Being There

Sermon Parshat Nitzavim 5784

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

 Do any of you remember a film from long ago called "Being There"?  It starred Peter Sellers and Melvyn Douglas—both Jewish, by the way—and was based on a novel by a controversial Holocaust survivor Jerzy Kosinski, also Jewish, of course.  “Being There” was about a mentally challenged middle aged man trained as a gardener who finds himself, completely accidentally, suddenly enshrined through happenstance as the economic and social guru of the president of the United States, and who then becomes a global media icon.  His simple statements about gardening are taken for pithy wisdom with earth-shaking impact.  It's about being in the right place at a particular time; “being there.”  You could say that two other films, Woody Allen's “Zelig” and the classic “Forrest Gump” were more or less modeled on Being There, fine examples of how sometimes just showing up is all that matters.

We see many examples of this phenomenon in our own lives: people who seem to succeed just by being in the right place at the right time.  It's certainly not true that most of us are just taking up space in this world, for everyone is created in the image of God, b’tzelem Elohim, but there are times when you do wonder a little bit about whether some folks have achieved great heights simply by just showing up.

But perhaps this isn't the right approach to the question of what it means to simply be there.  Without venturing too far into Zen Buddhism—or, as we say on my Too Jewish Radio Show, Zen Judaism—perhaps we should explore what simply being present, truly present, can mean in our world.

For example, God's own greatest name in Judaism, the four-letter Tetragrammaton, the holiest name for the Holy One, is Yud Hay Vav Hay—a name made up of the past, present, and future tense of the Hebrew verb “to be;” God is the ultimate example of “being there,” then, now and going forward.  As the hymn Adon Olam puts it, hu hayah, hu hoveh, v'hu yihyeh—God is, God was, God will be.  Thus, the essential quality of God, the holiest description of the Creator of the universe, is existence—that is, presence.  

God is, and while that might not be enough of a tangible depiction for some, it is a central element of God's identity.  Ehyeh asher ehyeh, God tells Moses: I will be what I will be, I am what I am.  If being, existing, is God's primary nature, “being there” must be pretty important.

This weekend we are celebrating the final Shabbat of the year, with Selichot tomorrow night beginning the High Holy Day season.  That means that our Torah portions form one of the great sections of the entire year, Nitzavim-VaYelech: you stand here today, all of you, the oldest to the youngest, from the wealthiest to the poorest, the most famous to the humblest, the leaders of your community and the strangers visiting with you.  You are all part of the covenant with the Lord your God.  You, and every other generation to come who will be descended from you.  This great berit, this covenant affirms that you will be God's people, and God will be your Lord.

This universal covenant affirms that we are part of a profound and eternal tradition, a connection to our ancestors that will be carried forward to our descendants.  Each of us present tonight, every one of us who will join together on Wednesday and Thursday for the new year of Rosh Hashanah, all of us are part of this remarkable compact.  It is an extraordinarily democratic and egalitarian agreement with God, a berit shared with everyone regardless of gender or age: children and women stand with men, not always the case at the time of the Torah, or even today.

So it's a very special covenant.  But what is the content of the mitzvah that we are now to observe?  That is, besides just being there, or here, what are we actually supposed to do?

At the climax of our Torah portion we are told ki hamitzvah hazot asher anochi m'tzav'cha hayom, lo nifleit hi mimcha—Look, this mitzvah that I command you today is not too awesome for you, and it's not beyond your reach.  It's not in the heavens that you should say "Who among us can go up to the heavens and take it for us and teach it to us so that we may do it?"  It's not across the sea that you should say "Who among us can cross over the sea and bring it back to us so that we may do it."  No, it's very close to you, already in your mouth and in your heart to do it.

As Rabbi Lawrence Kushner says, "So the Torah is not somewhere else.  It's already in us.  We're made of it…  Torah is already coded into our protoplasm, our DNA.  And that's why it feels so good to live by the Torah, the way of all being: we're just doing what we've been designed for from the very beginning."

Perhaps the mitzvah that Nitzavim/Vayelech speaks about is no more than becoming aware of the presence of Torah in our midst—or, more precisely, of the presence of God in the here and now.  In this season we prepare for our Teshuvah, our return and repentance.  But if God is here right now, then Teshuva is a way of becoming aware that Torah is in our mouths and hearts.  And perhaps teshuvah simply means God saying, "Return to Me, again become aware of Me always being present in your life."

Our Christian friends speak of something called the "Ministry of presence".  It's the way in which we bring consolation to those who are terribly ill, or severely wounded by life, at a time when words fail.  We help solely by being present.  By being there.  For when we are there for them, we are truly living out the notion of being created b'tzelem Elohim, in the image of God.  Our presence reminds them of God's presence in their lives.  Just as we are there, God is there.

Even when we are not in crisis, we still need those reminders.

And so, in this season of teshuvah, we seek to be reminded of God's presence in our lives.  Ruth Brin has a beautiful poem entitled "A sense of Your presence."

Among our many appetites
There is a craving after God.

Among our many attributes
There is a talent for worshipping God.

Jews who wandered in the deserts beneath the stars
Knew their hearts were hungry for God.

Jews who studied in candle-lit ghetto rooms
Thirsted longingly after God.

In tent or hut or slum
Jewish women prayed to God.

But we who are smothered with comfort
Sometimes forget to listen.

Help us, O God, to recognize our need,
To hear the yearning whisper of our hearts.

Help us to seek the silence of the desert
And the thoughtfulness of the house of study.

Bless us, like our ancestors in ancient days
With that most precious gift: a sense of Your presence.

Brush us with the wind of the wings of Your being.
Fill us with the awe of Your holiness.
We, too, will praise, glorify, and exalt Your name. 

May we come to understand what being there really means, in these coming days of Awe.  And may we be blessed with the awareness of God's permanent presence in our own lives, and our own share in creating holiness.

The Missing Center

Sermon Parshat Ki Tavo 5784

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

What are the central elements in Judaism?

When we carry the Torah around the sanctuary during a hakafah we often sing Al Shloshah Devarim, the passage from Pirkei Avot in the Mishnah: Al Shlosha Devarim Ha’olam omeid; al hatorah v’al ha’avodah v’al gemilut chasadim; on three things the world stands.  On Torah, on work, and on acts of kindness.  In this formula, Torah is listed first, making it the most important part of our tradition. 

You may be familiar with the great Labor Zionist Achad Ha’Am’s related concept that Judaism is made up of three great elements: God, Torah, and Israel.  Torah, for Jews, is at the very center of life.  When I taught my recent class on the History of Zionism we explored this; and when I teach Introductory Judaism I teach that the greatest ideas of Judaism are God, Torah and Israel.  These are the primary concepts of Jewish ideology, the centerpoints of our existence for thousands of years.

So what are we to make of a central Jewish text that completely omits Torah?

This week we read the portion of Ki Tavo in Deuteronomy, which begins with an unusual declaration: when we come into the land that the Lord our God will give us as an inheritance we are to take the first fruits of our produce, and bring them to the priest who is in the land at that time, and say this formula: “Arami oveid avi, my father was a wandering Aramean, and he came to Egypt few in number, and became a great nation there; the Egyptians dealt harshly with us, and enslaved us; but God brought us out with a great hand and an oustretched arm… and brought us to this place, flowing with milk and honey.”  In addition to its central role in an important Biblical ritual, this passage was quoted often in rabbinic literature, most famously in the Pesach Haggadah.

