Some thoughts on Tisha B’Av this year

Tisha B'Av, the 9th of Av, is a day dedicated to the remembrance of great tragedies in our people's long history.  Today we recall the destruction of the First Temple in 586 BCE on this date, and of the Second Temple in 70 CE, the catastrophic annihilation of our nation and our great city of Jerusalem, also on Tisha B'Av.  It was the last of these that ended 1000 years of Jewish sovereignty in Israel.  

Today we recall as well the fall of Beitar in 135 CE on Tisha B'Av, bringing a disastrous end to the Bar Cochba revolt, the final great, failed effort to recover Jewish freedom and independence.  The Jews of England were expelled in a royal writ issued on Tisha B'Av 1290.  The expulsion of the Jews of Spain in 1492, destroying a great Jewish civilization that had flourished for hundreds of years, was timed to coincide with Tisha B'Av, to add misery to misery.  

In the aftermath of the Shoah in the 20th century, the rabbis initially recommended remembering the dead of the terrible Holocaust on Tisha B'Av.  But the Jewish people demanded a unique day of remembrance, which became Yom HaShoah, and is now additionally reflected in International Holocaust Remembrance Day.  

In this 5784 year of tragedy for the Jewish people, when October 7th brought so much horror and suffering, we also remember the 1200 Israelis, Americans, and the dead of many other nations slaughtered by an enemy no less merciless or brutal than our previous tormentors.  

What is different about the tragedy of October 7th and the many previous disasters in Jewish history, inflicted by enemies that despise us because we are Jews?  Perhaps only this: that today we have a Jewish nation, Israel, strong enough to defend itself, able to prevent atrocities from turning into ultimate collapse, destruction or exile from our land.

Today we acknowledge the dark history of our past, and our recent suffering, too.  But there is so much more to our religion, people, and nation: Judaism is an incredible, life-affirming faith, filled with joy, warmth, creativity, brilliance and enchantment.  Even in Aycha, the Book of Lamentations we chanted last night, there are moments of hope.  Hatikvah--the millenia-old hope of a people for our own, precious land.

On this day of memory, may we also, always, embrace that hope.

For the Love of Learning

Sermon, Shabbat Devarim-Hazon 5784

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

This Shabbat we start chanting the final book of the Torah, Devarim, Deuteronomy.  The traditional name of this book is Mishnah Torah, which means “the repetition of the Torah,” reflecting the fact that Deuteronomy consists of three long speeches by Moses recapitulating everything that happened in the last three books.  If there is nothing new under the sun, as Ecclesiastes teaches, there is definitely nothing new in Devarim.  The English name, Deuteronomy, is taken from the Greek and means something similar to the Jewish nickname for this book, Mishnah Torah; Deutero Nomos, “Repeated Law” or “Second Law.”  That doesn’t sound very entertaining, does it?

And yet the book itself turns out to be gripping reading, compelling and interesting in ways that other parts of the Torah aren’t always.  Devarim is filled with new insights, moral and inspirational highlights that are powerful, motivating and elevating.  And Deuteronomy is also rich in pathos, with its ongoing theme of Moses’ God-decreed inability to enter the Promised Land. 

The style of the Hebrew used in Deuteronomy is also notable.  It is sharper, more precise, fresher in its use of language than any other book of the Torah.  It is perhaps the most immediately quotable book the Torah if not the entire Tanakh, the Bible.  The Shma is here in Deuteronomy, and the Ve’ahavta, and the Ten Commandments are repeated here, but there are also such phrases as Tzedek Tzedek Tirdof, “justice, justice you must pursue” and uvacharta Chayim, “I set before you today life and death, blessing and curse, choose life!,” and “man does not live by bread alone” and so many other classic statements of Jewish belief and wisdom.  It’s great, from the concise history of the Israelites listed in this week’s portion all the way through to the end of Devarim and the dramatic death of Moses.

Perhaps what makes Deuteronomy a favorite book for rabbis is that it represents the concept of “Torah” in its literal meaning, teaching, the most completely so of any of the five books.  I mean, Moses is supposed to be standing up there telling all of this to the Children of Israel, instructing them in how to live lives of goodness and blessing, how to truly serve God and the people of Israel.  And as for the idea of teaching; well, by golly, that’s what we rabbis do for goodness sakes; teacher is really what the word rabbi means.  It is here in Deuteronomy that Moses earns the title Moshe Rabbeinu, Moses our teacher, our rabbi, most fully.  Not bad for a guy with a speech impediment.

Now we know that the Book of Deuteronomy almost certainly dates from the 7th century BCE, over 500 years after Moses has died.  The Bible, in the book of 2nd Kings, tells us it that Devarim was “discovered” when King Josiah of Judah had the priests renovate and cleanse the Temple, and while they are cleaning up they open a chest or cabinet and “find” this amazing book.  They bring it to the king, he is overwhelmed at its power and beauty, and has it read aloud to the whole people.  It was at that point, perhaps, that the public reading of Torah was first instituted.  It’s a great story, and it’s even in the Tanakh, the Hebrew Bible itself, not just in a midrash created long after the fact. 

Most scholars believe that the Book of Deuteronomy was actually written at that time, not just rediscovered, as part of the good king’s efforts at religious reform and return to the belief in the one true God.  But it doesn’t really matter whether this was a pious retelling of the wilderness history of the Israelites written by King Josiah’s scribes, or is the original text created in the time of Moses; Devarim is a brilliant piece of educational material, a great, gripping explanation of Judaism’s highest values and wisdom.  It’s a fantastic educational text. 

And that gets us back to rabbis, and teaching.

There is an ancient Jewish joke from the days when the Rothschild family was the standard for wealth in the world.  The Rothschilds were the Warren Buffets, the Bill Gates, the Jeff Bezos’, the Elon Musks of the world for 200 years.  The joke goes like this: a man says to his friend, “If I were Rothschild, I’d be richer than Rothschild.”  And his friend says, “Richer than Rothschild?  How would you be richer than Rothschild?”  And he answers, “Because I’d do a little teaching on the side.”

I have a close friend, Alan, going all the way back to high school, who refers to my need to teach Judaism as an “addiction.”  Of course, the very word “rabbi” means, essentially, teacher, so there is something appropriate about that addiction, I suppose.  I do like almost everything about the process of teaching people Jewish subjects, seeing understanding and knowledge grow and develop.  That motivation—maybe it is a compulsion—is true in every area of Jewish learning, at nearly every level.  From watching a pre-school child learn to sing the Shma for the first time to discussing complex theological issues with sophisticated adults to exploring obscure mystical texts in community, I find the process of Jewish learning beautiful and fulfilling nearly always.  That’s true of my Too Jewish Radio Show as well, where we strive to entertain but also educate, and where I have had the opportunity to talk with so many brilliant Jews over the years about important and challenging subjetcs. 

Now, in my weekly role here at Beit Simcha I typically teach five or so different ongoing Adult Education Academy classes on various subjects, and at times I have taught as many as seven or eight.  The weekly adult classes range from Torah to history to Kabbalah mysticism Torah reading to Hebrew.  Of course, I also teach bar and bat mitzvah students, Confirmation students, and Hebrew school students.  But it is in adult teaching that I get to explore new areas and express things most fully.

Typically, during the summer I have taken a break from some aspects of my day job as a congregational rabbi to recharge my intellectual batteries and deepen knowledge of various aspects of Judaism and, well, anything interesting.  That means that for, say, the month of July I often don’t teach adult classes much.  But this summer I didn’t really take that break.  Our Religious School was off for the past couple of months, so there was less instruction of kids, but I ended up teaching a full Adult Education Academy schedule over the summer, and even added some classes.  And next Wednesday I’ll start teaching a 3-part class on The History of Zionism at the JCC.

It made for a different summer experience, of course, but it also reinforced my strongly motivated love of Jewish teaching.  There is something magical about the alchemical process of learning along with your students, and even when it is hot and you are tired, an incredible Jewish concept can leap off the page—or out of your Kindle or laptop—and fire your spiritual imagination. 

There is one exception to this personal rule of mine, the love of all Jewish learning, and that exception is near-heretical: I don’t really like learning or teaching Talmud very much.  That is a painful confession for a rabbi, hopefully not a truly terrible one, or a disqualification. 

Now Talmud—by which we generally mean the Babylonian Talmud, which was completed in today’s Iraq by great Jewish scholars over 1500 years ago—is the preeminent text of all Jewish learning.  It is the authoritative source for Jewish law, Halakha, and the greatest compendium of Jewish legal and legendary information ever assembled.  For Orthodox Jews Jewish learning and Talmud are nearly synonymous, and there are many people of every Jewish stream of religious observance and non-observance all around the world who begin each day by studying a Daf Yomi, a page—actually, it’s two pages—of Talmud every morning.  That includes my 98-year-old father and my own wife, among many others of all ages. 

I have studied a good amount of Talmud in my life: the entire tractates of Brachot, Blessings, and Sanhedrin, which deals primarily with capital offenses, as well as Kiddushin, about weddings, and lots of sections of tractates—that is, book-length discussions—on all the many holidays, on commercial transactions, and many other subjects.  I know some Aramaic, understand Talmudic reasoning, have explored some of the many commentaries on the Talmud—Rashi, of course, and others—and always got top grades in seminary classes on Talmud; I even won the Talmud award there.  I have studied Talmud in ultra-Orthodox yeshivas in Jerusalem and at Chabad synagogues in California and at Reform movement study conferences and with Conservative rabbis, in chevrutah, and online, and in groups and so on. 

But I have come to a conclusion: I just don’t enjoy studying Talmud, nor do I find it nearly as fulfilling as digging deeper into the Tanakh, the Hebrew Bible, or exploring Zohar, greatest text of Jewish mysticism, or reading Jewish philosophy or novels or learning more Jewish history.  When studying Talmud the same thing always happens to me: I start out engaged and interested, exploring the text and the various winding ways of its arguments and many detours, its associative logic that leads it farther and farther afield.  And then, every single time, after about 40 minutes, I find my mind has completely wandered away and I just can’t force it back home to the page of Talmud.   

Now, I also don’t want to read or study American legal codes or cases, which is why it’s good I never became yet another Jewish lawyer.

I’m quite sure this Talmudic aversion is simply a failing of mine that will be rectified in the world to come.  But until the Messiah arrives and that occurs, I will continue to love studying and teaching almost every aspect of Jewish learning, from Bible to liturgy to commentaries to music to poetry to archeology.  And I will quote Talmud where required and explain it as needed and respect Talmudic scholars and teachers and students, may God bless them all and extend their lives in health. 

Now, this anti-Talmudic confession reminds me that I never tire of studying Torah, especially a book like Deuteronomy.  Because at its heart, Devarim, after our introductory section this week, teaches us remarkable life lessons, and holds exceptional moral truths.  Are there also sections that seem outmoded and archaic?  They become grist for the intellectual mill, a way to see how our ancestors, living in a different time struggled with complex ideas and situations that we address in varying ways today.

I’m reminded of a concept in Judaism that teaches us that we should learn a little each day.  Our morning prayers are structured in such a way that early on they include a passage from Torah, another from Mishnah, and third from Gemarah so that we can fulfill this mitzvah of daily Jewish study almost automatically. 

If there is one great lesson to take from Devarim, it is that the process of Jewish learning is a beautiful opportunity to keep our minds fresh, our hearts open, and our wisdom growing every day of our lives. Perhaps then, like Moses, we will be able in the fullness of our lives to continue to learn, and teach, and direct ourselves and others to the holiness that God seeks for us in this world.

Retribution or Revenge?

Sermon Shabbat Matot-Masei 5784

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

There are wonderful midrashim, rabbinic legends, that investigate just which is the most important ethical value of Judaism. Some rabbis insist it is love, ahavah, as exemplified by the ideal of divine love, the gracious gifting of which we celebrate in our appreciation of God’s flow of life and energy to the world.  Our share in this ideal is to love God, and to reciprocate God’s gift to us.  Other rabbis insist that the greatest value is compassion, the kindness symbolized in Jewish mysticism by the sefirah of chesed, the emanation of generous care given to us, which we reflect not only by loving our fellow human beings but by having compassion on all living things, and even our precious earth itself.  Compassion, they insist, is the greatest of all motivations. 

But other rabbis insist that the supreme ethical teaching, the highest of the moral high grounds in Judaism, is our insistence on justice, Tzedek.  We are taught in Deuteronomy, Tzedek Tzedek tirdof, you must pursue justice fully.  And throughout the Torah we are reminded repeatedly that we must constantly seek to create a just world, to administer justice impartially, to show no favoritism to the rich and powerful but also to show no favoritism to the weak and underprivileged.  According to these sages, only a society based on a foundation of true justice has any claim to receiving the benefits of God’s compassion, or God’s love.

I think that I would agree with this final group of scholars, particularly insofar as the Torah is concerned, for justice is clearly the central ideal of our greatest text, and how it is to be applied and administered are a major preoccupation of Judaism throughout history.  Justice underlies everything good in this world.

Of course, love is powerful and beautiful; compassion and empathy influence so much of what is best about humanity.  Still, life is more than a Hallmark card or a happy emoji: it requires a foundation of equity and justice to rely upon, or those fine feelings eventually evaporate.  Love and compassion without justice and fairness are bound to end in disappointment, at best, and disaster, at worst. 

As Bob Marley famously sang, “No justice, no peace.”  It is even more than that; for without justice the very foundations of the world are undermined. 

Of course, there must always be a balance between justice and compassion, and that is reflected throughout Jewish tradition.  We understand that we are subject both to the justice of judgment on our own actions and attitudes, and we seek forgiveness and compassion without which we couldn’t flourish in this world.

Still, the bias of Judaism, and the Torah, lean towards justice.

Here in Matot-Masei, the final chapters of Numbers two major aspects of justice are explored, one related to preventing miscarriages of justice and the other to administering retributive justice.  Both relate to the question of revenge, although in quite different ways.  And both illuminate the complex and challenging issue that revenge presents for systems that seek to establish justice, and to create a just world.

The easier aspect explored in our portions involves the creation of the remarkable institution of the cities of refuge.  These were established in a world in which justice was often administered privately; rudimentary public systems for trying and punishing crimes were far from adequate to deal with the problems that occurred in our ancestor’s societies.  An accidental killing could lead to a revenge killing by family members of the original victim.  That could easily begin a cycle of slaughter that would never end.  These kinds of feuds existed not only in antiquity, but throughout history, and still remain a problem in some societies today.  The disastrous feuds of the Hatfields and McCoys of American history and Mark Twain’s literary parallel in Huckleberry Finn, were real in many parts of the world.  They remain an issue in tribal societies today—and among gangs in American and European cities, too. 

Revenge killings are often the “solution” when people die, whether or not the death was intentional.  Only a strong criminal justice system can prevent an accidental manslaughter from being treated as first degree murder.

The cities of refuge were created to prevent someone accidentally involved in a death, or accused of a killing, from becoming a victim before a reasonable trial could be conducted.  It was a powerful effort to insist that justice, not revenge, take precedence, that the moral warrant for the authority of society lay in its ability not only to be certain that real crimes were punished, but that the innocent or the inadvertent were not to be so punished.  Justice, not revenge, was the goal, always.  If revenge killings began, they had to be ended through the administration of justice by the leadership of the people.

Now the second issue and, as Chuck has told you, the more troubling example of retributive justice in our portion is the command, given by God here through Moses, to take revenge on the Moabites and Midianites.  Leaving aside the bloodthirsty flavor of this section—by the way, there is no archeological evidence that such a destruction was ever carried out, and the Moabites and Midianites live on a long time after their supposed destruction here—let’s examine the motivation behind this brutal order.

The Israelites were, in the telling of this tale, fighting a war with Moab and perhaps Midian.  They had offered to pass through the land of Moab peacefully, touching nothing, solely desiring to enter the Promised Land.  The King of Moab instead declared war on them and sought to destroy Israel by a variety of quite devious means.  Those means—including ritual seduction, sorcery and perhaps infecting the Israelites with plague through a primitive kind of biological warfare, and of course battlefield attacks—all failed.  That failure left both himself and his people at the mercy of the triumphant Israelites.  And they took revenge. 

Again, I must stress that this text must be taken with a large grain of salt, a heaping dose of skepticism, if you will.  If all the Moabites were killed and their young daughters taken as slaves, the Moabite nation would have disappeared.  It did not, existing for centuries afterwards; in fact, King David, who lived 250 years later, was descended from a Moabite woman.  The Midianites, too, seem to hang around for a very long time after their supposed annihilation.

But the larger question of whether retributive justice in warfare is a necessity or not is not without its contemporary parallels.  According to the Torah, Moab sought to annihilate the Israelites, destroying them.  That effort could not simply be ignored.  It had to be both addressed among the Israelites so corrupted—that was last week’s portion, and the week before—and by removing the danger posed by such treacherous and evil enemies.

Judaism is always a form of pragmatic idealism.  It seeks, in an imperfect world, to improve matters, to move us closer to ethical goals and moral ideals, always understanding our innate humanity and our limitations.

So how does this apply today?

Last week we learned that the State of Israel had very likely killed—some use the term assassinated—three men.  Two were Hamas leaders, terrorists who planned and executed the atrocities of October 7th, and who rejoiced in the death and destruction and captivities it caused.  One was a Hezbollah commander who had directed the attack last week on a soccer field, murdering 12 children playing sports and maiming 50 more. 

Was this a revenge killing?  Or was this also a form of retributive justice?

It is a hard question, but of course these are hard times.  Israel has been at war with Hamas since October 7th.  It has been in a desultory sort of war with Hezbollah since around that time as well.  It has long stated its priority in this war to execute those who planned and carried out the brutalities of October 7th.

