You’re Gonna Miss Me When I’m Gone — But What Part of Me is Me?

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

Sermon, Vayakhel 5784

A few years back on a sabbatical trip I took around the world, I visited with a high-ranking member of the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate in Istanbul, Turkey.  A significant prelate and an important assistant to the Patriarch himself, he grew up in suburban Chicago and spoke English fluently—or as well as they speak it in Chicago—and we had a wonderful, long conversation about theology and ritual.  As I endeavored to understand the intricacies of the Greek Church, he explained carefully to me how central the concept of the rewards of eternal life are for Orthodox Christians.  The goal for every believing person, in his faith, was to achieve eternal reward in a much better world than this one.  And then he said, “I don’t understand something about Judaism: how you can get people to be good if they aren’t trying to get to heaven, and afraid of going to hell if they are bad.” 

I did my best to explain that in Judaism we seek to inspire people to live ethical lives through observing mitzvot, fulfilling commandments designed to make life moral and holy.  And I told him what I always say, respectfully: we Jews are much more interested in the quality of life before death than in theoretical rewards or punishments after death. 

But that’s not really the whole story.

This week in two different classes, “Zohar, Crown of Kabbalah” and our “Passion and Prudence” course on Ecclesiastes and Song of Songs, we touched on just what constitutes a soul, and what Jews believe about life after death. It’s a very interesting subject, and one that Jews, particularly Reform and Conservative Jews, don’t spend much time talking or thinking about. 

In fact, non-Orthodox Jews spend less time thinking about the afterlife than pretty much any other religious tradition.  It is difficult to imagine Christianity or Islam having developed without a strong belief in heaven and hell, and the same applies to Hinduism and Buddhism.  Virtually every religion has a highly developed conception of life after death, including for many reincarnation, and for almost all of other religions the rewards and punishments of the afterlife are central to their belief system. 

But for most Jews, the life after death isn’t a particularly significant part of our own foundational religious convictions.  We figure we have a good deal of control over our own actions here in this world, and not much control over what happens after we die.  And so we focus on what we can control, our own character and conduct.

Having said that, it would be incorrect to say that we Jews don’t believe in life after death, or heaven and hell; it’s just that it’s not nearly as important for us as it is for many other religions.  As the Talmud puts it neatly, those who don’t believe in the world to come have no share in it, which seems completely fair to me.  Don’t believe in it, don’t get it.  Fair enough.  A done deal. 

But when you study the question it turns out that Jewish ideas about life after death are extensive and varied.  While the Torah, our central and most ancient text, does not mention life after death at all, over time two central aspects of belief took hold in Judaism about the hereafter.  One was the notion that our bodies would be resurrected, brought back to life in some way or another at some future time.  The second was the idea that our souls, that part within each us that is intrinsically and uniquely us, will continue on after our physical deaths.

Over time, these two ideas became linked into one system for what happens after we die.  By the time the Book of Daniel in the last part of the Bible, the Ketuvim, was written, there was also a concept of a judgment day. The whole scenario was that we die, our bodies are buried, and at some future date our souls will be returned to our bodies, they will be restored with flesh and blood, we will rise from the grave and be judged, and then go on to either a good future or some kind of oblivion. 

You might recognize most of this as what was later enshrined into Christian belief, and those guys really ran with it: it became central to Christianity in an enhanced form—new and improved!—with very vivid depictions of hell and much more fleshed-out editions of heaven.  Islam came along and amped up the heaven part a good deal, at least for men, while Christianity continued to elaborate the hellfire and brimstone parts of things. 

But Judaism, which originated these ideas, never took to them as completely as these daughter religions did.  While most Jews probably believed in these basic tenets, others did not.  And varying interpretations of what it all meant and how it all worked—imagine that in Judaism, differences of opinion!—developed.  Rationalists, like Maimonides, believed that the true heavenly ideal consisted of being in perfect connection with the great divine active intellect; that is, our minds continue on forever, in communion with the Greatest Mind of all, God’s.  Mystics believed our souls ascended to connect with the indwelling female presence of God, the Shechinah, in a kind of blissful connectedness to holiness.  Later Kabbalists came to believe that if our souls hadn’t completed their journeys during our lives, we were reincarnated after death, our souls implanted in new bodies to live again and seek to have our souls ascend to higher levels.

In modern times, Orthodox Jews have continued to believe, at least officially, in the standard Jewish views of life after death, and to pray for bodily resurrection and the eternal soul.  Chasidim have embraced reincarnation as well.  But most liberal Jews, Reform, Conservative, Reconstructionist, organizational, secular, and so on, are much less likely to embrace the concept of bodily resurrection.  But many believe that they have a soul.  And there is a great deal of interest these days in spirituality in the form of the soul and its eternality.

In the course of my rabbinate, I’ve met several people who have had contact with relatives who are gone, and who have experienced a sense of connection with children, spouses, and siblings who’ve passed away.  They tell fascinating stories of experiencing animals who seemed to carry a lost relative’s message, or of sensing the presence of a child or spouse who has died in natural or unusual events.  These are moving, and often beautiful, narratives that have great meaning for the people who experience them.

After exploring life after death in Jewish belief, the greatest insight may be the understanding that what we believe about life after death helps us understand what part of ourselves which we truly believe is essential.  Judaism doesn’t believe that there is only one way to think about what happens after we die.  And that openness to the possibilities of what may exist after we go can give added meaning to our lives now. 

What we think happens after we die says a great deal about who we believe we really are.  There are three words for soul in Hebrew, Ru’ach, Nefesh, and Neshamah.  Each has a somewhat different meaning, but each is used to identify the intrinsic quality of the individual. 

If you think that the most important part of you is your mind, your intellect, your education and thinking, then you are most likely to think that that is your soul.  If you believe your feelings, your emotions, your intuitive connection to special people or places make you unique, you will tend to identify your soul more mystically.  If you are proudest of your connection to your people, you might identify yourself with that as part of your soul.  And so on: that which you value most, you are likely to think as the part of you that will go on forever, or that you wish would do so.

That is, thinking about what part of you is really you can help understand what you feel is truly important about your own life now, here, in this world. 

Remarkably, if you clarify your thinking about life after death, and what you feel happens in the afterlife, you gain clarity about what is most important about you, and what you want your life to be like here, in this world.  How you wish to exist forever helps you know how you wish to be today and tomorrow.

And that is a goal every Jew can embrace, now, in this world.

Spectacle and Human Need

Sermon Parshat Ki Tissa 5784

Rabbi Sam Cohon, Congregation Beit Simcha, Tucson, AZ 

We had a nice Super Bowl party here at Congregation Beit Simcha a couple of Sundays ago.  It reminded me of the party we held two years ago, when my hometown team, the LA Rams, finally won the Super Bowl over my dad’s hometown team, the Cincinnati Bengals, after many years of disappointments.

As you may not know, in my high school years my close friend Alan—with whom I went skiing last week for a couple of days—got me a gig on Sunday afternoons in the fall ushering for the Rams in the old Los Angeles Colosseum.  We would take tickets for the first quarter and then go in to watch our team play, and usually beat, whoever was up that week for the rest of the game.  I was a big sports fan—still am—and when that team made it to the playoffs I got to attend the first playoff game, in which the Rams whipped the old St. Louis Cardinals, long before they moved to Arizona and the Rams moved to St. Louis, of all places.  After that victory, and a shocking upset in the other NFC playoff game, I was thrilled that my team might make it to the Super Bowl.  Being 14 years old, I waited in line for more than four hours to buy tickets to the game that would send the LA Rams, a good franchise and team that had never quite been able to make it to the biggest of big games. 

It turned out that the NFC championship game that would send the LA Rams to the Super Bowl was played on my 15th birthday, many years ago, and since I had waited all those hours and bought the maximum number of tickets, I invited my dad and brother and sisters to go with me.  As I recall, only my oldest sister was available, and she was no football fan, but we all drove down and this time I didn’t have to usher but I just got to attend this momentous game as a pure fan.  My Rams were favored and finally, they would get to go to the greatest spectacle of all, the Super Bowl.

And then the game started, against the hated but underdog Dallas Cowboys.  The Rams were the far better team, favored by 7 points.  Early on, the Cowboys drove down and scored a quick touchdown.  I wasn’t worried. Surely the Rams would come back and crush them, and fulfill their destiny in the Super Bowl.

And then the Rams’ quarterback threw an interception, and Dallas scored another touchdown.  And then Dallas scored again, and at halftime the Rams were behind 21-0.  My sister Rachel had begun to chant “Go Rams,” in a somewhat satirical manner.  That got worse as the second half began with another Cowboys touchdown and another Rams interception.  We stayed to the bitter end, a 37-7 Dallas victory, my dear sister continuing to intone “Go Rams” as a kind of dirge over the last quarter or so.

I had waited four hours to buy tickets for this? 

I thought about that day again on Super Bowl Sunday, when after finally returning to Los Angeles, reaching and then losing a Super Bowl, my professional team of preference finally reached the pinnacle and won this great spectacle just two years ago.  It was a pleasure to experience, of course.  But I don’t think it had quite the same resonance that a victory would have had in my childhood or adolescence.  Those illusions may die hard, but die they do.

I must admit that this year it was hard to watch the overblown hype of the Super Bowl telecast, the movie-star-laden commercials, the halftime extravaganza, oceans of confetti pouring from the sky at the end, and not understand that there is something amazing about the pure spectacle such events encompass.  Few societies in the entire history of the world have managed to pour so much energy, talent, and technology into the creation of public drama as ours.  Perhaps ancient Rome, with its excesses of months of public gladiatorial games and parades matched the demonstrations of the Super Bowl.  These enormous pageants create a kind of shared experience that turns an ordinary day into, “Super Bowl Sunday,” third most important holiday annually in America now. 130 million people watched it on TV or a streaming device, one third of America.

But you know something interesting?  When the game ended, and the confetti fell and everyone turned off their TVs or screens, life went on.  And the only people whose lives were really changed by those events were the guys who played in the game—some of them, anyway—and perhaps the coaches and owners.  For the rest of us, when the Super Bowl was over it was on to the next thing.

Which, oddly perhaps, reminds me of this week’s Torah portion.  This week we read the traumatic sedrah of Ki Tissa, the story of the Golden Calf.  It reads like this: while Moses is up on Mt. Sinai receiving the 10 commandments the Israelites start to worry that he’s not coming back.  And so, while God is carving the words “You shall have no other gods besides Me, nor make any image of them” into a stone tablet, the faithless people persuade his brother Aaron to make them an idol of gold, a calf, that they can call their new god.  Pleased with the result, they worship it and then throw a big party, a bacchanal, a carnival, Rodeo, Mardi Gras in the Sinai.

Coming down the mountain, Joshua and Moses hear noise from the camp below.  Joshua is astonished, and thinks it must be the sound of battle, but Moses knows what a party sounds like.  And when Moses sees all the cavorting, and the newly Chosen People worshipping a golden idol, he throws down the sacred stone tablets of the commandments, shattering them.  The music and dancing stop suddenly.  It is a shocking scene.

For the rabbis this is one of most dramatic and distressing portions in the entire Torah.  The problem is acute: according to the text, our people witnessed the divine power of the Ten Plagues, were personally saved at the shore of the Sea of Reeds by God, received the direct revelation of God’s presence at Sinai—in short, experienced God more directly than any other group in history ever has—and almost immediately afterwards turned around and rejected God in order to worship a cow made out of their own jewelry.

In rabbinic midrash this week’s events are called the Ma’asei Ha’eigel, the awful story of the calf.  How can a people given such a clear set of signs and wonders, including direct revelation and verbal commands, only follow the true God for 40 days before pursuing such a ridiculous, bovine substitute?

The answer lies in our own makeup.  We enjoy spectacle, are impressed by it, even awed by it—you know, like the fabulous but overblown Super Bowl—but as soon as it is gone its effects linger a very short time indeed.  What makes us tick as human beings, what keeps us in line, is the very dailiness of regular rules and schedules, the kinds of human laws and rituals of worship that are very much a part of practical Judaism.  We need both societal structure and the rhythms of devotion, and until these are provided in a coherent way we tend to flounder—even disastrously so, as we did at the time of the Golden Calf.

Without a way to connect to God regularly, without both prayer services and a personal commitment to do mitzvot each day, we quickly lose our ability to be holy.  Instead of goodness we chase gold, in place of God we place false deities.  We become obsessed with our own trivial pursuits, chase our own idols of gold.

We need more than grand ideas or sweeping spirituality: we need religion and a Jewish grounding in practice and experience, or we won’t be able to remain ethical.  Without these we begin to worship Golden Calves of every kind.

The Torah is filled with references to idolatry, to all the ways we can worship idols and deny God and why we shouldn’t do that, and the awful consequences of such terrible behavior.  And of course, in our own lives, it’s easy to see the ways that we end up worshipping idols of our own making, objects, items, money itself, personal promotion and honors and so on.  It’s easy, too easy, to become absorbed in desires and pastimes and obsessions that become idols in and of themselves.

And none of those bring us closer to real holiness, or to living lives of meaning and purpose and sanctity.  The path to those far more meaningful things requires regular practice and a dedication to the good.

At the end of Ki Tissa there is a denouement to this painful story of spiritual failure, providing a kind of limited redemption.  Moses goes back up Mt. Sinai and brings down another set of tablets.  And then he asks God to reveal God’s essence to him.  Moses doesn’t get exactly what he wants, but he is provided the privilege of experiencing God’s passing presence.  And then Moses, too, must continue to try to sense the presence every day thereafter.

In other words, even Moses, the best of us, the person closest to God, must continually seek God’s presence.  

How much more so is that true for the rest of us Jews today, we modern-day Israelites?  In spite of our failures of faith and action, in the face of our frequent focus on the inconsequential and the trivial, if we nonetheless choose to continue to seek God, we too will be blessed with a touch of that sacred divine presence. We, too, will find holiness. Whether or not our teams win the Super Bowl.

Springtime Hope on Rodeo Shabbat

Sermon, Parshat Tetzaveh 5784  Rabbi Sam Cohon 

It’s Rodeo Shabbat, so naturally we must begin with some Jewish cowboy jokes.  Three guys are sitting next to each other on a plane flying out of Texas: two big guys with big cowboy hats and a little old Jewish man with a little cowboy hat. They get to talking and one of the big fellas says, “Boys, I own a spread. Thousand acres, thousand head of cattle. My name is Hoot, and I call it the Big H.”

The other big fella says, “That’s nothin’. I’ve got a spread, too. Ten thousand acres. Ten thousand head of cattle. My name is Luke. I call it the Big L.”

The little old Jewish man says, “That’s very nice. I only own a hundred acres, and I got no cattle. My name is Yitz.”

Both big guys scoff, and Luke says, “Oh yeah, Yitz? So just what do you call your spread?”

And Yitz answers, “Downtown Dallas.”

Or this one:  Outlaws attack a stagecoach and kill everyone but one terrified Jewish guy.  They say, “Look we got the strongbox, but we’re not going to kill you because we need you to be the lookout while we drive the stagecoach.  This is Apache territory, and there are Indians here.  So, you sit up top on the coach, take this rifle, and if you see an Indian, you tell us and when we tell you, you shoot the Indian!”  The Jewish guy says, “Oy, vey” but what choice does he have?  So, he takes the rifle and sits on the stagecoach as it bounces along and the outlaws call out, “Do you see any Indians?” and he says no, no Indians. 

A little while later they call out again and say, “Do you see any Indians?” and he says, “Yes, way up ahead, I see an Indian up on that ridge, he’s this big.”  And the outlaws say, “OK, wait, when we tell you, you shoot the Indian.”

A while later they call out again and say, “Do you see the Indian?” and he says, “Yes, up ahead, I see the Indian, he’s this big now.”  And the outlaws say, “OK, wait, when we tell you, you shoot the Indian.”

A bit later they call out again and say, “Do you see the Indian?” and he says, “Yes, I see the Indian, now he’s this big.”  And the outlaws say, “OK, wait, when we tell you, you shoot the Indian.”

Finally, they come around a corner and there he is, the Indian, he’s big as life, he’s huge!  And the outlaws say, “OK, NOW, NOW! Shoot the Indian?”

And the Jewish guys says, “How can I shoot him, I’ve known him since he was this big!”

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

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

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

Wyatt Earp’s common-law wife—well, his last one, anyway—was a Jewish woman named Josephine Marcus, who was originally from San Francisco, and whom he met in Tombstone; she was called Sadie and she was quite a looker.  They ended up being together for 46 years.  And although you might not immediately associate Jews and cowboys, there were quite a number of prominent Jews in the old west. There were many peddlers and merchants, but there were Jewish mayors of Tucson; Charles Moses Strauss, who was a prominent merchant in Memphis—he opposed Ulysses Grant for President because of Grant’s Order expelling the Jews from his district during the Civil War.  Strauss moved to Tucson in 1880 for his health—a year before the shootout at the OK Corral—and was elected mayor in 1883.  He built the City Hall, and was part of a council that met with and negotiated with Geronimo in 1886.  He also helped found the University of Arizona in 1887.

And there were even Jewish sheriffs and Jewish outlaws.  If you aren’t sure of that, go and visit Boot Hill’s Jewish cemetery in Tombstone itself; it’s not far from the main Boot Hill in Tombstone, where the victims of the OK Corral shootout are theoretically buried among other outlaws, and it has its own unique Jewish character and both prominent Tombstone Jewish citizens and some clearly Jewish outlaws buried there, too.  

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

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

In any case, I hope you are all enjoying this Rodeo Shabbat celebration of our superficial western-ness.  To me, Rodeo is a sign that spring has sprung here in Tucson, that we are ready to embrace a season of pleasant warmth and natural growth.  And I must note that this year we are going to enjoy our usual excellent spring weather.