But this formula for what we are supposed to say when we bring our offering to the Tabernacle is surprising.  In its mini-history of our ancient people it includes two of the enormous elements in our people’s history, Yetziat Mitzrayim, the Exodus from Egypt, and the entry into and settlement of Eretz Yisrael, the home Land of Israel.  But it curiously omits all mention of a third equally crucial event: the giving of Torah at Sinai. 

It’s a fascinating, even a shocking, omission.  If the three most important elements of Jewish identity are God, Torah, and Israel, omitting Torah means having an incomplete form of Judaism.  Ironically, here in the Torah itself what is missing is, well, Torah. 

The explanation for this omission teaches us much about how religion evolves, and what an organic and remarkable creation Judaism is. 

In Biblical times our people constituted an agricultural nation, living on and with the land.  The most important religious experiences were farming-related: planting crops, harvesting, dividing the produce, offering it, and eating it.  The connection to the land itself, and the labor needed to produce food from it, was absolutely central to our identity. Erets Yisrael was truly the holy land of Israel, and our intimate and permanent relationship to that land was forged over centuries of daily labor and life. When Zionism reconnected Jews to our land in the 19th century in a real, tangible, practical way, it revived the whole experience of loving and serving God by creating food from the very earth, hamotzi lechem min ha’arets.  The land of Israel was at the heart of our people then, and it is also at the heart of Ki Tavo, as we hope it is at the heart of every Jew in the world today.  Wherever we fall on the political spectrum, we are all deeply connected to Israel.

Like Erets Yisrael, God, too, was central to Jewish life in the times of the Bible, as it is today.  In Ki Tavo we are commanded to bring this offering to God in the Tabernacle (and later, the Temple) and to thank God for all that we have.  And we are to remember the great gift of freedom that God conferred upon us by miraculously redeeming us from Egyptian slavery.  Everything comes from God, a good lesson today as in the time of Deuteronomy.

So we have God and Israel here—but not Torah.  Clearly, the third leg of this stool of Jewish identity, Torah, was far less crucial to our Deuteronomic ancestors than the other two. Again, why? 

As farmers in our own land the need to study Torah, in whatever form it existed, must have seemed less urgent.  We had an immediate relationship with the land, and we needed God for the basics that make agriculture possible: rain, sun, soil.  The importance of Torah was diminished when we lived on the land itself.

It is a little like the experience you may have had when you went on a trip, say, a pilgrimage journey to Israel.  It was a great trip, you had fun, you learned a lot, you laughed you cried, you took a ton of photos.  And when you got home you went through all of your photos, and you selected the best of them.  And you posted them on your Facebook page with captions: With my son praying at the Kotel!  My wife and I floating in the Dead Sea!  The beach in Tel Aviv at sunset!  The view from the Caro synagogue in Tzefat!  On a wrecked Syrian tank on the Golan Heights!  Rafting the Jordan River!  Wine tasting in the Galilee!  An Ethiopian cultural center in Beit She’an!  At the Knesset!  And everyone of those places was the highlight of your fabulous pilgrimage to Israel!

Now, this being the digital age, there were lots of other photos too; a cactus in the Negev, or a small dumpy house located right on the Green Line between Israel proper and the West Bank, or yet another archeological ruin whose name escapes you where you can’t remember why you took the photo, and of course that smelly camel on the Mt. of Olives.  Those pictures are still in your DropBox or on your Google Drive or in your iphoto account, but you don’t post those on your Facebook page, and you quickly forget them, like a lost Instagram post.

And then one day you are listening to the news—whichever denomination of news you prefer—and you hear the amazing, incredibly improbable news that Israel and the Palestinians have just signed a peace treaty—and they did so in some small house on the Green Line between the West Bank and Israel proper.  And you think—wait a minute!  I swear I saw that little house when I was in Israel.

And you dig through your Google Drive or DropBox or iphotos or hunt up the memory stick with your original Israel photos, or search your hard drive or cloud file, or, God forbid, pull out an old box of photos from a closet or garage and suddenly, there it is!  The photo of a dumpy little house in a sensitive spot that somehow has now become the center of Jewish and Palestinian and Middle Eastern history.

And you immediately post it on your Facebook page and send everyone you know in the entire world a message that you were in that house!  And that it was the highlight of your entire trip to Israel! 

Well, you see, that’s kind of what the great treasure trove, the storehouse of Jewish experience and knowledge is like.  When we were in our own land, 2000 years ago, that land, Israel, and our relationship to God were central.  Torah didn’t matter so much.

But when we were sent into Exile in the Diaspora, and forcibly torn from our own land, we needed Torah.  In fact, without the study of Torah, Judaism would have disappeared, and the people of Israel faded into the dust of history.  Only Torah preserved us—gave us the moral foundation, and the religious identity, to not only survive from thrive.

When we read in Ki Tavo—in the Torah, of course—that we are to give a tenth of all that we have earned to charity, to the poor and the homeless and the widow and the orphan, we acknowledge that we have been blessed.  We are following an ancient agricultural practice, more than 3000 years old, designed for an ancient people in a land of long ago.

But we are also using this remarkable text, Torah, to teach us how to live today.  And therein lies the true genius of Judaism.

For wherever we are in the world it is the Torah that binds us together and makes possible our unity as a people.  It is the Torah that reminds us to worship God, and of our connection to the holy land of Israel.  It is the Torah that teaches us that tzedakah must be part and parcel of our very being.  It is our remarkable ability to evolve our knowledge and understanding of Torah that have allowed us to reshape our fantastic religion to fit every era and every place on the whole of the globe.

That is why Jews are always at the center of the movements to welcome the stranger and the immigrant, to work to end homelessness and hunger, to make health care available to all, to promote justice in an unjust world.

As the Haftarah for tomorrow’s service says, in 2nd Isaiah’s great words, “your people shall be righteous, all, and inherit the land forever, the seedling I have planted, the work of My hands to glorify Me.”

Paradoxically, even when the Torah seems to be absent, as it appears to be in Ki Tavo, it is not only implicitly present, but actually central, in our religion and in our lives.  May it always be so for each of us.

As we approach these last two Shabbatot of the year 5784, with Selichot a week from tomorrow night, may we each find our way back to engaging with Torah, discover how to embrace the learning and living of life with this remarkable text of our tradition in our hearts and in our minds and in our souls.  For if we do this, we will find that we will work to make this a world in which God’s influence is present for us, for all Israel, and for all the world.

For the Birds: Loss and Letting Go

Sermon Shabbat Ki Teitsei 5784

Rabbi Samuel M. Cohon, Congregation Beit Simcha, Tucson

Although I spend a good deal of time in the great outdoors, my knowledge of zoology is, at best, minimal. My older daughter, Cipora, took a high school field science class once in which she learned to identify many species of local birds by sight and sound.  She ran her electronic flashcards by me one night—and, out of 25 birds, I believe I correctly identified two. Apparently, I am not much of a birder.  My wife Sophie, who is an expert on ornithology, is thrilled when I correctly identify any birds at all.

Tucson is, I am told, one of the top birding destinations in the country—in fact, in the world.  There are canyons here people travel from around the world to visit so that they can add to their “collection” of birds.  Even in our own backyard we see hummingbirds, finches, hawks, cardinals, and many more, to me, unidentified species.  Coincidentally, I can tell you that this particular Torah portion we read this Shabbat is, literally, for the birds.  I will explain. 