Taking out the leaders doesn’t end the war, of course.  But it was a priority of Israel’s leadership to remove the people who planned October 7th, and they have now done so.

There is no joy in this event; justice is not always something to celebrate.  But we should be clear that such acts, directed at the ones responsible rather than as a form of collective punishment, are an attempt to reassert justice in an unjust region, and of course an unjust world.  Iran will rattle its weaponry again, and claim that it must take action; but the truth is that at some point this sequence must end. 

Judaism does seek retributive justice.  But it precludes revenge.  In these complex days, may we see a return to a time when justice prevails and we can again embrace those beautiful values of compassion and love more fully.

A Disney Movie in the Book of Numbers

Rabbi Samuel M. Cohon’s Sermon on Balak 5784

What does it mean when a Disney movie breaks out in the middle of the Torah?

Sefer Bamidbar, the Book of Numbers, begins with Torah portions that narrate various rebellions against the authority of the leaders of the people of Israel, Moses and Aaron.  These rebellions won’t end until the Israelites finally arrive at the very entrance to the Holy Land, Erets Yisrael, and I know this will shock you, but they continue even when we get to the Promised Land and take up residence there.  We are a fractious people, prone to arguments about everything, and according to Bamidbar we always were like that.  This whole book has mostly been a list of troubles we created for ourselves.

But then, suddenly, this week in the sedrah of Balak, in the midst of this litany of self-generated tzoris, we have a text so unusual the rabbis call it Sefer Bilam, “the Book of Balaam” as though it were a separate entity unrelated to the rest of Numbers, an extra book inserted into the middle of the Torah.  The Book of Balaam tells a very different sort of narrative, the tale of a pagan prophet hired by an enemy king who is supposed to curse the people of Israel but instead ends up blessing them on three separate occasions. 

The Book of Balaam is the kind of magical fable that Walt Disney would love.  It includes a jealous king, a brilliant pagan sorcerer, a talking donkey, gold treasure, reversals of fate, and three separate songs not yet composed for the animated screen by Alan Menken, or even by Lin Manuel Miranda.  All that’s missing is a pretty teenage girl heroine in need of rescue and you would have Frozen in the Middle East, or an early Canaanite version of Aladdin.  We could call it Maleficent in Moab or The Sorcerer’s Apostasy or even Encurso. 

Or, if you upgraded the rating of this portion of Balak to PG-17 and included the scenes of sexual license and extreme violence with the Midianite sacred prostitutes (priestesses) at the end of the parshah, you’d have a good episode of Game of Thrones or House of the Dragon.  So just what is this crazy story doing in the Torah?

To recap, the actual tale we tell is that King Balak of Moab is terrified of the rising power of the invading Children of Israel.  He tries to hire the pagan prophet Balaam to curse the people of Israel, to cast an evil Voldermort-style spell on them to block their impending conquest of Moab.  Balaam agrees to do this for a very high price, more even than Shohei Ohtani is making with the Dodgers this year, accounting for inflation, but Balaam inserts a codicil in the contract: he insists he will only use the words God gives him.  Balak’s minions OK the deal, and Balaam sets out.

On the way to his new gig cursing the Israelites, Balaam’s own she-ass, his donkey, sees an angel with a flaming sword blocking the path, and forces Balaam to see it, too, by squashing his foot against a wall.  Balaam beats the donkey, which very unexpectedly objects out loud and begins, well, speaking to him.  In keeping with cartoon standards, the donkey ends up sounding like a Jewish mother: “Haven’t I always carried you everywhere?  When have I ever, ever failed to be there for you?  Is one Nobel Prize too much to ask after all I’ve done for you?”  And so on.  Actually, the donkey doesn’t really say that last line, but you get the idea: the donkey can see the angel with the flaming sword, while Balaam cannot.  The prophet, the great seer, is blind to a reality his own ass can easily recognize.  In effect, any old ass can see what the professional visionary can’t.

Now, about this talking donkey: as far as I can recall, the last animal in the Bible who spoke actual words to a human being was the serpent in the Garden of Eden who chatted up Eve.  If you recall, that didn’t end at all well, so Balaam now decides he’d better pay attention and behave, especially when the angel with the flaming sword tells him not to do or say anything God doesn’t specifically command.  It’s all very Disney, dramatic and slightly ridiculous, and at the end the angel, of course, disappears, poof. 

When Balaam arrives in Moab and meets the King—can’t you just picture the catchy little song as he arrives in the camp?  “Be our guest, be our guest, come please curse those Jewish pests”— and Balaam is led by Balak to his job cursing the Israelites, and taken to a high place to look down at their spreading population.  Balaam reaches down into his bag of sorcery tricks, pulls out his oracle bones and casts lots and does his mumbo-jumbo routine, and then to his own surprise finds that he is unable to curse Israel, and can only bless them.  He tries hard to do his worst but delivers instead a positive poem of praise to the Israelites.  Balaam is clearly under the kind of spell worthy of any magical fable, and the words that come out of his mouth are not hatred and curses, but blessings and generosity.

King Balak, his employer, is furious, and he tries to get Balaam to change his perspective on the matter.  The king moves this sorcerer around to different vantage points, but Balaam can only spout more and more fulsome blessings for Israel.  It’s an animated musical for sure by this time: Not one, not two, but three separate tunes about how great Israel is come pouring out of his eloquent mouth.  The third time is really the charm.  His final poem begins Ma Tovu Ohalecha Ya’akov mishkenotecha Yisrael, “How good are your tents Jacob, your dwellings Israel!” and that becomes the beginning of our morning services and the phrase we are supposed to say every time we enter a synagogue.  And it is created by a pagan sorcerer trying to summon up a curse. 

And so, Balaam ends up blessing the people of Israel in triplicate, seeing them—us—in all the Israelites’ beauty and integrity and talent and success, understanding that God has blessed them and will continue to bless them, appreciating the holiness of their covenant with God. 

After this climactic, theatrical moment the narrative follows a predictable path.  Soon after this cursing debacle Balak goes to war against the Israelites anyway, and is badly defeated by them.  Balaam goes back home, riding the same donkey off into the sunset, and everyone, or at least the Israelites, lives happily ever after in the Promised Land.  And then, having experienced this happy fairy tale, we can all sing one of those diabetically sugary infectious Disney tunes on the way out of the theater… “The Israelites, they are truly grand, the Israelites have a Promised Land, the sky’s blue and sunny, there is milk, there is honey, it’s a Jewish, Jewish land.”  You get the idea.

We have all been enjoying the wonderful world of Balaam, if you will.

Only that’s not how this story finishes.  After all, the world is not actually a Disney movie, or even a Dreamworks one, and happily-ever-afters are scarce in Jewish history.  Mind you, this is still the same people of Israel who constantly failed to follow God and practice Judaism, who consistently rebelled against Moses and Aaron.  Nearly every week in Numbers they will continue to walk a tightrope bordering on complete disaster, bouncing chaotically from crisis to crisis, from kvetching to slander to rebellion to full-on revolution to pagan apostasy to sex scandals.  The people of Israel, the Wandering Jews of Numbers, are more like a bad reality TV show than a powerful, growing nation coming into its own.  They are trouble, a grease fire just waiting to spread, the Kardashians in Canaan. 

Yet while Moses and Aaron have been pedaling full speed just to keep this group traveling in the same general direction, Balaam has been singing Israel’s praises in operatic hyperbole.  In spite of the political and social reality on the inside, to an outsider these Jews look spectacular.  There is a lesson here, and it is one that we Jews need to be reminded of today: our self-perception is often not in harmony with the way others see us.  Although we are used to viewing ourselves as the disputatious, argumentative, stiff-necked people we know that we truly are on the inside, the outside world sees us quite differently. 

Jews are viewed by others today as successful, highly educated, talented, and part of an influential peoplehood.  The big complaint is that nowadays the “Jewish Lobby” has too much influence.  We have made it every area of economic, artistic and social endeavor.  It’s not that we are all rich; we aren’t.  It’s that we have risen from the abject poverty and persecution of our early days as immigrants to become an extraordinary success story, here in America and around the world.  Only our own vision of ourselves is blinded by some odd sort of lingering spell; we can’t really see ourselves for what we truly are.

Even the Anti-Semites, and they have been coming out of the sewers in far greater profusion recently than in quite a long time, are influenced by some weird sorcery, a kind of perverse alchemy.  They genuinely believe we Jews are so powerful that we control the economy and the press and social media and the government and the banks and Hollywood—well, OK, we do control Hollywood; still, their websites and conspiracy theories are a kind of updated version of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.   

And yet we ourselves spend so much time on infighting, and on agonizing over how we are supposedly disappearing, failing.  To the outsiders we look great.  To ourselves?  We still look like, well, shlemiels.

The truth is that we Jews, and our Jewish communities, have incredible strengths and remarkable resources.  We are truly blessed—in Balaam’s words, how good are our homes, how beautiful our dwellings.  But we often have trouble seeing that, like the prophet whose donkey has better vision than he does.

All that’s really required of us American Jews today, is commitment to our religion and our practice, and some hope and optimism—or perhaps it’s just realism.  If we can have the courage of our accomplishments, our synagogue and our Jewish community will expand and grow and flourish, as Balaam predicted all those centuries ago.  We don’t need to agonize about our place in American society as loyal citizens.  We just need to be proud of our Jewish identities, and active as religious, committed, liberal Jews.

On this Shabbat of Balaam’s praise of Israel may we come to appreciate all we have, all we already are, and all that our amazing tradition offers us.  And may we then come to embrace our own Judaism and our community, and live fully, proudly, and cooperatively, as Jews.

French Rights

Sermon Shabbat Chukat 5784

Rabbi Sam Cohon, Congregation Beit Simcha, Tucson, AZ

We had a genuine monsoon yesterday, which was refreshing, although today was back to 108 degrees.  That’s toasty—it’s a dry heat, but so is an oven.  It’s midsummer now in the Sonoran Desert, so it’s supposed to be this hot, more or less.  The fact that most of this country is experiencing super-hot weather now is small consolation, to be honest…

This being more or less midsummer also means that this Sunday will be Bastille Day, July 14th, the national independence day for France. And wouldn’t it be nice to be vacationing in France right now? 

So, close your eyes and think for a moment, about France… the Champs d’Elysee, the Arc de Triomphe, the bridges over the Seine, the Eiffel Tower, wine, cheese, croissants with jam and coffee, great food, great art, lovely countryside, bicycle riders, the tricolor flag, beautiful cities, and very rude people.  You know, France, far from the heat of a Western summer… a good place to be going, in time for Bastille Day.  And, this summer, it also has the Olympics.  And in spite of what everyone thought initially was going to happen, the fascist party founded by the antisemite Jean Marie Le Pen did not end up winning the recent election in France.

And you ask—Rabbi, just what possible Jewish meaning can this rhapsody about France have? 

Aha, I say—you may not know this, but the first nation in the old world to guarantee full citizenship to Jews was revolutionary France, and without the French Revolution of 1789 Jewish history in Europe would have been very different.  We are very grateful to our own country of America, whose 4th of July we celebrated last week; but we should retain respect for the country that created the first universal declaration of human rights, and which benefited our people in particular. 

My favorite weird historical question that most people don’t get is this: who broke down the walls of the ghettos in Europe, walls that had existed since the 1500’s?  Who emancipated the Jews of Western Europe?

And the answer is Napoleon Bonaparte.

You see, when Napoleon was conquering Europe in the 1790’s and early 1800’s his armies were fighting, at least in theory, for liberty, egality, and fraternity.  He had no love for religion in general, and certainly not for the old order of the church that had enforced so many terrible rules and constraints on Jews throughout the Middle Ages and Renaissance and into early modern times.  And while Napoleon had no particular regard one way or the other for Jews—he was a non-commissioned officer from the island of Corsica, with little exposure to Jews—he had a very strong sense of the necessity to break down the Old, bad order.  As he said, “to the Jews as a commune—that is, a people—nothing; to the Jew as an individual citizen of France, all rights and privileges.”  Which was a very great change, and a great gift, at that time in that world.

As the French armies crossed Europe, conquering, plundering, and establishing their own governments everywhere, they also, almost as an afterthought, broke down the walls of every ghetto they encountered and let the Jews out. And they established, for at least some time, a new legal system, the Code Napoleon, which allowed Jews to go to universities for the first time, to serve in the military, to be part of the civil service, to be doctors and lawyers, to live wherever they wanted, to live as full citizens.

It was an extraordinarily important moment in Jewish history.  France enabled us to enter the modern world, at least wherever its armies had control, and the ghetto walls were never established in quite the same way, or with quite the same force, again until Hitler.

That meant that we Jews suddenly could experience all that the modern world had to offer.  And it made possible the extraordinary successes and accomplishments and experiences of modernity in Judaism.  It was while Napoleon controlled Germany in the early 1810s that Reform Judaism was born, an Enlightenment form of Jewish belief and practice that catalyzed all modern Judaism, either inspired by it or in reaction against it.  In the long run, emancipation made Zionism possible, and the State of Israel.  It was earth-shaking.

And it was all because of France.  Now Jewish history in France before the revolution in 1789—the taking of the Bastille, deposing and executing the king, etc.--wasn’t all pan de chocolat.  Nor was it that way even after emancipation, as we shall see.  And in that history there are some lesson for us here in America that have great relevance.

Jews first moved into what became of France in Roman times, and established important communities in places like Narbonne and Lyon and Provence.  But we were always on the fringes of acceptable society, no matter who was in charge, at the whim of kings, dukes, and counts, popes, cardinals and bishops.  While there were great Jewish figures in France—like Rashi in the 11th century—Jews were often persecuted, attacked, robbed, and expelled.  Because we were so important to the economy of France, the next king after the expulsion often invited the Jews back in—only to have them robbed and expelled again a few years later.  In one dizzying sequence, King Phillip the Fair expelled all the Jews of France in 1306—and after economic disaster followed his son invited them back in 1315, just nine years later.  That same see-saw experience was repeated several more times, confiscation of all property and expulsion, followed by the invitation to return.  Some French kings protected the Jews, but usually this was a temporary experience.

Only after the French revolution did things change dramatically for Jews in France—and as noted, Napoleon established Jews as full citizens, although it took until 1831, long after Napoleon was deposed and later died, for all the legal restrictions and limitations on Jews to finally be fully eliminated. 

And Jews did thrive as emancipated citizens of France, rising in all areas of society, business, government, literature, and the arts.  Of course, antisemitism did not disappear.  In fact, at the end of the 19th century the Dreyfuss trial shocked the world; in Paris, in the Belle Epoque, the glorious era of the Impressionists and the Paris Opera, the City of Light and the most advanced city in the world, a virulently antisemitic trial evoked ugly chants of “Death to the Jews” from the mobs in the Paris streets.  It was hearing those chants in the streets outside the courtroom that convinced a journalist from Vienna that we Jews finally needed to have our own nation.  His name was Theodore Herzl, and shortly thereafter he convened the Zionist congress that ultimately led to the creation of the State of Israel.

Jewish life in France after the Dreyfuss affair improved, and remained generally positive—until the Nazis conquered most of France, and French Jews suffered as so many Jews did all across Europe and North Africa.  And when Israel was founded, for the first twenty years of existence it had no stronger ally than France, which provided the jets that won the 6-Day War.  

And today?  Well, antisemitism in France now is real and dangerous.  While much of it is the result of the virulent and violent antisemitism of the Arab immigrant underclass from France’s former North African colonies, some of it also from the rising right-wing nationalism of the party founded by the neo-fascist Le Pen faction. Still, we do well to remember, in this challenging time, that it was France that first gave Jews the full rights of citizenship 235 years ago.  And that the national government of France has taken strong and powerful positions against any form of Antisemitism.  The current Prime Minister of France is a Jew of North African background, and there have been Jewish Presidents of France in the past, as well as recent presidents who have Jewish ancestry.

How does this relate to our own experience here in America, the other nation to give Jews full citizenship way back in the 18th century? 

I have always contended that antisemitism is in the very soil of Europe, and never seems to disappear no matter how much things may change superficially.  Like any poisonous weed, antisemitism always has the possibility of reviving there, and in today’s world it often takes the form of anti-Zionism, declaring that only Jews don’t have the right to our own nation.

We are fortunate that America does not have that same history of institutionalized antisemitism.  We did not need our government to turn from persecuting Jews to accepting us as citizens.  But America is also something of an amnesiac nation that tends to forget its own history as soon as it can.  And our long dedication to protecting the rights of minorities is being tested now, in an environment when Jews and Israel are under constant criticism and often unfair attack.

By the way, it emerged this week that some of the pro-Palestinian protest movement on American college campuses has been funded by Iran, in its continuing efforts to attack Israel and destabilize American politics.   

Still, here in the US we do not need a Napoleon to guarantee Jewish rights as full citizens.  We simply need leaders who believe in the ideals that America stands for, the rights enshrined in law that guarantee freedom of religion and that protect all minorities from persecution.  And we need officials with the courage to enforce those protections.

So enjoy watching the Tour de France, have a café au lait and pastry this weekend, play an Edith Piaf or Maurice Chevalier song, and salute the nation that first gave us full rights as citizens.  And remember that those rights exist for us here in America, and need to be asserted with pride, now more than ever.