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

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

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

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

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

And springtime hope is more than just the dreams and prayers of well-paid and semi-amateur athletes. 

Now on the subject of hope, I have to share an important message from this week’s Torah portion of Tetzaveh. It comes when God, through Moses, instructs the Israelites to light a ner tamid, an eternal light that will be kept burning in the Tabernacle, the first temple of our people, at all times.  As long as the people of Israel continue to keep that light burning God will be present, the Shechinah will dwell among us.

If you have ever kept a fire burning around the clock—say, a campfire or bonfire, or for heat on a cold winter’s night—you know just how much fuel you need to do it.  You are always either stoking it or bringing in more wood for it to burn. If neglected for any length of time it will burn out.

The Ner Tamid was not just a symbol, but a process, requiring regular care and feeding to flourish. 

That is, that if we could—can—keep that light burning, that light of hope, and if work and cherish that dream and not only preserve it but nurture it with love and support and care, well, we can in fact accomplish anything.    

What is that famous Kevin Costner movie phrase, set in Iowa, embodied in the baseball midsummer classic held each year now?  If you build it, He will come?  Well, you could actually say, if you keep that fire burning, if you make sure that Ner Tamid is truly continual and eternal, well, God will be with you.It’s a promise of hope. 

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

On this springtime Shabbat of Rodeo and Tetzaveh, may we all find ways to keep our light burning brightly, to renew our own hopes, and bring about our dreams.

What Makes a Holy Place?

Sermon Parshat Terumah 5784, Rabbi Sam Cohon, Congregation Beit Simcha

In a mitzvah that is at the heart of Jewish religious experience today, in our portion of Terumah this week God commands the Israelites “Asu li mikdash, v’shachanti b’tocham—make for Me a sanctuary, and I will dwell among you.”

With this statement, the book of Exodus moves from practical laws to ritual ones.  The plans for the creation of the Tabernacle in the Wilderness, first site of national worship, and the directions for building of the ark of the covenant are explained and detailed.  In order to create the new central shrine for prayer, the place which God’s presence will actually inhabit, Moses calls on the people of Israel to donate materials from the best of what they have—what comes to be called a Terumah offering.

And a remarkable thing happens: when the people are asked to donate gifts to build the holy structures needed to worship God they come forward immediately and give much more than is required.  Moses actually has to ask the Israelites to stop bringing so much gold and silver and so many precious fabrics.

This marks the first and only time in history when a temple building campaign brought in more than was asked for or required.  May it happen again sometime soon… right here, perhaps…

In any case, the word for this experience is Terumah, a freewill offering, a gift to God out of the goodness of the heart.  This generous freewill offering is a powerful thing indeed.  For when it is constructed the Tabernacle in the Wilderness, built from such free generosity, immediately is filled with God’s presence. 

When we give freely of ourselves to our temples today—in time, love, care, or funds—we seek to recreate that freewill offering, the full gift of heart and hand of our ancestors in Moses’ time.  And when we succeed in doing so, we, too, bring God’s presence, and love, into our lives. 

Now an important question: what was the true purpose of the original sanctuary decreed in Terumah?

You might think that it was a place for the people of Israel to gather.  The name of it in Hebrew, the Ohel Mo’eid, the Tent of Meeting could lead you to that conclusion.  But that turns out not to be correct.  For the Tabernacle was in fact the place to meet God, not to meet other Israelites, and while individual, normal Israelites could bring their sacrificial offerings to the front part of the tent, they were not permitted to enter it.  That privilege was reserved for the Levi’im, the Levites, and to a greater degree, the Kohanim, the higher level of priests, the descendants of Aaron.  That is, only a special tribe was allowed into the heart of the sanctuary. 

If you are Kohein today—named Cohen or Kagan or Kahane or Cohn or, well, Cohon—you are descended from these priests.  In the time of the Tabernacle and later the Temple that meant you also received a portion of the sacred offerings brought, the holy food offered in the Temple.  Sadly, there is no such specific residual benefit accruing today, although we do get to eat at the same Oneg Shabbat table as all Jews…

Now, along the same lines of limited access, the very holiest section of the sacred tent, the Kodesh Kodashim, the Holy of Holies within the Tabernacle and of course later the Temple, was reserved for the Kohein Gadol, the High Priest who was allowed to enter it just once a year, on Yom Kippur. 

The Tabernacle was for the worship of God, alright, but not for the purpose of gathering together as a community.  The Shechinah, the female divine presence of God, resided within the Tabernacle.  We assembled elsewhere, in front of the building, sometimes, or in front of a mountain or in some other public space.

Now, later, when the permanent Temple was built in Jerusalem, a series of large courtyards were constructed to allow the people to assemble, and perhaps to hold some public events, such as the annual Yom Kippur wait on the Day of Atonement to see if the High Priest emerged unscathed from his entry into the Holy of Holies.  But generally speaking, while the First and Second Temples were busy places, they were not considered to be places of general assembly.

Asu Li mikdash v’shachanti b’tocham, the passage reads: make me a holy place and I, God, will dwell in their midst.  But not, they will come into my holy place in the name of community.

There are many quotations in the Tanakh, the Bible, that refer to people coming to God’s holy mountain—usually understood to be the Temple Mount in Jerusalem—but again, they were to come to make offerings and fulfill their obligations to offer sacrifices to God, not to gather for some sort of communal connection. 

What is particularly interesting is that the need for such communal connection, that is, a place to gather to affirm Jewish community and fulfill the non-ritual functions that are so essential to Jewish identity and, in fact, to Judaism itself developed when the 2nd Temple still stood in Jerusalem. The earliest synagogue in the world, we believe, was located out in the Aegean Ocean, in the Diaspora, on the island of Delos, just off of Mykonos.  It was a humble structure, just a large room really with benches built into the sides of the walls, with some sort of central bimah.  It was most likely a Beit Knesset, a house of assembly—that is also what we call synagogues today—by the way, synagogue is a Greek-origin word—that allowed the Jews living there or visiting there to gather to learn the news that impacted Jews and to meet others and to arrange the affairs of the community.  It was also a Beit Sefer, a place of learning, to allow Jews to study Torah and Jewish law and understand the meaning of our classic texts in their own lives; it was likely also a place to teach Judaism to children, so that they could carry on the tradition.  It may or may not have been a Beit Tefilah, a house of prayer, although eventually, of course, that became a central function of the synagogue.  And it probably functioned as a place for Jews to connect to other Jews for business purposes, and for to offer and receive charity.

In other words, it was what we think of today as a temple, a synagogue, a shul, a congregation.  A place for true Jewish community.  The essential place that guarantees that Judaism can and will flourish in the next generation.  

Now, I don’t believe that Terumah envisioned all of that when it commanded the creation of a Tabernacle.  But I do believe that is what is required today, as it has been for two thousand years, for the perpetuation of a vibrant Judaism now and in the future. 

But I also think that the love that was poured into that first creation of a holy place has a strong place in the life of any meaningful congregation today.

The great Israeli poet Yehudah Amichai wrote beautifully and sensuously on the subject of the synagogue in his final book, Open Closed Open:

I studied love in the sanctuary of my childhood,

I sang, “Come, Sabbath bride” on Friday nights

With a bridegroom’s fever, I practiced longing for the days of the Messiah,

I conducted yearning drills for the days of yore that will not return.

The cantor serenades his love out of the depths,

Kaddish is recited over lovers who stay together,

The male bird dresses up in a blaze of color.

And we dress the rolled-up Torah scrolls in silken petticoats

And gowns of embroidered velvet

Held up by narrow shoulder straps.

And we kiss them as they are passed around the synagogue,

Stroking them as they pass, as they pass,

As we pass.

May we find love of God, and holiness, in our own sanctuaries today.  And may the communities we build in our own temple flourish through that love.

Hope in a Time of Trauma

Sermon Shabbat Mishpatim 5784: Israel Report, Rabbi Sam Cohon

I learned a Hebrew poem last week, written by a new friend, Rabbi Amnon Riback, whose Passover poem I have used in my own sedarim on Pesach each year for the past ten years or so.  It was filled with the dream of hope, and he sang it for our rabbinic group at a center for Jewish-Arab cooperation in Haifa.  After it was done, our guide told the group, “Since October 7th, that is the first time I have heard the word hope expressed so often.”

My friends, I returned a week ago or so from a rabbinic solidarity mission to Israel, and it was a powerful and valuable experience, if not exactly a pleasure trip.  For context, I’ve been to Israel 17 or 18 times, led four congregational trips to Israel, co-led an interfaith pilgrimage trip to Israel, lived in Jerusalem for a year and for a summer in the north of Israel long before that, and have found every Israel experience I’ve ever had to be unique and typically quite wonderful.  This was a different kind of journey, going to Israel during wartime to offer support and to see what I could learn that I didn’t already know from obsessively following the news and talking to friends, relatives, colleagues, and professionals in Israel every week since the October 7th atrocities took place. 

To begin with, this was the first time I’ve gone to Israel when I didn’t anticipate it with a sense of great personal excitement.  I knew beforehand that being in Israel during wartime would be different.  I was in Israel during some of the worst days of the 2nd Intifada in the early 2000s, and I can tell you that it was rough back then.  But at no point during that run of terrorist bombings and suicide/homicide attacks by Palestinians did it feel like a threat to Israel’s very existence. 

This time, the perception throughout the country is very much that what Hamas perpetrated on October 7th, the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust combined with torture and rape and the brutal mass kidnapping of hostages into the hellish tunnels of Gaza, made it explicit that Hamas must be destroyed now, or it will remain an existential threat to Israel and its civilian population.  And, in fact, the sense in Israel when I was there was clearly that this was different from anything that had preceded it since the war of independence in 1948; different from the 1980s war in Lebanon had been, different from the several wars with Hezbollah in the north that saw rocket attacks as far as Haifa, different from the First or Second Intifadas, different even from the Yom Kippur War, for those old enough to remember 1973.  Those wars—and really, you can’t simply call them conflicts—each impacted Israel greatly.  But they had not changed the overall mentality of the nation in the ways that this horrific attack had.

Israel on October 6th, just before this atrocity was perpetrated by Hamas’ Palestinian terrorists, was a divided nation.  The judicial coup that the government of Bibi Netanyahu was attempting led to massive protests for ten months, and created a level of social disruption and tension that was unprecedented.  But when the awful events of October 7th exploded all of that was essentially forgotten.  The entire nation came together in unity, with the knowledge of a common threat.  The horrors of October 7th brought people of extremely different political perspectives and quite different Jewish observance identities together.  That unity has seen tremendous voluntarism across all aspects of Israeli society, and that was evident throughout my time in Israel. 

The examples of this unity and voluntarism are legion: city people from Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, including my retired computer programmer cousin Ken, who is Modern Orthodox, take busses weekly down to the south of Israel to harvest crops, replacing the farmworkers from Asia who returned home on October 8th, replacing the many Palestinian Arab workers from Gaza who no longer are able—or are likely ever to be permitted again—to enter Israel to work.  Fancy hotel chains, like the Dan group, have opened their doors free of charge to evacuated families from the south of Israel near Gaza and from the north of Israel near Lebanon, without knowing whether the government will reimburse them for the rooms and food they are providing to so many Israelis.  Individuals, families and non-governmental agencies of all kinds have rushed forward to help the displaced Israelis, many of whom had to evacuate without any supplies, and to offer support services for the many traumatized victims.  Our rabbinic solidarity even visited an innovative center for PTSD treatment in Tel Aviv that uses giant decompression chambers to successfully treat the large number of soldiers and civilians who are trying to recover from the trauma of the terror attacks.

So there is exceptional unity in Israel now.  No one expects that to continue much past the end of this war, whenever that takes place.  But it is true for the present.

Notably, on this trip put together by the Central Conference of American Rabbis I was meeting with many progressive and left-wing Israelis. In the week that I was in Israel, traveling from Tel Aviv to Haifa to Jerusalem to Kibbutzim to small towns north and south and, well, all over, I never heard anyone, with one upsetting exception, express a strong desire for an immediate cease-fire with Hamas.  These progressive and very liberal people with whom we met are the same Israelis who employed Palestinian workers, who drove Palestinians from Gaza to Israeli hospitals, who had friends in Gaza, who believed that they had forged bonds of respect and cooperation.  Their trust in the good-will of ordinary Palestinians, and their compassion for the fate of Palestinian Gaza civilians, has been not only undermined by the vicious atrocities of October 7th.  It has essentially been destroyed. It will be a long time before Israelis, who have been attending funerals, memorials and the hospital beds of their relatives and friends for four months now, can feel compassion or, certainly, trust for Palestinians.  Some told me that they felt badly that they couldn’t summon any sympathy for the Palestinians in Gaza; some said that they simply had no room in their hearts because of the enormous pain all Israelis are feeling now.  Others on the left expressed more explicitly the betrayal that they felt because Palestinians from Gaza who had had coffee in their homes were likely the same ones who drew maps for the Hamas terrorists of their kibbutzim, and who knew enough to tell them which houses the heads of kibbutz defense lived in and where the weapons were stored so that the Hamas Palestinian terrorists could shoot rpg’s at those buildings first.

In addition—and this is incredibly important—the profound faith that nearly every Israeli feels for the military, the IDF, has been shaken.  Look, trust in the government is never particularly strong in most countries, and certainly not in a vibrant democracy like Israel.  I mean, how much do you trust our government to do the right thing and to be efficient about it?  So it is in Israel.  And certainly now virtually no one supports Prime Minister Netanyahu, widely blamed for this horrifying disaster and the appeasement of Hamas that led to it. 

But in Israel, where nearly every non-ultra-Orthodox man serves in the Israel Defense Force for almost three years, and where most women do as well, and where reserve duty continues for an additional 15 and more years, a belief in the military and its effectiveness and good judgment is central.  The fact that the IDF was unprepared for the severity of the horrifically brutal Hamas attack on October 7th, that the army took 6 to 8 hours to reach the scene of the massacres, and in some cases took 20 hours to relieve embattled and trapped civilians, shocked all Israelis.  While the IDF has conducted the Gaza campaign with remarkable effectiveness overall, and has taken serious losses nonetheless, the Israeli public’s faith in the military is still shaken.     

I was told by many people “This entire country has PTSD.”  That is not wrong.  There are family members who know that there are relatives have been held under Gaza, in tunnels as prisoners of brutal Palestinian terrorists, for 120 days now.  There are families that don’t feel they can ever return to their homes because they were locked in their safe rooms, terrified, for 12 hours and more.  There are families who have no homes to return to, whose neighbors and relatives were murdered.  And there are families whose husbands, sons, and fathers have died fighting in Gaza, or whose daughters, mothers or wives were murdered on October 7th.  It will be a long time indeed before these people recover.

And yet: in many ways, Israeli life goes on. Cafes were busy.  Stores are open.  In wartime, businesses are managing, even with many important employees out on reserve duty in Gaza and the north.  Everyone knows that this war is necessary for Israel’s survival, and the sense of normality is still there.

An example or two: I stopped at a bookshop to get a couple of Israeli kids’ books for Ayelet.  I was about to buy two of them when the owner—or perhaps simply the manager—told me, “Don’t get those; look in the back, there’s better, cheaper ones on the kids table there.”  It was such a totally Israeli thing to do… I thanked her, and found two much better books—one features a little red-headed girl named Ayelet, by the way; it’s a charming and wonderful series—for half the price.  I also stopped at a Judaica store in Tel Aviv run by an elderly Iranian Jew who had come over from Teheran forty years ago.  He told me his life story, lowered the prices continually since business now is terrible, I spoke to him in Hebrew, my own father is older than he is, and he found out I was a rabbi, and then he convinced me to buy two things I did not need.  His grandson is fighting in Gaza now, while his own brother has never left Teheran, which he finds baffling.  Only in Israel.  I found a lovely necklace in Jerusalem for Sophie at a jewelry shop run by a Moroccan Jewish woman whose husband made it and whose three children are all fighting in Gaza now, and who told me that part of the problem was that too many Israelis are not Orthodox.  I did not argue with anyone, which is, I suppose, not very Israeli.

And of course, the synagogues I attended for Shabbat services were full, active, energetic, positive.   

Israel is surviving, and in spite of the hundreds of posters and installations about the hostages everywhere, in spite of the obvious pain that its people feel, in spite of the challenges of a nation at war, it remains an amazing country deeply dedicated to its Jewish and democratic identity.  It may not have been fun being there this time, but it was powerful and meaningful.

One more thought, when I suppose I could continue for a great deal longer. The greatest impression I have had since returning exactly a week ago is the profound disconnect between the perception of the situation in Israel and here in the United States.  Israelis across the entire political spectrum, from extremely progressive to extremely conservative, are under no illusions about the necessity for this war in Gaza, and the need to carry it forward to its completion.  There is no ambiguity about the need to destroy Hamas’ capacity to perpetrate more such atrocities, which these Palestinian terrorists have sworn to try to do.  There is surely controversy over just how committed to saving the surviving hostages the current government of Israel is, and how this can best be accomplished in the context of a terrible war.  But there are no doubts about the necessity of the war being conducted now. 

Here in America, where we are all at least 5,000 miles from Gaza—nearly 8,000 miles here in Arizona—that moral clarity is clouded by distance and propaganda.  Virtually from the moment Israeli citizens were brutally attacked on October 7th—murdered, raped, tortured, stolen from their lives and carried off into imprisonment as hostages in the gigantic tunnel network that Hamas Palestinian terrorists built under Gaza—world opinion turned against Israel.  Israelis don’t understand how anyone can glorify brutal Islamist terrorists who burn people alive and celebrate their atrocities on social media.  They don’t understand why there are such vigorous calls for cease fire when their children, women and men, civilian captives of these Palestinian terrorists, are being held hostage against all international law, and when there was a cease fire in place on October 6th that Hamas chose to destroy.  They certainly don’t understand why they are accused of genocide when they have taken nearly obsessive care to warn civilians to leave areas where they are planning to attack Hamas terrorists—something nearly unprecedented in wartime in human history—by all means possible, including dropping flyers, sending texts and emails and using audible warnings in Arabic.