Ki Tetze, our parshah, has more mitzvot than any other Torah portion, 74 of them, and more specific commandments. Some have great meaning and power, some are very minor ones, some are in between.  There is one particular minor mitzvah that caught my eye this week.  If, it says, along the road you chance upon a bird’s nest, in any tree or on the ground, and the fledgling or eggs are inside of it, and the mother is sitting over the fledgling or the eggs, do not take the mother together with her young.  Let the mother go.  Take only the young, that you may fare well and have a long life. 

True, it is not the most important mitzvah in the history of Judaism, but it is an intriguing one.  If we see a bird sitting on her eggs, or with her young, we are to chase her away before we take the eggs—or, if we wish to take the young for some reason or another—lest she see her own children be turned into omelets.  The rabbis debated and discussed this odd little mitzvah: what could it possibly mean, because, like every mitzvah in the Torah, it must have great importance?  That last phrase, if you do this mitzvah “l’ma’an yitav lach vha’arachta yamim, your life will go well, and that your days will be lengthened,” is an unusual and atypical kind of formula.  For if you do this mitzvah, you are promised a specific reward. 

Now, that’s not typical of most of the commandments in the Torah.  Here you are promised not only a specific reward, but the specific reward of a long, good life, just for doing this peculiar little mitzvah.  Just think, no matter how high your cholesterol, no matter how bad the shape you are in, no matter what your doctor told you at your last physical, all you have to do to have long life is chase away the mother before you take her eggs.  A pretty good deal. 

A teaching from Abram Mordechai of Ger, the Gerer Rebbe on this particular section says that this is a wonderful mitzvah because it is so easy.  You see, most commandments require intention and preparation.  You are required to think about them in advance and make special effort.  You might even have to take a chance to do them.   But here you are just walking along the road; maybe it’s near a swamp at San Diego, maybe it’s in your own backyard in Tucson.  You chance upon a bird that has eggs, you chase it away, and then you take the eggs.  You have fulfilled a mitzvah.  It’s a lot easier, for example, than preparing for a Bat Mitzvah or Bar Mitzvah, which takes a year.  Certainly, it’s easier than Brit Milah.  It’s easier than so many of the commandments.  For the Gerer Rebbe this is a truly wonderful mitzvah, the best kind, the kind you just fall into.

There is a famous story associated with this mitzvah, however, which could lead one to believe that maybe even easy mitzvahs, even the easy commandments to fulfill, and not without their complications.  Rabbi Elisha ben Abuyah was one of the great scholars of the Mishnaic period, who lived in the second century.  He, along with three or four others, was considered among the greatest scholars of his generation.  There is a wonderful book called As a Driven Leaf that fictionalizes his life, but the Talmud has plenty to say about him all by itself.  For Elisha ben Abuyah, this great scholar, this leader of the Sanhedrin, this champion of Jewish knowledge and teaching, became, at one point in his life, an apostate, and moved away from Judaism, never to come back.  In fact, he became a pagan.  It was a great scandal.  In the Talmud they call him HaAcher, the Other, for he had left Judaism.  Mind you, he was not a fringe player.  Here he was, this great scholar, paragon of Jewish knowledge, judge and decisor of crucial laws, who totally abandoned Judaism. 

Milton Steinberg treated the story in this novel As a Driven Leaf.  He described the moment in which Elisha ben Abuyah decided that he no longer would believe in God.  You see, his friend Rabbi Meir’s two children had died, and Elisha ben Abuyah tried to comfort him.  Rabbi Meir later went on to become perhaps the greatest figure of the 2nd century in Jewish thought and teaching and law, and yet his two twin boys had been taken from him by a sudden plague.  Elisha was affected by that death, but still believed and comforted Meir.   But perhaps his faith had been touched a little. 

The story goes that a little after that incident he was having a conversation with some of the other rabbis as they walked on the road, when they looked up and saw a boy climbing on the limb of a tree.  They could see the object of his attention—a bird’s nest, sitting there with the mother bird inside of it, and obviously there must have been some eggs in the nest.  The boy crawled along, and in fulfilling this mitzvah, of which we are told “vayitav lach, vha’arachta yamim, it will go well with you, and your days will be extended”— to guarantee himself that reward, the boy chased away the mother bird.  But in doing so, he lost his balance, fell from the tree limb, struck the ground, and died.

This passage is from Milton Steinberg, who picks up the story at just that moment: “Elisha trembled from head to foot, cold perspiration covered him, nausea writhed through his entrails.  The scene he had just witnessed brought with sudden vividness to his mind the tragedy that had befallen Meir’s children.  The two pictures merged into a unity—the same, incredible.  A wild protest stormed up in him against the horror of it, its senseless waste of life, its wanton cruelty.  The scholars turned and slowly mounted the slope together, talking meanwhile, trying to restore their confidence.  To solidify a crumbling universe.  At first Elisha did not listen, so stunned was he, so dazed his senses.  But as his mind recovered from its initial disorganization, he heard one of them say, ‘He will have his length of days.  God is just.  It is hard to understand, but let us remember there is a better world, in which it is all day, a day that stretches for eternity.’  At once, Elisha knew the answer to the question he had never ventured to face before.  The great negation crystallized in him, the veil of deception dissolved before his eyes.  The only belief he still cherished disintegrated, as had all the others.  The last tenuous cord that bound him to his people was severed.  And when the sages droned on, their words buzzing like flies, revulsion swept Elisha.  He could no longer tolerate their deliberate blindness.  In cold desperation he silenced them. ‘It is all a lie,’ he said with a terrible quiet in his voice, ‘there is no reward.  There is no judge.  There is no judgment.  There is no God.’

“The wind blew in from the sea across horror-stricken faces.  The sun, weltering so long in its own blood, died slowly.”

Vivid writing.  Elisha ben Abuyah lost his faith.  Is that possible for us, as well?  If we are to be tested even by a simple commandment—where do we turn? 

When faced with accident and loss, with terrible tragedy, somehow the impossibility of ever putting the genie back in the bottle, of ever putting right what is wrong, strikes us.  Sometimes we can allow our faith simply to float—perhaps it will return.  But usually it does not.  We try hard to rationalize the loss, to work it all out.  And sometimes that works.  Sometimes. 

Acceptance is the hardest of lessons for Jews.  We are not well constituted to accept loss or tragedy, senseless or otherwise.  We are used to arguing with each other, even with God.  We are used to considering everything to be a discussable issue.  We are not used to taking things on faith.  What do we do with mitzvot that seem to lead us only to loss?  What do we do, how do we feel and think, when we do what appears to be right and terrible things happen?

But perhaps these mitzvot, these simple commands, this simple command, means something else.  In Jewish tradition the acceptance of a commandment, the ability to see what has happened, the acceptance of faith, comes into a different category than it does in many other religious traditions.  As Jews we search, we probe, and we write drashot that explore and look for meaning.  We are used to that—two Jews, three opinions.  Every Rabbi answers a question with a question.  And there is always another question.  You can never finish a Jewish meeting, can you?  We don’t even know how to say goodbye very well.  You know the old joke ‘Non-Jews leave without saying goodbye.  Jews say goodbye and don’t leave.’

Somehow we want an explanation, we want to understand, we want to know.  Yet some things really are beyond probing and questioning.  Some mysteries, some losses, are beyond rational argument and clever discussion and continual exploration.

A poem, by the Australian poet Michael Leunig, one of my favorites, says that

“We search and we search and yet find no meaning.

The search for a meaning leads to despair.

And when we are broken the heart finds its moment

To fly and to feel and to work as it will

Through the darkness and mystery and will contradiction.