D-Day and Yom Yerushalayim

D-Day and Yom Yerushalayim

Sermon, Shabbat Bamidbar 5784, Rabbi Samuel M. Cohon

Congregation Beit Simcha, Tucson, AZ

Yesterday, and really all this last week, there were extensive celebrations and commemorations of the 80th anniversary of D-Day, the beginning of the Allied invasion of occupied France in World War II.  It is quite fascinating that this is one of two days of the year, along with Pearl Harbor Day on December 7th, when we remember the enormous struggle against Fascism and the fight to triumph over brutal, criminal authoritarianism that was the essence of the most terrible war in human history.  As important as D-Day was, as many fine films and documentaries have been made about it and as touching as the commemorations and speeches have been this week, it is strange that we focus on it so much.

D-Day was not the end of World War II; in fact, it marked the beginning of a hard campaign that took another eleven months, many more casualties and much destruction to finally defeat and destroy Nazi Germany, ending with V-E Day in May of 1945.  In fact, D-Day wasn’t even the first invasion of German-held mainland Europe; that was the invasion of Italy that began nine months earlier.  It wasn’t the turning point in the war; arguably, the defeats of the Nazis at the hands of the Soviet Union’s Red Army in the east at Stalingrad and Kursk had reversed the long course of Axis advances and begun the long push back against their evil regimes. 

But it is D-Day that has captured the imagination of America, Britain and France, perhaps because we have remained fairly close allies over the eight decades that succeeded that traumatic day in June 1944.  V-E Day we would have to share with Russia, an uneasy alliance during World War II—they were allies of Nazi Germany the first two years of the war, if you remember—which was soon to be a dedicated enemy during the long Cold War that followed almost immediately.  And so, instead of the ultimate victory over the Nazi evil, we remember the heroism of the Allied soldiers, sailors and airmen, the trauma of attacking those beaches and the bluff beyond, and the sacrifice that so many made that day and in the subsequent battles.     

As Anshel Pfeffer wrote in the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz, “The way in which a war is remembered and commemorated often tells us more about the present day than about the war itself. The Western governments have their D-Day anniversary this year, clinging to the idea of an alliance… at the same time, at the other end of the continent, Putin's Russia had its show of nationalistic strength, vowing to continue the "special military operation" against the "Nazis" in Ukraine.”

Now the day before the 80th Anniversary of D-Day, in Israel they celebrated Yom Yerushalayim, the holiday that commemorates the reunification of the city of Jerusalem in the miraculous Six Day War of 1967.  Similarly, only this victory in Israel’s history is commemorated with its own national day of celebration.  The Six-Day War is Israel’s version of WWII, the last “good war,” a victory so total that it can be nearly mythologized as a “perfect war,” the kind of war Israel and Jews can idealize. It was not tainted by failure or inconclusive endings like the other wars, such as the Yom Kippur War or Lebanon Wars or the Sinai Campaign or the serial struggles in Gaza. And of the multiple fronts in that war, the reunification of Jerusalem used to be a symbol that the overwhelming majority of Israelis could gather around.

Putting aside for the moment some of the triumphalism and bullying that accompanied this year’s processions and parades, it is worth revisiting the experience of those 6 days of war, and in particular the recapture of Jerusalem.

It has been 57 years since we Jews were finally able to return to the Kotel, the Western Wall, the holiest place on earth for Jews; 57 years since the commander of the troops who captured the Old City from Jordanian forces, Motta Gur, announced, Har HaBayit B’yadeinu—the Temple Mount is in our hands.

On the third day of the war, Israeli paratroopers captured the Western Wall and the Temple Mount without using air power or artillery, lest they damage the many sacred sites.  They restored Jewish presence to the Old City of Jerusalem that Arabs had forcibly denied us after capturing the city from the Jews in the War of Independence in 1948.  That same day in 1967, Defense Minister Moshe Dayan declared, famously,

“This morning, the Israel Defense Forces liberated Jerusalem. We have united Jerusalem, the divided capital of Israel. We have returned to the holiest of our holy places, never to part from it again. To our Arab neighbors we extend, also at this hour—and with added emphasis at this hour—our hand in peace. And to our Christian and Muslim fellow citizens, we solemnly promise full religious freedom and rights. We did not come to Jerusalem for the sake of other peoples' holy places, and not to interfere with the adherents of other faiths, but in order to safeguard its entirety, and to live there together with others, in unity.”

Jerusalem, Yerushalayim, in Hebrew is based on Ir Shalom, which means the City of Peace. Jerusalem has not often been that, a city of peace; it has been captured militarily some 18 times in its long history, going back to King David’s troops taking it from the Jebusites around 1000 BCE.  But for all of it’s unpeaceful past, Jerusalem has been the most sacred place in the entire world for Jews for three thousand years, and wherever we were scattered throughout the world we longed to return to her.

And now, of course, we have returned, and on the ruins of the Jewish Quarter destroyed by the Jordanians of the Arab Legion in 1948, the Israelis have built a magnificent new Jewish Quarter of Jerusalem out of stone and passion and love.  It is beautiful, unique, vital.

By the way, it was not initially a military objective of Israel’s in 1967 to capture the Old City of Jerusalem, or the West Bank or Jericho or Masada—or the Golan Heights, for that matter.  In fact, Israel tried very hard to keep Jordan out of the war altogether—Syria, too—and focus solely on Egypt, which had the largest military and the most militant leader, Nasser.  Only when Nasser strong-armed his ally Jordan into attacking Israel—partially by lying to King Hussein and pretending Egypt was winning and had destroyed most of the Israeli military when the opposite was already true one day into the war—only after Jordan attacked did Israel seek to capture the Old City.  And the Israelis only captured Jericho and Masada and most of the West Bank after they realized that the Jordanian army had abandoned them. 

And so 57 years ago last week Israel captured Jerusalem, and ended up with the West Bank, which has been, at the very best, a mixed blessing.

In Israel today, Yom Yerushalayim is celebrated with military parades and ceremonies throughout the country, and especially, of course, in Jerusalem.  It is far less observed by Jewish communities outside of Israel, including ours, but it is historically a remarkable and very important day.  This Jerusalem Day is also a time to wonder about where we have come, these 57 years later.  This year we are in the midst of an eight month long war against Hamas Palestinian terrorists in Gaza, and today marks the 8th month that Israeli hostages have been brutally held in the tunnels and houses and hospitals of Gaza. We don’t know how many of the 130 hostages remain alive; Israel believes that at least 30 have died.  All were kidnapped from their lives and none can ever be the same again.

Many offers of cease fires and exchanges that would free the remaining hostages have been rejected; the latest have been rejected yet again by Hamas, whose leaders are finally being threatened by their patron Qatar with expulsion from Doha if they do not agree.  We will see.  The ongoing destruction and death in Gaza does no one any good, and while the IDF has eliminated many of the remaining terrorist soldiers they have neither liberated any more hostages nor killed the highest Hamas’ leaders who planned the brutalities of October 7th.  Prime Minister Netanyahu, whose war cabinet is about to fall apart, has refused to take responsibility for the disasters of October 7th.  There appears to be no postwar plan for Gaza among Israel’s leadership.

It is a disturbing situation, and one that bears very little promise of peace with the Palestinians in the near or foreseeable future. 

Of course, Dayan’s olive branch offering to the Arabs in 1967 was categorically rejected, and it is not clear that any course of action Israel could have taken then would have resulted in a lasting peace.  In fact, just one week after the end of the 6-Day War, on June 19, 1967, the Israeli cabinet voted to offer to return the territories captured from Egypt and Syria in exchange for a peace treaty.  That offer was categorically rejected two months later at the Khartoum Conference, in which the Arab League Summit declared a famous three “no’s”: “no peace with Israel, no recognition of Israel, no negotiations with Israel.”

Progress was made, eventually, with Egypt and Jordan, of course.  And in recent years with the UAE and Morocco and even Saudi Arabia.  But crucially, in those days more than half a century ago, Israel’s leaders, including the Minister of Defense, Moshe Dayan, tried very hard to seek peace as the ultimate goal and made serious, concrete offers of captured territory for peace. 

History isn’t always a good teacher: sometimes we see opportunities lost and assume that we can never again achieve something we missed earlier.  The Middle East today is a very different place than it was then, both better and worse.  Then, Arab military dictators, kings, and sheikhs publicly rejected Israel’s right to exist and sought to drive the Jews into the sea, while Palestinians tried to kill Jews in order to draw attention to their stateless situation.  Today, Arab military dictators and kings have accommodated themselves to Israel’s existence, and sometimes even seek its assistance; and Islamic fundamentalists try to destroy the dictators, kings, and sheikhs along with Israel.

But Israel has come a very long way from the nation that in 1967 teetered on the brink of destruction, and that did so again in 1973.  It is now a strong country militarily and economically, and a rich country in creativity and innovation. 

The city of Jerusalem is proof of that incredible growth.  It is not only the Jewish Quarter that has been rebuilt: the whole city is filled with new structures built of ancient-looking Jerusalem stone, with a highly functional newish light rail line and an incredible diversity of peoples, cultures, food, and life.  We should celebrate its vitality, beauty, and place at the heart of Jewish life, incredibly so two thousand years after its destruction, 57 years after its recovery for the Jewish people. 

And on this Shabbat after Yom Yerushalayim, we can also pray that Jerusalem may someday truly be the City of Peace that is its name, and that its holiness for Jews, Christians, Muslims and so many others will allow it to become what we have always said: an or lagoyim, a light to the nations for hope and for peace.

The Right Kind of Spy

Sermon Shabbat Shlach Lecha 5784

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

During a critical mission, a CIA agent is given the task of finding a spy named Epstein in New York and giving him a secret code that only he will understand.

The agent enters the lobby of an apartment building on the Lower East Side of Manhattan and browses the directory. He notices that there are two Epsteins listed; one on the first floor, the other on the second.

He takes a chance and knocks on the door of the Epstein on the first floor. When Epstein opens the door, the agent tells him, “The sky above, the mud below.”

Mr. Epstein replies, “Oh! You want Epstein the spy. Second floor.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

My good friend Harold Bongarten, of blessed memory, did this kind of work during World War II, slipping behind German lines and pretending to be a returning German soldier wandering around France.  Harold was not tall or dramatic looking, had an easy smile and a kind manner, and he was constantly underestimated, which he counted on and exploited with great charm.  He spoke German fluently, and he sent back a series of reports that helped the Allies know whom to trust and whom to arrest in each town as they recaptured it.  And then he quietly and anonymously moved on ahead of the armies to the next town.  And he was never caught.  My guest on the radio show this Sunday wrote a book about her father-in-law who did the exact same thing.  The program wasn’t declassified, it turns out, until around the year 2000.  That’s how you spy…

So why is this relevant in a religious sense? 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

May this become our will, and thus our blessing.  Ken Yehi Ratson.

Summertime

Sermon, Naso 5785, June 14, 2024

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

June is busting out all over these days, a season filled with heat and natural light.  It’s also filled with children, now freed from school and plopped into one of the many summer camp experiences that abound this time of year.  If your children or grandchildren or great-grandchildren aren’t away at camp, either as campers or as counselors in training, or as counselors, they are probably in some kind of summer day camp activity. 

I was startled the other day driving through Tucson and noting the astonishing array of different day camp experiences available.  There are baseball camps, swimming camps, art camps, basketball camps, choir camps, history camps, natural history camps, cheerleading camps, Summer Bible Study camps, botany camps, science camps, robotics camps, probably even stamp camps, for all I know.  I wondered about their prevalence these days: as a kid I remember Jewish day camps, and generic sports day camps, but not this veritable profusion of camps, kids, and college-age counselors.  Are there more kids today?

That seems unlikely—after all, I am from the tail end of the original baby boom.  No, it’s simply that nowadays both parents work much more frequently, and when your child gets out of school you need something to keep them gainfully—or not so gainfully, but at least safely—occupied.  Growing up we played outside all summer, over-the-line and running bases—we called it pickle—and hide-and-go-seek.  We sold lemonade at our own stand, picked buckets of apricots from our tree for jam, or walked over to the park for basketball.  We painted on big pieces of butcher paper, or built forts out of scrap lumber, or went bike riding—usually to the 5 and 10 cent-store for a new rubber baseball, since the old one had gone into the sewer—or we played slip and slide and sprayed each other with hoses.  Once a week, for a treat, we went to the zoo or the local kiddie amusement park or, if we were really lucky, the beach or the stadium for a baseball game.  It was pretty unstructured.  I sound old, don’t I? 

So, this week, after seeing all of these camps running in a synchronized schedule of instruction and development, my own childhood summer memories seemed idyllic—and probably idealized.  Certainly, it was not all waterfights and barbecues.  I’m sure we were bored sometimes, and I know we failed to gain all the skills we might have.

And the times I was raised in were not without challenges and conflict: I grew up in smoggy Los Angeles in the 1960’s, when breathing the summer air was a dangerous adventure all by itself.  And there were even more serious concerns: the Watts Riots took place nearby when I was 4 years old.  The smoke from those fires darkened the sky for days, in our line of sight.  I also remember biking over to the corner when I was 7 years old, in 1968, to the Women Strike for Peace center to buy a button that read “Draft Beer, Not Students”—which I don’t think I understood at any level at that age.  I’m not sure kids today get much exposure to that kind of stuff, and that’s probably all to the good.

But even so there was something light and unstructured and sacred about those summer days, as I remember them, and that feeling of waking up to a day of wide-open possibility is something I still miss, even now.

I thought of that going biking the other day.  We live, of course, in the middle of the desert, a unique place to evaluate what it means to live in a place of infinite possibility.  Every religious tradition seems to have a wilderness element in its founding, from the oldest to the most recent—we Jews just have the greatest concentration of those stories and historical elements.  But other religions have them too: Buddha spend years wandering alone; Jesus went off into the Judean Wilderness for an extended period; Mohammed was exiled from Mecca and was, of course, a desert dweller all his life. 

For us, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob—especially Jacob—spent extended time in desert journeys, and the book of the Torah we are reading over these early summer weeks is called Bamidbar, literally “in the Wilderness”, and covers 38 of our 40 years as a people wandering in the Sinai Desert. It’s as though we are closer to God in the Wilderness, as though we can only encounter God in places with little water and less civilization.  In fact, only after we have gone into this physical desert, lived in it, allowed the desert to become part of us, are we even ready to accept God’s rule and role in our lives.

Now most people think that the point of this wilderness experience is to make ourselves empty and spiritually open, and in a sense that’s right.  The physical openness of the desert, the wide starry skies and the open vistas contribute to a sense of the enormity of the universe, the overwhelming appreciation of God’s greatness.  It is difficult to be anything but humble in the wilderness, and the first step to finding God is discovering that we are not all that matters. The desert is a symbol for emptying out, a place without structure, away from the ordinary and the routine.  We enter into the midbar to change our lives, to break with the complexity of more civilized life, to find a way to God.  In the desert we must slow down, limit our obsession with self, come to know the pleasure in the pause of difference, the stopping that breaks routine and teaches us to be open to potential.

Kind of like summer, that way, and not just because of the heat.  We discover that there is another way to live, and we come to realize that we can slow down or speed up at will, that God is there either way, in the wonderful realm of the always possible.

You know, we did something else back on those long summer days of my youth.  Every week we had Shabbat at home, no matter how busy everyone was.  We lit candles together—usually, there was at least one additional neighborhood kid with us—and we chanted Kiddush, and we sang the motzi and we had a Sabbath meal together, in which we talked about everything.  And we always talked about something Jewish during that Shabbat meal.  It meant that whatever else filled our lives that week—waterplay, or the Dodgers, or the troubling news of the day, or new friends—for that meal, at least, Shabbat and Judaism reigned.  It was fun, and interesting, and different, and although we had Shabbat every week in the summer it somehow seemed more special: more relaxed, slower paced, more time to talk about the kinds of things that really matter in life. 

The essence of Shabbat is simply this: taking time to appreciate the blessings that we, each of us, all of us, have.  Learning to stop and become aware of all that we are given, being conscious of God in our world and in our lives.  Each week Shabbat can be a kind of summer, a break and a gift.  Each time we make it a point to breathe and to be, we open ourselves up to all that is best in our lives, and in this remarkable world so rich in goodness, blessing and possibility. 

May this be, for each of you, a Shabbat of true rest, of difference, of peace.  May it be, as well, a summer Shabbat that helps you feel God here in the world, and in your own life.

Love and Fear

Sermon Shabbat Bechukotai 5784, Rabbi Samuel M. Cohon 

Abe is on his deathbed, and he turns to his faithful wife, Sarah. 

"Sarah... Sarah,” he says. “We have been married for 46 years... Isn't that right Sarah?"

"Of course Abe, of course we have," Sarah replies.

"And when I was hit by that truck when we first started dating," Abe says, "You were there for me, no?"

"I never left your side in the hospital, darling," Sarah answers.

"And when our house burned down right to the ground just after we got married," Abe says, "We worked together and saved for years to build a new one, didn’t we, and you were there with me?"

"I was there Abe," Sarah replies.

“And when the IRS audited me out of nowhere, and we had to pay them a huge fine, you were there,” Abe says.

“I was there darling Abe,” says Sarah.

"And now, on my deathbed, you are here with me yet again..."

"I am." Sarah replies.

And so Abe turns to his wife and says, “Sarah, you’re a terrible jinx.”

What is that antique line attributed to Sholom Aleichem in Fiddler on the Roof?  God, we have been your Chosen People for so many years.  Maybe just once you could choose somebody else?

I’ve been thinking about those two jokes this past week when news reports came in criticizing Israel from everywhere.  Thank goodness that jury in New York came out with their verdict this week or who knows how bad it would have gotten in the media and on social media for the Jews?