Gaza is urban warfare, initiated by an intrenched enemy that has constructed military-grade tunnel systems with electricity, communications, rations, water, full electronics in underground chambers that are half the size of the New York City subway system.  There are 2.3 million people in Gaza, crammed into an area about twice the size of Manhattan, with about the same population density as Boston.  The current belief is that about 27,000 Gaza Palestinians have died.  The IDF, the Israeli military, says that about 9,000 of them were armed terrorists.  If that’s the case, then 18,000 civilians have died in the fighting. 

That is tragic, incredibly sad and painful, and the humanitarian crisis in this war begun by Hamas is certainly real and terrible.  For that it’s worth, and to put it into perspective, in the Gulf War in Iraq estimates put the number of Iraqi civilian deaths at the hands of the US, its foreign allies and Iraqi allies at somewhere around 300,000.  In Afghanistan the number of civilian deaths at the hands of the US military are calculated at over 70,000.  The total number of civilians killed in the post 9/11 wars as the direct result of US military action is about 432,000.

In Gaza the civilian deaths are calculated now at 18,000.  I spoke extensively to a rabbi who witnessed the three-part verification system Israeli units use now before eliminating terrorists.  I’m sure that it is imperfect; but it is a remarkable exercise in restraint in a brutal war against a vicious opponent.

To state what should be obvious: It is extremely difficult to fight a determined enemy that hides behind its own civilians, using them for human shields, and which has failed to construct a single bomb shelter for any Gaza Palestinians, while simultaneously building an underground network of extraordinary sophistication to protect its own leadership and its terrorist army.  In these circumstances, when humanitarian aid is very likely to be stolen by the same Hamas terrorists who have squirreled away so much aid already, civilians are going to suffer no matter how careful the Israeli military is.  And remember: the Israeli soldiers are fighting a war, trying to limit their own casualties while they strive to liberate hostages taken and cruelly held by Hamas.     

No one truly knows when this war will end.  The Hamas Palestinian terorrists have now been forced into the southern end of Gaza almost completely.  The elaborate network of tunnels will not be easily destroyed, or perhaps cannot be completely destroyed at all, depending on which engineers you listen to.  Israel will not go back to normal any time soon.

But, ultimately, in every crisis there is opportunity.  While Hamas remains in control of Gaza nothing good can be accomplished.  Frankly, so long as Netanyahu remains Prime Minister nothing much can be accomplished towards a durable solution.  I believe both realities will change soon, perhaps within two months.  Then we will see if a new day will indeed dawn in the Middle East, in which a Palestinian people can turn from reactive hate to embrace a more positive reality, and in which Israelis will be able to live in a secure peace.

A final, hopeful thought: Our daughter Ayelet is just a year old.  When I was her age, Israel was a tiny country, poor, hanging onto its security by the skin of its teeth.  So much has changed, and will continue to change.  But the hope that is built into the national anthem, Hatikvah, is at the heart of the Zionist enterprise.  A hope for a country that is strong, healthy, and at peace.  A final note of hope: That dream will come; and may it come sooner than any of us now expect.  Ken Yehi Ratson.  May this be God’s will, and ours.    

Initial Impressions from Israel Having Just Landed Back Home

Initial Impressions of Israel, Having Just Landed Back Home

Sermon Parshat Yitro 5784

As you know I’ve just returned from a week in Israel, mostly on a rabbinic solidarity mission, although I had a Jerusalem Shabbat and a Sunday in Tel Aviv before the formal program began.  Since I have now been traveling nonstop for the past 30 hours or so—I got on my shuttle to Ben Gurion Airport the equivalent of noon Thursday in Tucson, and have been flying or driving ever since—I think it best to reserve my serious reflections for next Shabbat’s Israel Sabbath when we are planning to invite the community to hear more about the experience of being in Israel during this terrible war.  It will take some time to assimilate and reflect on all that we saw, heard, learned, and felt during this brief but intense trip.  But I want to capture at least a few of the most urgent observations while they are still fresh in my mind.

I hope that most of you have had the chance to read at least some of the seven daily reports I sent back from Israel and were able to view some of the images I posted on our Facebook page as well.  As always, no matter how much you read or watch about Israel from over here, and most of us have been somewhat obsessed with news from Israel since October 7th, actually being there is different, surprising, and enriching in ways you can’t possibly predict.  Some things about Israel seem utterly changed; others are not changed at all.  And there were many surprises over the past ten days or so that I could not have predicted. 

This was the first time I have been in Israel since COVID times, although not for lack of trying.  I have had three planned trips cancelled by Coronavirus issues—Israel’s, not mine particularly—and that makes it the longest I’ve been away from the country since the mid-1990s.  The first surprise was how totally empty Ben Gurion Airport was compared to any other time I’ve been there.  And while I had seen images of the hostage photos that greet you when you land, the ubiquity of the reminders about the hostages, that there are posters and paintings and bumper stickers and banners everywhere all around the country was a stark reminder of just how profoundly painful this is for all Israelis. 

What was not surprising, because I have spoken to many people in Israel over the past four months, is the overall mood of the country.  The shock and horror of the nearly inconceivable atrocities perpetrated by Hamas Palestinian terrorists on October 7th, the dislocation of hundreds of thousands of Israelis from kibbutzim, villages and towns in the south and a similar dislocation of a hundred and fifty thousand Israelis from kibbutzim, villages and towns in the north has had a profound impact on the state of mind of the ordinary Israeli.  When you ask people how they are doing these days they don’t respond with the typical “Kol B’seder, it’s all fine” but with “L’chulam”, meaning I’m like everybody—that is, not doing so well. 

Israel is at war, and it understands the effort to destroy or at least defang Hamas as an existential war.  There is a nearly universal belief among Israelis—young and old, rich and poor, right-wing and left-wing—that this fight must be prosecuted as far as it can be.  There is an incredible sense of unity on this subject in Tel Aviv, in Haifa, in Jerusalem, in the small towns and Kibbutzim we visited too.  This is all the more remarkable because on October 6th Israel was a visibly divided nation, severely split over the fight over the judiciary purge the government of Bibi Netanyahu was trying to conduct, going to the matt to protect democracy.  That conflict evaporated in the first hours of October 7th.  The religious-secular divide in Israeli society, always sharp but increasingly severe in recent years?  Also washed away in the bloodbath of Hamas’ Palestinian terror.  If there is an intense unity, though, it is a somber, intense form of unity.  Everyone wants the hostages freed.  No one believes that Hamas, or even the Gaza Palestinians more broadly, can be trusted.  And in spite of the fact that Israelis are some of the most compassionate people on the planet—they are Jews, after all—sympathy for the Gazan Palestinians is in short supply.   

Now, I was on a trip with a group of about 37 American Reform rabbis, typically a left-wing population of people.  I was genuinely surprised to learn that many of them, including two classmates of mine who are super left-wing, brought substantial donations—tens of thousands of dollars from smaller congregations—to purchase necessary equipment for IDF troops engaged in Gaza or the north.  These are flak jackets, protective helmets, drones, night-vision goggles, and other items that reserve units in particular lack when mobilized.  I asked them if they could have imagined raising money for IDF troops supplies back when we were in rabbinical school together, and both agreed they could not have imagined it in those days.

So what happened to all the peacenik Israelis, young and old?  The comments I heard from other left-wing Israelis is that many of them died at the Nova Music Festival or are imprisoned in Hamas tunnels under Gaza.  The people who lived near Gaza, who hired Palestinian workers in their fields and homes, and who drove them to Israeli hospitals when they were ill—these people were on the front lines, and were brutally attacked.  They don’t have room in their hearts right now for the Palestinians civilians: they are too busy attending funerals and memorials, getting temporary housing or providing it to others, being treated for PTSD themselves or assisting with food for homebound people who haven’t been able to be evacuated, helping out doing the jobs that reservists are unable to do right now.  As many people told me, the whole country has PTSD.

Still, there are profound contrasts in Israel now: I met with past Cohon Foundation Award Winners while I was there and the cafes in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem—the ones frequented by locals—were full, active, busy.  The hotels are pretty full for January and February—although that’s mostly because so many families have been evacuated from their homes in the north or south to hotel rooms, and their kids are all over the lobbies doing homework, playing soccer in these fancy hotels, which opened themselves up for free to the families.  The Israeli public has been amazing at supporting people; the government much less so, slow, bureaucratic, disorganized. 

Fortunately, Israel is a land of volunteers.  My cousins take the bus a couple of days a week—a bus service organized by Leket, whose founder Joseph Gittler received a Cohon Memorial Foundation Award a few years ago for his work on food security for needy Israelis using surplus food—they take the bus to the south to harvest bananas, pomelos, whatever crop needs to be brought in because Palestinian workers from Gaza certainly aren’t going to be let in now, and the east Asians workers all left with a day or so after October 7th.  People are active, busy, making do in a country at war.  I attended Shabbat services in Jerusalem last week, Friday night at a Modern Orthodox synagogue, Nitzanim, with a charismatic rabbi and a great deal of singing.  In many ways, their service is quite similar to ours; we even use some of the same melodies.  Saturday morning I attended a Syrian Orthodox synagogue, Ades, for the chanting of the Song of Moses at the Sea, the Shirat HaYam.  On a cold, rainy Shabbat both sanctuaries were crowded and energetic, a mix of old and young, including soldiers who were there on leave, weapons at their sides.  The mood at both shuls was enthusiastic and filled with the joy of Shabbat, even though relatives of members had been killed fighting in Gaza.  The contrasts are always here in Israel.

Everyone I met said that things in Israel are profoundly changed.  Not everyone agrees on exactly how, however.  But three things stand out.

First, nearly everyone, of every political position, believes that this government must go after the war is fully prosecuted, and no one thinks it can go on for more than a few additional months.  It is clear that the political leadership, embodied by Bibi Netanyahu, has failed dismally and allowed this disaster to occur, and Netanyahu himself is harshly criticized for failing to attend October 7th funerals and for failing to even meet with the families or even call them. I’ve heard this from religious and secular Jews, right wing, center and left wing; Bibi must go.  There is beginning to be a lot of talk in Israel about what happens the day after the war is over—but the government seems to have absolutely no ideas even about what its goals after the war should be.  It is a matter of time before it is out of office, and Netanyahu rides off into the sunset. 

Second, no matter what Israelis think about their government—and they are often harshly critical of it—the one institution that has always had universal respect has been the army, the Israel Defense Forces, the IDF.  And for the first time since the Yom Kippur War, that faith in the army has been challenged and is being questioned.  The army took anywhere from six to 20 hours to arrive at the homes of that brutalized communities of the south.  In a small country with a large military presence this was a shocking failure of military intelligence and preparedness.  Israelis still have some of their habitual faith in the military—which means faith in themselves, since all the men and most of the women serve in active duty and then in the reserves for years, and the reserves have all been called into active service the last four months.  But the bedrock faith that existed in the military before October 7th has been shaken.

And third, there is no trust of the Palestinians.  Left-wing Israelis who used to drive Palestinians to Israeli hospitals, like my new friend Rabbi Amnon Riback, no longer are open to that kind of cooperation.  Those who were building factories near the border with Gaza to employ 10,000 Palestinian workers aren’t building them anymore.  It will take time—maybe another generation—before the level of cooperation and trust that existed before October 7th can possibly be restored, if it can be restored even then.  Some of the same Palestinians who sat in the homes of Israelis and drank tea with them drew maps for the Hamas terrorists of which houses to attack with rpgs and in what order on October 7th. 

It is traditional to end a Haftarah, and even a Midrash, with a note of hope, a nechemta.  I must add such a note tonight, for it is impossible for Jews to live without hope, and hope for peace.  Nine years ago on this Shabbat I climbed Mt. Sinai, in the Sinai Peninsula near Sharm el Sheikh.  It was a memorable night and an amazing dawn.  And it was a reminder that for the first 30 years of Israel’s existence Israel had no more implacable foe than the nation of Egypt.  From before the founding of the State of Israel through wars in 1948, 1956, 1967 and 1973 Egypt swore to drive the Jews into the sea and annihilate the Zionist entity.  Yet after all those years of warfare and overwhelming hatred peace was arranged—and that peace has lasted for 45 years and counting. 

I do not believe that the result of the current Gaza War, the true end of the October 7th atrocities, will prove to be a lasting peace with Palestinians and a demilitarized new Palestinian state that is somehow democratic and coherent.  But stranger, less probable things have happened right there.  As Ben Gurion famously said: to be a true Israeli you must believe in miracles. 

Israel itself remains a modern miracle.  We will talk more about it next Shabbat; but as nearly everyone in Israel said to me at the end of each meeting or talk: may we meet again in Israel in better, happier times.  And may those times come speedily and soon.

7th Israel Report: Survivors of October 7th

Israel Report #7 - Survivors of October 7th

This morning we visited Shaar Ha’Emek kibbutz, where the entire population of Kibbutz Nahal Oz was evacuated to after October 7.  There are many evacuees staying in hotels in Israel, including ours in Haifa and Tel Aviv.  At our Haifa Dan Panorama hotel there were evacuees from Tel Dan in the north; at our hotel in Tel Aviv I met families evacuated from the town of Sderot. 

This morning in the news three more names were released by the Israeli government after their deaths were confirmed.  One is a 45-year-old policeman, who had been believed to be a hostage, a father of 4, confirmed to have been killed on October 7.  His body had been taken to Gaza by the Hamas Palestinian terrorists.  In total, 43 Israeli police officers were killed October 7 and since then; that’s comparable to something like over 1000 police officers in the US if this had happened in comparable scale in America.  In other news today, 15 countries have pulled or paused their funding from the UNWRA organization because some of th UNWRA employees’ involvement in the October 7 atrocities.  Germany is now suggesting dismantling UNRWA completely.  The reported proposed hostage deal is now some 2000 Palestinian prisoners in exchange for some portion of the hostages.  Some hostage families have gone down to the Kerem Shalom crossing to protest giving humanitarian aid to Palestinians while Israeli hostages, from a 1 year old baby to an 86 year old, are not receiving medications or adequate food.  There have been 223 Israeli soldiers killed since October 7. 

We met with three residents of Nahal Oz who survived October 7 and are now living in temporary housing on Kibbutz Mishmar HaEmek in the Jezreel Valley in the north of Israel, about 170 kilometers from their homes.  In addition to the civilian residents brutally murdered, Nachal Oz also had a military base where more than 60 soldiers were killed on October 7.

Yael from Kibbutz Nahal Oz began the program.  The kibbutz was established on Simchat Torah 1953 and this fall was supposed to be celebrating 70th anniversary with a big show put on by th residents.  Of course, the October 7th attack took place on Simchat Torah.  The origin of the kibbutz, like many kibbutzim, was to put an agricultural settlement next to the border.  Soldiers were stationed near there and some of them would decide to stay and settle after their service was done.  Kibbutz Nahal Oz was located right at an army base at its start.  From 1956-1968, 6 soldiers were killed out of the kibbutz population.  1968-on was a good time for Nahal Oz.  It was a successful kibbutz, on the traditional socialist model for kibbutzim of that era.  T

Throughout the 80s and 90s Nachal Oz continued to do well, but began to have security needs.  Prior to the 1990s no fence existed between the Gaza Strip and the kibbutz, workers went back and forth freely, people drove over to Gaza to shop, interaction was simple and non-violent.  In the year 2000 the first rockets fell on Nahal Oz, but no one really took it seriously, neither the government nor the army nor even the residents.  By 2003 they started to understand that they needed to have some security.  Of course it has intensified steadily since then.

There have been three large IDF military operations in Gaza prior to this war, the last big one in 2014.  They lost a child in Nahal Oz in a Palestinian rocket attack on 8/22/2014.  Some families left then, and the kibbutz population went from 400 down to 300.  But by October 7 2023 it was back up to 467 people. 

Kibbutz Nahal Oz lost 15 people who died October 7 in the Hamas Palestinian terrorist attack.  7 kibbutz residents were taken hostage, 5 of whom have been released.  One person killed that day had his body taken into Gaza by Hamas. 

When the population of Kibbutz Nahal Oz had to evacuate they were left with nothing, no medicine, no extra clothes.  On that day the residents who survived spent many hours locked in their safe rooms with no water or bathroom facilities.  Everyone is traumatized, 70% of them are living now around Shaar Ha’Emek in temporary housing.  Others from the close Kibbutz Nahal Oz community are living scattered with family members around Israel.

We heard movingly from Naomi Adler, a survivor of 10/7.  Although born in Minneapolis she grew up in Jerusalem.  Her husband was a kibbutznik from a different kibbutz.  They joined Nahal Oz in 2017.  They had their final rehearsal for the big anniversary show the night before the attack; the kids were in the show, too.  This kibbutz was real community and gives her life meaning differently than growing up in Jerusalem.  She’s a nurse who works as the community activity planner, her husband is a farmer, they have 3 young sons. Their three boys are 7, 6, and 2 years old.  Her husband had 20 Palestinian workers from Gaza working for him in agriculture, and when October 7th happened he was concerned with how his workers were.  Their home was just one year old, they built it themselves 18 months ago, but now she’s not sure that she can go back to it ever.  Trauma is real for all of them and long-lasting.  She is now the event coordinator for a kibbutz in exile.  Their kids’ bedroom is the safe room.