For this is its freedom, its need and its calling;

This is its magic, its strength and its knowing,

To heal and make meaning while we walk or lie dreaming;

To give birth to love within our surrender;

To mother our faith, our spirit and yearning;

While we stumble in darkness the heart makes our meaning

And offers it into our life and creation

That we may give meaning to life and creation

For we only give meaning we do not find meaning;

The thing we can’t find is the thing we shall give. 

To make love complete and to honour creation.”

On this Shabbat, whatever part of your heart that has been wounded in this last strange year, whatever commandment or act you left unfulfilled, whatever mitzvah you did or did not do that caused injury, let it go. Release the demand you place upon yourself to explain the inexplicable, to unravel the impossible knot.  For if you can do this, if you can finally let go of the need for absolute information, you may find within yourself the capacity simply to allow God—and the heart—to heal.  If you can let go of the resentment, the disappointment, the failure, the loss, the pain, then you can begin to allow God to bring you to healing.  If you can let that need to control and explain fly away—like the birds do—you may find that you are able to move past those losses towards wholeness. 

This is a complex, challenging truth.  It is essential, if not easy.  It may be what this text, and this story, truly means.

For if you can do that, then, accept all the losses and vagaries of your own experiences, your own life may be vayitav lach, v’ha’arachta yamim—truly good, and its days extended by peace.   May this be God’s will; and may it be our will, as well.  Shabbat Shalom.

Unity and the Lessons of 9/11

Sermon Shabbat Shoftim 5784

Rabbi Sam Cohon

This coming week we will commemorate the 23rd anniversary of 9/11, a somber and terrible day in American history and one that had and has profound implications for the entire world.  It’s hard to grasp that it has been well over twenty years since that tragic terrorist attack, and it’s astonishing to realize that with the withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021 we only ended our last American involvement in wars that originated with 9/11 after 20 years of killing, dying, torture and maiming—and that, as last October 7th demonstrated so horribly, we are very far from eliminating terrorism, even Islamist terrorism, from our world. 

It has been a complicated twenty three years, hasn’t it?

As a rabbi I chaired the commemorations of 9/11 for the Multi-Faith Alliance for many years, including through a complex 10th Anniversary series of events.  I watched as the initial energy waned over the years, as new tragedies and historical events replaced our memories of that horrible day.  Eventually, it became clear that annual commemorations that didn’t take place in New York were of less and less interest to people.  Life moves on, and shocking tragedies continue to occur that obscure our memories of past disasters. 

9/11 reemerges as a kind of historical curiosity, a footnote or comparison to October 7th for Jews.  Do you remember where you were when it happened?  I certainly do.  Questions like that can bring 9/11 back home emotionally.  But I wonder: what have we really learned over these nearly two and a half decades?  What do those shockingly collapsed towers, that failed attack on the Capitol, the damage and death in the Pentagon, the heroism on that plane in Pennsylvania, what do they mean to us now? 

We lost more people on 9/11 than died at Pearl Harbor; and while that pales proportionally to what was lost on October 7th in the much smaller nation of Israel, it was devastating.  The well over 20-year-long war against terrorism has, at the least, kept another such event from occurring here in America—but it certainly didn’t stop the creation of the Islamic State terror regime of ISIS, or the Taliban reconquest of Afghanistan, or the Charlie Hedbo attack, or October 7th, or many other terrible things from happening.

I think of my own children, whom I schlepped to annual 9/11 memorials every year of their childhood; only my oldest can remember that day in his own memory, and he was just 6 years old at the time.  What will my kids take as the lesson to learn from 9/11?  How will Ayelet think of it, born more than twenty years after it occurred?

You know, we Americans aren’t very good at serious introspection as a nation. But if I were to pray for anythingas we approach the 23rd anniversary of 9/11, and I will, it would be for us to seriously look back and consider what we might have done differently in response.  And to try to grasp the lessons of 9/11 for this changing world in a more serious and profound way.

This is Shabbat Shoftim, when are commanded to pursue justice.  When we examine our own nation, and our world, we have a few things to figure out and some important lessons to learn.  What can we come to understand about justice in the aftermath of that terrible time? 

While I am fascinated by history and the choices that historical figures make, I am not a military or political analyst. Still, one thing that has always puzzled me about the American response to 9/11 is the choices we made about whom we were going to attack.  Of the 19 men who were 9/11 murderers, the hijacking terrorists who killed so many of our citizens and the citizens of other nations, 15 terrorists came from Saudi Arabia.  Two came from the United Arab Emirates, and one each came from Egypt and Lebanon.  Of the 19 terrorists, four were pilots, the most highly trained and trusted of the mass murderers, and these came respectively from Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Lebanon and the UAE. 

Yet we chose to direct our American military first against Afghanistan, where Al-Qaeda had rented space from the Taliban, and then against Iraq, which had no connection to Al-Qaeda at all and actually opposed it in every way.  At no point did we consider punishing Saudi Arabia for its citizens’ direct involvement and leadership in 9/11, although some of the 9/11 terrorists were the children of prominent figures in the Saudi political and economic leadership.

While those Afghanistan and Iraq wars initially were widely supported by the American public, these were strange military and political choices, to say the least.  The four pilot hijackers actually trained in the United States, and were part of a terror cell that originated in Hamburg, Germany.  When the vicious mastermind behind 9/11, Osama bin Laden, was eventually tracked and killed, he was in Pakistan; the Afghanistan war effort never caught up with him.

Three years ago we finally concluded the long, expensive effort to build Western-style democracies in Iraq and Afghanistan.  I do not think it will surprise anyone if I say that the United States was unsuccessful in those efforts.

So just what did we learn from 9/11 that we can take with us these 23 years later? 

To me, the greatest of those lessons was the way that all Americans in the year 2001, within a very short time, came together in a unique and powerful display of solidarity.  We understood that we are, in fact, one nation, with common goals and fears and dreams.  It may have taken a tangible enemy, a truly evil attack to bring us together, to shock us out of our complacency and break down our silos and separations.  But for a while, in shared tragedy and shock, 9/11 did bring us together.  It reminded us of our common needs and hopes, of our lost innocence and security.

At a multi-faith service that I chaired on October 11, 2001, a prominent Evangelical minister standing on the bimah of my synagogue said, “We all came to this country in different boats, but we are all in the same boat now.” For a while, at least, 9/11 changed us.  Jews, Christians and Muslims spoke to one another, and so did Hindus and Buddhists and Sikhs and, well, every one of the varied religions and groups in America.  We realized we were part of a shared, diverse nation, that we had been attacked, all of us, because of that very diversity and openness.

I remember visiting New York City a year or so after 9/11 and being astonished at how nice everyone was.  That had never been my experience in New York before, although I always enjoyed the city.  But now there was a completely different approach to how New Yorkers greeted people and treated people.  It was as though something profound had changed, and we all came to realize that we needed each other.  It stayed true for a while; when I visited 5 years later with three young children in tow, everyone went out of their way to be gracious and kind.  Manhattan had been transformed into Indianapolis or something, where everybody is supposed to be nice.

But really, everywhere in the US for a while people treated each other differently, better, with more kindness.  We were, in quite interesting ways, brought together by 9/11, and made one.