Which brings me to the Torah portion this week, the very end of the Book of Leviticus, Vayikra, called Bechukotai.  Bechukotai is a final, convenantal section that makes very explicit the agreement that God is making with the people of Israel, us: if we observe God’s commandments we will be richly rewarded with the title and prosperity of our own land of blessing.  And if we do not fulfill God’s commandments we will be harshly punished and lose that land, at least in the short and perhaps medium term.  It is a statement that presages the larger covenant created in Deuteronomy it says: if you do good you will be rewarded with land and happiness.  If you do evil you will be punished in the worst ways you might imagine, including the loss of that land.  The only problem is that most of us don’t believe that things actually work that way at all.  We all know good people who suffer and evil people who flourish.

But here at the end of the Book of Leviticus, Bechukotai puts this contract baldly and very, very clearly.  If we do good, we will be rewarded.  If not, we will be punished.  And that assurance here in the Torah is supposed to motivate us to live good lives, right?  We should act well out of fear of punishment, and with the expectation of reward.

Now, fear can be an effective motivator.  Most of us are motivated in many ways primarily by our fears.  We get our work done out of the fear of failure.  We do it well out of a fear of embarrassment.  We hide our sins and errors because we are afraid of exposure.  We spend most of our lives looking over our shoulders at something gaining on us—a manifestation of fear.  It is fear that drives most of us to succeed. 

We see this in small, petty things as well as larger, more meaningful ones.  We drive our cars just a little over the posted limit out of fear of speeding tickets.  We file our taxes out of fear of the IRS.  We change our diets out of fear of heart attacks or strokes or cancer—or obesity.  We install security systems out of fear of intruders.  We make many of the choices that affect our lives out of a fundamental emotion of fear.

Some fears are, of course irrational.  I’m reminded of Jerry Seinfeld’s comment that, according to studies, the number one fear in America is public speaking.  The number two fear is death. Which means that at a funeral, most people would rather be in the coffin than doing the eulogy…

Some of those irrational fears impact our lives, of course.  Some of us choose not to travel to Israel because we are afraid that bad things will happen to us, although no tourist has ever been injured by an attack.  Some of us fail to take advantage of opportunities that present themselves because we are simply afraid.

Fear can seem beneficial at times.  Fear helps limit the things we shouldn’t be doing in the first place—fear of exposure, or embarrassment, or humiliation.  We limit ourselves out of the fear of the loss of relationships or status.  Fear as a motivation can be powerful.

But fear is also temporary. What we fear in the moment can be swallowed up by other, quite different fears.  Our fear of shame may be overturned by our fear of poverty.  Our fear of embarrassment can be overcome by our fear of loss of status.  Our fear of doing the wrong thing can be outweighed by our need to be accepted.

And fear also fades away in the absence of direct consequences.  When we get away with things we lose our fear of punishment or loss.  When we do things we shouldn’t do repeatedly, or don’t do what we should do for a period of time, we gradually lose our fear of misconduct.

Space and time, too, lessen fear.  A frightening moment becomes less so over time.  It’s like those flashing red lights in the rear-view mirror: in the moment they frighten us, perhaps even change our driving habits for a while.  Why, we might even slow down for a week or two.  But over time, we lose that fear.  Otherwise, we would need far fewer traffic police, and they would need only ticket each driver once in a lifetime.

Fear motivates everyone, to some degree—fear of embarrassment, fear of being wrong, fear of failure, fear of being refused. Sometimes even fear of success.   Fear motivates—but erratically, and with rapidly diminishing returns.  And fear can also paralyze us.  Where real transformation is required, fear of change can prevent any movement at all.

Fear is based partly on experience, and partly on, well, just fear.  It is an emotion that has a life of its own.  As Franklin Roosevelt said during the Depression, “we have nothing to fear but fear itself.”

I’ve always wondered at that famous line.  After all, at that time, America faced many things that were exceedingly frightening— unemployment of 30-40%, the Dust Bowl, starvation on the streets, the rise of Fascism in Europe, fanatics at home seeking revolution—a whole host of very real things to fear.  There was a lot to fear beside fear itself.

And yet it turned out that we could overcome all those problems, and many more—provided we weren’t paralyzed by our fears.  Provided we didn’t lock ourselves into a system of conduct that couldn’t change because of the habits perpetuated by fear.  Provided we could learn from our mistakes, and change, and transform in ways that fear didn’t restrict.

In keeping with Bechukotai’s message, what do you fear?  What fears control your life?  What fears limit and control your life?

And what if there was a different way to get motivated?

What if there was a path, an approach to life that did not require fear.  That came instead out of love?  Judaism makes that promise as well: we are, after all, commanded to love God in the Ve’Ahavta, which we chanted tonight as part of the Shema, to love with all our heart, mind and soul, all our strength.   If we act out of that love, we are promised, anything is indeed possible. 

Love is actually stronger than fear.  But first we must make a choice to be motivated by love instead of fear.

Now—and this is the heart of the matter—think about what it is you truly love.  Who do you really love?  What matters most to you?  What do you really value above all else?

So, what do you love?  Deciding this can take some time—or no time at all.  For most of us, we really do love our family members.  We love some of our friends.  We love some places, and some ideas. Find those people and those things, get them in mind, and keep them there.

Next, decide to commit to what you love.  Really commit to it.  To make it the most important thing in your life.  Because the truth is, it is the most important thing in your life.  Make that love, that ahavah, the source of the strength you need to change.  Because when you make that choice to commit to what you love, to truly commit, then change is easy.  When we make that commitment, to love, we also make a commitment to change what needs to be changed for the sake of that love.

Choose to make what you love the most important thing in your life, and act as though that were true.  Do not be distracted from that course, not even by fear.  Simply make that love your most important priority.  Make that the heart of your actions.  Make the truth of that love the guide for your actions.

If you act with complete commitment to what you love you will not fail.  The changes you make may have unexpected outcomes—often, very good ones—but the very changes themselves will be for the good.  Change through love means starting fresh—simply choosing to act through love, to open yourself to God and to those people and things you love—and so to find the best in yourself and others.  It means simply choosing love over habit, commitment over transgression, choosing to act for the sake of the love that you are dedicated to.

And now the really great part about this: if you choose to be motivated by ahavah, by love, first decide what you love, truly commit to that love, and start to make changes based on that love—then our tradition teaches us that God will instantly help.

Erpah m’shuvatam—ohaveim n’davah, the prophet Hosea has God promise—I will heal them from their backsliding and I, God, will love them freely.  When they come to me in love, I will heal them and love them unconditionally, for who they are now.  More or less, it’s as easy as that.

When you make the decision to act from love rather than fear you will find that you are no longer shackled by routine or imprisoned by habit.  You will find that the goals you seek come powerfully, directly, almost easily.

You will find that you are changing virtually without effort.  That you are becoming someone who really is a little different.  A little more loving.  A little more open.  A little better.  A little holier. 

Fear can work.  But love—love can, and will, transform. 

Poet Michael Leunig explains that:

There are only two feelings. Love and fear.

There only two languages.  Love and fear.

There are only two activities. Love and fear.

There are only two motives, two procedures, two frameworks,

two results.

Love and fear.  Love and fear.

Bechukotai is focused on creating individuals, and an entire community and nation, who are truly good.  It can be done by fear.  But if we are to truly change, if we are to become the people we wish to be, if we are to fulfill God’s wishes and dreams for us, then we must seek to do so through love.

May God give us the strength to love fully and to act from that love, and so to become the people, congregation and nation that we wish to be.

Getting Our Priorities Right about Jewish College Students

Shabbat Emor Sermon, Rabbi Sam Cohon, Congregation Beit Simcha, Tucson, AZ

About two weeks ago I got a request from a teacher at Immaculate Heart Middle School in Oro Valley: would I be able to come speak to her 7th grade history class about Israel.  They had lots of questions, and she felt unprepared to answer all of them.  Could I talk about Judaism the history of Israel, and perhaps the Gaza-Hamas War as it related to that? She offered to pick up some challah and Bobka at Beyond Bread as a treat for her students and asked if that would be OK.

I accepted her invitation, believing as always that it’s extremely important to explain facts to non-Jewish groups of any age whenever people are open to hearing them, and adolescent students are particularly impressionable, of course.  I freed up some time Tuesday afternoon; and then that morning the teacher emailed and asked if I could come an hour earlier and talk to her 8th graders, too, since they would be going to high school soon and expressed real interest in hearing from a rabbi.

As it turned out, purely by chance, the date of the class was Yom haAtzma’ut, Israeli Independence Day, the 76th birthday of the modern State of Israel in the old/new Land of Israel.  Truly appropriate: and so, I ended up explaining the entire history of Jewish connection to the Holy Land, from Abraham to Moses to the Babylonians to the Romans to Theodore Herzl to the contemporary nation, twice that afternoon.  The kids were great: attentive, curious, funny.  I had them point out tiny Israel on the map I saw in their classroom, and asked them to estimate how big it was compared to the massive Arab and Iranian and other Muslim states that surround it; I showed them this dogtag, reminding me of the hostages still captive in and under Gaza.  They asked lots of questions; when did we stop doing animal sacrifice, for example; although my favorite was “Can rabbis get married?” 

Catholicism is different that way.

Some of the kids told me eagerly that they were performing Fiddler on the Roof at the school this weekend and when I told them I had done that show in high school they asked if I could attend.  And so, this morning I took an hour and a half and drove back to Immaculate Heart High School’s hall to see these very Catholic kids peform the most Jewish show ever.

I have to say, it was heart-warming.  They did a much more complete version of Fiddler than I could possibly have imagined: costumes, dancing—including the bottle dance—singing, sets, really charming.  They did cut the show down, but still it was over an hour without intermission, and they did a commendable job.

Most of all, they captured the essence of the show, the humanity of Sholem Aleichem’s characters, the devotion to tradition, the dislocation forced on the characters by antisemitism.  And as I was driving away several of the kids shouted “hey rabbi” and “thank you rabbi.”

It reminds me of the time I returned from a trip to Israel and spoke for a Catholic group with then-Bishop Gerry Kicanas here at a local country club.  I had to drive up to the guard gate at Skyline and get admitted; and I recall saying, “Hi, it’s Rabbi Cohon. I’ve come to speak to the Equestrian Order of the Knights of the Holy Sepulchre…. I’m pretty sure that sentence has never been spoken before in all of human history.”

Which is a long way of saying that it remains incredibly important for Jews in America, and right here in Tucson, to build relationships of respect and understanding with people of all religious traditions.  But it also emphasizes a rather different point; that we need to do the same kind of work with our own young people.  And we do not always choose to do that.

The anti-Israel, pro-terrorist movement on college campuses, as well as the organized efforts to disrupt city council meetings and public spaces on behalf of Palestinian terrorism, is finally waning as colleges end semesters and encampments are disassembled.  I’ve been asked several times over the past week what I thought about the apparent young people’s public embrace of the Palestinian “cause”, often in openly antisemitic ways that advocate violence and genocide of all “Zionists” and the killing of all Jews. 

First, I must note that the pro-Palestinian-terrorist organizations that motivate and run these efforts on college campuses have been funded and largely created by big sums of money sent through devious channels from Qatar and Iran.  These protests all use the same “playbook”, including the same chants, to simulate a popular movement.  And the radical ideology that pretends all Israelis—most of whom have darker skin—are colonials oppressing “black and brown people” has been ginned up by people funded by Arab and Middle East Study Centers paid for by Arab and Iranian oil money.  It’s infuriating, to be sure.

But there is another side to this story—the Jewish side. 

I’ll start with a personal al cheit, a public confession and comment on the way the organized American Jewish community has failed our Jewish youth on college campuses for many years. 

When I began serving 25 years ago as a senior rabbi in Tucson, my then-synagogue was just a mile from the campus of the University of Arizona, considered the finest university in the state.  After rebuilding membership at that temple, dramatically upgrading the religious school and life-cycle offerings, creating an Early Childhood Center, and developing a talented staff, I turned my attention to our older teens and college-age students, many of whom were attending the U of A. 

I was friends with a Reconstructionist rabbi who assisted the director of the Hillel there—we were in a small running group together—and I asked him about the market penetration Hillel was achieving among the 6 or 7,000 Jewish students at the university.  It seemed like most Jewish kids at the U, and most Jewish graduate students and administration and faculty there, did not engage with Hillel, the main Jewish campus organization on nearly every decent-sized college and university campus in North America. 

The statistics Hillel boasted about at the University of Arizona reflected that failure to engage: perhaps 1,000, at most, Jewish students attended a Hillel Shabbat dinner or program over the course of the whole year, roughly one of out of 7 of the Jewish kids in school, not to mention the many other Jewish members of the university community who could have been involved but weren’t.

I began work on a program to connect students at the university with our synagogue, which was a short bike ride from campus.  I was young enough then to hang out with college students in coffee shops and cafes, and we had an even younger assistant rabbi who easily connected with the college and grad school-aged students and younger faculty.  I reasoned that if Hillel wasn’t reaching most of the students—and it surely wasn’t—shouldn’t we help make Judaism, and Israel, a stronger influence on campus by using our own synagogue’s energy and effort?

As we began, however, I received a call to meet with a major congregational and community donor.  He told me that Hillel was raising funds for a large expansion of its building, and that Hillel was the organization empowered to connect college students to Judaism, not our synagogue.  In other words, Rabbi Cohon, put your efforts elsewhere.

This was not exactly a threat, but it certainly implied one: you are trodding on someone else’s turf.  That message was reinforced by our local Jewish Federation, which had what it termed “beneficiary agencies”—never synagogues—who have their own mandates.  Other Jewish entities, like our temple, who did not receive Federation funding, still weren’t supposed to invade the areas that these beneficiary agencies claimed… or else punishment would come.  Mind you, the amount of money that funded Hillel was never very large; there were always other things to put community philanthropy money into, like paying the salaries of Federation workers.  Still, they believed the U of A was Hillel’s turf, and we synagogues shouldn’t be trying to engage students there except through Hillel.

Since Hillel was missing 6 out of every 7 Jewish students, I thought this attitude was absurd, that keeping rabbis from reaching out to college students and grad students was insane.  But I had plenty to do in my 80 hour a week job at my own synagogue without putting effort and resources into campus Jewish life.  I had only just managed to wrestle adult Jewish education back where it belonged, at the temple, my first couple of years on the job.  I didn’t really see how getting into a community battle over college students would benefit anyone.

So I redoubled my own efforts at Outreach, bringing in people who wanted a connection to Judaism throughout the larger community, with success.  But I didn’t engage the university community directly, save for guest lecturing at an occasional class, or holding an event on campus every year or two.  I had been warned off, and decided not to fight that battle.  Besides, Federation was already causing mischief with our own temple board.

Now that’s just how our Jewish community here in Tucson worked; I can’t speak for how it worked elsewhere, but I suspect it went similarly.  We synagogues would keep our own students engaged in Jewish education and temple life through bar and bat mitzvah and then all the way through high school, many of them teaching younger kids in our Religious School.  Then they would graduate high school and we’d send them off to college and hope—pray?—that Hillel kept them connected. 

We’d ship them Hanukkah candles in December, Purim and Pesach treats in the spring; once a year, in December after classes let out, we’d have a College Shabbat and invite all the kids back for nice dinner and Oneg Shabbat.  That was about it.  And locally, we didn’t really connect in any systematic or organized way with the college students here in Tucson.

Now since Hillel had such limited impact, the void in Jewish communal life at the University of Arizona was filled a tiny bit with free Shabbat dinners at Chabad—drinking alcohol was the big draw with Chabad, of course; random Orthodox rabbinic couples coming to push observant Judaism from time to time—JACS, I think it was called; there was one Jewish fraternity—I was chapter advisor at one point—and of course some of the Jewish students from the U came to teach at local Religious schools. 

The larger issue, that a huge potential Jewish population, perhaps 20% of the whole university, was unconnected to its Judaism, went unaddressed.  Most Jewish kids were not connected to organized Judaism during their time at university, or during grad school.

I suspect that’s very much what happened, and happens, everywhere in this country. And that means that when our own youth are most impressionable and growing and changing the most, during their formative college years, most of them have no real connection to Judaism or Israel or synagogues.

Which also means that when these organized efforts to destroy Israel and advance the Palestinian terrorist positions—and eliminate the only Jewish nation on earth; and advocate the genocide of all Jews—arrive the organized Jewish community of America is in an incredibly feeble position to respond on campus.  Because our best allies, the Jewish kids we educated through their high school years, have been cut adrift and essentially abandoned by us.  And instead of dynamic pro-Israel organizations on campus, and an excellent array of Jewish choices built by knowledgeable and talented young Jewish leaders, synagogues, and organizations, we have the Hillel movement—laudable, but so limited in its reach!—and then Chabad, whose Israeli members don’t even serve in the IDF and who aren’t really Zionists.  And the response is predictably tepid and ineffective.

That needs to change.  The American Jewish community has serious resources at its disposal.  What we need now is the vision to apply those resources to the marketplace of ideas that the university academy is supposed to be, and to engage and recruit our young Jewish adults in a serious and committed way.

I know that this seems like a large agenda: but we are devoting so much effort now as a community to the painful work of salvaging a PR disaster, and we are discovering that the very Jewish students we should have been connecting with and assisting are sometimes part of that disaster.  Shouldn’t we put in the positive effort to build college and post-college communities that are dedicated to Judaism, Jewish life, and Israel, instead of paddling upstream against a flood of well-coordinated anti-Israel and anti-Semitic propaganda?

There is a theme in Fiddler on the Roof that is worth remembering: Tradition, when it runs into change, must adapt.  And we must adapt and consider our sacred youth, our children at university and in their early adulthood, as truly essential for the future of our people, and our Jewish nation.