On October 7th Naomi woke up at 6:29am to the loudest noise ever, nonstop, something that had never happened before.  She didn’t even hear the red color (Tzeva Adom, severe danger) notice.  The incredibly loud noises (rockets from Gaza) stopped after 10 minutes.  She opened the door of the house for air and saw cars driving through the field towards the Iron Dome base near them which protects them from rockets.  She saw strange cars driving through the fields, and saw her next-door neighbors, one of whom was later murdered by Hamas.

At that point Naomi saw the message on her phone to get into the safe room and lock the doors.  They were in there with some water, but no bathroom facilities, no diapers and the 2- year-old is not yet potty trained.  The terrorists shot their door but through luck one bullet lodged in the door and locked it shut.  Then the power went out, and they spent 12 hours with no power in a closed safe room, hot, stifling.  They saw on their phones’ WhatsApp group neighbors begging for help, asking “where’s the army?” and saying “they (the terrorists) are here…” they heard grenades, spoken and shouted Arabic, RPGs fired and exploding.  They were in their safe room, overall, for 19 hours.  Used a box as a toilet.  Smelled terrible.  Hot, not much air.  No idea what was going on.  Cell service dropped at noon.  Phones were used as flashlights so they weren’t totally in the dark throughout.  “I don’t know how we survived.”  Each person fell asleep at various times likely from low oxygen.  At 7pm the power came back on, then WiFi.  Her mom called crying and she told her mother we are still stuck in here, but we are fine so stop crying (now that’s an Israeli thing to do!).

Later in the evening they saw families being rescued by the army and shipped out.  They texted, “Hey, we Adlers are still here.”  The IDF, going house to house got there around 1:30am.  Kids woke up, were scared; they left with the kids barefoot, Naomi grabbed diapers and wipes, grabbed kids clothes but not their own.  Soldiers were all around them in full battle equipment.  There were 20 to 30 bodies of Hamas Palestinian terrorists behind their home but they didn’t see them.  It was a full-on warzone outside.  Both of their cars were torched by terrorists.

The IDF brought them to a garage until enough survivors had collected there to put them on a bus to an army base.  An IDF Officer told them, “You are safe now” and they all began to cry.  People in pajamas.  Friends telling them “They shot Maayan, and they took Tzachi.”  There was a social worker on the army base when they arrived to help the families.

She and the kids can’t go back home for a long time.  Her husband goes back 2 to 3 times a week to harvest bananas and other crops.  He will never again work with Palestinian workers from Gaza, he says.  All trust is gone.

The family was soon bused to Kibbutz Mishmar Ha’Emek in the Jezreel Valley the next morning, and have been here ever since.  They are now staying in dorms made for 16-17 year olds.  Kibbutzniks here supplied them with all essentials.  Their kids, who dearly love their grandparents in Jerusalem, are too scared to leave Mishmar HaEmek to visit them.

No one is OK.  The closest to being OK are those who say they are not OK.  She will stay in Israel.  Not sure about going back to her home.  Can’t be among people who are living a normal life right now.  Erev, Nir, Alon are her 3 boys.

Danny Rachamim spoke next.  He was an extraordinary speaker.  Born in Israel in Hadera, he has lived for 50 years in Kibbutz Nahal Oz.  Stayed after his army service.  He came in 1975, got married in 1983 to someone who came to visit.  They have three children, 2 who lived on Kibbutz Nahal Oz.  A 39 yr old son, two grandchildren, daughter with partner and a one year old.  His 30 year old daughter can’t stay in Nahal Oz because of PTSD.  On 10/7, Shabbat, there were rockets, he and his wife were alone in their apartment, went to the safe room-shelter.  After 20-30 minutes shooting started.  They went out a few times from their safe room during the day (this is not recommended by authorities during a terror attack; they were lucky).  At one point his wife was in the bathroom and saw Hamas terrorists on the path next to the house speaking Arabic.  She quickly came back to the shelter room.  They heard shooting behind their house, and a good friend was murdered there by Hamas terrorists who shot through the door of their safe room shelter and killed her, then shot her husband.  Hamas left through their back yard and went to a house 30 feet from them.  People called his cell to see what was happening but of course he couldn’t talk or make any noise—and he was in some shock as well.

They received WhatsApp messages from neighbors begging for help and felt helpless.  Danny phoned TV channel 13 and told them what was happening in Nahal Oz.  “Where is the army?” he said. “Tell them we need them to come help us, save us.”  Their daughter and her partner were in communication with him, but his son was just 500 meters away in his home but they couldn’t reach him and they didn’t know what happened to him. 

Their son actually heard the shooting, locked his door and closed his house down.  His wife had left at 4am to go to Beersheba for her running group and was driving back to Nahal Oz that morning and saw bodies.  The kibbutz checkpoint stopped her (she called her husband crying “what about my children?”; he told her it was too dangerous to try to come home). Finally, she got a text through to her husband, he said kids are ok.  His wife didn’t believe it initially.  Believed they were hostages and Hamas was sending messages using his phone.  She asked him to spell her name in English to prove it, Siobhan (she’s Irish).  It took an hour but he proved they were ok.  Meanwhile, his father Danny couldn’t find the key to the safe room.  His wife said “ok, so if we die, we die.”

Then, in the evening, Danny went to the bathroom and heard and saw IDF soldiers speaking Hebrew.  He came out of his house to find an Israeli soldier aiming at him; he was able to convince them he was Israeli.  Soldiers went to rescue his son and grandkids.

Screaming followed then; a friend, Sharona,  had lost her husband to friendly fire.  Danny says, “we didn’t worry about our own lives, just our son and grandchildren.”

During the attack, their son closed doors and windows, had no power and didn’t know what was happening.  He gave his kids candy, and they had electronic tablets to play on.  Early on their son went out, and since he is a carpenter he cut some wood to brace the door and prevent anyone opening the door to the safe room. 

Evening came.  When it was time for his kids to shower he said, “look, I have good news.  You don’t have to shower tonight!”  The kids responded by cheering, ‘Yay!’”

By 9pm he figured the terrorists were all dead, and he and his children came out of the house.  At 1am the army came and told them they were safe.  Danny’s wife wouldn’t leave the Kibbutz until they knew their son and grandchildren were ok; his wife went with the army to see if family is ok.  It took what seemed to Danny quite a long time but finally they came back.  He shouted at her “what took you so long!”  Just a stress reaction…

Until today it’s hard for him to hear that everyone is the same, that Arabs are bad, that all the Palestinians are Hamas.  He doesn’t believe that.  People are good and bad regardless of whether they are Muslim or Jew or Christian.  He has a Muslim friend who cried with him after that Shabbat.  Another friend, a Muslim Arab, saved many young people at the Nova festival before Hamas killed him.

Danny is very active in the reform congregation, does divrei Torah regularly.

Kibbutz Mishmar haEmek has opened their hearts to them, far more than the government would do.  The Nahal Oz kids are in school here at this kibbutz.  Kids in Shnat Sheirut, the year of national service before entering the army, are teaching them.  It’s not, for them, like the community of Kibbutz Nahal Oz.  They haven’t had time to process and grieve.  Not all the victims are buried yet.  There is as yet no place to go and remember.

The people of Israel showed up big time; but the government failed badly to respond.  Big hotel chains opened up their hotels without any idea if they would be compensated for doing so.  Government took a month to respond and more. 

It was incredibly powerful and moving to hear these stories, this testimony of surviving terror and evacuation, of lost friends and relatives murdered by Hamas Palestinian terrorists. It is not hard to see how hard it is for people who have gone through this to find room to care about the casualties on the Arab side.

6th Israel Report: Can Co-existence Flourish in Israel Still?

Israel Trip Report #6 – Can Coexistence Flourish in Israel?  

It was pouring rain today in Haifa, mirroring much of the mood in the country.  This morning we visited Beit haGefen, an important center where Jewish and Arab citizens in Haifa have long worked together on respect, understanding and mutual cooperation, and it was a valuable and positive experience but with a challenging note at the conclusion.

There was a lot of news this morning: yesterday 11 rockets were fired at Tel Aviv from Gaza.  7 were intercepted by the Iron Dome and 4 fell in open areas.  The alarm sirens are localized to the extent that they know what Tel Aviv neighborhoods are targeted by the trajectory.  We heard the siren but the best thing for where we were in the bus of full of rabbis was to keep driving. 

Negotiating continues on the release of the Israeli hostages in exchange for 1000s of terrorists and a cease fire.  In Jenin in the West Bank three terrorists were killed by Shabak and Yamam (the Israeli security agencies who work in the territories) in a hospital the terrorists were using to plan a terror attack.  No one else was injured in a daring and effective operation.  In Haifa an Arab car and axe attack was foiled by soldiers who killed the terrorist.  One soldier was seriously wounded.  The terrorist was from the Israeli Galilee, a citizen of Israel. 

Beit HaGefen is an Arab-Jewish institution was founded in 1963, supported by the Municipality of Haifa.  It is the only officially supported such organization focused on living together.

There was an honest discussion of interfaith interactions in Haifa, which has long had the reputation of being the city in Israel with the best relations between Arabs and Jews.  Beit haGefen is focused on culture and art programs that aid the positive understanding and experience of human relationships among Jews and Arabs.  We heard from a Reform rabbi of Moroccan Iranian Orthodox background, Gaby Dagan, who first received orthodox smicha (ordination), attended yeshiva, and worked as an army chaplain for a combat unit for 20 years, then later went to Hebrew Union College for Reform ordination.  His colleague, Naama Dafni Kelen, is his co-rabbi at their Haifa congregation.  She comes from a secular Haifa background.  They explained their own work in Haifa, and the nature of the city. 

We had a fascinating meeting with an Arab Israeli Druze young woman.  She noted that as a Druze woman she is a minority within a minority.  The Geffen Center is called a Third Space— a place of meeting that is not the home of either but a safe and open place for both Jews and Arabs.  Haifa is known for its diversity.  But is diversity just variety or is it interaction and cooperation and sharing? 

The young Druze woman used the metaphor of being an iceberg, lots of different and unrevealed aspects of her identity.  “Ever since October 7 things are awful.  Beyond conception how bad the terror attack was, the people from the south who are now homeless.  But also everything in Gaza now is horrible.  It came out of the blue and changed everything… people are being displaced in the north, the south.  There has been and continues to be Irresponsible leadership on both sides.”  Lots of Arabs feel like they have to shrink themselves in Israeli society now.  She is 33 years old. 

Asaf, a cultural educator, sees the third space as an opportunity to connect between art and education. How to open conversation about identity and conflict.  Involvement and engagement is critical.  Must be proactive.  There is an interesting large mural in the courtyard at Beit HaGefen created by Haifa muralists called “broken fingaz” illustrating different ways of thinking about Haifa, and life, which encourages interpretation.  Their education department has people write different stories to the same pictures. Pluralism, to him, is the opposite of a standard museum that tells you what everything means and what you should see.  Here, you interpret and bring yourself to the experience.  In general, he said, it’s easy to find difference; it  takes effort and energy to find commonality. 

We also spoke with Rabbi Amnon Ribak, who composed a wonderful poem I have used for several years on Passover.  He has been in rabbis for human rights and until 10/7 drove Palestinians to Israeli hospitals for care.  Feeling very conflicted now.  Loss of trust not only with Israeli authorities and army, who failed so badly on October 7th, but also a profound loss of trust in the goodwill of Palestinians. 

The staff shared their tools for coexistence cards: by changing perspective you see others better, reflect and learn and gain respect. 

This place so dedicated to cooperation for so many years and so creative and beautiful in its work now is facing a restart of its work, as one Progressive rabbi says.  It’s a tough situation indeed…

Rabbi Amnon Ribak added “I will speak about hope.  Exhibition of two artists one Arab one Jew and holding a circle of listening.  The hope holds us, but we must hold onto hope too.  Tikvah includes kav, line, a thread, a rope to grasp and reweave the cord of relations.  Like Mikvah, the waters that gather together…”

We later met with the rabbis of and a number of members and volunteers at the Leo Baeck Center in Haifa.    Much gratitude expressed by everyone we have seen for our presence during this challenging time. 

The Leo Baeck school has some 2500 students, a Reform Jewish center of education and activity, but diverse population of students and families.  It’s K-12.  The students and families are active in school but also at Shabbat and Jewish festivals, as well as for bar and bat mitzvah.  The vision is to plant the seeds from preschool through high school.  3000 alumni now.  Building community for progressive Judaism in Israel. 

Rabbi Ariela of the congregation.  Lots of community activities.  Hani, Christian Arab Haifa resident and coordinator of programs, spoke about the joint Jewish Arab programs including the community garden (we were supposed to work in it today but it’s pouring out) and described the joint holiday programs they hold on all festivals of all 3 major religions in Israel, Judaism, Christianity and Islam.  Visitors from all over Israel visit to see the model of cooperation.  International groups also visit and volunteer. 

They celebrated 13 years of the community garden last fall, bar mitzvah of the Gan.  Their Building Shared Communities program is one that communities all over Israel imitate. 

“You reap what you sow” is their slogan.  They are very proud and invested in what they have created here.

We heard from a Muslim Arab woman, mother of 3 children who are grown now.  One a doctor, one works for Microsoft, the youngest a computer engineer.  Works for shared communities, always wanted to work for that.  Worked various places around the country shared Jews and Arabs.  Jews, Christians, Muslims. 

Nir: has 2 daughters in elementary school here.  Was 40 and had never been to an Arab village.  Wanted to know the other people in his society.  Need to meet each other on a friendship basis.

Grief for October 7 but prayers for peace.  Arab woman speaking of her heartbreak over the terrible events. 

Moran: 3 kids.  Raised them on friendship, we are all the same.  Sends her kids to Jewish-Arab summer camp.  Get to know one another at the personal level.

17 communities have come to them so far to learn from and model on their community garden.

“It’s made what we are doing here even more important.”  The conversations always go on, just more intense since October 7.  They have something special here. 

Rabbi Oshrat Morag spoke about what a special community they have.  It seems to be true, here.  And October 7 has only intensified their feeling that what they have created is extremely valuable.

Later we met with Rabbi Miriam Klimova, reform rabbi from Ukraine.  She brought chocolate her mother sent from Ukraine by way of Poland, the only way to send it to Israel.  Ordained last November.  Her family couldn’t come from Ukraine for her ceremony.  Her friends here in Israel came and from her congregation and have become her family.  She grew up at reform congregation in western Ukraine.  At 18 she went to Moscow to study in Judaic program.  Moved to Poland got her BA and MA there, became a service leader in Warsaw and Gdańsk.  In 2018 made Aliyah.  When in 2020 she started at her Haifa congregation 2 people came to Kabbalat Shabbat.  Now 34 people.  20 for classes.  Community now includes new Olim from Byelorussia, Ukraine, Russia.  Nearing 2 years of war in Ukraine now.  Many members now from Odessa. 

They are connected to immigration integration center, she works there and gets referrals for potential congregants.

Community members wished to do something for people in Ukraine.  30% of Israelis in Haifa speak Russian.  Many are from Ukraine… there are some carefully managed tensions in the congregation between Russian Jews and Ukrainian Jews. 

We also heard from a lay leader of her community; he himself moved to Israel from Ukraine in 1991.  He’s a major in the reserves.  Fixes tech systems on Israeli tanks.  On October 7 he woke up at 9am, saw the news, headed to his military unit.  He started back in the military on 10/7, has been in ever since.  His young kids have been worried about him, but his wife didn’t tell him that so as not to worry him during his service.  Later his family went to Greece for 3 weeks.  He got leave after 4 weeks, washed his clothes, congregation sent dinner, bought him stuff he needed, day and a half leave; went back to his unit.  In the south it’s been rough, a little more controllable in the north but he has been out of his civilian job for four months, very tough for his wife and three kids. 

October 6, they did a community shachrit at a park 4 hours, 60 people. It was all lovely, peaceful.  Little did anyone know…

Satellite Beit Daniel congregation, young rabbi.  Rabbi Benni Minnich.  He is now in his 4th year at Kehillat Daniel in Jaffa.  Served in Haifa before that.  When he started it was COVID.  Only 7 active people when he started.  He’s from Crimea originally.  Meir Azari said do what you want to do in building community.  Took 2 months to figure out that the fact he was Russian speaking brought in Russian speakers even if that wasn’t the goal.  In 6 months Tri-lingual congregation: Hebrew, English, Russian.  Feb 2022 traumatic, Russian invasion of Ukraine.  He got flak for being too pro-Ukrainian.  Multi-lingual with Ukrainian—then French Jews came.  Complex community.  Now 30 households.  Berit for 2nd baby, 2 more coming.  Getting younger.  Wanted more than a place for Jews; that’s easy in Israel.  They have Parshat Hashavuah class in English, plus one in Russian.  LGBTQ group joining from Russia by Zoom.  Complicated rabbinate!

5th Israel Report: Hostages

Israel Report #5: Hostages

We began the day visiting hostage square, in front of the Tel Aviv modern art museum and across from the Israeli equivalent of the Pentagon.  It is moving and powerful and incredibly sad and distressingly. I’ve attached photos that capture some of the feeling of it.  It’s a complex of installations created by citizens to insist on remembering and seeking to free the hostages.  It was hard to see it all and not become overwhelmed by the emotion of these people, many of them young, stolen from their lives of potential and accomplishment, of family and community and creativity and music, and imprisoned brutally in torturous captivity. 

Perhaps the most stunning thing I’ve become aware of is the fact that so many American Reform rabbis, mostly left wing and with the reputation of being peaceniks, raising substantial funds to purchase military supplies for the IDF units fighting now in Gaza.  One colleague brought $100,000 to purchase helmets and goggles and armored vests for under-equipped units; another $25,000 from one donor.  I know that most of the group has done similar things.  That’s quite a sea change, in my view, brought about by October 7th.