Well, it has been 23 years since that time.  And in so many ways we have lost that concept completely.  We have retreated into our own silos again, perhaps to a greater degree than ever before.  In the time since 9/11 we have developed nearly separate media systems, information sources that seemingly bear no resemblance to each other or, often, the factual truth.  And we have come to fetishize our differences at the expense of our commonalities.  People casually talk of seceding from the nation, habitually claim those on the other side of the political aisle are evil, believe conspiracy theories of the most ludicrous sort, threaten revolution, demonize those who believe differently.

It seems we have forgotten the central lesson of 9/11: we are stronger together.  We are better unified than divided.  We have far more in common than we have differences. 

As we approach this anniversary of 9/11, on this Shabbat Shoftim, we need to rediscover that connectedness, that unity that bound us together twenty three years ago.  And it shouldn’t take a great, sudden, shocking tragedy to do that. 

It might be enough for us to simply look back, look around, and do a bit of Tshuvah.

One of the things I love best about Congregation Beit Simcha is that we aren’t joined together by a political ideologies.  We are here for the purpose of creating a great congregation, a synagogue where we can pray and study and celebrate and mourn together as Jews and as a community.  And perhaps it is because of this that we may be the best kind of example of the kind of response to 9/11 that we ought to be able to all make today.  To seek to bring together, in respect, all the diversities of our community across the boundary lines of race, religion, orientation, and even ideology. 

If we can do that in our own shul, then perhaps we can do that in this great nation, too.

And then the memories of those who died on 9/11 will have helped us to grow into the country that we should truly be.

On the Murder of Six Jewish Hostages

The tragedy that unfolded last weekend with the murder of six Jewish hostages—five Israelis and an American-Israeli—by Hamas Palestinian terrorists has struck all Jews everywhere.  We mourn the loss with Israel and the Jewish world.  It is awful and profoundly saddening.

The facts are quite simple: Eden Yerushalmi, Hersh Goldberg-Polin, Ori Danino, Almog Sarusi, Carmel Gat, and Alexander Lobanov endured almost eleven months of kidnapping, captivity, and abuse by Palestinian terrorists.  Five were violently taken from the Nova Music (and peace) Festival; one, Carmel Gat, from Kibbutz Be'eri.  All were alive a day or two before an IDF operation to rescue them discovered their bodies in a tunnel, shot multiple times by Hamas Palestinian terrorists at close range.  All were between 23 and 40 years old and survived terrible conditions and existential fear.  At least one, Hersch Goldberg-Polin, sustained severe injuries protecting other Jews and yet survived until he was murdered execution-style by Palestinians.

Media coverage of this cruel multiple murder by Palestinian terrorists has focused on the outrage by the Israeli public that its own government has not been more successful in bringing the hostages home.  We should share that frustration while we remember that it was Hamas Palestinian terrorists who created this war and murdered these innocent people.  It has also been Hamas' intransigence, primarily, that has prevented a cease-fire-for-hostage-release deal since the initial exchange of innocent-hostages-for-Palestinian-terrorists way back in November.  And it is Gaza's Palestinian "leadership" that has continued to condemn its own people to a hopeless war of attrition.

There is no greater mitzvah in Judaism than the redemption of captives, pidyon shevuyim.  As we mourn with the families of the murdered young Jews, we continue to pray for the release of the remaining hostages, and of the bodies of those hostages murdered by Palestinian terrorists and still ghoulishly held in Gaza by Hamas. 

And we pray for an enduring peace, in the very face of these latest Palestinian terrorist atrocities. 

Choosing Blessing

Sermon Shabbat Re’ei 5784, Rabbi Samuel M. Cohon, Congregation Beit Simcha, Tucson, Arizona

It’s Labor Day weekend, which back East means that the summer is officially over on Monday night; no mor white clothing until the spring, supposedly.  Here in Tucson, of course, public school started three or even four weeks ago, our Beit Simcha Religious School began last Sunday, and the High Holy Days are coming up in just over a month. We will bless the new month of Elul on this Shabbat because Rosh Chodesh Elul is Wednesday, the beginning of the last month of the Jewish year 5784. It's the time of year for us to think about the state of our relationships, to prepare to do a cheshbon hanefesh, an accounting of the state of our souls, to reflect on where we've been, where we are in our lives, and where we are headed. 

We are beginning this yearly journey of getting ready for the chagim, the Jewish fall holidays, examining the choices we continually make and the way our choices have worked out for us in the past year.

The opening lines of this week's parsha, Re'ei, are about choice.  In that passage Moses says to us, the people of Israel,

Re'eh, anochi noten lifneichem hayom bracha u'klalla.
Et habracha asher tishm'u el-mitzvot Adonai Eloheichem asher anochi m'tzaveh etchem hayom.
V'haklallah im-lo tishm'u el-mitzvot Adonai Eloheichem…

See, I give you today a blessing and a curse.
The blessing, if you listen to the mitzvot of your God which I command you today.
And the curse if you don't obey or listen.

Re’ei goes on to talk about the danger of turning away from God and the mitzvot, and commands us, when we go into our land, to read this blessing and this curse on top of two different mountains there.  The directions are clear and dramatic: half of the Israelites stand on one mountain and shout out the blessings, and the other half stands on the neighboring mountain and shout out the curses.  And everyone says “Amen, Amen; we agree, we accept.”

On the surface, it seems like a simple, powerful, restatement of the central message repeated all through Devarim: if you do good, you will be blessed; if you do evil, you will be cursed, the Deuteronomic covenant that lies at the heart of the Torah’s understanding of ethics.

Now, Judaism is a religion that absolutely believes in personal choice: God gives us commandments, but it’s always up to us whether we choose to follow them.  There is nothing predetermined.  Everything comes down to what we decide to do.  On the continuum of religions, between free will and determinism, we Jews are radical free choice advocates, made clear here once again.

The idea that good choices lead to good results is a central aspect of the berit, the covenant established throughout the Torah and so vigorously emphasized here in Re’ei, and in Deuteronomy.  Blessing comes when you follow commandments; curses arrive when you do not.  Quid pro quo.

But commentator Nechama Liebowitz points out that it's not really the case that there are two parallel “ifs” here in Re’ei, “blessing IF you listen, curse IF you do not."

You see, the Torah uses two different words: it reads "et habracha ASHER tishm'u", "v'haklalla IM-lo tishm'u".  That is, the blessing comes because you listen, while the curse comes only if you do not.

In a footnote on Rashi the commentary Torat Chayim summarizes this loophole as K'tiv haklallah b'lashon tnai, v'habracha b'lashon vedai, "the curse is written in the conditional, and the blessing in the declarative."  That is, the blessing of God is definite; while the curse is only a possibility.

Nechama Liebowitz makes a key point out of this.  She says God actually gives us a line of credit, a mitzvah equity loan if you will, and we can borrow blessing on the speculation that we are likely to do mitzvot.  It seems like a good deal for us, although not necessarily a good one for God.  In this understanding, God leans towards us, favors us even before we act well.

This credit analogy is comforting; we get blessings from above loaned to us on the hope that we will do mitzvot.  God rewards us and then trusts—and maybe prays—that we Jews will act ethically.  God gives, we accept, and everyone hopes we do right and good. 

But what if we read this passage a little differently, as other commentators do who focus on a different part of the verse?  How about if we translate it,

"I'm setting before you now a blessing and a curse,
a blessing because you are with me today listening to the mitzvot of God your Lord that I am sharing with you,

the curse if you don't continue to listen and be linked in community with Me and with each other and instead turn off to a path that leads to you not knowing what is holy in your life."

This takes the phrase at the beginning of Re’ei, asher tishm'u, “if you listen” and reads it as "because you are already currently listening together with your community."  