Let’s remember that commitment, and seek to build a better college future for our kids, and by doing so, for ourselves.

You Do You, Really? Loving Your Neighbor as Yourself

Rabbi Samuel M. Cohon’s Sermon Shabbat Kedoshim 5784

Last week I drove twice to Phoenix, the second time to conduct the wedding of the children of congregants.  On the way, of course, I passed huge billboards advertising casinos; I mean, there are always commercials for casinos here in Arizona, on TV, as web ads, and billboards.  One of the most prominent has the tagline, “Come to our casino, where you do you.”  In the TV version of this ad, beautiful and glamorous looking women and men—mostly women—are busy gambling, dancing, swimming, eating lavish meals, drinking, flirting, and then gambling again.  And at the end, that repeated tagline: “Our casino, where you do you.”  

Frankly, I don’t exactly know what “you do you” means, but I assume it is a way of saying that at these places of hedonistic pleasures you can show yourself all the love you personally deserve.  And while you are doing you, you can also spend some money at the tables helping the casino do itself, I suppose.

That self-indulgent ethos, that focus on pandering to the most superficial of pleasures, is certainly a big part of contemporary American life.  And if “you do you” means more than that—and I’m not sure it really does—it is probably a reflection of our secular society’s concept that each of us has the privilege—perhaps even the right—to live and act however we desire, without much regard for our fellow citizens.  Want to wear clothes that don’t fit in?  In Tucson, that’s hard to imagine, but go ahead, you do you.  Want to voice harsh political opinions in front of people who will be offended?  Go ahead, you do you.  Want to cut someone off in traffic and then slow down?  Go ahead, you do you.  Choose not to pick up your own trash?  Go ahead, you do you.  I mean, you are the most important person in your world, right?

So, you do you. 

I mean, you can’t love anyone else until you love yourself, right?  So, by showing yourself lots of self-love you are undoubtedly improving your chances of being loving to others, right?  Yeah, go ahead, you do you.

In a way, this is an attitude that’s antithetical to Judaism’s general belief that we are each mutually responsible for one another.  Kol Yisrael areivim zeh bazeh, we are told in Talmud, again and again: every Israelite is responsible for one another, that is, each person is responsible for, and to, every other person in our society.

But in another way, there is one place in the Torah that this self-absorbed outlook might reflect something valuable.  And it deals with the question of love in a unique and powerful way.

As you know, this Shabbat we read the great Torah portion of Kedoshim, which includes the Holiness Code, the ethical injunctions that lie at the heart of Jewish practice.  Kedoshim includes mitzvot that require us to assist the poor, treat strangers, widows, and orphans with generosity and kindness, obligates sensitivity to those with physical and other impairments, and insists on fair business practices.  This is not “you do you” at all, but you act in ways that build a good and just society.  This is you doing things that help others, not yourself, and that create justice and kindness in our world.

Kedoshim directs us to live moral lives, then tells us how to do so, and finally builds thematically to its most powerful message.  That message is ve’ahavta lerei’acha kamocha, love your neighbor as you love yourself.  It is perhaps the greatest of all moral instructions, and it lies at the heart of the religious spirit in life.  Love your neighbor as you love yourself—and do so by acting in ways that build trust and goodness every day.

This remarkable sentence comes in the precise center of the middle book of the Torah, Vayikra, Leviticus.  Kedoshim, the Holiness Code, is in the middle of the middle of the Torah.  It forms the heart of the heart of our most sacred text.  And at the heart of the heart of the heart, if you will, is the ethical injunction to love your neighbor as you love yourself. 

This concept is an amazing, utopian ideal—love your neighbor as much as you love yourself. 

But what does that truly mean?  How do you show another person that you love her or him as much as you love yourself?  Is it even possible?

The Kotzker Rebbe, a noted and brilliant contrarian, in typical fashion asks a question about this passage, ve’ahavta l’rei’acha kamocha, love your neighbor as you love yourself: “How can one be asked to love his friend like himself?” he begins.  In other words, how is it even possible to ask this, when on the surface it appears that we must follow the dictum in Pirkei Avot, the Ethics of the Ancestors, im ein ani li mi li, if I am not for myself first, who will be for me; who will stand up for me if I don’t take care of my own needs?  Who will advocate for me if I don’t do it first?

But then the Kotzker Rebbe goes on to question the very essence of this statement.  He asks further, “Since when is loving yourself a truly good thing?  Loving yourself brings a person to selfishness and a host of other bad qualities.”  Narcissism, hedonism, egotism, greed, and on and on.  No, the Kotzker Rebbe says, “The goal should not be love oneself at all, but rather, a person should negate himself totally.”  This is a mystical idea, actually: the goal of the truly good person, the religious person, should be to humble the ego, to eliminate the obsession with the self completely.

Wait: does that mean that according to this approach, that is how the Torah wants you to treat your friend?  You know, since you have focused on humbling, even negating your own selfish ego you should do the same for your friend?  That is, treat them as nothing, too?  Ah, no, the Kotzker answers, quite the opposite: “ve’ahavta lerei’acha kamocha means that to the same degree with which you negate yourself to the epitome of humility and self-abnegation, so too you must love your friend to the epitome of love.”

In other words, we are being taught here to diminish our own self-love and egotism, and exchange that for love of our friends, relatives, and all other members of our society.  Love your neighbor with the love you give him or her in place of giving it to yourself.

Not you do you: you give of you, you give from yourself, you do what’s best for others.

Ve’ahavta lrei’acha kamocha—love your neighbor as you love yourself as a gift of your best to others.

OK, so just how are we supposed to do that? 

While the Torah does not choose to explain this central tenet, in true Jewish fashion it also does not make this simply an idealistic statement and hope people figure out how live up to it.  It is instead worked into a practical imperative.  Kedoshim builds up to this magnificent commitment with a series of ethical injunctions: leave a corner of your field for the poor and the stranger.  Don’t leave a stumbling block before the morally blind.  Care for the widow and the orphan.  Be honest in your business dealings.  Have equal weights and measures; be honest in your personal conduct.  Be holy, because God is holy—that is, be ethical, because that is the heart of holiness.

Kedoshim teaches us that the way to love your neighbor is by treating him or her fairly, honestly, and compassionately.  It makes it clear that showing empathy and concern for others is a pragmatic approach to love that is just so Jewish. 

We are not obligated to convert our neighbors to our own views.  We are not obligated to save our neighbors from their own belief systems.  We are not obligated to change our neighbors into carbon copies of ourselves.  We are not required to condemn our neighbors because they are different from ourselves, or have other political beliefs.  Rather, we are commanded to treat them as we wish to be treated: respectfully, honorably, honestly, charitably, ethically, generously.  That is the best expression of love.

Frankly, this is exactly what our society today needs most.  Not you do you; you do what’s right for all.

This is love of one’s neighbor expressed in a functional, healthy world.  Not coercion, but concern.  Not compulsion, but care.  Not elitism, but egalitarianism.  Not dishonesty or manipulation, but honesty and generosity.

May we learn to reshape our own lives, and perhaps then the public life of our country, in these profoundly Jewish ways.  And may we come to do this speedily and soon.

Scapegoats

Sermon Parshat Acharei-Mot 5784, Rabbi Sam Cohon, Beit Simcha 

Do you know the two Yiddish words, Schlemiel and Schlemazel?  They are similar, of course, but they convey slightly different meanings.  Both a schlemiel and a schlimazel are, well, losers, but there is a subtle difference between the two words.  To clarify, a schlemiel is someone who spills his entire bowl of hot soup on the guy next to him.  The schlimazel is the one he spills the soup on.

I was thinking about that important Yiddish linguistic distinction while reading this week’s Torah portion of Acharei Mot, because it is in the beginning of this portion that we get what might be the most important example of a ritual version of the shlemazel in all of Jewish tradition.

This famous section of Acharei Mot describes the rituals of Yom Kippur, and the way we atone for our collective sins.  The most notable part of this ancient practice is the way that the High Priest, the leading religious figure of antiquity, transfers the guilt of the entire people of Israel to a poor innocent goat, sending it out into the wilderness to carry the iniquity of the nation away.  This marks the invention of the function of the scapegoat, the sacrificial goat who is not actually sacrificed, but instead is preserved to wander the wastelands on the fringes of the Promised Land, carrying its permanent burden of the errors and evils of others into eternal semi-exile.

Of course, our society has accepted this term, scapegoat, for anyone who is blamed for the wrongdoing of others and sent off to suffer a dismal fate for the crimes and misdemeanors of others, usually higher ups.  That scapegoat term from right here in Leviticus has received such universal acceptance that those who foul up and are blamed for losses in sports, fairly or otherwise, for many years have been called simply the “goat” of a lost World Series or Super Bowl or NBA Championship; the “scape” part was dropped in the sports world’s usage.

In recent years a new sports term has come along, oddly, the “GOAT”, in our craze for acronyms, standing for “Greatest Of All Time”.  It is applied and argued about, who is the “GOAT”, the greatest quarterback, pitcher, basketball player, hockey goalie, and so on.  There is an irony to this; apparently the scapegoat remains damned, but the GOAT is now actually a hero. 

The idea of a scapegoat accepting the sins of his betters and becoming the fall guy—by the way, there is a section in the Talmud that says that the scapegoat wasn’t just sent off to wander but was actually pushed off a cliff, making the scapegoat also the fall guy, I suppose—has become universal in our society.  The truth is that when people at the top of a company, or a government, or a social organization get into trouble it’s handy indeed to have someone further down the pecking order to blame.  What was that term that became popular during the Watergate scandal?  Plausible deniability?  If you can just blame someone further down the food chain for what went wrong, well, you can simply skate past the scandal with minimal damage.

I’ve been listening to a podcast the past few months when I go cycling called “American Scandal.”  It’s put together and narrated by a successful podcaster named Lindsay Graham—not that Lindsay Graham, a different guy altogether—and it chronicles a wide array of national scandals that range both geographically and chronologically.  The scandals on this show come in many varieties: political, economic, environmental, military, religious, bureaucratic, sexual, commercial, musical, obscenity, and on and on, and since they have recorded some 40 seasons of these scandals—some are just a few episodes; others take as many as 6 shows to complete—after a while you get a good sense of how these things work.  While sometimes the scandals depict bad events that led to some sort of justice being done and the perpetrators punished and the damage restored or at least compensated, more often than not, the guilty parties in these scandals manage to transfer the righteous punishment to someone down the line; that is, they dump it on, you know, a scapegoat.  Sometimes the scapegoat takes all the blame, and sometimes the true perpetrators eventually find a way to pardon even the scapegoat.

While I like this “American Scandal” series and have learned a great deal about famous controversial events I thought I knew well, and even more about some events I didn’t know existed, I must admit that after a while it can be depressing to realize that so many of these scandals resulted in the guilty escaping punishment and innocent people suffering.  And of course, quite frequently—nearly always—some poor schnook became the scapegoat for the failings of a system or a person or a nation or an institution.  A lot of the scapegoats in these scandals actually become schlemazels, abandoned and blamed by the very organizations and people they helped reach their seedy heights.

Clearly, that was never the intent of the Leviticus ritual for Yom Kippur.  After all, the Day of Atonement was one in which collective responsibility for the good of society was shared by all Israelites, in which the greatest and the humblest both were required to atone for sin and seek forgiveness, not dump their mistakes on the nearest likely candidate for schlimazelhood.  The symbolic goat was just one aspect of this day of self-examination, self-reflection, self-abnegation.  We were immersed in the idea of responsibility for own actions, not the culture of passing the buck to a likely loser. 

So, what do we learn from Acharei Mot and that poor wandering goat in the Wilderness?  Is the scapegoat just an older version of the chad gadyo, the only kid my father bought for two zuzim in the Pesach Seder who gets bitten by the cat, who is eaten by the dog who is beaten by the stick that is burned by the fire, etc. etc., low animal on the totem pole always getting the worst of it from the superior powers above?  Only at the end of the Chad Gadyo does the Holy Blessed One restore justice by destroying the Angel of Death, ending the long string of higher-ups punishing those below.

Perhaps the most important function of religion is to assure us that eventually God will restore justice to unjust situations, will find a way to balance the inequities we see in our own lives and in our society.  The Jewish God, in particular, is a God of Justice, insisting that ultimately it is both our responsibility, and God’s responsibility, to create honesty, integrity, and justice.  Sadly, looking around at the world we live in, as our ancestors must have done, does not yield a rosy picture of justice fulfilled on a planet teeming with righteousness and goodness.  Just this past week, the tendency to place collective blame on others—in this case, of course, the Jews—was enacted on college campuses across our country, and elsewhere.  It is worth noting that at Columbia University, one of the epicenters of the blame-the-Israelis-and-the-Jews-for-everything-wrong-in-the-world movement, well over 50% of the “progressive protestors” arrested for violence were not actually college students at all.  Draw your own conclusions here.

Look, you can see the over the long course of Jewish Diaspora history, and now Israel’s 76 years, that the world community often decides that the Jews should be the scapegoat for whatever problems are currently perceived to be occurring.  It’s so easy for leaders to claim that it is one scapegoat’s fault that things are going wrong, rather than take responsibility for challenging problems and trying to fix them honestly.  And this time, as usual, it is Israel’s fault for existing at all, and the world’s Jews fault for supporting the only Jewish state in the past 1800 years.

But the goat here in Acharei Mot was not intended to be a cheap or easy way out for the powerful.  In fact, the Biblical scapegoat, by allowing the Israelites to be relieved of the sins they had committed, literally helped free them of the burden of seeing an unjust world and believing that they personally had caused it.  It allowed them to let go of their sins of the previous year and permitted them to enter the newish year with clean hands and pure heart, at least officially, as long as they pledged to try to do better this time around.

By the way, the English term for this goat, scapegoat, is said to come from famed Bible translator William Tyndale, who called it the “escapegoat” because it avoided the fate of its partner goat who was slaughtered and offered to God.  It took on the sins of the people, but remained alive and headed off to the hills, as goats are wont to do.  “Escapegoat” soon became “scapegoat,” easier to say, to blame.

What are we to make of the institution of the scapegoat now?  Of course, we know that it is often easier to seek to blame another person or multiple people for one’s own failings, and to redistribute blame towards an innocent instead of accepting responsibility.  Psychologically, it is far easier to shunt misdeeds and errors off on another than to carry the burden oneself.  This tendency to avoid responsibility is certainly human, and normal.  Who wants to walk around with the guilt of the world, or even of our own mistakes, on our own backs when we can blame it on someone, or something, else?

The scapegoat, sent off to Azazel in Acharei Mot on Yom Kippur, directed to wander the wilderness bearing its sinful burden, served a most useful purpose.  It allowed our ancestors to let go of the weighty detritus of their own failings and gave them the opportunity to begin again free of that painful baggage.

Of course, some of us still employ scapegoats to take on the responsibility for our own mistakes.  Our parents didn’t love us enough: we were misled by our spouses; we were pressured by our employers, or employees, or our neighbors; we cut corners because bad guys run the world and we don’t want to play into their hands.

Doing good can be hard.  Blaming others for failing to do so is easy.

What should we use in place of this Azazel scapegoat today?  The last of these poor animals went off into the Judean Desert nearly 2000 years ago.  How are we contemporary Jews to handle our own burden of sin and error?  You would think that we would have figured out a better way to handle things than dumping our problems on a scapegoat. 

I would suggest that we are in fact fortunate that Judaism abandoned the scapegoat motif so long ago.  Instead of a magical transfer of guilt to a goat, we instead took on the responsibility of resolving our own issues directly.  It was up to us—it is up to us—to seek to fix those damages we create in our own lives and in our world.  No High Priest can transfer out sins and errors to a helpless animal and send our guilt off into the wilderness.  We must seek out the people we have injured and make amends.  We must see the world’s damages and try to repair them. 

In a world that has so many challenges—terrorism and hostages, brutal invasive wars, corrupt and authoritarian leaders, global warming, paralyzing political polarization, and the eternal scapegoating of minorities everywhere—among them, of course, the Jews—it is up to us to address those challenges.  It is our responsibility, not that goat’s, to right the wrongs and restore justice.  In our own lives, and in our world. 

How can you take responsibility better for what isn’t right in your world?  How can you help your community, your synagogue, your family to a better place, without access to scapegoats or scapegoating?

May we learn from Acharei Mot to act in our own lives, and in this mistake-prone world, to create honesty, integrity and justice.

Kein Yehi Ratson.

Freedom

Sermon Shabbat Passover 5784, Rabbi Sam Cohon

I have been hunting about for a new Passover joke this year, but sadly, all I can find is old ones.  Some of them, however, are classics. 

A Jewish man is waiting in line to be knighted by the King of England. He is supposed to kneel and recite a sentence in Latin.

His turn arrives, he kneels, the King taps him on the shoulders with the sword ... and in the panic of all of the excitement he forgets the Latin phrase. Thinking quickly, he recites the only other line he knows in a foreign language, which he remembers from the Passover Seder: "Mah nishtana ha-lailah ha-zeh mi-kol ha-leilot."

The puzzled King turns to his adviser and asks, "Why is this knight different from all other knights?

Or, of course, my all-time favorite Pesach joke.  A blilnd man is sitting on a park bench during Pesach, and a rabbi comes and sits down next to him and pulls out his lunch.  He feels bad eating with this poor blind man next to him with nothing, so he takes a piece of matzah and gives it to the blind man.  A few minutes later the blind man taps the rabbi on the shoulder and says, “Who wrote this garbage?”

As we know, as a festival, Pesach is special in some unique ways.  Even the name of the holiday has special importance. 