The most powerful experience this morning was when we met with Lee Siegel, whose brother Keith Siegel is still held hostage in Gaza. Keith is an American citizen, held captive in Gaza for 115 days now. 

Lee himself made Aliyah to Israel in 1976 to kibbutz Gezer.  Kosher kitchen do all Jews could eat there…. He is from North Carolina, went to UNC, lived Northern California, then moved to Kibbutz Gezer.

The morning of October 7, his kids and grandchildren banged on the door to use their safe room, Mamad.  There were Sirens and lots of rockets at kibbutz Gezer, which is not all that close to Gaza.  They went to their mamad, their safe room.  He contacted using WhatsApp his brother and family, texting  “I really hope you are in the north” as they live in Kfar Aza.  After a couple of hours the responding messages stopped.  Usually that means dead phone batteries or the system becoming overloaded.  But not this time.

It took an agonizing 6 to 8 hours for the Israeli army to get to Kfar Aza.  There were battles for 5 days.  His brother and sister in law live 2 miles from Gaza.  When the army finally reached Kfar Aza they found that Keith and his wife were not in their home.  The army located his cellphone electronically in Gaza and the Israeli Army believed both of them were hostages.  While often this is not accurate since anyone could have taken his phone, it was true.  There was footage of Keith’s car being driven with them and another family driven into Gaza by Hamas terrorists.  Keith’s son, in his 40s, Shai survived in his safe room.  His story was that he heard gunshots, people speaking Arabic and then finally, hours later, Hebrew.  He had to decide if it was the IDF.  It was and he survived.  The army used his house as a command post for another 12 hours of fighting.  He’s now starting with a daughter in Afula.

The Friday after October 7 the families of the hostages met here in Tel Aviv.  It has become a family within a family, people meeting people they would never have met.  5 people from kibbutz gezer were murdered at the Nova music festival by Hamas. 

After 50 days, when the 100 hostages were released they kept hoping that Aviva would be released.  That didn’t happen for two days.  Then finally the Red Cross accepted the hostages and she was freed but Keith was not released.  She didn’t want to leave without her husband.  Aviva had been held hostage for 50 days, with very little food, wearing the same clothes she was kidnapped wearing early that terrible Saturday morning.  The Terrorists had been telling the hostages that “there is no more Israel, nothing to go back to.”  Finally, shockingly they were released.  Aviva lost more than 25 pounds.  After days without her meds, even weeks, she finally received some thyroid medication.  After treatment at Wolfson hospital in Israel she is doing ok.  Aviva has now been to DC, and has become iconic with the obit of her at the White House hugging President Biden.  Among the hostage families—indeed, everywhere in Israel—there is great appreciation for the Biden Administration and its unwavering support for Israel and its dedicated work to bring the hostages home. 

Keith has now been a hostage for 115 days.  There is a great and powerful urgency to get the living hostages home and the bodies of the dead back. 

Gilad Shalit was traded after 5 years for over 1000 prisoners including the butcher Sinwar.  It has taken 115 days for Netanyahu to agree that Jewish life is truly sacred and another trade must be arranged. 

Keith himself has done various jobs, he’s a pharmaceutical rep.  Aviva is a kindergarten teacher.  She Was holding the young girl Avigayil while leaving Gaza.  Both live in kibbutz gezer. 

It has been, for Lee, a surreal experience.  Tired, lots of talking.  It’s what we can do, advocate, protest.  PTSD for the whole country.

The Israeli government has had relatively little communication with the families.  Lots of ex-Mossad people as liaisons.  There is a guy who limits who gets to sit with Netanyahu.  The ones who see him are not representative of the hostage families.  Galant has spoken with many families but he’s a full war advocate.  Netanyahu has little credibility with the families but how do you change prime minister during a war?

“I hope that the day after we Israelis will hold onto the unity that is everywhere now.  But we will win means different things to different people.”

Hostage Square is across from the kiriyah, Israel’s pentagon.

There is a strong feeling that the war cabinet and government have not felt the urgency of the hostages and their families. 

The families are not military people.  They know that the short pause allowed 100 hostages to get out.  There is no release of hostages during military action, only during a pause in fighting.

The immediacy and struggle of the family of just one captive Israeli hostage held by the Hamas’ Palestinian terrorists was powerful and disturbing to hear and feel.  May all of our prayers and actions help bring these hostages home speedily and soon.

4th Israel Report: Tel Aviv at War

Israel Report #4 - Tel Aviv in Wartime

Tel Aviv seems, in many ways, the same busy city as always.  The front desk did give me extensive information about the locations of all the shelters in the hotel in the event of a rocket attack; the last siren was about two weeks ago, they said.  Jerusalem hasn’t had a siren in six weeks, my friends Rabbi Leon Morris of Pardes and his wife Dasee Berkowitz said at Shabbat lunch.  Their kids shared stories of the chaotic experience of heading for the bomb shelter as the sirens sounded, and being certain not to emerge too soon; they know of a young man who came out of a bomb shelter too soon, and was killed by shrapnel from the Iron Dome knocking out a Hamas rocket.  So, things are both normal and very much not. 

The posters of the hostages and the signs and stickers and displays demanding their return are everywhere.  Shops are open, and if business is low it seems not as slow as it was during the 2nd Intifada 20+ years ago.  The cafes of Tel Aviv were full, some with soldiers on leave, but in the middle of Dizengoff Square I found a display that was traumatic for me: not only the photos and names of the hostages, but photos and memorials to the many people, many of them young, murdered on October 7th by Hamas.  It continues to distress that theoretically neutral press accounts say “Israel claims that 1200 were killed” or “1200 were killed according to Israel” as though the facts, documented by the Hamas murderers as well as by Israel’s professionals and other countries, were in any doubt.  We have the names, photos, ages and all details of the many murdered Israelis, the lives brutally cut off, entire families annihilated.  Why, besides blatant antisemitism, is there any need to cast doubt on these horrifying verified facts? 

I’ve had several meetings today that have been both eye-opening and inspiring.  Shanna Fuld is a dynamic young journalist who has created the Israel Daily Podcast, which has quickly become wildly popular.  She was a guest on Too Jewish in October shortly after the atrocities, and is becoming a friend as well. She noted as we met in the lobby that many displaced Israelis are staying at the Dan Panorama hotel.  I has wondered about all the families with children, including dogs, who are staying at this oceanfront hotel in midwinter, but hadn’t quite figured out what was going on.  I did notice that the people were very friendly, unlike the average Tel Avivian, however; more typical of Israelis from the periphery than the big city. 

Shanna shared her observation that for all Israelis the sense of security they shared before October 7th is now destroyed.  I told her my historical perspective that in the long run, walls don’t work.  They create a false sense of security, and the societies that depend on them are always shocked when they are breached. The Great Wall of China, visible from space, didn’t stop the barbarians; the Maginot Line surely didn’t protect France from the Nazis in World War II; the Bar Lev line failed dismally in the Yom Kippur War.  Sooner or later walls don’t stop a determined enemy.  The only thing that really works long-term is turning neighboring enemies into allies, or at least neutrals.  But that seems far away right now.  Shanna spoke about her fear of the unity in Israel now turning into something else, jingoistic and unreflective of the reality; and she also talked about how when she goes to bed at night what keeps her up is thinking about the Palestinians without beds, without adequate food, electricity, water supplies, medical care. 

In the midst of all the war talk, she also shared that in the five years she has been living here there is a remarkable new energy to young observant Jews in Tel Aviv, whose practice might be described as somewhere between Conservative and Modern Orthodox, how the communal spirit is strong and active.  There is a vitality that wasn’t present in my past experience of Tel Aviv, to be honest, but is now. 

I also met with a representative of Leket, Deean Fiedler, an incredible organization that takes leftover food from food suppliers in Israel and feeds people in need.  I had hoped to meet with the founder and director, Joseph Gitler, a Cohon Award recipient in 2018, but tragically his 27 year old son-in-law was killed last week in fighting in Gaza.  Deena came in his place, and explained that an additional service of Leket now is providing food to homebound people who can’t leave the south near Gaza because they are immobile.  All the stores are closed, so Leket brings food to them.  In addition, in many situations, Leket has had to turn to buying produce instead of getting it donated because hotels and banquet facilities have emptied out during the war as tourism plummeted.  Leket has set up fruit stands for the hundreds of thousands of displaced Israelis from both the south and north, and is providing buses to drive volunteers to the fields of the south.  As soon as October 7th happened the farmworkers vanished: the Asian guest workers went home, and the Palestinians who provided perhaps 50% of the work force could of course no longer cross over from Gaza.  The south of Israel now produces 70-75% of Israel’s food; finding a way to harvest that food has become a communal volunteer effort for the whole country.

Our first formal meeting of the Rabbinic Solidarity Mission was with Rabbi Gilad Kariv, Member of Knesset and an old friend.  He described the consensus that that of course there was a catastrophic failure on 10/6,  failure of security authorities and political authorities.  But is Oct 7 like the Yom Kippur War?   No, in his opinion it is much more like 1948, as Israel then as now faced an array of enemies bent on its annihilation.  In 1973, as awful as things were for the army in the first days of the war, it was a war against Egypt and Syria alone, and did not include the massacre of civilians.  This is a war against both Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in the north, even if it is limited to a degree in the north.  They have now evacuated 150,000 Israelis from the north, the first time that Israel has done this.  There are threats in the Golan from Syria, in the West Bank from Hamas, and and attempts by Yemen of course as well.  It is a war with Iran and its proxies, and in a variety of theaters.

It is clear that Israel, for all its military capabilities, cannot defeat the entire coalition by itself.  It needs the help of the US and other allies.  He also noted the gap between the ardent support of the Biden Administration for Israel and the less fervent support of much of the rest of the American public. 

In addition, there is gap between the coverage of Israeli media, which understandably doesn’t show the conditions of Palestinians in Gaza.  It is yet another gap between Israel and the rest of the world. 

So, Kariv asked, What is the ability to present a liberal moderate Jewish perspective on the current situation?  Israeli society doesn’t really grasp what’s happening in USA and Europe and Australia around this war.  In Israel there is really only room for one left-wing Zionist party with Benny Gantz’ party, Yair Lapid’s party, the Arab parties.  If the various left-wing Zionist parties unite they can likely gain 8-10 seats.  Meretz, Labor, etc. have room to work, in that they can advocate for a “day after” the war vision.  There seems to be nothing much coming from Gantz or Lapid on the day after the war. 

Currently, are Israelis caught up in a situation so draining that it is beyond their emotional capacity to feel for the Palestinian civilians.  He noted in particular that the only real Israeli desire for a cease fire with Hamas is to save the hostages.  Most crucially—and remember, he is a Labor Party Member of Knesset, a left-wing Zionist himself—he reminded us that if hamas remains in power in Gaza it’s the end of the 2-state solution and the end of the Palestinian Authority.  It is a left-wing goal to destroy Hamas and strengthen the Palestinian Authority.  It was   Netanyahu’s policy to weaken the PA and strengthen Hamas.

We have a full day of meetings and visits tomorrow, and it will be emotional an eye-opening.  I appreciate all the prayers for my safety that I have received.  Frankly, I feel very safe.  Please pray for the safety of those engaged the brutal fighting in Khan Younis now, and for the families who are suffering loss and trying to recover from trauma, and most of all perhaps, for the hostages brutally held in Gaza.

3rd Israel Report: Normalcy in Wartime

It’s cold and wet in Jerusalem, normal for this time of year, but when you have to walk everywhere on Shabbat in the wind and rain it reminds you that the sabbath of this amazing, unique city is not always easy. That hasn’t changed over the 30 years or so since I lived here and have been coming back in winter. Jerusalem is made out of stone, which retains cold wonderfully well—a much better trait in summertime.

As usual, spending time in Israel can change your perspective on hamatzav, the situation, often multiple times in a short period. Now that I have been here for Shabbat, and have spoken with a number of relatives, friends and strangers, I’m seeing things a little more deeply, and consequently also a bit differently.

As my cousin Ken says, “Israel was a deeply divided country before October 7th. The brutality of the assault unified the whole nation. It was completely clear that we had to go in and destroy this enemy that perpetrated those atrocities.” There is a desperate concern about the 130 hostages, evident all over Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. But there is also both a sense of determination to win this war, and an odd normalcy about the functioning of this ultra-pragmatic, modern, sophisticated country during wartime. There is traffic and people going to work, and full synagogues on Shabbat, with everyone going to someone’s home afterward for Shabbat dinner or lunch. There are returned soldiers in the seats at shul, some still carrying their weapons; but the talk is of visitors and the rabbi’s dvar Torah and the weather, with only some mention of friends or relatives who have people on the idf and the casualties there.

Israel is indeed engaged in what it fully believes is an existential fight against Hamas terrorism. That doesn’t necessarily mean an anti-Palestinian attitude from Israelis.

One of the surprising facts about the current situation is that many thousands of Gaza Palestinians worked the farms and factories of southern Israel prior to October 7, and had done so for generations, right through other Gaza fighting. That is no longer possible, bringing additional economic hardship to a war-damaged region. You cannot, of course blame Israelis for refusing now and in the future to allow Palestinian workers from Gaza into Israel to work when some of those workers were Hamas’ spies sent to plot out invasion routes and places to attack and bring rape and murder.

There was some hope after October 7 that the Palestinian people would see Hamas for the murderous, corrupt butchers they have demonstrated themselves to be. That was naive, at best. Some Palestinians, including those I’ve spoken with, believe that democratic elections in Gaza—Hamas has not held elections in 17 years; the Palestinian Authority hasn’t done so in even longer in the West Bank—and a new non-terrorist regime can bring both peace and prosperity to Gaza. I hope they are right, but like any observer of the Middle East, while I have hope I also am skeptical.

Real, functional democracy does not exist in any Arab nation. Only Israel in this region actually holds elections and has representative government. Will the Palestinians, under the thumb of Hamas in Gaza and the corrupt kleptocrats of the Palestinian Authority, supported by the Israel military, suddenly embrace true democracy and economic and social modernity?

It is Shabbat Shirah, a day of chanting the song of Moses, a triumphant ode to military victory over an enemy bent on genocide of the Israelites. I don’t see God stepping in and solving this war. And I’m not sure just what “victory” will look like. But perhaps praying for peace and elimination of Hamas at the same time is the best we can do right now.

Now, back to a long walk on the rainy, windy cold….

Shabbat Shalom and Shavua Tov from Yerushalayim!

2nd Israel Report: Losses

Israel Report #2

 Rabbi Sam Cohon

Israel suffered its worst one-day loss of life since the October 7th atrocities earlier this week when 24 Israelis died in fighting in Gaza.  Hamas managed to collapse a building by firing an RPG, a rocket propelled grenade with multiple explosives, at neighboring buildings in Khan Younis, causing the death of 21 Israelis.  Three more Israelis died that day fighting against Hamas’ Palestinian terrorists in central and southern Gaza.

While we somehow think the death of soldiers is normal in war, there is nothing normal about losing sons, brothers, fathers and husbands, mothers, sisters and wives in their teens, twenties, thirties, and forties.  Over 220 Israeli soldiers, men and women, have died fighting against Hamas Palestinian terrorists since October 7th.  Several hundred active duty and reserve soldiers were killed on October 7th itself, including those providing security and working in the police forces and as border guards.

Everyone in Israel has direct family members or relatives, friends, or certainly friends of friends who have died in the Gaza War.  Israel is a small country, tight, community-based.  Unlike the American military, nearly everyone in Israel serves in the IDF, the Israel Defense Forces, and continues in a reserve role with the same unit for many years, doing milu’im, reserve duty annually for a month.  Those dead men and women are close to so many people.  The losses in this war will be felt for many years to come.  Each death is personal.  Everyone is impacted.

It is obvious here that there is ever-increasing pressure on the Israeli government to try to get the remaining hostages out.  Over 130 people have been held for nearly four months now in brutal captivity by Hamas’ Palestinian terrorists in the tunnel network of Gaza, miles and miles of it, but negotiations to free the Israeli hostages in exchange for Palestinian prisoners held in Israeli jails during a cease fire have stalled.  Hamas is insisting on a “permanent cease fire” that leaves the terrorists in control of Gaza.  Israel has agreed to a one-month cease-fire and exchange of all hostages for prisoners, with humanitarian aid allowed into Gaza in a much larger way than it has arrived at until now.  There is no apparent prospect of any deal soon.

Although Qatar and Egypt have led efforts to negotiate a deal, Hamas has remained intransigent.  As you might expect from terrorists who realize that the moment the last Israeli hostage is freed what remains of the gloves will be off, and their leadership in Gaza will be targeted and liquidated.  Israel has accused the absentee top terrorists of Hamas, who live in cushioned comfort in luxurious style in the United Arab Emirates and Qatar, of using the Palestinian civilians of Gaza as brutalized pawns, putting them in the line of fire, forced migration, and disease, making them human shields are PR martyrs while they themselves enjoy the fruits of international aid funds in distant lands.  These absentee Hamas lords of terror have refused to compromise to free the remaining hostages, preferring to see their own civilians destroyed.  While Gaza burns they sit in the UAE and drink tea.

There are never easy answers in the Middle East, are there?

Meanwhile, it is extremely clear that the current leadership of Israel, definitely including Prime Minister Natanyahu, will face a day of reckoning for the horrible failures of October 7th.  That day has not yet come, and may not come for a few more months.  It is extremely hard for any nation to change leadership during a war.  It will be particularly difficult for Israel to do so, and I don’t think it will until some decision is reached in this battle against terrorism.