Rabbi Meir of Rothenburg, the Maharam, a 13th-century German commentator, agrees with this.  He points to a connection between these lines in Re’ei and Psalm 133, when it says Ki sham tziva Adonai et habracha, chayim ad-ha-olam.  “Because there, [in the mountains of Zion] God commanded blessing, life eternal.”

The Maharam highlights that this passage in Re’ei is one in which our ancestors pronounced blessing and curse as they assembled at the mountains.  And if you look at the beginning of the Psalm you will find the famous text Hinei ma tov uma na’im shevet achim gam yachad—the one we sing so often at every Jewish event, “How good and lovely it is for us to be together.”

You know, “we are family,” and we must join together right now… in unity.  That begins the Psalm, and then a sentence later it adds, “Ki sham tziva Adonai et habracha, because there God commanded blessing, life eternal,” echoing Re’ei.  It means that when family and community come together, when shevet achim gam-yachad… sham, in that very coming together there, that’s when God makes a gift of blessings to us.

In other words, the sharing of mitzvot together is the bracha, the blessing that Re’ei is promising.  And that blessing of being together in community, in prayer, according to these texts and their commentaries, is life at its fullest.  When we join together, we discover and enjoy brachot, blessings given by God.

So perhaps we already get these blessings by doing the work as a community to get ready for the chagim, by spending this coming month of Elul looking at our past year and seeking to find new ways to improve our lives, our temple and our community.  By coming together to prepare for and celebrate the High Holy Days, to share joy, to remember that we are all anxious and humble together, that we all long to be blessed and inscribed together in the book of life, and that we are each vulnerable and each flawed, by doing this, Re’ei promises, we receive the blessing of life.  It is this, in itself, that is a blessing we definitely can have just for the asking—or rather, just by showing up and being present and helping.

In this interpretation of Re’ei, being together in Jewish community means being inscribed fully in the good book of our own lives.

Just as we are commanded to return and prepare our Teshuvah, our return in this coming month of Elul, so we return to that first point of Re’ei: blessing is offered first, while curse is only there in reserve.  It is a promise that God is predisposed to favor us, forgiveness and love are there for us in advance.  We only need to look at our own lives and make a sincere, honest effort to find, and be, our best selves.

Perhaps this can be a model for our cheshbon hanefesh, the honest scrutiny required as we enter this holiest period of the year.  When we look at our lives, the Torah suggests we have a much kinder friend in God than we can often be to ourselves.  In fact, God’s advance affection for us is so practical that the Torah contains messages of forgiveness in advance, knowing that, being human, we will inevitably screw up and require more forgiveness.

Psalm 27 is traditionally said every day during Elul.  It includes the beautiful passage:  Horeini Adonai darkecha unecheini b’orach mishor

lulei he’emanti lirot betuv Adonai, b’eretz chayim

Teach me Your way, God, and lead me in a straight path

I believe that I will see the goodness of God in the land of the living.

On this Shabbat of Re’ei, and during the coming month of Elul, may we each make the choice to accept God’s offered blessings, in community—and may we also work, in goodness, to be worthy of them.  And then we need not worry about curses; because we will be able through our own shared actions to bring blessing.  Shabbat Shalom.

The Lessons of the Heart

Sermon Shabbat Ekev 5784, Rabbi Samuel M. Cohon

Congregation Beit Simcha, Tucson, Arizona

Do you know this classic joke?  An Orthodox, a Conservative, and a Reform rabbi are each asked whether you are supposed to say a brochah over lobster.

The Orthodox rabbi asks, "What’s a...'lobster'?"

The Conservative rabbi says, “Some say yes, some say no.”

The Reform rabbi says, "What's a brochah?"

Or, what are the main differences between Orthodox, Conservative and Reform Judaism?

At an Orthodox wedding, the mother of the bride is pregnant.

At a Conservative wedding, the bride is pregnant.

At a Reform wedding, the rabbi is pregnant.  And so is her wife.

And so on.  Back in the olden days of the 20th Century, when I was growing up, we used to know that there were three kinds of Jews: Reform, Conservative, and Orthodox.  That was it.  Then I learned that there were other divisions among us: Sephardic Jews from the Mediterranean and Oriental, Mizrachi Jews from parts east and south, as well as Ashkenazic ones; Israeli Jews, who were different from North American Jews; and English and Australian and South African Jews who spoke funny.  As our horizons broadened, we learned that there were other types: Hasidic Jews, who were Orthodox but dressed like the Amish; Reconstructionist Jews, who didn’t believe we were the Chosen People; and Renewal Jews, who were very touchy-feely and wore Birkenstocks.  We even learned that there was something called Secular-Humanist Jews, who didn’t believe in God and got together in minyans to not pray.

But in recent years there has been a development of new forms of Jewish identity, or semi-identity to complement the old stand-bys:  Gastronomic Jews: I am Jewish because I eat bagels and lox.  Checkbook Jews: I am Jewish because I give to Jewish causes.  Aerobic Jews: I am Jewish because I work out at the Jewish Community Center.  Sensory Jews: I am Jewish because I feel Jewish.  Committee Meeting Jews: I am Jewish because I am on the board of a Jewish organization, even though I am Catholic.  Cultural Jews: I am Jewish because I like Woody Allen, Jerry Seinfeld, Mrs. Maisel and New York City.  Political Jews: I am Jewish because I support AIPAC—or J Street, but definitely not both. Post-Facto Jews: I was very Jewish in Detroit or New Jersey or Chicago or Cleveland, but I already did that...  And of course, minimalist Jews: I am Just Jewish.  But of all the contemporary formulations of Jewish identity, my favorite is one that puts this tendency into sharpest focus:  Cardiac Jews: I am Jewish in my heart. 

Now typically we members of the organized Jewish community are not too favorably disposed to Cardiac Jews.  After all, if the only place you keep Shabbat or the holidays or your connection to Israel or other Jews is in your heart, you are not exactly actualizing your experience of our amazing tradition.  So much for the goodness of cardiac Judaism, I tended to think—at least until I read this week’s Torah portion of Ekev. 

You see, there is a puzzling passage in Ekev.  It tells us to do something physically impossible—in Ekev we are instructed to circumcise the foreskin of our hearts…  This is a new kind of berit milah, and one that smacks of flat-out self-murder.  Circumcise our hearts?  How are we to do that, with a flint knife on top of an Aztec Temple?  And how could that possibly relate to the moral commandments we have been given in this portion, which form the core of our Deuteronomic covenantal connection to the Ethical God?

First, if we were to do that actual act, circumcising the heart, cut off a flap of the essential human organ, we would die, no matter how skilled the mohel.  So, it must be a metaphor.  In fact, this passage defines the fact that the Torah was never meant to be read purely literally, and makes it very clear that Torah is and always was a teaching device to create and focus moral direction, not a simplistic piece of ancient lore to be taken literally.  No Jews really read the Torah purely literally.  Not even Chabadniks…  So just what can this odd locution mean? 

A word about the heart.  To our Israelite ancestors and to many authors, poets, songwriters, and greeting card companies, the heart has always been considered the seat of human emotions.  “I give you my heart,” we say, or “I love you with all my heart.”  In the Shema, in last week’s Torah portion, we were commanded to “love God with all your heart, b’chol l’vavcha.”  Sometimes, we give the heart credit for more than just love; hatred too, can be located there.  We are taught, in the Torah, “Do not hate another in your heart” and “he hardened his heart”; and we say things like, “She has a cold heart.” 