Pesach actually has no fewer than four official names in Jewish tradition: Pesach or Passover for the paschal offering, the lamb that was sacrificed and roasted in the days of the Bible and the Temple; Chag HaMatzot, the holiday of matzah, the unleavened bread we eat for the week of Passover; Chag HaAviv, the springtime festival, probably the oldest of the names of Passover; and most thematically, zman cheiruteinu, the season of our freedom.  Each of these names has something important to teach us, and each is interesting in and of itself.

The word pesach itself comes from the word for “leaping” or jumping in Hebrew, an apt description of the ways that young lambs leap and cavort in the fields. The use of this animal for the sacrifice of the Passover reminds us of that the Angel of Death “leaped over” the homes of the Israelites when striking the first-born of the Egyptians dead, and it also refreshes for us the memory of the leaping joy of freedom, the ability to move and act as we wish that is prevented during slavery.  Free people can cavort, skip, dance or jump as they please.  Slaves jump to someone else’s command.  Hence, Chag haPesach, the holiday of “leaping over.”

The second name for Passover is Chag HaMatzot, the festival of poor man’s bread, Matzah.  Unleavened bread, made with flour and water in 18 minutes or less, baked quickly and simply, the food our ancestors made as preparation for a hasty journey in flight.  Of course, on Pesach we eat matzah all week, and therefore do not eat chametz, which is best described as being the opposite of matzah, anything made with leavening or fermentation.  In a way, Matzah is completely unadulterated bread, pure, if, well, tasteless.  But simple, plain, honest.

The third name for the festival is Chag HaAviv, the holiday of springtime.  Undoubtedly there was a spring festival observed long before the events of the Exodus led to the creation of the holiday of Passover.  Spring is celebrated in every culture and nearly every religion in the world.  In our Seder celebrations, which of course teach the meaning and story of freedom in a rich and wonderful variety of ways, spring was featured in the green vegetables we dipped in salt water and in the hardboiled egg that symbolized the rebirth of spring.  The magnificent love poem, Shir HaShirim, the Song of Songs in the Hebrew Bible, is chanted on the Shabbat of Passover—tomorrow morning—and it’s a text filled with images of gardens and growth and love in the flowering springtime.  A wonderful way to celebrate this most beautiful and verdant of seasons, this springtime festival.

And finally, the ultimate theme of Passover is freedom: zman cheiruteinu, the time of our liberation.  It is this essential ideal that is woven all through the week of Passover, the central focus on God’s gift of liberty that has made Pesach the model freedom festival for the world.  B’chol dor vador chayav adam lirot et atzmo ke’ilu hu yatzah miMitzrayim.  “In every generation each of us is obligated to see ourselves as though we, personally, had been brought out of Egypt,” we are taught in the Haggadah.  In addition to our own celebration of our ancestors’ freedom, we also are compelled to learn compassion and have empathy for the downtrodden.  For when we can view ourselves as survivors of slavery we are compelled to sympathize with the dispossessed, a central principle of Jewish belief. 

It is a fascinating aspect of Judaism that we focus so much on the fact that our ancestors were slaves, the lowest of the low in any society.  So many peoples celebrate their noble ancestry, their descent from high-born people or even actual gods.  For example, the Emperor of Japan was quite literally believed to have been a descendant of the sun itself; the pharaohs of ancient Egypt, our enslavers, were considered to be divine themselves, gods on earth descended from the gods.  Greeks kings and Roman emperors claimed similar highest-possible ancestry.

But not the Jews.  In fact, we make it a point to say Avadim hayinu l’Pharaoh b’Mitzrayim; we were slaves to Pharaoh in Egypt.  We had nothing of our own, had no status at all.  We were, in that materially advanced but morally stratified society, akin to Untouchables.  And in our retelling of this tale we don’t hide that at all; instead we remember our origins and where we came from with insistence.  We weren’t born with silver spoons in our mouths, but among the hardworking, the lowly of the earth.  We were slaves, and God, through Moses, brought us out to freedom.  But it was not the last time we were enslaved.

In fact, that has often been our fate in the many centuries since that original burst into freedom we commemorate at Passover.

There are, in fact, a number of words for freedom in Hebrew, perhaps because there are many different kinds of freedom, and many different ways it can be either achieved or curtailed.  The first you’ve heard already, Cheirut, liberation or freedom, for this season of freedom, zman cheiruteinu.  But there are many others: chofesh, which means free of obligations, like a vacation from work or school; dror, which is usually translated as liberty, as in “Proclaim liberty throughout the land,” the ukratem dror ba’arets, from the commandment to celebrate the Jubilee and free all servants; and even padah, as in Pidyon shevuyim, the freeing or redeeming of captives that is a central mitzvah in Judaism and one we are struggling with now as we seek to liberate the hostages held by the Palestinian terrorists in Gaza.

I’ve been thinking about freedom this week, for very obvious reasons, not simply because it is the central focus of Passover, not only for the hard and painful fact that our brothers and sisters are trapped in chains under Gaza now, but for the troubling fact that we are experiencing, in our own way, a little less freedom right now in America than we have enjoyed for some years.  Most of our daily lives are not impacted by the hatred pouring out at Jews on our college campuses—but some of us are very much affected by a new and frightening reality that hasn’t existed here in most of our memories.  And the acts of vandalism and more direct violence both verbal—including shouts of “Israel must die” and “we want Jewish genocide” at the University of Arizona this week—and physical have eroded the freedom we feel.  We have, perhaps, taken our remarkable level of freedom here in America a little for granted.

I always ask people at the Seders I conduct to reflect on freedom, and what limits their own freedom.  The answers always range broadly.  Sometimes people talk about addictions; sometimes they talk about restrictions imposed by society; sometimes they mention physical ailments that limit them, or financial hardships that curtail their freedom to act, and live, as they would wish.  This year one of my friends answered in a unique way: he said that what restricted his personal freedom was his own conscience; that is, he needed to act responsibly, which was at odds with feeling truly free.

I suspect we are all limited in the freedom we feel by a variety of factors.  But perhaps the most important thing to remember on this festival of freedom, is that freedom, as generally defined in Judaism, is not simple the absence of constrictions, the liberation from slavery or imprisonment.  It is also having the ability to choose our own ideals and standards, to follow the valuable course in life that we wish to follow.

I love a poem of Adrienne Rich’s on this. She says, “Freedom. It isn't once to walk out under the Milky Way, feeling the rivers of light, the fields of dark—freedom is daily, prose-bound, routine remembering. Putting together inch by inch the starry worlds. From all the lost collections.”

May we all be able, at this season of liberation, to achieve such meaningful freedom.

Rabbi Cohon’s Response to the Iranian Attack

As you all are likely quite aware, on Saturday Iran brazenly attacked Israel directly, sending over 350 missiles and drones at Israeli cities and other civilian population centers.  Anti-missile defenses—primarily Israel's, but also American, Jordanian, and other allied nations—shot down all of them, with no loss of life.  Iran also seized an Israeli-linked ship in the Straits of Hormuz, a vital artery for the oil trade.  

While Iran has long used "proxy" terrorist groups to attack Israel, including Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis in Yemen, and Iran's Syrian clients, this marks the first direct attack on Israel by Iran ever.  It is a major escalation against Israel, a violation of all international law, and an act of war.  It is quite obviously a Casus Belli, a legal reason to go to war.

Israel has shown restraint in not immediately responding by attacking Iran directly.  To this point, much of the world's effort has been directed at restraining Israel from answering Iran's obvious provocation, rather than condemning Iran for acting against all responsible standards of civilization and being the outlaw theocratic state that it is.  This shows, yet again, the highly prejudicial double standard applied constantly to Israel.    

No one knows how this will all develop.  But it is clear that we must stand with our brothers and sisters in Israel who are being attacked yet again, this time in an unprecedented way by a regional power that has continually broadcast its fervent desire to destroy the only Jewish state on the planet and massacre all its Jews.  Israelis have had a sleepless night; it could have been much worse.  We can thank God, and Israel's defenses and allies, that it was not.

The international effort to delegitimize Israel has ratcheted up ever since the Palestinian Arab atrocities perpetrated by Hamas and other Palestinians on October 7th, an incredibly brutal and horrific attack that was sponsored and coordinated by Iran.  The Israeli hostages who still remain alive have now spent over six months in terrifying captivity in and under Gaza, and we will begin Passover a week from tonight with the knowledge that this year, in particular, we are not all free.

At this time of challenge and attack on our homeland of the heart, Israel, it is incumbent on every Jew in the world to support Israel in every way that we can.  We may not always agree with everything that Israel does; in fact, it would be positively un-Jewish to think that we would.  We may not approve of the current Israeli government; most Israelis don't either.   But it is a mitzvah of the highest order to support Israel as a primary Jewish act right now.  Kol Yisrael Areivim Zeh Bazeh, the Talmud teaches us.  Every Israelite is responsible for every other; every Jew has a moral obligation to care about and help every other Jew.  

And all of us have just such a responsibility to Israel.  

My sermon, delivered last Friday night before this Iranian attack, addresses this question, too.

May Israel emerge from this latest dark chapter a stronger, better nation.  And we pray that peace returns to her speedily and soon.

Chazans and Israel

Sermon Parshat Tazria 5784

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

A chazan, as you may know, is a cantor, the shliach tzibur, the person entrusted with leading the community in prayer.  I am, of course, both a rabbi and a chazan, a member of both the Central Conference of American Rabbis and the Cantors Assembly, the two oldest existent professional organizations for rabbis and cantors, respectively, in America, and so I may have a unique perspective on the role of the chazan in the leadership of Jews. 

The role of the chazan actually may predate that of the rabbi, since in antiquity those who led prayers had to be expert in text and tune as well as articulation.  Most congregants probably did not have siddurim, prayerbooks to follow the prayers, or chumashim, Torah texts.  Books were handwritten, expensive and likely hard to come by, so the chazan’s chanting was the way that Jews could speak to God using the beautiful language of our liturgy, and could learn the text of Torah.  The word chazan likely is derived from the Hebrew word chazah, to show, as in the one who shows the way.  And of course, chazanim, cantors, were supposed to have pleasant voices, even excellent ones, in order to make the prayers soar up to God.

Which reminds me of a classic story.  It seems that one Shabbat Palestinian terrorists take over a synagogue, and then hold the rabbi, the chazan and the president hostage.  They tell the three, “We are going to kill you, you vile Zionists.  But before we execute you, we are going to grant each of you a final request.”

The Palestinian terrorists turn first to the rabbi and they say, “What’s your final request?”  And he says, “I have this amazing sermon I was going to preach, the best one I’ve ever written.  I’d like to deliver it before you kill me.”  The terrorists say, “How long will it take?” And the rabbi answers, “One hour.”  So they say, “OK, you can deliver your sermon and then we’ll shoot you.”

They next turn to the chazan and they ask him, “What’s your final request?”  And he says, “I have this incredible ma’ariv evening service I’ve always wanted to chant.  It’s the most extraordinary Jewish music ever, and I’d like to sing it.”  And the terrorists say, “How long will it take?” And the chazan answers, “Two hours.”  So they say, “OK, you can sing your service and then we’ll shoot you.” 

The terrorists then turn to the president of the synagogue and they ask him, “What’s your final request?”  And the president says, “Shoot me first.”

I realize this is particularly dark humor this year, when we have seen Israeli hostages held for more than six months now in and under Gaza, and we don’t even know how many of them remain alive, or if they will be freed during the coming Pesach, the Festival of Freedom.  Still, in good times and especially in bad times, we Jews have always responded to persecution, pogrom and tragedy with our own brand of sardonic humor. 

This extemporanea about chazanim is provoked by a little exploration I did concerning attitudes towards Israel today among world Jewry, both in America and in other parts of the Diaspora, and it comes from two articles written by people with the last name of Chazan.  And while these are not new articles—perhaps because they are not new articles—they have much to show us about how we can and should respond to questions about our support for Israel today.

Over twenty years ago Professor Barry Chazan, then Professor of Education at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem wrote a challenging article about the Diaspora’s relationship with Israel (Struggling for Israel in The Sovereign and Situated Self, 2003).   The context of his article was the rapid downturn of engagement with Israel in synagogues and Jewish communities worldwide that began with the Second Intifada of 2000 and which ended with the building of the separation barrier between the West Bank and Israel.

He began his article with this challenge: “We have lost the authentic narrative of Israel in the lives of the Jewish people.”  He said that in the melee of politics, opposition to the policies of a particular Israeli government, horror at the effects of the struggle between radical Palestinian terrorists and the State of Israel and the risk of disdain from our neighbors who are not connected to Israel, or who do not support Israeli actions or policies, we have failed to teach and pass on to our future generations the continuation of the centuries old link between Erets Yisrael, the land of Israel, and Jewish culture, Jewish civilization and Jewish religion.  Israel, Chazan said, is an indispensable element of being Jewish and of Jewish peoplehood.

Of course he was right, and ahead of his time.  Connection to Israel in the is as indispensable an element of being Jewish as is connection to Shabbat, to Jewish festivals, to our Jewish texts, to our responsibility for Tikkun Olam, the improvement of the world in our lifetime, to caring for others and all that we understand as the Mitzvot, our Jewish duties.  Caring about and supporting Israel is not optional.

This connection is not and cannot be conditional on how Israel acts at a particular time in history.  Our Bible, particularly our Haftarah portions, continually document how Israel under various kings acted dreadfully – in Elijah’s time it was King Ahab supporting the prophets of Baal to bring the Israelite people into idolotary; in Isaiah’s day he describes a society where the rights of the stranger, the widow and the orphan are trampled upon by a falsely pious wealthy few.  The prophet Amos says that people in power in Israel who would sell the needy for a pair of shoes.  Jeremiah lavishes some of the most beautiful poetic imagery in the history of literature to describe how thoroughly rotten the Israelites are acting both in embracing idolatry and cheating the poor and hungry.  None of these great prophets said “Since you disagree with some of Israel’s actions you should stop supporting the right of the Jewish people to live in the land.”  They all advocated a continuing connection with Israel and a profound duty to improve her.

Another Professor Chazan – Naomi Chazan, then President of the New Israel Fund—also weighed in.  At a conference of the European Union for Progressive Judaism she said that “the most patriotic thing you can do as a Jew is to fight for a decent and just Israel.”

Our link with Israel – cultural, religious, and peoplehood based, is so central to Jewish identity that it cannot be conditional on us fully approving how Israel acts.

The first Chazan here, Professor Barry Chazan set out six ways in which we can ensure that we here in the Diaspora and our children will build our span in the bridge to Israel for now and the future.  Mind you, he said all of this more than 20 years ago.  I only wish the world Jewish community had fully listened and acted on these principles with the full weight of its resources beginning two decades ago. 

First, he said, we should teach our core Jewish texts with Israel intertwined.  Part of our Torah portion today, Tazria, is about a house built in the Land of Israel which is rotting but can be fixed.  Our Torah texts will continue for most of the rest of this Jewish year with the introductory words “when you come into the land of Israel”  – they are here to establish values which will make the Jewish nation and our relationship to it sacred, unique, holy.

Second, we should not dumb down our engagement with Israel – rather in what we do in our Diaspora communities we should emphasize the realities of the contemporary State of Israel with all of its confusions.  As Naomi Chazan says, “We have to distinguish between dissenters and destroyers”.  In the debate over judicial reform last year in Israel hundreds of thousands of Israelis came out to peacefully protest the Netanyahu government’s attempt at a judicial coup, to defend democracy in Israel.  These, our brothers and sisters were not destroying Israel – they were seeking to preserve a central, nearly sacred aspect of our Jewish State for the present and the future.  But when Israel was attacked in the horrific atrocities of October 7th they all rallied to the support of the only Jewish nation on the planet, and did so with great energy, devotion and passion.

Most Israelis have no use for their Prime Minister now—but they support their nation and its right to exist.  So must we, too, and do so with passion but with intelligence, that supremely Jewish quality. 

Third, Barry Chazan recommends we must use the Hebrew language. This is our unique possession by which we best express Jewish ideas and, spoken, written in, sung in, it conveys the culture and civilization of our people better than you could ever do in English.

Fourth we must create multiple Israel experiences throughout the year – chances to celebrate, times to learn, opportunities to enjoy Israeli food, music, film, art – just woven into what it means to be a Jew anywhere in the world in 2024, as we seek to do at Beit Simcha in every way that we can.

Fifth, Barry Chazan says, make sure that there is plenty of access to Israelis as he writes “we should use real human beings.  One of the best texts we have in teaching Israel is real Israelis.  ….  By giving the Jewish people access to all kinds of Israelis, we are offering them an opportunity to view Israel as the diverse textbook of Jewishness that it is.”

Finally, we should go to Israel, even at times of great challenge—perhaps especially at times of its greatest challenges.  Israel changes rapidly and only by seeing with your own eyes can you experience the potential for our Jewish state, see its struggles, experience how it is to live just a few miles from a place where there are people who have continually tried to destroy your country, experience the determination of Israelis who campaign for co-existence, find yourself right in the middle of the debate about how Israel will be.

Mind you, these ideas are not new.  But at time of supreme difficulty for Israel, when the enemies of the existence of a Jewish state are emboldened everywhere, it is of utmost importance that we play our important part in affirming the central role that Israel plays in our own Jewish identities.

Even when we disagree with its government, or that government’s actions.  The modern State of Israel is the fulfillment of a dream, yes, im tirtzu ein zo Aggadah, if you will it, it is no dream; but it is also reality that must lie close to our hearts.  Our support for it should neither falter nor flag, even while we disagree with some of its actions.

And may the Land of Israel again soon know peace.

Strange Fire?