The latest information on the Hamas tunnel network is daunting.  It is now reckoned that it is as extensive as the London Underground system, and it is likely many tunnels are not yet discovered even after nearly four months of warfare.  The latest reports make it clear that destroying it would be an engineering feat beyond the capability of the IDF, or perhaps any world military now.   Only a fraction of the tunnels in the north of Gaza, under the full control of the IDF now, have been destroyed.

Israeli society has come together to support this war.  But it will be a great challenge for it to continue to remain on the current path for much longer.

May God give Israeli leadership not only strength but wisdom, which is a rare and precious commodity in wartime and always hard to come by.

1st Israel Report: Leaving for Israel with Concern

Dear Friends,

I’ve lived in Israel on two different occasions, once for a year, and have traveled to Israel 15 or 16 times.  This marks the very first time I’ve headed out on a trip to Eretz Yisrael with more foreboding than excitement.  When you follow the war from afar it sounds like Israel is profoundly struggling.  And that’s hard to hear about, but may be even harder to experience firsthand.

It’s not that I haven’t been in Israel in challenging times before.  The very first time I was in Israel for the summer of 1976 happened to coincide with the Entebbe hijacking, which ended triumphantly for Israel but surely did not start that way.  In the early 2000s I was on a rabbinic mission trip during the 2nd Intifada when we visiting rabbis were forcefully instructed to stay out of all cafes and off of public transportation, when stores normally crowded with shoppers were quite literally empty and all the news was of terrorist outrages and homicide bombers blowing themselves up in crowded malls and markets.  And in 2014 I led a congregational trip to Israel that was on its last days when the news suddenly was filled with the three students who were abducted and murdered by Palestinian terrorists, leading to the last Israeli war in Gaza prior to this one.

Even when things were fine and my time in Israel was blessed with peace and great experiences and memories, we were never far from Palestinian violence and the murder of innocent Israelis. I was installed in the Cantors Assembly in the summer of 1988, rented a car with friends and got thoroughly lost driving in the West Bank just a few months before the First Intifada changed everything in that part of the territories, with its horrible death toll.  In 1991 I arrived for a year of study in Israel just months after the end of the Gulf War, when the memory of SCUDS falling was fresh in everyone’s mind.  The following spring when we tried to go visit the Samaritan Passover near Shechem, the rental van I was driving was stoned by a Palestinian kid, shattering the passenger window and showering me with shards of glass.  Even jogging in the wrong Jerusalem neighborhood could lead to a hail of stones from Palestinians that year, a year in which most people were basically optimistic about the future.  On one of my last visits to Israel, a time when things also seemed calm and prosperous, I drove past forests burned by rockets fired from Lebanon in the recent war with Hezbollah, aiming to destroy Israel.

Still, I have never been in Israel during actual wartime before.  Of course, Israel has never experienced an atrocity like that perpetrated by the Palestinian terrorists of Hamas on October 7th.  The mass murder, rape and torture of civilians, the horrifying surprise of the atrocities that Hamas’ war crimes inflicted on an unsuspecting population, the huge number of innocent hostages brutally abducted by the criminal Palestinian Islamist terrorists, all were unique in the history of Israel.  How would it be to visit when hundreds of thousands of reservists are serving on active duty in Gaza or in the North? 

Nor have I been in Israel when soldiers were fighting, and dying, every day in hard fighting against a desperate enemy that hides behind civilians.

The flight to Israel was full, not surprising since El Al has been the sole carrier that didn’t cancel its flights to and from Israel.  Notable for me was how helpful the passengers were to one another.  The plane, like Israel itself, felt like a large extended family, making sure that everyone is OK and helping the flight attendants complete their tasks.  My seatmate was a youngish father of three children under the age of 6, flying back to do volunteer work wherever he is needed with his parents and siblings.  Tomer is a magician who performs at the Magic Castle in Los Angeles, an extremely nice and engaging guy who said, “People don’t realize what losing a soldier means in Israel; everyone knows everyone, really, and it’s like losing a family member each time one is killed.”   

Ben Gurion airport, always bustling and crowded, is very light on traffic now; the only planes I saw were El Al, plus one from Emirates Airlines, and one or two regional carriers, when the runways here are typically bustling with planes of all nationalities.  War time.

During the 13.5 hour flight some passengers managed to get the limited El Al WiFi to work, and news spread of the tragic loss of 21 Israeli soldiers in a Hamas RPG attack that causd a building to collapse in Khan Younis in Gaza. 

The other side of it is that so far as I can tell, in most other ways Israel is continuing to function just fine, with normal life proceeding even in the midst of war.  I will of course know much more as the trip goes on.   

Darkness and Light

Sermon Shabbat Bo 5784

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

I was speaking with our upcoming visiting scholar, Dr. Joel Hoffman, this week, who will be right here speaking about “Ancient Answers to Good and Evil” two weeks from Monday night, in a talk we are co-sponsoring with Church of the Apostles.  He lives back East, and he said, “it’s 17 degrees here; I’m looking forward to being in Arizona!”  Of course he is.

Look, here in Tucson we live in a world of sunlight most of the time.  We enjoy well over 300 days a year of sunshine, and soon come to take it for granted.  Especially this time of year, when much of our country is cold and frozen, we are typically blessed with beautiful weather and sunny days, like today.  The fact that at Beit Simcha for three years we were located next door to a tanning salon is one of the truly astonishing things you could ever imagine.  Who needs a tanning salon in the Sonoran Desert?  Apparently even in a place filled with sunlight there are those who crave even more illumination.

Light is considered a blessing in Jewish tradition.  It is, after all, God’s very first creation in Genesis, Y’hi Or, “let there be light”; we light candles each Shabbat and every festival to symbolize the special blessing of light that we are granted on these holy days; Hanukkah, of course, brings an abundance of light into a period of darkness.  In Zohar, the amazing Kabbalistic text we study every Tuesday at noon and again at 7pm, light is understood to be the way in which divine energy emanates into our own universe; the very name “Zohar” means a kind of illumination, divine light.  And the great movement of the 19th century that brought the great light of reason to bear on our entire tradition is called the Haskalah, the Jewish enlightenment; my grandfather was a part of that, as were the leading lights of early Zionism and all other modern Jewish movements.

So the denial of light would be, in nearly all circumstances, a challenge of the first order.  Which makes the ninth plague, the penultimate punishment of the Egyptian slaveholders, such a dramatic moment in a narrative replete with them.  The description of this event, the advent of deepest darkness, is eloquent in our Torah portion of Bo in Exodus:    

Then the Lord said to Moses, “Hold out your arm toward the heavens that there may be darkness upon the land of Egypt, a darkness that can be felt.” And so Moses held out his arm toward the sky and thick darkness descended upon all the land of Egypt for three days. People could not see one another, and for three days no one could get up from where he was. (Exod. 10:21-23)

There is something uniquely powerful in this particular plague that differs qualitatively from the plagues that preceded it.  It’s not as though the earlier punishments were trivial.  Indeed, they were vivid and awful, each in its own way.  But this plague of darkness somehow has a different quality to it.

There is a Midrash on this, in Shmot Rabbah (14:2) that calls the plague of darkness “The darkness of Gei-Chinom, Hell, connecting the darkness visited upon Egypt with the primordial darkness that preceded God’s command “Let there be light!”  Remember, the Torah tells us this is a darkness that is so deep it can, literally, be felt.

Have you ever explored a deep cave, like the wonderful ones at Kartchner Caverns near Tombstone?  Sometimes when you tour a cave they do a little demonstration for you, as a visitor, and shut off the artificial lights, so that you can see what it feels like when the lights go completely out, when it’s truly black.  You can hold your hand in front of your face and not see it.  When you have that experience, of utter darkness completely devoid of all sources of light, you begin to understand what it might mean to “feel the darkness.”  A period of a minute in an utterly dark cave is enough to cause some serious anxiety, I can promise you.  A period of three days would be utterly terrifying. 

We know that the long-term effects of being deprived of light, especially sunlight, are very negative.  Most people consider Scandinavia to be a place where people generally are very content; those countries are quite well off, their educational systems and health care are excellent, their governments well thought-of, they have many advantages that most nations don’t enjoy, including elegant furniture designs and incredibly safe cars.  Lots of people in many parts of the world would love to live in Scandinavia.

Only not so much in the winter, when wonderful countries like Sweden, Norway, Denmark, and Finland have spectacularly high suicide rates, among the very highest in the entire world.  It’s not the cold that causes this; it’s the long days in the far northern winters with minimal light.  It’s the darkness.

Darkness is closely associated with depression in psychological literature, and the causality is well established.  Even when there are no other stressors, research shows that darkness causes depression, and can even damage the brain, limiting its ability to accept positive neurotransmitters. That is, prolonged darkness provokes a kind of anti-endorphin response, and we sink down into a dark tunnel.  The response it provokes is also one of alienation. We see, or rather feel the darkness, and simultaneous believe we are alone in this.  We perceive that we are alone in the dark, as it were.

Our Torah commentators focus on this when considering the plague of darkness.  You see it wasn’t just the darkness that was the problem; it was that those afflicted with it were unable to see anyone else.  They became locked in the prison of themselves. 

The darkness is not just an inability to see things.  It is in particular an inability to see people, other people, to recognize them as similar human beings who have similar needs. 

As one commentator says, “Just as the special light of Shabbat is an appetizer, a foretaste of the world to come, the reward that awaits the righteous, so the darkness of the ninth plague is a foretaste of Geihinnom, the punishment that awaits those who cannot truly see their neighbors, who cannot feel the pain and recognize the dignity of their afflicted neighbors…  The person who cannot see his neighbor is incapable of spiritual growth, of rising from where he is currently.” 

There is a famous passage in the Babylonian Talmud (Berachot 9b) that explores how we know when dawn has come and darkness has ended.  Although I first studied that tractate during high school with my father, Rabbi Baruch Cohon, it was brought to my mind by an Episcopal Rector named Clay Turner when I served a congregation in South Carolina.  The rabbis are discussing when it is we know that dawn has come and the darkness of night is over.  They debate, and argue about whether night is over and the morning has come when you can tell a white thread from a black one; or perhaps it’s only when you can tell a blue thread from a green one, a much harder thing to judge, a tougher standard.  After pages of discussion another answer is offered: the night is over and morning has come when you can look on the face of a fellow human being and see the face of God. 

That is, dawn has come and darkness is over when you can look at another person and see the divine image, the face of God.  When we can see the other, and recognize the Divine image shared by all humanity, then darkness ends.

In Bo the Torah describes the effect of darkness as, “People could not see one another, and for three days no one could get up from where he was.”  Rabbi Yitzchak Meir Rotenberg, the Alter Gerrer Rebbe, founder of the Ger Hasidim near Warsaw, comments that the greater darkness is when a person does not see his neighbor and does not sympathize with his pain; the result is that his capacity to feel becomes dull and he is paralyzed, and therefore no one could rise from his place, nobody could move.  It was lack of empathy that caused this paralysis, a total inability to realize that they—meaning we—are all in this together.  Each of us must seek a way out of the darkness, and when we realize that we are not alone we find others to help us.

Remember, this plague of darkness in Exodus is no accident.  For the darkness the Egyptians experience, the terror and depression that overcomes them and make them feel the deep angst of their existential aloneness, is closely tied to how they have acted for 400 years as enslavers of the Israelites. The Torah tells us that the Israelites suffering under Egyptian slavery were so afflicted with hard labor that they had kotzer ru’ah, depressed spirits. 

Yet the Egyptians did not see the despair of the people of Israel. They did not look into the eyes of their fellow human beings, the suffering Hebrews, and acknowledge their pain.  Metaphorically, they already were stumbling about in moral darkness, tripping over core values like basic respect and human freedom.  These Egyptians were a people already blind, engulfed by spiritual and emotional darkness.

Now, how does darkness become a plague? By blocking the light, turning off our awareness, shutting down relationships, and preventing us from feeling, from changing our behaviors and our culture and society.

It is notable that even after the plague is lifted the Pharaoh and his people do not allow the Israelites to go free.  For the plague of darkness they have so recently experienced is still mirrored in the darkness of their own souls.  They act unjustly, inflicting slavery and darkness on those weaker than themselves.  A little object lesson in obscurity does not prove to be enough to change their dark habits.  A greater, even more powerful and destructive punishment will have to be employed in order to free the captive Israelites.

But perhaps this lesson of darkness may prove to be enough for the rest of us.  For the great message of this plague is that when we can bring light to bear we will see that we are not alone, that others suffer more than we do, that we have the capacity to rise from despair and bring hope and blessing to others through our own actions.  Proverbs, Mishlei, teaches us that Ner Adonai nishmat adam, the soul of a person is the light of God.”  We each have the ability to bring light into our world by our own actions, by truly seeing those people all around us, feeling not the darkness but their warmth and need, and helping them.

At the end of Shabbat each week we kindle light once more, at Havdallah.  We light the braided candle and illuminate our Saturday night, bringing the special light of the Sabbath into the week to come, assuring that it will not begin in darkness, allowing its flames to remind us that we each have an opportunity to bring our own nitzutzei Elohim, our own small sparks of God into our own society and world.

In my own home, we always put some coins in the Tzedakah box right after Havdallah.  It’s a small reminder that this light of God, this illumination that prevents the plague of darkness, is within our capacity to ignite, even in the smallest of ways.  May we each find ways to do so now, on this Shabbat, in this coming week, and always.

Tunnels

Sermon Parshat Va’era 5784, Rabbi Sam Cohon, Congregation Beit Simcha, Tucson

 There was a strange incident last week at Chabad headquarters in Brooklyn.  For reasons that remain unclear, a group of young Chabadniks had illegally constructed a significant tunnel under the center for Lubavitch international at 770 Eastern Parkway in Crown Heights.  Police accounts say it was over 60 feet long, and while it was empty, it was some 8 feet wide.  It was apparently designed and built by a group of fanatical 19 to 21 year-old young men who believe that the late Rabbi Schneerson, the last Lubavitcher Rebbe who died in 1994, was the Messiah.  T

This passageway started in the basement of an empty apartment building behind the headquarters, snaking under a series of offices and lecture halls before eventually connecting to the Chabad synagogue.  This allowed the young diggers to have unauthorized access to the Chabad shul so they could pray and study at unusual times that they favored.

The current Chabad leadership characterized the tunnel’s construction as a rogue act of vandalism committed by a group of misguided young men, condemning the “extremists who broke through the wall to the synagogue, vandalizing the sanctuary, in an effort to preserve their unauthorized access.”

Those who dug and supported the tunnel, meanwhile, said they were carrying out an “expansion” plan envisioned by the former head of the Chabad movement, Rebbe Menachem Mendel Schneerson.  They felt the Chabad headquarters synagogue should expand outward and encompass the surrounding the properties.

When a cement truck hired by the Chabad leadership at 770 Eastern Parkway arrived to fill in the tunnel, some of the young fanatics refused to leave the tunnel and had to be forcibly removed.  Nine of them were arrested by police and are being charged with various forms of malicious mischief and other crimes.

Look, when something weird happens in Chabad it should not surprise anyone.  Chabad’s understanding and practice of Judaism is, frankly, very close to the practices of a bizarre cult.  Their version of Judaism includes hanging photos and pictures and samplers of the late Lubavitcher Rebbe everywhere in their homes, businesses, and synagogues, a direct contradiction of the 2nd Commandment in the Torah.  They focus their studies not so much on traditional texts such as the Torah or Talmud as on the Tanya, a text written by the founding Lubavitcher Rebbe that mixes Mussar teaching, an idiosyncratic version of highly simplified Kabbalah mysticism and a preference always for the spiritual greatness of Jews over non-Jews.  Chabad sends out its emissaries, shlicihim, quite young and barely trained rabbis, with orders to bring Jews into their synagogues—and they eagerly seek to take Jews away from other non-Chabad synagogues whenever they can, and of course to raise money from them to support their eternal efforts at expansion.  No one outside of Chabad knows the value of all the real estate they have amassed over the last few decades, because of course it is a registered non-profit—but it’s huge. 

And religiously speaking, Chabad has many, shall we say, unique practices that are not aligned with other Orthodox Jews, let alone liberal or progressive Jews.

Still, tunneling under the Chabad headquarters in Crown Heights at 770 Eastern Parkway is not something we would have suspected of even the most fanatical and weirdest Chabadnik—nor is the Lubavitcher leadership calling the police and having its own people charged as “extremists” something we see every day; or ever.

But it did trigger for me, at least, an exploration of how much we have been hearing about tunnels lately, and their import and impact for Jews.

Of course, in Gaza the Israel Defense Forces have been confronted with a complex network of underground fortifications, that is, a tunnel network nearly as extensive as the New York subway system.  This has required a complex way of fighting the Hamas Palestinian terrorists who built it over the past 17 years; mind you, they built it mostly by using international aid resources intended for humanitarian use and redirected it—that is, stole it—in order to construct this deadly system of fortifications.  Israel has been fighting in these tunnels now since October 7th—and in reality, Israel has been dealing with terror tunnels for nearly two decades.  And now recent reports highlight that Hezbollah in Lebanon has an even more extensive and much more sophisticated tunnel system on the northern border of Israel, protecting its own terrorist leadership from both scrutiny and attack while allowing it to prepare for war with an Israeli military establishment that is located aboveground.

You see, in today’s world you use tunnels when you want to do something others don’t know about…

This is not exactly a new practice, of course.  At my recent ONEG conference this past week one of the topics we explored was the ways that museums are sometimes today being forced to return artifacts taken—well, kind of stolen—from other countries.  It took a while for the museums involved—which, it turns out, includes the most famous and prominent museums in the entire world—to steal—er, acquire—these treasures from former conquests and colonies, or sometimes to buy them from the people who stole or extorted them in the first place.  While much attention has been paid to the incredible treasures that the British Musem and the Louvre have in their collections—I believe that the British Museum should really be renamed “The Museum of Imperial Kleptocracy”—and the fact that they are quite unwilling to return them to their countries of origin, one of the most interesting objects of all, taken in a pretty typical act of colonial theft, sits in the Archeological Museum of Istanbul. 