The heart is also seen as the locus of knowledge, the place where our essential understanding is kept.  We are in a presidential election campaign now.  Long ago Arizona’s own Barry Goldwater ran for president with the slogan, “In your heart, you know he’s right.”  He wasn’t, but the appeal to the heart was central.

But of course, this heart stuff is all a metaphor.  Modern science has taught us for generations now that the heart is just a very fancy, very efficient pumping machine, merely an important part of our indoor plumbing.  Our emotions, our higher cognitive functions, and our memory are all located higher up in our anatomy, within our brains.  Cogito ergo sum, Descartes told us long ago: I think therefore I am.  Generally speaking, scientific research has confirmed this.  The heart is the engine that drives the car but not the operator, a strong, stupid, muscle-and-valve contraption that can be replaced by an artificially built machine.  In fact, you can take one heart out of one body and put it in another successfully, and they used to do this here in Tucson at the U of A’s Sarver Heart Center.

The heart isn’t the center of emotion or memory at all.  All those old songs, poems and stories, and our Torah portion of Ekev, they are all wrong about that.  Or are they?

There is some very interesting research that has been done on patients who have successfully had heart transplant surgery.  A man named Dr. Paul Pearsall, a neuropsychiatrist on the faculty of several major universities, including doing work at the U of A heart transplant center, wrote 18 best-selling books among many other accomplishments before he died in 2007.  He studied transplant patients and found some unexpected results: the background of a new heart affects its recipient directly.  That is, the feelings and preferences, and even the knowledge and personality of the original heart’s owner begin to change the recipient after the transplant.

The changes documented in the heart recipients are startling.  One man began to yearn for spicy foods and to study Spanish—and then learned that his donor had been Hispanic.  Another found herself going repeatedly to walk along the banks of a local stream for comfort—and learned later that this had been the donor’s favorite place to sit, think, and write.  A quiet, reserved, painfully shy man suddenly discovered new confidence and entered a career in public speaking—only to find out that the donor of his heart had been a TV newscaster.  There are many stories like this in the book called The Heart’s Code.  Dr. Pearsall goes on to explain the theory and science behind energy cardiology, an emerging field that is uncovering one of the most significant medical, social, and spiritual discoveries of our time.  It turns out that the heart is not just a pump; as the book puts it, “the heart conducts the cellular symphony that is the very essence of our being.”   The heart not only feels, as our ancestors believed, but also thinks and knows and cares.

Pearsall theorized that what is wrong with our own society is that it is run by our brains, not our hearts, and that this damages us on a personal and sociological level.  If we learn to listen to the subtle energy and wisdom contained within our own hearts we can learn valuable lessons about love, work, prayer, healing, and even playing.

I believe that the Torah was on to this concept long ago, right here in Parshat Ekev.  Circumcising the foreskin of our hearts means that to open our hearts to God, to holiness, and to goodness in order to learn just how to do what God asks, we must cut away a certain layer that exists there.   We must remove the hard casing we construct over our innate humanity, the armor of ego and self-interest and self-importance that build up out of our insecurity, or out of overconfidence—the arrogance of the eternal critic, for example, the cool hostility of the perpetual cynic, the self-righteous anger of the eternally injured.  We must take our heads out of the equation for a bit, shut off the controlling negativity of the brain and let our hearts express the depth of feeling and empathy within them.

It is reflecting the compassion of the heart, rather than the criticism of the mind.  It is emphasizing our shared humanity, not our superficial differences.  It is a kind of spiritual brit milah that Ekev teaches.

When we remove the hard casing around our hearts, when we perform this spiritual milah, we change ourselves for the better.  We can then open our hearts and feel, and know, that God is good, and desires good—that what God wants is something we can offer.  The various ways that Ekev advocates exploring how to fulfill God’s desires are really no more than a means to creating good in the world: one path of kindness, ethics, and personal respect. This is the heart of the matter.  This is the lesson of the heart.

On this Shabbat, and over the coming week, may we each learn to listen to our own hearts, to get our heads out of the way long enough to touch that holiness within us.  And then we may become truly cardiac Jews—Jews in our heart, and in all other aspects of our lives.

Loss and Power

Sermon, Shabbat Va’Etchanan/Nachamu 5784, Shabbat of Consolations

Rabbi Sam Cohon, Congregation Beit Simcha, Tucson, AZ 

By Jewish tradition, this Shabbat is subtitled “Shabbat Nachamu, the Sabbath of Consolation.”  It marks the first in a series of Sabbaths that follow Tisha B’Av, the commemoration of the destruction of both the First and Second Temples.  Each Saturday until Rosh HaShanah we will have a Haftarah, a prophetic reading on Shabbat morning taken from the works of Second Isaiah, the great prophet of comfort, designed to bring us hope in the aftermath of great national loss.

Tisha B'Av, the 9th of Av, is the day dedicated to the remembrance of great tragedies in our people's long history.  Last Monday night we recalled the destruction of the First Temple in 586 BCE by the Babylonian Empire, and of the Second Temple in 70 CE by the Roman Empire, the catastrophic annihilation of our nation and our great city of Jerusalem that ultimately ended 1000 years of Jewish sovereignty in Israel.  On Tisha B’Av too we remembered 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. 

Other tragedies befell our people on that dark day: the Jews of England were expelled in a royal writ issued on Tisha B'Av 1290, and the expulsion of the Jews of Spain in 1492, destroyed a great Jewish civilization that had flourished for hundreds of years and was timed to coincide with Tisha B'Av in order to add misery to misery.  The First World War, which ultimately led directly to the Second World War and the Holocaust, began on that day in August 1914, the “Guns of August” that destroyed the old world of Europe.  

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, now additionally reflected in International Holocaust Remembrance Day.  In the context of Tisha B'Av, I'm reminded of Rabbi Emil Fackenheim's 614th Commandment, in multiple parts: “We are, first, commanded to survive as Jews, lest the Jewish people perish. We are commanded, secondly, to remember in our very guts and bones the martyrs of the Holocaust, lest their memory perish. We are forbidden, thirdly, to deny or despair of God, however much we may have to contend with him or with belief in him, lest Judaism perish. We are forbidden, finally, to despair of the world as the place which is to become the kingdom of God, lest we help make it a meaningless place in which God is dead or irrelevant and everything is permitted."

In this 5784 year of tragedy for the Jewish people, when October 7th brought so much horror and suffering, this is a fitting reminder.  On Tisha B’Av this year, as we have every week since October 7th, we remembered the 1200 Israelis, Americans, and the dead of so many other nations slaughtered by an enemy no less merciless or brutal than our previous tormentors.  

So, 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?  Only this: the existence of a sovereign Jewish state, Israel, with its own army.  Rabbi Yitz Greenberg formulated an ethic of Jewish power, an unequivocal statement that in the aftermath of the Holocaust it is a profound moral obligation for Jews to accept the necessity of having the ability to defend ourselves.

​As Greenberg puts it, "After two millennia of passivity, of living by sufferance on the margins of the host society, Jewry opted to take power to shape its own fate by creating the State of Israel.

​"Taking power required a 180-degree turn in Jewish ethics. Jewish morality had high standards, but it was the ethical code of the powerless. We were totally innocent because we had no army and there were no people under our control.

"The choice to take power was challenging because it meant giving up moral purity. Having an army and waging wars meant that, inescapably, there would be innocent civilian casualties. The heartbreaking truth is that in the real world, the definition of a moral army is that it kills as few innocent civilians as possible." 

