or in the formal sense of the term mitzvot: they are the basic rules for civilized societies of any kind, of any religion or nation or peoplehood, the foundational laws that define whether a system, a culture, is good or evil.

While it can be a bit complex looking just at the literal text to discern where there seven rules are commanded, there is general agreement among rabbis and scholars that these are what God has Noah, on behalf of all humanity—after all, we may all be descended from Adam but we are also, according to the Tanakh, the Bible, also all descended from Noah—there is general agreement on the seven.  They are:

1.   Do not murder.

2.   Do not steal.

3.   Do not commit acts of forcible sexual violation.

4.   Do not cut the limbs off of a living animal, let alone a living human.

5.   Do not blaspheme.

6.   No idolatry.

7.   Have courts of justice.

These, it seems to me, are pretty basic rules that define whether people are ethical or unethical, moral or amoral, good or bad.  Please note, again, this has nothing to do with whether people are worshipping the right god, or keeping a Sabbath, or even whether they are giving enough to charity.  They simply are there to teach us how to know who is good and who just flat out is not.

Because in the Torah there is never an assumption that we will live in some bland, universally observant society or civilization.  There is always provision made for interacting with people and groups and nations and civilizations that think differently than we do.  And some of those will be good and deserving of respect and understanding.  Unfortunately, some will not.

Most of these rules seem so basic and essential, and we can scarcely argue about them: don’t murder, steal, rape, abuse animals; some are perhaps less obvious—do not attack the foundations of this code by claiming it has no moral source, that would be blasphemy; do not worship idolatrous gods that undercut the basic morality of this code.  And one, establish courts of justice, is there to make certain that the other six are maintained.

It is this B’nai No’ach covenant, this contract with God that we are glad to observe in the larger world, and that we should expect of any society or group with which we interact.

And yet—and yet, some societies fail to manage even this basic code.  We know that the Palestinian terrorists of Hamas intentionally, repeatedly and viciously violated the first four of these commandments two weeks ago and continues to do so.  We know that there has not been a judicial system worthy of the name in the 18 years Hamas has controlled Gaza, nor in the 27 years that the Palestinian Authority has controlled the West Bank.

It is in this context that I want to share with you part of a letter I received today from Rabbi Naamah Kelman, who heads Hebrew Union College’s Israel Rabbinic Program.  She writes, from Jerusalem,

The civilian mobilization has been extraordinary — I dare say, a Jewish miracle. Within hours, many key partners of the protest movement morphed to create city-wide situation rooms, local centers for relief, rescue, and recovery that are providing missing military equipment, accessories, food, clothing, and more for the reserves. These centers are working to support the tens of thousands of evacuees from the South and the North who are being sheltered in hotels and private homes. You will find Israelis of every stripe showing up at these centers. The sense of unity of purpose is inspiring, particularly after close to nine months of tension and conflict among us. We are called an am k'shai oref, a “stiff-necked people,” but oref is the modern Hebrew for homefront. We have proved again what it means to be a stubborn homefront while keeping our humanity in the face of this chaos. Something new is being born here, with all of you. I pray we can maintain this sense of shared purpose and hope so that we can write a new social contract that includes all Israelis: ultra-Orthodox, Israeli Arabs, Bedouins, and Druze alike — and we must find Palestinian partners to live with us in peace.

I have received many emails and texts like Naamah’s affirming examples of this all across Israeli society.  Secular, chilonim of course, which is most of Israel, and Modern Orthodox Jews, which is most of the Orthodox Jews in Israel, but also chareidim—who, like Chabad people, refuse to serve in the Israeli military—nonetheless coming forward to help care for the wounded, to prepare food and clothing items for those whose homes were destroyed by the Palestinian terrorists or who have been forced to evacuate by the rockets of Hamas and Islamic Jihad and Hezbollah.  Israeli society is a polyglot mix of a vast array of Jews who have different cultural and personal observances and even beliefs, and of Druze and Arabs and people from many nations who live in modern, civilized country.  And who have come together, when attacked, as we could only have dreamed would happen.

And perhaps that’s because of a shared understanding of what it means to be a basically good person, as defined here in No’ach.   

The goal of these Noahide laws has always been to allow people of different belief systems, different ethnicities and cultures, different backgrounds and hopes and dreams to live together in peace.  It allows diverse societies to reach across the boundaries of their differences to work towards a common goal.  It is that these real and even meaningful differentiations do not prevent us from achieving good in our civilization when called upon to do so.

It is perhaps something that our US House of Representatives needs to learn…

On this Shabbat No’ach, may we reinforce the lessons we have learned from this dramatic portion, and from our traumatic present, and grow to accept and understand others for their underlying goodness.  May we celebrate these differences, but base our larger actions on our foundational, covenantal similarity.

We are all human.  We all can seek to create goodness in our society and in our world.

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.