That Turkish museum is utterly fascinating, containing incredible treasures taken by the Ottoman Empire from the many lands it conquered and controlled, including wonderful Greek sarcophagi, great Roman sculptures, incredible Byzantine mosaics, and artifacts taken from everywhere in the Middle East.  Of particular Jewish interest is a plaque located, when I last visited, on the third floor next to an open window.  It’s quite old and famous in archeological circles, as well among those of us who love Jewish history.

If you have ever visited Israel, particularly if you have gone on an Israel pilgrimage with me in the past, you have probably walked through Hezekiah’s Tunnel, cold water rushing over your sandalled feet as you went from Jerusalem to the source of the water.   That tunnel was built when Jerusalem was about to be attacked by the powerful and terrible Assyrian Empire in the 8th century BCE, 2700 years ago.  Hezekiah’s tunnel was constructed to give the city of Jerusalem a steady supply of water from the Gihon Spring, allowing it to survive the siege of Assyrian general Sennacherib’s army, and for the nation of Judah to survive and keep Judaism alive.  King Hezekiah ordered the construction, and it worked, an incredible feat of engineering, a tunnel that was used not to kill but to save lives.  When the workman hacking out the rock with axes, coming from both directions to save time, somehow managed to reach one another and open the tunnel they celebrated.  We know this because a plaque commemorating this incredible event was carved and put up in the tunnel itself.  It was discovered back in the 19th century by archeologists—and the Ottoman Empire government was so impressed with this plaque, which had been underground in the tunnel for over 2500 years back then, that they grabbed it and stuck it into the Istanbul Archeological Museum.  Where it still lies, its ancient Hebrew inscription testifying to the fact that there was a Jewish state in Israel for a thousand years.  The plaque has been radiocarbon dated to 700 BCE, the time of King Hezekiah.

That plaque also testifies to the fact that this tunnel brought water to Jerusalem and saved the country of Judah, and all Judaism, from the Assyrian Empire 2700 years ago.  Because, you see, tunnels can save, too… More recently there was the tunnel system—really, a reuse of the underground sewer system—that was used by the Jews during the Warsaw Ghetto uprising against the Nazis, and allowed some of the survivors of that heroic doomed fight to survive; there, tunnels were used to escape captivity and death.  And I’m told that for the superrich today, including Jews like Mark Zuckerberg, when they construct their own private compounds they inevitably include a fortified secret tunnel network so that they can survive the inevitable end of civilization. 

Now, for those of us who are not in the process of building out own survivalist compounds, tunnels can also be a kind of powerful metaphor.  Tunnels can be used to hide, and to damage; but they can also be used to save and protect, or as a means of escape.

So, in your own lives, what sort of tunnels have you constructed?  Have you built private, secret networks to hide your worst tendencies from others, and from the world?  Are you utilizing these inner tunnels to protect aspects of your life that you don’t want others to know about?  Are you hiding things, perhaps even from yourself, that you would be better off dealing with openly?  Are these tunnels below the surface concealing problems you really should seek to solve?

Or are you using these tunnels to escape from a harsh reality in your own life, an area of challenge or even danger that would be better addressed above ground?  Are you tunneling out from under the pressure of daily life as you seek a different reality?  Or are you simply using those tunnels to hide?

I suspect that none of us will be arrested for trying tunnel into the Chabad headquarters’ synagogue any time soon.  But perhaps over this Shabbat we can all examine the ways in which we use our own subterranean spaces for our benefit—and the ways in which we might change from the ways we are using them to our own detriment.  For only when we bring those things to the surface, and face them honestly, can we repair ourselves, and begin to repair our world.

Infinite Possibility

Sermon Shabbat Shmot 5784

Rabbi Samuel M. Cohon

Congregation Beit Simcha, Tucson, Arizona

You may be aware of the tendency of Jews who immigrated to America to change their names, particularly last names.  Greenberger became Green; Katznelson became Katz, or sometimes Nelson; Beilin became Berlin, and so on.  Movie and TV stars were legendary for doing this, of course.  Issur Danielovitch became Kirk Douglas; Jacob Garfinkle became John Garfield; Bernie Schwartz became Tony Curtis.  Jon Stewart Leibovitz became Jon Stewart. 

First names, too, changed with the geography.  Lazer and Soreh became Louis and Sarah, but they named their kids Sidney and Fanny, and they named their children Steven and Heather.  But sometimes things changed in the next generation. 

This is an update on a classic Jewish joke about names. 

A young boy is walking with his father in the middle of the 21st century. A passerby is impressed with their interaction, and says to the father, “Your little boy is so smart and handsome.”  And the father says, “Thank you. I'm flattered. And so is my son.”  And the stranger says, “What's your son's name?”  And the father says, “His name is Shlomo.”  The man is taken aback.  “Shlomo? What kind of name is Shlomo?”  And the father says, “It’s Jewish.  He was named after his late grandfather, whose name was Scott.”

Well, this week the name of the Torah portion is Shmot which in Hebrew means “names.”  That is, the name is “names.”  Which raises an interesting question: how much does what we name someone or something matter?

Superficially, a name seems unimportant, an arbitrary designation.  Would you really be a different person if you had been given a different name? 

William Shakespeare famously has Romeo say, “What’s in a name?  A rose by any other name would smell as sweet.”  It would, surely, and yet, names do matter.  Would that play have been nearly as successful if it was, as Tom Stoppard suggests, called “Romeo and Ethel”?

In another sense names can hold great meaning indeed.  For example, in Ashkenazic Jewish tradition we never name a child after a living relative, partially out of the superstition that it will be a jinx to both the child and the one he or she is named for.  But if you are given a name after a relative of distinction or great regard, you are supposed to live up to that, no?  Now, Sephardim often name after living relatives, leading to jokes about all Sephardim being named David ben David ben David on Israeli comedy shows.  But again, that sense of carrying on a name has resonance for the recipient of the appellation.

Some authors are quite good at creating memorable names for characters: Oliver Twist’s life takes many turns; Holly Golightly floats elegantly just above reality.  “Call me Ishmael” is the beginning of Moby Dick, predicting disaster.  Sometimes names appear to predict greatness; at other times they foreshadow misfortune.  Can anyone forget the acronym of the Committee to Re-Elect the President when Nixon ran in 1972—CREEP?    

The significance of a name is just as true of places as it is of people.  Would the town of Tombstone be quite as infamous if it was called instead “Silver, Arizona?”  And how many of us would like to admit that we were natives of a place named “Oxnard”?  Of course, there are places that seem almost miraculously misnamed: Yerushalayim, Jerusalem, where I’ll be in a couple of weeks, means the City of Peace.  Yet it has been forcibly and brutally conquered at least 44 times throughout history.

I leave tomorrow for a rabbinic conference that I have attended nearly every year for over 20 years.  We meet annually in Colorado at this time of year, and for five days we become a warm, supportive, caring community, who learn together, pray together, share sorrows and joys, and grow immeasurably from the experience.  It is a true chevrei, in the Hebrew word, an association of diverse people who respect and enjoy one another and help and support one another.  The name of the organization is ONEG, and I can’t for the life of me recall what it is supposed to stand for; but of course, the Hebrew word oneg means a fulfilling celebration, as in Oneg Shabbat.  In this case it’s a particularly appropriate name.

In a previous conference we studied with this week’s Torah portion of Shmot, the great parsha that begins the Book of Exodus.  Naturally we looked at the Burning Bush episode that lies at the heart of our portion, and raises a deep and elusive subject: how do we understand the essence of God?  But it begins with which names we use for God, which is at the heart of the burning bush episode itself.

So, what’s the right name to call God?  In Genesis, Jacob, our patriarchal ancestor, has a great dream of a stairway to heaven, with angels ascending and descending.  At the top, God appears, and offers reassurance to Jacob that he will become the father of a great and populous nation, and that the land he is lying on will become his people’s eternal home.

Jacob awakens from this dream and says, “achein, yesh Adonai bamakom hazeh v’anochi lo yadati,” usually translated, “Behold, God was in this place and I, I did not know it.”  That translation doesn’t truly capture the nuances of Jacob’s statement, in particular the ways he refers to God.  First, God’s name is given as Yud Hay Vav Hay, the holiest four-letter name of God.  And hamakom is another name of God, meaning “the place,” which seems particularly appropriate since by tradition the place that Jacob is lying on will someday be the location of the Holy of Holies of the Temple in Jerusalem, the “place” where God dwells most intensely in all of Jewish belief. 

But most interestingly, when Jacob says, “God was in this place v’Anochi lo yadati,” that is, “and I, I did not know it” he uses Hebrew in a peculiar way.  First, he need not actually say Anochi at all, since by saying lo yadati he has already said, “I didn’t know it.”  By adding the grammatically unnecessary extra “I” he has done something Biblical commentators see as a theological statement, a description of God and God’s essence.  That is, he says not “God was in this place and I, I did not know it,” but “God was in this place and Anochi, I did not know God by that name.”

The word Anochi means “I” or “me,” but it means a very specific kind of “I” or “me.”  It is a stronger word than the more common and basic Hebrew word Ani.  It is a word of presence, a definitive “I”, a powerful statement of existence.  What God is saying to our father Jacob is, “I exist, and I am here; do not be afraid.”  That extra letter, the Hebrew letter kaf, changes the innocuous pronoun ani, I, into an actual name of God, Anochi.   In fact, there is a custom among some Jews, Sephardim in particular but also Chasidim, to make the symbol of the letter kaf with their hands, signifying the presence of God. 

Our patriarch Jacob, in one of the great moments of his life, comes to understand God as Anochi, the God who is always present and will be with him through all of his trials and tribulations.  Anochi, the God who is most definitely here. 

That name will eventually be the way that God begins the Ten Commandments: Anochi Adonai Elohecha… that is, I, Anochi, am the Lord your God; I, God, am here, now.

And then, in our Torah portion of Shmot this week, Moses has his own first great moment of personal revelation.  Like Jacob, the encounter comes as a surprise to him.  Unlike Jacob, the meeting with God is not a dream sequence, but occurs in the form of a vision.

Moses is pasturing sheep in the desert when he sees that famous bush that burns but is unconsumed.  This Burning Bush is an arresting site, and he turns to approach it.  Out of the bush comes the voice of God, and Moses, startled, engages in a long dialogue with God.  God urges and finally demands that Moses take up the call to fight for the freedom of the Israelites, that he become God’s emissary to free the Hebrew slaves serving Pharaoh in Egypt.  Moses is beyond reluctant to take on this great task, arguing repeatedly that he is unqualified and should not have to go.  At one climactic moment in this dramatic dialogue, Moses asks God to identify God’s self, so that Moses can tell Pharaoh—and even the Israelite people—just who is demanding freedom for the slaves.

God’s answer appears ambiguous in the extreme: Ehyeh asher Ehyeh, God says, I will be what I will be, or I am that I am.  

Ehyeh shlachani elayich, God continues—Ehyeh sent me, you should say to the people.  That’s My eternal name and that’s how I will be remembered from generation to generation.  And God also says that the four-letter name, Yud Hey Vav Hey, is a name by which God was not known to Abraham, Isaac or Jacob.

But simply put, that part’s factually wrong.  God was known by that holiest of names to all three patriarchs, and this is not actually a new name at all.  What’s going on here?  What is God trying to tell Moses?

Again, the commentators weigh in.  It’s not the Tetragrammaton, the four-letter-name of God, Yud Hey Vav Hey, that’s a unique new designation, a fresh name for God.  They say that it’s actually Ehyeh that’s a new name for God.

So just what does Ehyeh mean?  Literally, “I will be.”  That is, God is infinite potential, capable of anything, up to and including redeeming the nation of Israel from slavery, splitting the sea, and bringing us to Mt. Sinai and an eternal covenant.  Ehyeh, God can do anything.  Ehyeh, God is absolute potential, the unlimited divine energy to transform things as they are to things as they should be.

According to this interpretation, Jacob knew God as Anochi, the God who is, the God of what is, a reassuring presence.  But Moses comes to know God, through this Burning Bush episode and more elaborately in the next four books of the Torah, as the God of infinite possibility, the God of what will be.  It is this not-so-small difference between God as Anochi and God as Ehyeh that transforms an acceptance of what is into the realization that something great can be, and that we have the potential to be part of that greatness.

I believe that this has resonance for each of us.  Faith in God as an existent reality is a wonderful thing, Anochi, and it can provide reassurance and support throughout our lives.  But belief in a God of infinite possibility, a faith that supports the incredible potential God has implanted in this universe of ours: that is the God of the Burning Bush, the Ehyeh that provides hope and promise that anything can happen if God wills it, the assurance the redemption can come for each of us.  What’s in a name?  In this case, it is a gift: a gift of hope in times of distress, of light in times of darkness, of belief in moments of doubt. 

We need this reassurance when things seem bleak, when we are faced with challenging and even depressing times.  Knowing that the God of infinite promise exists, and cares can bring us out of our depression towards hope once again.

On this Shabbat of Shmot, of names, may we each find reassurance in these unique names, and discover promise and inspiration in our own understanding of Ehyeh, the God of the infinitely possible. 

Perspective at a Tough Time

Vayechi וַיְחִי  Sermon 5784 Rabbi Sam Cohon, Congregation Beit Simcha, Tucson, Arizona

Shabbat Shalom, and an early L’shana Tova, a happy secular New Year—or as Israelis say, Happy Sylvester.  So why, you may ask, do Israelis call the secular New Year’s “Sylvester”?  And, well, who was Sylvester?

It’s a little complicated, but essentially, in Israel they name this upcoming holiday, which was more or less established by the Roman Empire for bureaucratic reasons—consulships began January 1—with the name it was later called by Christians in the 4th century in honor of the anti-Semitic pope in place at the time of the Emperor Constantine and the Council of Nicaea.  In other words, they, and we, are celebrating a festival that honors both a pagan administrative holiday and an Anti-Semitic pope.  Oh, and if Christmas actually commemorates Jesus’ birth then New Year’s, the eighth day after that, would celebrate his bris.  That is how it is celebrated among a variety of Christian denominations still, as his bris, his circumcison and naming day.

To say the least, a rather odd occasion for Jewish festivities of any kind.

In truth, even in an ordinary year—and this 2024 beginning is far from ordinary for Israel with the Gaza war ongoing—but even in an ordinary year they don't care much about this holiday in Israel, and perhaps neither should we, since we already had our own Jewish New Year back in September at Rosh HaShanah… still, the opportunity to gain some perspective, to look around and see where we are, should never be wasted.

Beyond the personal desire to make new year’s resolutions and seek a better year in 2024 it is impossible not to reflect on how we ought to be thinking about things in Gaza right now.  I was asked by my sister Deborah last week exactly when Bibi Netanyahu, Prime Minister of Israel for all of these years and in charge when the disastrous atrocities of October 7th occurred, would have to take responsibility and step down.  The standard Israeli response after October 7th has been that Netanyahu must go—but not now, not while Israel is at war with a genocidal, vicious, antisemitic Palestinian terrorist group armed to the teeth by Iran that has just perpetrated the worst atrocity since the Holocaust.  So, my sister asked: do I think that its finally time for Bibi to go?

While polls put Israeli support for Netanyahu now at something like 25%, and there is a nearly universal belief that the horrifying disaster of October 7th and the subsequent war is to a good degree his fault, the standard answer has been that it’s not yet time for him to go.  I agree.  In my view, he must prosecute the war against these Islamist Hamas Palestinian murderers, rapists, torturers, and kidnappers to the fullest extent that Israel can do so.  After they are eradicated and their power destroyed, he should resign, allowing Israel to blame him for the tragic and terrible human destruction that is unavoidable when you are fighting Palestinian terrorists who hide behind children and women, who put their terror tunnels and rocket launchers in schools and hospitals, and who steal life-saving supplies for their own stockpiles.

My answer may impress you as cynical.  But if Netanyahu truly cares about Israel more than his own skin, he has a unique opportunity now to destroy Israel’s most proximate and most horrifying enemy, and also take the international heat for doing so.  And then he can accept responsibility for the monumental failure of his policies in Gaza and leave the scene.

I also believe that the best way to get him to leave is to guarantee he gets to stay out of prison on those corruption charges, which are, frankly, small potatoes in all of this.  Let him ride off into the sunset already—but only after Hamas is destroyed.

And then a new Israeli government, under a new leader, can seek sane partners among the Arabs who will constructively work for a far better future for everyone.  That is optimism in a time of deep darkness; but there will be a brighter day, ultimately, after the destruction of the Islamist terrorists and the fall of this Israeli government.

Now, back to Sylvester, or the artificial New Year’s we are about to enjoy.  Again, the opportunity to gain some perspective, to look around and see where we are, is always meaningful.  And the Torah itself helps us this Shabbat.

This week’s portion of Vayechi concludes the great book of Genesis, Breisheet.  And while Vayechi is itself interesting, the fact that we are concluding the first book of the Torah just before completing a calendar year is just too tempting a coincidence to miss.  At this new-secular-year time, when we try to figure out just what happened over the past 12 months and what it all means going forward, we have the opportunity to do the same thing for the first of the five books of the Torah.