Sermon, Shabbat Shemini 5784

Rabbi Sam Cohon, Congregation Beit Simcha

We have now officially begun our Passover preparations, which include finding the Haggadahs we so carefully put away last year, cleaning out the old stuff from our refrigerators and freezers, and gasping at the extremely high prices the local markets charge for Passover supplies.  And of course, dusting off Pesach jokes from recent years.

For example, there’s the question of just what you call someone who derives pleasure from the bread of affliction?  That’s right, a matzah-chist.

Now, just in time for Passover this year, and most unexpectedly, the number one streaming series on Netflix this week is not a reality TV show on finding love, nor a cooking show, nor a detective or murder show, nor even a teen drama with supernatural overtones.  No, the number one show on Netflix this week—actually, for a few weeks now—is called Testament: the Story of Moses.  Sophie and I tried to watch it one night last week, and found it to be pretty weak: it’s not exactly a drama, since it has “experts”, that is, talking heads opining about Moses and the Exodus story. But it’s also not quite a documentary, since it has dramatizations of the events of the truly greatest story ever told that are odd and stiffly staged, with mediocre CGI recreations of the high points of the story, then back to the expert commentary.  I’m not sure exactly what they were trying to convey here, but I do know that we didn’t make it through two full episodes before falling asleep, and we tried on two consecutive nights. 

Look, I’m glad it’s popular, especially this time of year.  We have had to depend on the rather hokey and profoundly outdated Cecil B. DeMille Biblical epic The Ten Commandments film with Charlton Heston and Yul Brynner for almost 70 years—three score and ten, if you are keeping track in Biblical terms in your scorecard—or the animated Prince of Egypt movie that was made in 1998 by Dreamworks; that one is over 25 years old now.  There was a wretched version of the story called Exodus: Gods and Kings with Christian Bale that filmmaker Ridley Scott made 10 years ago which was, to be kind, unwatchably bad; and besides, it starred a guy as Moses who was named Christian.  With that limited repertoire of Pesach films to recommend, when this mini-series popped up on our Netflix menu as the number one show in the country I had to view it.

And this one?  Not great, nor even good.  We found it pretty hard to stay awake. Which is a shame, and, frankly, somewhat startling. 

I mean, it’s astonishing how many terrible films and TV shows are made from fantastic Biblical stories.  I find it puzzling that producers and directors, given great plots, terrific characters and memorable dialogue in the original sources somehow can’t make a decent movie or TV series out of these extraordinary stories that shaped all later literature, not to mention fostering three major religions and most of western civilization. 

Look, the Exodus story is terrific.  It has everything you could want in a dramatic epic, including even a bit of sex appeal in the Moses-Tzipporah romance.  It’s got the struggle for freedom from enslavement and oppression, the rise of an extremely reluctant and unexpected hero, a powerful, evil and deceitful king defeated by a resistance movement, a series of supernatural plagues, miraculous redemption, and finally a national covenant proclaimed and Jewish identity affirmed.  Everything you could want in a feature film or streaming series, if only they could manage to capture it. 

The Exodus story can be seen as the struggle between the ancient pantheon of corrupt gods and a new, unified moral God, and there are twists and turns in the plot enough to satisfy any great dramatist.  It’s a magnificent story… and the movies and tv shows they make from it are, generally speaking, pale imitations of the original.  This Netflix series is not an exception.  Testament: the Story of Moses’ popularity is rather shocking, in view of the fact that everyone seems to think that religion is fading away in America these days.  Yet many people are glued to their streaming devices watching a less-than-compelling telling of this extremely ancient tale in a not-very interesting way.  Somehow, viewers seem to still appreciate a rip-roaring Biblical classic even when it’s poorly made.  I guess you can’t always watch Vanderpump Rules or Kardashian re-runs.

Of course, the Exodus story doesn’t end with leaving Egypt and achieving freedom, nor does it finish at Mt. Sinai with the Ten Commandments.  It continues on the Israelites’ journey to commitment and holiness, with the creation of the Tabernacle in the Wilderness, our people’s first temple.  And in order for God to be present in that Tabernacle priests must be ordained to fulfill the rites and rituals that connected our ancestors with God.

Which brings us to this week’s portion of Shemini, including as it does the beginning of the rituals of sacrifice that connect the Israelites to the divine Presence.  It all starts well, with the final ordination rituals, the anointing of Aaron and his sons as Kohanim, high priests, and Shechinah filling the Tabernacle immediately.  Adonai is in God’s temple; all is right with the world.

But then things take a terrible turn.  The story in this week’s Torah portion is challenging indeed.  Just after the ordination of the priests who are to serve in the Tabernacle in the Wilderness and the beginning of the rituals that are designed to bring God’s presence, the Shechinah, into the midst of the people of Israel, Aaron the High Priest’s eldest sons, Nadav and Avihu, make a ritual offering of something identified as eish zarah to God, something we are told that is “not commanded.”  And God is very much not pleased.  The two sons are immediately slain, apparently in such a way that they are instantly killed while their clothing remains intact.

This shocking incident impacts Aaron, the High Priest, brother of the leader Moses and central figure in the rituals of the Tabernacle.  Here he has just celebrated the eighth day of their inauguration into the Priesthood, and seemingly out of nowhere they are suddenly killed by God.

In our portion, Aaron is notified of the death of his children.  The Torah continues, "Then Moses said to Aaron, ‘This is what the Lord spoke saying, ‘Bikrovai ekadesh v’al pnai ha’am ekaveid,’ vayidom Aharon: Through those that are near to Me I will be sanctified, and before all the people I will be glorified;’ and Aaron was silent."  (Leviticus 10:3)  It is a profoundly tragic and heartrending scene.  No one should have to experience the death of a child, let alone at a moment of great pride and celebration.  The comfort that Moses, and God, offer is small indeed.  Aaron’s only response is silence… perhaps the most profound way to experience loss.

Now this portion has long been explored to try to determine just what Nadav and Avihu did, how these two priestly sons erred and why they were destroyed for doing so. What constitutes “strange fire”, eish zarah?  Explanations have ranged from the possibility that they were drunk—there is a prohibition given shortly thereafter on priests drinking before performing rituals—to the idea that they were offering a pagan incense sacrifice to some other god to the possibility that they just exceeded their authority and took it upon themselves to make an unauthorized offering.  We don’t know exactly what they did wrong, except that it was an unsolicited act.  And the Torah does go to great pains to delineate all the rituals in incredible detail. 

It is intriguing to speculate what the Torah might mean here; are we to learn that every mitzvah in the Torah must be fulfilled super scrupulously or we, too, might be turned to ashes?  Are we to understand that those called to serve a priestly role must be held to much higher standards than mere ordinary Israelites?  Are we to wonder if perhaps these priests were simply too young to appreciate the gravity of their task of bringing holiness to the people, of almost literally bringing God to the earth? 

Or maybe we might look instead at just what constitutes eish zarah, strange fire, today.

There is a midrash from Pirkei D’Rabbi Eliezer on the relationship between “man,” which in Hebrew is ish, and “woman” which is ishah. In Hebrew, these terms share the letters alef and shin, which together form the word “eish” meaning “fire.” The difference between these two words is that “man” contains a yod and “woman” contains a hei. Put those two letters together and you form the word “yah” meaning God.  The midrash teaches us that God is saying “if you go and observe My commandments, My name will be with you and will save you from trouble; but if My name is not between you, then you will be like fire — and fire eats fire,” (Pirkei D’Rabbi Eliezer, “Horev” Chapter 11) meaning we will destroy one another.  Or perhaps—we will offer strange fire, and be destroyed.

I’ve been thinking about the true purpose of ritual—or prayer, of services, of meditation, even of orderly festivals like Passover.  Why do we have them?  Why do we need them at all?  God is everywhere, and we are busy people, right? Why do we need to sing the same words, and often the same melodies, read the same passages, do the same rituals?  Why is it important to do any of that?

I think that perhaps the answer lies in this disturbing story of Nadav and Avihu.  If we fail to ground ourselves spiritually, we put ourselves in danger of pursuing eish zarah, the kind of strange fires of passion and belief and insanity that seem to be perpetuating themselves in our society, and in our politics.  If we don’t turn to God regularly and respectfully, we run the risk of losing our way completely, of becoming strange fire ourselves, of believing the crazy conspiracy theories afoot everywhere these days, of chasing dangerous chimerical combustion. 

It is when we choose to seek God, and God’s way, with sincerity and consistency that we find the Shechinah is always present, and available to us. 

May we remember to do so on this Shabbat of Shemini, and always.

The Choice to Be Good

Sermon, Parshat Tzav 5784

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

This week someone emailed me a piece entitled “Acts of God” which lists a wide variety of natural disasters—plus some human ones, like fires and trampling incidents—in which many people have died over the last 2000 years or so.  The comment in the email was was “please discuss on your radio show.” 

I have rarely failed to rise to appropriately flavored ideological bait, and this was certainly a tasty morsel of theological challenge.  And it seemed wrong to wait to talk about it until Sunday morning’s Too Jewish Radio Show—because the question of the morality of God is certainly appropriate material for a sermon, and the synagogue is certainly one place where we ought to be able to talk about ethics and fairness.  After all, if not here, then where?

The implication in the article I received—which documented most major natural tragedies in human history, and seemed to credit them all to “acts of God”—was that if God is powerful, and God is good, what kind of God causes these horrific natural disasters—like the tsunamis last December---that kill so many people, including the elderly and small children?  As this article put it, “Here are some of the more spectacular acts of God since recorded time, and their toll in human lives…” and it then went through a list of earthquakes, epidemics, floods, hurricanes, volcanoes, and fires with a tabulation of their victims. 

Cheerful stuff.  Obviously, in that view, either God is all-powerful but none-too merciful, or God isn’t very powerful, and God’s mercy is therefore pretty irrelevant. Game, set, and match, right?

Well, without in any way diminishing the terrible trauma of the victims of such disasters, and their bereaved families, I have to say that the Jewish view of such events is rather different.  First, most of our own people’s traumas have occurred at the hands of other human beings and can’t precisely be ascribed to God’s direct acts.  I mean, God created us all free beings, with the ability to choose to act for good or evil.  When we have that choice we individually or collectively, have the capacity to act badly, to do things that cause serious harm to others.  If God intercedes and compels us to “do the right thing” then we are not really free, or independent, and our choices are not really moral.  So, in the Jewish understanding of the world God doesn’t dictate our choices for good or evil—we do.

Now, for better or worse, the natural world has its own rules and laws, and they don’t necessarily harmonize with the choices that we human beings are making.  An earthquake is no great tragedy if people don’t build cities next to large seismic faults.  A tidal wave rarely goes very far inland, so if you live in the highlands instead of on the attractive beaches you can avoid such events.  Volcanic eruptions don’t impact people living in non-volcanic areas.  But we human beings continually place ourselves in areas that are subject to such events.  That is our choice.

Of course, you can’t really avoid a natural disaster once it’s upon you, but you can choose not to live in areas that are subject to them. 

The other interesting fact about these so-called “Acts of God” is that they are usually the result of the natural processes and laws of the universe interacting.  There is nothing so remarkable about natural disasters: they have been taking place throughout all of human history.  Water and wind and the moving of tectonic plates and magma coming from the earth’s core: these forces abut each other, powerfully, and help shape our natural world.  God created these great forces and gave them a certain inanimate freedom to function. 

Sometimes we humans get caught up in those forces, and bad things happen to us.  It’s not the “malice of God at work”—it is just the result of larger forces than ourselves at play in our world.  

The macro forces—the really big, powerful ones—have a certain inanimate freedom to function.  God created them and let them go to work.  We don’t control them… they are just part of this amazing universe in which we live.

All of that means we simply must appreciate what we do have: life, in all its complexity and beauty and struggle, and our own ability to choose to act well, and so to bring blessing.

When such disasters occur our ability to bring succor and aid, and to act with decency, kindness, and generosity, is what we truly control, and what defines our own goodness and our humanity.  It also shows that we can act, in our own way, for God, by creating morality through our own actions.

Our Torah portion, Tzav, would seem not to have much to do with ethics.  After all, it is essentially about animal sacrifice and pure ritual, rather than morality.

But even here there is a subtle message about ethics.  You see, we typically talk about thanksgiving only in the fall, around the turkey day holiday.  But in truth we have a great deal to be thankful for all the time, and mostly we miss that.

In Tzav there are many different types of sacrifices commanded: burnt offerings, guilt offerings, sin offerings, and so on.  But one group of sacrificial offerings stands out: the offerings of peace, the zevach shlamim.  And among this higher category of offerings one in particular stands out even higher: the zevach haTodah, the thanksgiving offering. 

In Tractate Berachot, it reads:

אָמַר רַב יְהוּדָה אָמַר רַב: אַרְבָּעָה צְרִיכִין לְהוֹדוֹת: יוֹרְדֵי הַיָּם, הוֹלְכֵי מִדְבָּרוֹת, וּמִי שֶׁהָיָה חוֹלֶה וְנִתְרַפֵּא, וּמִי שֶׁהָיָה חָבוּשׁ בְּבֵית הָאֲסוּרִים וְיָצָא.

Rav Yehuda said that Rav said: Four must offer thanks to God with a thanks-offering and a special blessing. They are: Seafarers, those who walk in the desert, and one who was ill and recovered, and one who was incarcerated in prison and went out. All of these appear in the verses of a psalm (Psalms 107).

That is, anyone who has come through a dangerous travel, or a time of physical or practical imprisonment, must offer thanksgiving.  I’m certain that all of us here would qualify as people who “walk in the desert.”  This offering gives us a sense of just how important it is to cultivate gratitude.

The rabbis thought so highly of thanksgiving to God that they are quoted in the Talmud saying that when the Messiah comes all sacrifices will have completed their mission, and all will be discontinued, with one exception: the thanksgiving offering.  That sacrifice will last forever.  Because even in a perfect world we must remember to give thanks, to be grateful for what we have.

So, on this Shabbat of Tzav, just after the fun holiday of Purim and as we begin to prepare for Pesach, the festival of freedom, we give thanks for what we have: for health and happiness, for the freedom to worship, and for all the wonderful goodness that God has given to this world we share.  And most of all for the ability to choose to live ethically, and to imitate God by being truly good.

How to Defeat Anti-Semitism

Sermon Shabbat Zachor/Vayikra 5784

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

There is an ancient joke that kept coming back to me this week:  An old Jewish man is sitting on a bench reading his newspaper when an anti-Semite approaches him and says angrily, "You know, all the world's problems are because of you damned Jews."

The Jewish man looks up and replies, "And the bicycle riders."

The anti-Semite replies, befuddled, "Why the bicycle riders?"

And the Jewish man responds, "Why the Jews?"

Since I am both a bicycle rider and a Jew, this joke works on several levels for me, but of course it points up the absurdity of any kind of random race hatred, particularly this one.  And this being Shabbat Zachor, the Sabbath of remembering anti-Jewish and anti-Israelite hatred in our history, it’s the right time to explore what it means and how we might best address it.

My friends, we Jews have been dealing with Anti-Semitism for a very long time, and perhaps the most innovative approach we’ve taken has been to celebrate our victories over it in innovative and delightful ways.  Perhaps the three most enjoyable Jewish holidays of all are Chanukah, Purim and Passover, which fall on our calendar from December through April.  These festivals can best be described in a nine-word sentence: “They tried to kill us, we survived, let’s eat!”  And tomorrow night and Sunday and Sunday night we will celebrate Purim, the most purely fun Jewish holiday of all. Only Jews could take our first experience of attempted genocide and turn it into a time of unbridled revelry, joyously observing our ability to survive attempted mass murder in Persia—that is Iran—2500 years ago.  Even in a year when we have experienced the greatest surge of Antisemitic violence and antisemitic rhetoric since the Holocaust, still we are commanded to celebrate our ultimate victory over this eternally recurring attempt to destroy our people. 

Look, is Anti-Semitism substantially different in character from the vicious racism and anti-anything that causes otherwise normal human beings to attack and slaughter those who are different from them in Sudan or Haiti or Ukraine?  No.  But it has been around longer, and it manages to come back from the dead, like an evil Lazarus-like zombie, just when you think it has finally disappeared for good.

Anti-Semitism is the world’s oldest and most persistent form of race hatred, an irrational and virulent hostility to Jews based on a foundation of lies, embraced by generations of people who all should know better.  It has shown a cockroach-like ability to thrive in dark corners and under all sorts of rocks, and a weed-like ability to grow in the least favorable conditions imaginable. 

It has been proven that you don’t even need to have Jews around for Anti-Semitism to exist and spread; international surveys of Anti-Semitism show that South Korea has a high level of Anti-Semitism, even though Jews have more or less never lived there.  Throughout history Anti-Semitism was fostered by major religious institutions, important nations and empires, and resulted in horrible persecutions ranging from massacres of Jews in Roman times to Crusaders slaughtering entire communities of Jews to expulsions from England, France and Spain to the torture chambers of the Inquisition to brutal, government-sponsored pogroms throughout the old Russian Empire to the Holocaust to Communist purges against Jews to Arab nations expelling hundreds of thousands of Jews in the 1950s to horrific Arab terror attacks on Jews in Israel, Europe and South America to recent events like Charlottesville and Pittsburgh here in America—to October 7th, and the hostility and violence world-wide, including on college campuses all across North America, and in major US cities and in city council meetings, where chants calling for “Jewish genocide” and the destruction of the only Jewish state on the planet in the name of Palestinians ruling “from the river to the sea” ring out.  Like a cancer on the body of the human race, Anti-Semitism simply refuses to disappear.   