As you may know, I started teaching a three-part class in the history of Zionism a couple of days ago.  A close friend said to me, “You really like trying to tame the tiger, don’t you?”, meaning I embrace the challenge of tackling a difficult and suddenly controversial subject.  I do, actually; but I must share that I began this class by explaining that the word Zionism means, simply, that we Jews, like every other people on earth, have the right to our own country, in the land we come from and in the place where we had full sovereignty for over a thousand years.  That’s it.  It’s not a racist idea, nor is it a colonial one.  Zionism is simply a statement that we Jews have the right to our own country, the place where we always had that country and where we dreamed and prayed about returning to it as our own nation for nearly two thousand years.  Jews have a right for Israel to exist.

To be an anti-Zionist is to believe that alone among all the nations on earth we Jews do not have the right to have our own, sovereign state.  To be a non-Zionist is pretty close to the same thing; it means you don’t believe that Israel should exist, which is a way of advocating for its annihilation, and the forcible exiling of over 7 million Jews from a nation we have had for more than 75 years.  To be an anti-Zionist is, by definition, to be a racist.  It is a statement that only we Jews don’t deserve to have our own country.

Now since we Jews have had a state in Israel for over 75 years now, longer than most people on the planet have been alive, being an anti-Zionist, or saying you don’t believe in Zionism, means that you think Israel should be destroyed and that the Jews living there, most of whom were born in Israel as Israelis, should be forcibly exiled to other countries they don’t live in.  I must add that the State of Israel was the first nation ever created by the vote of the United Nations—a UN that is no friend to Israel these days, but actually voted to establish the state in 1948. 

It's rather simple, really.  If take an Anti-Zionist position you essentially are defining yourself as an Antisemite, and perhaps an advocate for genocide.

I was on a Zoom call last week with Jonathan Conricus, who became quite famous after October 7th for his extensive appearances representing Israel on CNN, BBC World News, Fox News, Sky News, and more or less every media outlet there is.  Conricus is a retired Israeli Lt. Colonel with extensive military and diplomatic experience who was called back to be a spokesperson for the IDF and became the most evident official voice of Israel abroad in the months of the Gaza War.  After giving hundreds of interviews in the months after October 7th, Conricus left the official IDF service, and is now at an organization called the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies. 

Conricus is notable because he is both strongly pro-Israel, open about aspects of the situation that are usually not discussed, and willing to criticize the strategic mistakes his own country has made.  Ostensibly, the rabbinic meeting with him last week was to discuss Israel’s strategy of, perhaps, killing the leaders of Hamas and Hezbollah, but Conricus did not feel this was particularly significant; sort of, “What’s the difference in exchanging one murderous terrorist, who kills his own people with his own hands, for another who does the same?”   

In a discussion with the Zionist Rabbinic Network, the points he made that were most notable were that he said clearly that Israel’s strategy of trying to stop Iran from getting nuclear weapons and to resist Iran’s strategic efforts to build what he calls a “ring of fire” around Israel are failing. 

First, he stated that Iran is now nearly nuclear, has already enriched enough uranium for multiple nuclear bombs, and lacks only an effective delivery system.  And secondly, he notes that Iran has funded, armed and organized effective anti-Israel terrorist militias in Gaza, the West Bank, Yemen, Syria, and, as he puts it, their greatest evil accomplishment, Hezbollah in Lebanon, all of which are causing severe problems for Israel and killing Israelis.  In addition, he notes that Iran is working to create, fund and arm terrorist militias in Jordan and northern Somalia next.  These Iranian proxies are bleeding Israel in many ways. 

Israel’s military responses to these attacks, while tactically effective and even brilliant in many ways, always lead to harsh international criticism and damage Israel abroad—and damage Israel’s economy and society. 

Conricus, who has always represented the IDF rather than the Israeli government, strongly criticized Israeli strategy in these areas, as well as Israel’s struggles to create a successful media and social media strategy to counteract Iran’s manipulations.  For Conricus, Israel needs a new way to fight Iran that is more than simply seeking quiet or a limited level of hostility with these ultra-violent Arab proxies that are the tools of its greatest enemy.

Noting the “tremendous failure of October 7th,” he did highlight the tactical achievements of the Israeli military on the extremely challenging urban battlefields in Gaza.  Conricus also noted that just after October 7th he immediately recommended that Israel needed to present a plan for what was to happen to the Gaza civilians to answer the question for the international community, and that Israel simply did not.  In addition, he highlighted the total absence in the Israeli government, and in the IDF, of a contemporary and modern public affairs and information system.  Israel has been losing the information war, but it doesn’t have to lose it.  It hasn’t prioritized this nearly sufficiently, and there is a high price to pay for that mistake.

There are seven fronts, at least, in the current war that Israel is engaged in, according to Israeli military strategists, perhaps not even including the worldwide rise in antisemitism that has been provoked by October 7th and the Gaza War.  Most of these threats to Israel are sponsored by and curated by the Islamic Republic of Iran.  Therefore, the greatest goal for Israel, according to Conricus, should be regime change in Iran.  The oppressive Islamic Republic regime needs to be challenged in every way that it can be, which includes economic, technological and military efforts.  Conricus even noted that Israel has the capability to put a serious economic price on Iran’s actions, including stopping Iran’s petrochemical exports that it uses to fund the terrorist ring it has created around Israel. 

It was quite striking to hear Conricus state that Israel should dramatically change its regional strategy, to note that it is failing and that it is also losing the information war—and then to hear him make concrete recommendations about what Israel should be doing instead.  This came not from someone anti-Israel, but profoundly pro-Israel. His analysis—which seemed to me both accurate and cogent, and was certainly stated factually, without referencing personalities, like, say the current Prime Minister of Israel—hit home.

It's not clear if Israel will follow Conricus’s advice, and instead of attacking the Arab symptoms of the Iranian problem, actually bring the mullahs in Iran to understand that there will be a real price to pay for attacking Israel through proxies, and directly with missiles.  If you haven’t heard Conricus before, look him up on YouTube or online anywhere.  He makes a lot of sense.  And his English—he is Swedish/Israeli—is impeccable.

Unfortunately, none of this, so far, is terribly consoling on this Shabbat Nachamu, this Sabbath of Consolation.  I am encouraged by the joint statement from the United States, Egypt and Qatar released today stating that the time has come to release the hostages and establish a cease fire in Gaza.  They are clearing pressuring everyone to get the deal completed by next week.  We shall see, of course; the hostages have now been captivity for more than 10 months, those who are still alive.  We perhaps should also be encouraged that the wider regional war that seemed to be imminent just a week or two ago may have been averted. 

As the nechemta, the consolation conclusion of this view of the situation, we return to Rabbi Yitz Greenberg’s ethic of Jewish power: we are not in the position we were in for two thousand years.  Israel is militarily powerful, a strong liberal democracy with incredible resilience.  We will not have another epic disaster to commemorate on Tisha B’Av, for as brutal as the Palestinian terrorist atrocities inflicted on October 7th were, Israel has responded with strength and resolve. 

May we take consolation in our support for Israel, a support that can include criticism where it is appropriate.  May we give thanks on this Shabbat Nachamu that we have a Jewish nation in 2024, a powerful nation that is made up of and accepts all kinds of Jews from everywhere in the world.  And may we soon see it experience the freeing of its hostages, our brothers and sisters, and a return to peace.

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.