As hard as it is to comprehend just what this shocking year, 2023, especially the last quarter of it, has taught us, concisely summarizing the formative book of all western civilization, Breisheet, seems perhaps harder.  Genesis ranges in its scope from the creation of the world to the development of human beings, from the first natural disaster to the first murder, from the first city to the first war, from God’s initial covenant with Abraham to the tumultuous events that led to the creation of the children of Israel, from wandering nomadism to the entry into settled civilization, from Babylon to Canaan to Egypt.  Its stories and themes of faith and family, conflict and resolution, love and hatred, universal truth and simple beauty resonate today.  The triumphs and failures of the individual human lives portrayed in Genesis remain fresh and fascinating.  You can spend your life reading and exploring these tales and learn new lessons each and every time.   

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

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

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

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

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

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

But his brothers fear that as he stands there staring into the very place of his original captivity, he is dwelling on the evil they perpetrated against him; and now that Jacob is dead, Joseph will finally take revenge. So, they send him a message—which they fabricate—with Jacob’s concubine Bilhah, saying Jacob had urged Joseph not to take revenge.  

Joseph weeps, continues the Midrash, because his brothers have so little trust in his affection. When they appear, bowing abjectly, he speaks to them gently and puts their fears at rest. “Ten stars,” he tells them, “Could do nothing against one star, how much less could one star do against ten? How could I lay a hand on those whom both God and my father have blessed?”

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

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

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

It is a great lesson for us.  May we, too, learn to capitalize on this secular new year’s gift of perspective, conveyed artificially or otherwise, to see how to heal the wounds in our own society, and to move from division to unity.

I don’t know how long it will take to heal the terrible wounds of October 7th, or to build a new leadership among the Palestinians who will actually work for the betterment of their own people.  I only know that this will ultimately take place, and that in the long run, in the future that true visionaries like Joseph can see, it must occur.  We can gaze into a pit and see darkness and loss; or we can remember not only the pain, but the opportunities that may arise out of it in the end. 

May you all be blessed with a happy secular New Year.  But more importantly, may we all be blessed with the ability to continually turn to this great text of Torah, and find inspiration in its depth, beauty, and brilliance, and to use this unique gift to bring healing, hope and health to our troubled world.

In Praise of Chutzpah

Sermon, Shabbat Vayigash 5784

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

I have a new favorite definition of chutzpah.  You know the classic definition of chutzpah, don’t you?  It’s the tale of the guy who kills his parents—and then throws himself on the mercy of the court because he’s now an orphan.  But I like this one better:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We owe our very existence to chutzpah.

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

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

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

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

Wait, Genocide of Jews is Wrong?

Sermon Shabbat Mikets 5784

Rabbi Samuel M. Cohon, Congregation Beit Simcha

Hanukkah is over now, which means that we can sit back and just nod our heads at all the crazy rushing around everyone is doing for their own holidays these last couple of weeks of December.  I mean, we did a whole lot of rushing around last week and the week before, so it’s a bit of a relief to relax and watch someone else rush around this week.

Now, I must make one more Hanukkah comment, this one about First Gentleman Doug Emhoff, husband of Vice President Kamala Harris, who is Jewish.  He posted a picture of himself lighting the Hanukkiah on social media with a remarkable version of the Hanukkah story below the photo.  In his telling, he said Hanukkah commemorated a time when the Jews had to hide from persecution for eight days and nights, and only had enough oil to last for a little while—but the oil lasted all eight days that they had to hide.  

Well… not exactly.  As every five year old Jewish kid knows, we Jews had to fight for our religious freedom, and when we recaptured the Temple in Jerusalem we only found enough oil to light the menorah for one day, but it lasted for eight days and nights instead.  Whether this is the way it really happened or not, that’s what everybody likes to believe about Hanukkah.

Except, perhaps, for the First Gentleman. 

You know, if you are going to screw up a Jewish story, this isn’t the one to mess up.  I mean, this is probably the best known and most told Jewish tale after the Exodus from Egypt.  I wonder where Doug Emhoff went to Hebrew School, and if he flunked out?

In any case, I hope everyone had a great Hanukkah.  Now, if you haven’t yet cleaned your Hanukkah menorahs yet, the best way to do so is to use very hot water to melt the wax, and then to dry them off thoroughly before you put them away.  Oh, and next year, in 2024, Hanukkah begins on December 25th… Only 373 more shopping days to go.

With Hanukkah now in our rear-view mirror, we are approaching the end of 2023, and I’m not sure just what to make of it all.  As a Jew and a rabbi, so much of what happened before October 7th has receded into memory, having been replaced by the sense of intense shock and ongoing crisis ever since that dark day.  Things don’t look at all the same now as they did before Hamas’ horrific attack and the atrocities they perpetrated.  The war that these Palestinian terrorists began that day has brought great destruction, including to the terrorists’ own Palestinian people, and it has catalyzed waves of antisemitic actions and attitudes that we mistakenly believed were no longer possible in 2023. 

Which brings me to this week’s Torah portion of Mikets.  At the beginning of this week’s portion Joseph lies in an Egyptian prison, having experienced a traumatic fall from favor, comfort and privilege into the depths of dark despair.  He is forced more than once to confront dramatically changed circumstances, and must find a way to rise from disaster and fear and find a new way to be.  Ultimately, Joseph does so in a remarkable way here in Mikets.  But the initial situation is so shocking, so intensely different than what he must have been expecting in life that it reminds me a little of our situation as American Jews in the aftermath of October 7th. 

Last week, finally, the president of Penn, Liz Magill, resigned under fire for her inability to condemn calls for Jewish genocide, as did the chair of the board of that Ivy League university.  Magill, along with the presidents of Harvard and MIT, were called to testify before Congress a couple of weeks ago about the tremendous level of Antisemitism on college campuses since the Hamas atrocities of October 7th, particularly antisemitic rallies and public statements by students and professors at those prominent universities.  None of the three presidents would agree that calls for the genocide of Jews was automatically to be considered hate speech. 

So far, only Penn’s Magill has resigned, as the boards and, to some degree, the alumni of the two Boston area elite universities have backed their presidents in spite of the moral blindness that prevents these individuals from seeing that calls for genocide of anyone are ethically indefensible.

If the student groups, and university professors, some of them tenured, who were quoted calling for Jewish genocide had instead demanded the genocide of, say, Greeks or Hutus or Guatemalans or aboriginal Australians or Muslims there is no doubt that university administrations would have fallen all over themselves to condemn them and expel the perpetrators of such hate speech.  Imagine what would have happened if Jewish student groups had called for the genocide of Palestinians! 

No, it is only acceptable in the name of free speech to call for the murder of Jews, and the genocide of Israelis and Jews everywhere in the world.  Otherwise, you can’t do it on American university campuses.  But demand the annihilation and mass murder of Jews?  Oh, that’s protected free speech.

Magill’s performance before Congress was egregiously embarrassing to anyone who believes in the moral standing of American universities as bastions of actual ideas.  But the other presidents called to Congress with her, including Harvard’s Claudine Gay, and Sally Kornbluth, M.I.T.’s president, also had trouble answering forthrightly.  For Kornbluth, who is Jewish, this is particularly ironic, isn’t it?

Harvard’s Gay wasn’t any better, really; when asked in Congress if calling for the genocide of Jews would violate Harvard’s code of conduct, Gay said it depended on the context, adding that when “speech crosses into conduct, that violates our policies.”  You can see why Rabbi David Wolpe resigned from Harvard’s advisory board on Antisemitism after Gay’s performance.

You know, it takes a lot for me to agree to with anything U.S. Representative Elise Stefanik says, since she is an election denier and a bomb-thrower in Congress, but I am actually forced to agree with her about Harvard and its president.

“There have been absolutely no updates to Harvard’s code of conduct to condemn the calls for genocide of Jews and protect Jewish students on campus,” she said.

Still, Gay is holding onto her job, so far.  But if you think that the codes of conduct at American universities have any connection with morality, you are deeply mistaken.  And US universities and colleges should not be the recipients of the huge donations that people have been giving them in the mistaken belief that they represent something meaningful.  They do not.  Donate to a synagogue instead, where values are actually taught and lived.

We return to a basic statement that simply cannot be lawyered or argued away: calling for genocide, the total annihilation and murder of an entire people, is morally indefensible.  It is wrong in such a profound way that no organization or institution or social media entity or government or court or rational human being can possibly pretend that it isn’t completely wrong. Pure and simple, it is hate speech, and should be banned.  For God’s sake, if you call for the genocide of anyone you should be banned and in many countries you would be arrested and charged with a crime.  Any Jews who call for the genocide of Palestinians should be locked up, in my opinion, either here or in Israel.  But no one is calling for the genocide of Palestinians.  Instead, on campuses all across the country and all across the world, they are calling for genocide of Jews.

To shout for the murder of all Jews in the world less than 80 years after it was attempted by one of the most powerful nations on earth in a campaign of Holocaust horrors during which 6 million people were murdered, a third of all Jews then alive and more than half of all the Jews of Europe—in a post-Holocaust world to call for genocide is a disgusting level of evil that the presidents of some of the most prestigious universities in America cannot recognize. And to pretend that it cannot quickly metastasize from words to violence is to deny all the evidence of history—including the last two months when we have seen antisemitic violence spike in the United States. 

Look, this is a shocking and terrible time.  There have been rallies to boycott Jewish businesses in Philadelphia and New York. There have been physical attacks on Jewish students and on older Jews, too, some fatal, in the name of solidarity with Hamas’ Palestinian terrorists.  But we must expect—indeed, demand—better of our hugely expensive and publicly funded university communities.  This is egregious immorality dressed up as academia.  It needs to change, and the sooner and more dramatically the better.

This requires some re-thinking on our parts.  In Mikets, Joseph rose from personal devastation to great heights indeed.  He did so through talent and intelligence, by remaining true to his ideals, through his faith in God.  But he also did so by growing and changing, maturing, becoming fully aware of the people around him and the situations he lived in. 

We 2023 Jews need to do the same, and we need to respond to the changed circumstances in which we are now living.

As we approach the end of this strange and strained secular year, may we ultimately triumph not only over those who seek our destruction, but over those who allow them to flourish through their own moral blindness.

The Practical Power of Dreams: Hanukkah and Joseph

Sermon, Shabbat Vayeshev 5784, December 8, 2023

Rabbi Samuel M. Cohon

I don’t know how many of you spend time viewing the Hanukkah videos that are popular on YouTube.  This is not exactly a noble pursuit, but it is a highly entertaining one.  My favorite this year is the a capella group Six13’s Taylor Swift send-up—you know, Time Magazine’s person of the year—using her biggest hits reimagined as Hanukkah songs.  There are many of these every year—who can forget Hamilton star Daveed Diggs’ song a couple of years ago, “A Puppy for Hanukkah”—if you haven’t seen it, you should, since Daveed Diggs is Jewish and his Hebrew on the blessings is impeccable.  And then there was James Corden’s boy-band version of a Hanukkah song with, among others, Zach Braff and Charlie Puth, called “Boys to Menorah.”  For obvious reasons, there were a lot of Taylor Swift parodies this year… 

One group, the Maccabeats, took its original identity from its Hanukkah parodies.  Most of these music videos, while silly, capture the essence of the Hanukkah story, the victory of the few over the many, the ability to rise in revolution against an oppressor who denies us liberty to be who we really are. 

And the truth is that these parodies also capture the nature of our own contemporary struggle against assimilation, the tendency we have to get swallowed up into a larger culture that doesn’t necessarily understand or accept other views or beliefs.  If anything, American society at this time of year, when we are supposed to be sharing goodwill towards one another, tends towards a monolithic approach to popular and religious culture.  But we Jews have always been something different, a unique culture, and belief system, a people who believe in one God and the greater mission we have to further justice in this world.  We confirm that uniqueness through our ethics, our texts, our prayers, our rituals, our music.  It is a kind of sacred dream in which we have persisted for 3800 years.

This Shabbat we begin reading the great story of Joseph in the Torah and, of course, continue to celebrate Hanukkah.  In a beautiful and meaningful way these stories connect.  They are all about exploring unlimited potential—or really, seeking to fulfill your dreams, in a pragmatic way.

Of course, in the festival of Hanukkah commemorates the victory of the Jews over their Syrian Greek overlords who wished to destroy their religious and political freedom, we remember another time when practical dreaming overcame huge obstacles.  Nearly 2200 years ago a small group of dreamers insisted that their religious freedom mattered more to them than life itself, and that they would fight and struggle and work to overcome seemingly impossible odds to claim it.  And their victory—not easily, but over years of fighting and working and, yes, dreaming—meant that today we can celebrate that freedom by praying and living as we wish.  Without the events that Hanukkah commemorates there would be no Judaism today—nor any Christianity nor Islam for that matter, nor Western Civilization as we know it.  The Maccabees dreamed of freedom and fought to achieve it for all of us.    

And, much earlier in history, in this week’s Torah portion dreams also play a central role.  Our Biblical ancestor Joseph dreamed of personal greatness, but through tribulations he learned that dreams are only achieved through work and struggle.  And so, he came to interpret others’ dreams, and eventually to act on them in pragmatic ways.  His actions eventually reunified his family and brought him back together with his father and brothers: a personal dream that became the genesis of our entire people.

To me, Judaism is pragmatic idealism, practical dreaming.  In much more contemporary times, the Zionists of the 19th and 20th century imagined Jews returning home to Israel and building a nation of our own.  It was a wild dream too; but as Theodore Herzl, the founder of modern Zionism, said, “Im tirtzu ein zo Agadah—if you will it, it is no dream.”  And they created a vibrant nation that flourishes today, out of their own dreams and a great deal of extremely hard work. 

Now, when the only Jewish nation on the globe is at war against truly evil enemies who seek its total destruction, we can see how fragile that dream can be and how much care and dedication, Hanukah, it requires to preserve it.  That tiny geographical place that magnetically draws so much of the world’s negative attention, much of it focused on finding ways to assist in its destruction.  It takes a belief in that dream, and its realization, to preserve and protect it in this time of peril.

My friends, to make any dream come true you must always work in practical ways to make it become real.  That certainly has been true of our own dream here at Congregation Beit Simcha, whose 5th Anniversary we celebrate Sunday night, and it is true for every dreamer who seeks to change the world for the better—even to change just a small portion of the world.  Dreams alone don’t get it done.  But of course, if there is no dream in the first place nothing ever changes, and we never improve the world.

I think it is particularly important for young people to realize that it is their dreams, and their own ability to hold onto those dreams, that will drive the future of this society and our world.

This has been a frightening and threatening period for Jews.  Five years ago, we saw synagogues brutally shot up in Pittsburgh and then San Diego.  Three years ago a New Jersey kosher market was shot up.  But it is this year when an explosion of Antisemitism has seen groups chanting for Jewish genocide—in rhyme—on UCLA’s campus, and complete breakdown of moral standing by the presidents of Ivy League universities, who this week in Congressional testimony were unable to say that calling for the genocide of Jews was hate speech or unethical.

For years now Anti-Semitic rhetoric has cascaded on the right and the left, but since October 7th it has particularly flourished on the political left.  It is a disturbing time for our people in this incredible land of Jewish opportunity, this golden country that America has been for our people nearly since its founding.  The dream has had some overtones of nightmare lately, hasn’t it?

There have been a number of stories about Jews who normally wear them in public choosing to remove their kipot, their yarmulkes, of younger Jews hiding their Chai pendants or mezuzahs under clothing.  While understandable, this is not the right way to act.

Thirty years ago I served a small synagogue in Billings, Montana as its student rabbi.  There were antisemitic acts taken against that community, concrete blocks thrown through windows decorated for Hanukkah, hostile leaflets circulated.  The community was divided in how to respond. 

But the Christian and secular communities were not.  They came out strongly in support of their Jewish neighbors, putting up Hanukkah decorations in their own homes, rallying against hate.  I will never forget the advice I got from an older rabbi when I discussed how some Jews wanted to duck and let the wave of antisemitism pass, to avoid the publicity from the amazing non-Jewish community’s response.  He laughed: you can’t hide, he said.  And we chose—most of us—to join with those who supported us in acts of public affirmation of our Judaism and rejecting the hate that was directed towards us.  It certainly worked there in Montana, a place with few Jews but a great respect for religious freedom, for freedom in general.

At times when religious freedom, our right to live openly and proudly as Jews, has been assailed, the best response to such times is not to shrink or hide, nor is it to abandon our dreams.  In fact, the opposite is true.

This kind of challenge emphasizes the fact that it is especially true that at times of darkness it is crucial to believe in the power of dreams.  Without our Jewish ability to dream beyond the obvious, to believe in greater and higher ideals and better realities than the present ones, we would never have survived to carry on our mission.

The great poet Saul Tchernikovsky wrote a poem 125 years ago that he called his creed: it is called Sachki sachki al hachlomot, laugh, laugh at my dreams:

Laugh, laugh at all my dreams!

What I dream shall yet come true!

Laugh at my belief in humanity,

At my belief in you.

Freedom still my soul demands,

Unbartered for a calf of gold.

For still I do believe in humanity,

And in human spirit, strong and bold.

And in the future, I still believe

Though it be distant, come it will

When nations shall each other bless,

And peace at last the earth shall fill.

The reality is that we need to remember always to dream of how things can be, and we must work to achieve those dreams.  For when we do so we have the capacity to fulfill all the unlimited potential that God has implanted within us.  We can achieve truly great things, and make this a better, more just, freer, holier world.

Holding fast to our dreams gives us the strength to move beyond our fears, to embrace our proud heritage and seek to help it grow and flourish, to spread its ideals of justice, decency, faith, courage and good to the world.  This is particularly true at this time of year.  Like our patriarch Joseph, like our ancestors, the Maccabees, like the founders of the State of Israel, we have a responsibility to live up to our dreams and continue to work to make them real in this society, and in all societies in this world.

May this be God’s will, and especially, may it be ours.