But you know, back when we began the Too Jewish Radio Show in the year 2002 there was a consensus among scholars of Anti-Semitism that it was on the wane both here and around the world, and might even disappear soon, at least in America.  One of my very first guests on the show was Professor Leonard Dinnerstein of blessed memory, who passed away recently, author of the book Anti-Semitism in America, then the authoritative text on the subject.  He was the founder of the Judaic Studies Program at the University of Arizona.  Back in 2002, Dinnerstein said that the pernicious and irrational hatred of Jews that has been such a terrible burden for our people throughout history had been fading in America for decades and was no longer socially acceptable.  Jews had broken through the glass ceiling that kept us from many important roles in society, we were influential and accepted nearly everywhere, from Ivy League schools to formerly Jew-free industries to once-restricted country clubs to high government office. 

And then, well, bad things happened.  The Anti-Israel, Anti-Zionist virus in the Muslim world spread, and was nurtured and flourished among aspects of the left in Europe, and also in Canada and the US.  It took root deeply on college campuses and among so-called progressives, and went from reasoned discussions of a Palestinian state to the desire to destroy Israel, and then morphed into deliberately Anti-Semitic tropes and slanders, becoming ever-more virulent and prevalent.  In Great Britain the Labour Party became the home of openly Anti-Semitic politicians led by Jeremy Corbyn, who hosted Hamas representatives, and that form of liberal Anti-Semitism has come to the US Congress too, where Democratic Congresswoman Ilhan Omar plays in an ugly way on long discredited claims of Jewish dual loyalty and influential Jewish money, and where the so-called Squad seeks to destroy American support for Israel using anti-Semitic tropes.

Along with this left-wing Anti-Semitism there has been an awful revival of old-fashioned right-wing, racist Anti-Semitism in Europe and America.  That vicious Anti-Jewish hatred has manifested in extreme right-wing movements and political parties in Eastern, Central and Western Europe.  We even see revived neo-Nazi parties embracing the disastrously failed ideology of race-hatred and autocracy.  While the vast majority of physical attacks on Jews in Europe have been perpetrated by Muslim terrorists in recent years, fascists are now doing their share, committing publicly Anti-Semitic acts and violence against Jews.  In France, the first nation on earth to give Jews full and equal civil rights, third largest Jewish population of any country in the world, in France Anti-Semitic acts are up 100% in the past year, with a combination of far-right Anti-Semites making common cause with far-left protestors and angry Arab immigrants to deface Jewish tombstones, paint swastikas, and make Holocaust-flavored jokes about ovens.  Some say that central London has become a no-go zone for Jews because of the violent pro-Palestinian protests each weekend.

Here in America revived far-right hate groups and radical fringe websites of white supremacists encourage anti-semitic actions online, have resulted in awful attacks like the Tree of Life synagogue massacre in Pittsburgh and the fatal attack in Poway, California a couple of years ago.

Somehow, a quarter of the way into the 21st century, almost 80 years after the end of the Shoah, elements both far left and far right have embraced an insanely irrational ancient racism based on an entire library of conspiracy theories, lies and forged texts, Anti-Semitism.  Angry people on the fringes of society, far left and far right both, have chosen to blame the problems of huge, complex societies and regional and international issues on our tiny minority population that makes up far less than one percent of the world’s people.  This is in spite of the fact that we Jews and Jewish concepts and scholarship have advanced the progress of civilization and improved humanity in countless positive ways, ranging from medicine to music, from physics to filmmaking to finance, from art to architecture to advanced technology.  If you look at what Jews have contributed to the world you logically cannot possibly believe the propaganda put out by these lunatic fringes.  For pity’s sake, without our Torah and Tanakh there would be no New Testament or Koran, no Christianity or Islam or Western Civilization.

Why do people embrace Anti-Semitism?  Well, it’s far easier to blame the Jews than it is to actually try to fix the brokenness of the world.  Small-minded people prefer villains to heroes, and demonizing the Jews has always been the easy way out for demagogues, cowards, and frauds.  And when you have had so many important people advocating it for so long, well, you are bound to feel justified in accessing your very own bigoted bone.

So, rabbi you ask, what is the solution?  Why bring up a problem if you don’t have the answer?  Sadly, no one has quite figured that out in the past two thousand years.  But generally, the most effective response to Anti-Semitism requires three things: direct, strong actions that demonstrate that this is not going to be tolerated.  We must stand up to Anti-Semitism in every manifestation, whether the people demonstrating it are on our side in other matters or not.  It is pernicious, evil, wrong and very dangerous.  In fact, we are most effective combating Anti-Semitism in our friends, convincing people we know well and with whom we mostly agree to fix their own Anti-Semitic tendencies.

Secondly, we have to educate, others and ourselves.  A little learning and actual experience of interacting with Jews goes a long way towards exposing the falsehoods and illogic of Anti-Semitism and dispelling the insanity of irrational, racist hatred.  Learning about Judaism, coming to synagogue, participating in Jewish adult education and teaching your children about Jews and Judaism and Israel are all outstanding ways to counteract the ignorance and bias that perpetuate racist hatred.  Affirming our pride in our incredible heritage, passing it on with joy and integrity, celebrating our Jewish identity, these are the best ways to overcome Anti-Semitism. 

There is a third thing we can do, beyond speaking up against Anti-Semitism and educating ourselves.  And it is very likely the most important way to counteract this evil in our world.

The best allies we can have in the effort to eradicate this archaic evil are not actually other Jews.  They are smart, caring people of different traditions.  They are Christians and Muslims and Sikhs and secularists and other decent, grounded, humane people who care about making the world better.  The better they know us, and the more they see us support them when they are suffering and in time of need, the more certain it is that they will come to our support and fight Anti-Semitism when it arises.  Common cause with good people of all backgrounds is the surest way to defeat hatred.  It means making certain that people know that Jews care about the whole community’s needs, and work to heal and help it.

It’s fascinating: working against Anti-Semitism means that we have to demonstrate some of our Jewish ability to grow beyond our own limitations and embrace people we might secretly harbor some biases against ourselves.  But if we do, I promise we will be richly rewarded, and not only in paradise.

This week we read Vayikra, which addresses how we are to become close to God.  I think the lesson we may take from all of this is that perhaps we must first become closer to the good people around us, and then, and only then, will we be able to bring this troubled world closer to God.

May this be God’s will, but first of all, ours.

Highly Illogical: God or Reason?

Sermon Pekudei 5784

Rabbi Sam Cohon, Congregation Beit Simcha

You may have seen online that there is a new documentary coming out next week on the life of William Shatner, the actor, in time for his 93rd birthday, called “You Can Call Me Bill.”  Shatner is still around, still writing books and doing interviews and has become a kind of iconic figure these days.  The movie, directed by documentary filmmaker Alexandre O. Phillipe, is garnering good reviews, in large part for Shatner’s openness and contemplative, thoughtful observations and hopes.  Who knew that was possible?

As a kid I liked the Star Trek TV series, the original one with William Shatner overacting as Captain James T. Kirk and Leonard Nimoy underplaying Science Officer Spock.  There have been many iterations of the show subsequently: many movies, subsequent TV series—Star Trek Next Generation, Star Trek Voyager, Star Trek Law & Order, Star Trek CSI, Survivor Star Trek, Star Trek with the Kardashians, the Star Trek Bachelor and—many video games and so on, but the original show was always my personal favorite.  Leonard Nimoy ended up playing Spock on and off for nearly 60 years until his death. The fact that both Shatner and Nimoy were Jewish, and that Spock’s famous Vulcan salute was borrowed from the priestly blessing, the Birkat Kohanim that Nimoy remembered from his Orthodox upbringing in Boston, certainly contributed to my appreciation of Star Trek.  I found out later Leonard Nimoy was quite a fine singer as a kid, sang in his shul choir, and as a 13 year-old chanted so well at his bar mitzvah that he was asked to lead services the very next week at a different synagogue.  As his long-time co-star and occasionally director William Shatner said, "He is still the only man I know whose voice was two bar mitzvahs good!"

In any case, on the Star Trek show Spock, of course, was the voice of pure reason, coming from a planet, Vulcan, where no emotion was ever demonstrated or perhaps even experienced.  Shatner’s Captain Kirk was much more emotional, while the ship’s doctor, McCoy, was completely emotional, sometimes insanely so.  Regularly, you would see the tension involved in solving the plot problems they encountered out there in space using emotion and reason played out over an episode.  Spock would famously say of some situation, “I find that highly illogical.”  And McCoy would blow up at him, and Kirk would have to mediate.  The general implication, however, was that most of the time Spock was right.  To be honest, McCoy always reminded me of the Jewish mother on the show, even though he was clearly not actually Jewish, or a mother, or female for that matter; but he was definitely highly emotional.

In any case, the show highlighted the simple fact that there has always been a certain level of tension between emotion and reason in our world, and that tension has had a profound impact on how we think about God and even whether or not we believe that God even exists. 

I’ve been thinking lately about the concept of God, and the complex ways we relate to our Deity, however conceived.  What provoked this was two things: first, a section of the weekly Torah portion a couple of weeks ago that included the shlosh esray midot, the thirteen attributes of God, which offer God’s own definition of God’s intrinsic nature.  And the second was a book I’ve been re-reading by the social psychologist Jonathan Haidt called The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion.  The Exodus section, according to the Torah text, is God’s own self-revelation about what qualities God possesses, while in his book Haidt, who is Jewish, analyzes how human beings think, what reason and rationality really are, and how this impacts the way we think about crucial issues, including God.  And there is a fascinating interplay in these two.

The Torah passage in question reads, “I, the Lord, am a compassionate God of grace, long-suffering filled with kindness and truth, conferring kindness to the thousandth generation, removing iniquity, transgression and sin and purifying.” 

If you look closely at that section in Exodus—it is repeated several times in the Tanakh, the Hebrew Bible—it focuses on two aspects of divine power.  First, the compassion or kindness that God shows us; and then, equally importantly, the fact that God forgives our sins.  That combination certainly has its attractions for those who believe in God, or any higher power: the promise of divine kindness married to forgiveness for the mistakes we make. That is, in a small but important bundle, the essence of all religion: God has given us a good and generous world and offers relief from the burden of the bad actions we take.

Of course, true rationalists would say that such a belief in a kind and forgiving deity is not reasonable.  Our minds should be clear, analytical tools that aren’t confused by archaic notions of a supreme being or higher power.  We might seek kindness and forgiveness from other humans, but we cannot expect to receive these from God, if God even exists.  Reason should rule. 

Jonathan Haidt takes a different tack about personal reason.  Basing his argument on empirical scientific studies of the way human beings really think and act, he explains that rather than rationally analyzing and understanding the world, what we think of as “rational thought” or “the faculty of reason” is typically a kind of post-facto attempt to justify what we have already intuitively decided.  That is, we choose to do what we want to do, or choose to think what we want to think, then justify it by forging a rational defense for our own actions.  Many of our “rational” choices about good and evil or how to conduct ourselves are really not rational at all.  According to the social psychologist Haidt, they are simply things we choose to do because we like to do them, or our own innate biases lead us to act, and we then carefully explain our choice as rational using our reasoning to prove it, to ourselves and to others.

Which means that our values and ethics have at least as good a chance to flourish positively by being rooted in a received religious tradition—such as Judaism—as they do if we try to cultivate meaningful morality from our own faculties of reason.  Personal reason apparently has very little to do with pristine objective choice and much more to do with our own cultural and personal biases and our blinded effort to prove that we did it all ourselves, with no help from God, or any God-like creature.

If Haidt’s extensive research into the concept of the “righteous mind” is correct—and many smart people think he is—we humans have emotional desires and needs first, and then we justify them by calling them rational and constructing reasons and even systems around them.  But most of those decisions aren’t truly “rational at all” and have nothing to do with what is really right.   

There isn’t really a dichotomy between cognition and emotion, between thinking and feeling, with thinking being the higher-order function.  The research in fact demonstrates that in studies you can’t actually differentiate between what people are thinking and how they are feeling; feelings color the “rational” choices that everyone makes.  There are no Spocks among us mere humans after all.

Maybe the ancient Greeks had it right: they trained smart, articulate young people in the art of rhetoric.  Masters of rhetoric could argue one side of a question, using a wonderful, reasoned approach; and then immediately switch sides and argue the other side of the same question with equal success.  I know this because two of my children were state debate champions; they could out-argue me for years on either side of an issue.  Today’s high school and college debate contests use the same format for their competitions; the team or individuals who win do so because of their successful use of appropriate, well-reasoned arguments in a structured format, and can be, and are, called upon to argue either side of a question. 

Lawyers follow this as well; they are advocates, and it is far from unusual for, say, a public prosecutor to become a private defense attorney later in his or her career, or even the other way around.  Spock aside, reason is, in effect, just one tool that can be employed for any purpose, on either side of an ethical question.

So, what is the solution to the dilemma of our possessing quite imperfect reasoning abilities, mixed liberally with our own emotional needs and desires without our even being cognizant of that fact?  How are we to decide how to act, and live, and be patient with other views than our own if our own rational minds are so compromised?

Perhaps the answer lies in simply accepting that there is a higher level of thought and meaning than the merely personal biases we exercise as “rational,” and allowing those ideals and concepts—such as God’s gift of a generous world, and God’s ever-present forgiveness for those who atone—to influence our own actions and choices, and so improve our conduct, and perhaps even our world. 

And that may not prove to be so “highly illogical” at all.

Caring for the Earth and Each Other

Celebration of Prayer 3 14 2024

Prayer by Rabbi Sam Cohon

בָּרוּךְ אַתָּה יְהֹוָה אֱלֹהֵֽינוּ מֶֽלֶךְ הָעוֹלָם יוֹצֵר אוֹר וּבוֹרֵא חֽשֶׁךְ עֹשֶׂה שָׁלוֹם וּבוֹרֵא אֶת־הַכֹּל:

Blessed are You, Lord our God, Ruler of the Universe, Maker of light, Creator of darkness, Maker of peace, Creator of all things.

What is our responsibility, as human beings, to the planet on which we find ourselves?  And how are we to act in ways that demonstrate our moral appreciation, and the ethical imperative, to treat a shared space that is home not only to our unique species, but to every other unique species on the earth?

In Genesis in the Torah we are told that God, who according to Jewish tradition created everything, gave Adam, the first, primordial human, the responsibility to care for the earth.

וַיִּקַּ֛ח יְהֹוָ֥ה אֱלֹהִ֖ים אֶת־הָֽאָדָ֑ם וַיַּנִּחֵ֣הוּ בְגַן־עֵ֔דֶן לְעׇבְדָ֖הּ וּלְשׇׁמְרָֽהּ׃

“The LORD God took the human being, Adam, and placed him in the garden of Eden, to till it and tend it” the Jewish Publication Society English edition of the Torah reads that.  Now that phrase can be translated various ways: literally, in the original Hebrew, it means “to serve it and to guard it.”  Everett Fox, in his poetic translation, has, “to work it and to watch it,” which is also close to the original Hebrew.  The Schocken Bible has “To work it and to preserve it,” which is quite nice, if less alliterative.

In other words, our role in this creation in which we have been placed by God is both to work the earth and use its production for benefit—and also to protect it.

These two verbs, לְעׇבְדָ֖הּ וּלְשׇׁמְרָֽהּ can be said to represent rather different functions we must fulfill, which may sometimes, perhaps often, be in conflict.  We are commanded by God to utilize the earth we have been given to produce what we require: the traditional food, water, shelter, and clothing, but also heat, power, transportation, communication, connection, and healing in today’s world.  We know how to do this and we are good at it.

Note that we are also equally commanded to guard, protect, watch, preserve and be good stewards of the same natural world we might otherwise seek to exploit solely for our benefit.  You see, in Jewish tradition, we are required to consider not only whether we can derive benefit from the world in which we live but to decide whether we can do so while maintaining its full viability and vitality for the future. 

It is that tension that lies at the heart of our dilemma today.  We know that we must both provide for ourselves, and for all the people living now, and simultaneously protect future generations forever on this magnificent, but somewhat fragile planet with which God has blessed us.

For many years we have been living in an era that some scientists call the Anthropocene: a time when human behavior has transformed and profoundly affected our home, the earth.  Many of these changes are permanent, and some are decidedly dangerous to the future of many species, including ours, on this planet.  The phenomenon of global warming has impacted every part of the world, and after a great deal of denial about it for a long time here in America and elsewhere, we are finally coming to terms with some of the ways we must seek to alleviate some of the causes and consequences of that transformation.  

We know that if we do not change the direction of the damage we are doing to the earth through this process, and through other deformations of our natural environment by pollution and waste production—that is, nondegradable garbage—that we will reach a point at which it becomes impossible to truly preserve a healthy planet.

It is, frankly, a shared necessity that we protect the earth, the only one we have—Mars is not yet a viable alternative, no matter what some billionaires believe.  It is also a shared necessity that we do so while preserving our ability to provide for the true needs of people living now on the planet, to seek to do the other commandments that Genesis includes here: to feed, provide water, clothe, and care for the human beings, and the other beings, currently living.

It is that tension between those two words in the short Genesis sentence that lie at the heart of our challenge today.  It has been said that in America, we have rights, while in Judaism we have responsibilities.

In truth, our caring mission today must embrace our responsibilities to do both of these things, לְעׇבְדָ֖הּ וּלְשׇׁמְרָֽהּ, to preserve and protect, to work and to watch, to till and to tend. It is in that intrinsic tension, that creative frisson that our true task lies, our moral and practical purpose: to be true stewards of this precious earth.  May this be God’s will; but more importantly, may it be ours.