Community

Yom Kippur Morning 5785, Rabbi Sam Cohon, Congregation Beit Simcha, Tucson, AZ

Mr. Schwartz is sitting in his room, wearing only a top hat, when Steinberg strolls in.
“Why are you sitting here naked?” asks Steinberg.
“It’s all right,” says Schwartz. “Nobody comes to visit.”a
“So why the hat?” asks Steinberg.
And Schwartz answers, “Maybe somebody will come.”

“Maybe somebody will come.”  I admit that I was struggling a bit after Rosh HaShanah, which went superbly, as far as services go.  Our musicians and soloist were universally wonderful, the Torah reading and Haftarah went beautifully, the shofar choir did fabulously, the set-up went quickly and easily, the Rosh HaShanah treats were delicious and elegantly and efficiently distributed, the front door was well coordinated, the sound system worked flawlessly, our security was thorough throughout, even the air conditioning worked great, and everyone helped break it all down afterwards.  And yet… I was troubled.

I was wondering about those Jews who choose not to go to Rosh HaShanah services, who don’t come to hear the shofar or the music we spend so much time preparing or the sermons some of us spend much thought and effort writing.  It used to be, back when I began serving as a cantor and then a rabbi, that plenty of Jews didn’t come to services except on the High Holy Days.  On a regular Shabbat seats were always easy to find.  But on Rosh HaShanah and Yom Kippur you needed a ticket to get in, the seats were full, and there were overflow services held in other locations just to accommodate all the worshippers.  In other words, most of the year a synagogue looked like a partially or even mostly empty hall; suddenly on Rosh HaShanah it was standing-room only.  On the Yamim Nora’im, on the Days of Awe, every shul suddenly turned into a megachurch.  The two-or-three-day-a-year Jews always came out in force for Yomtov.

That began to change about twenty years ago.  It wasn’t instantaneous or anything, but gradually it became less of a priority for congregants to come to temple on Rosh HaShanah or even Yom Kippur.  The two services we had to conduct on Kol Nidrei Eve to meet the demand became one service; the full hall on Yom Kippur became a partially full shul.  I’m not sure what it was that prompted this slow erosion, but rabbinic colleagues throughout the country confirmed that it accorded with their own experience.  While attendance was certainly higher on the High Holy Days than during a regular Shabbat or on other festivals, it apparently had become a matter of personal preference whether you attended or not.  And plenty of people chose, well, not to attend.

I’m not saying I don’t appreciate everyone who participates in services, and attends, and prays here; I certainly do.  And it has always been part of our Beit Simcha approach that we provide the finest services we can no matter who is present, or absent.  We always wear a hat.

But even after 20 years of conditioning in lower attendance expectations, knowing that this is a national trend pretty much everywhere, it’s still a little surprising to me that for many Jews today—not you guys, of course; this is definitely preaching to the choir—attending services even on the holiest days of the year is now an optional sort of thing.

I was kvetching about this when my wife, Sophie, reminded me that I often say that being Jewish today takes many different forms; that I teach that Jewish identity is forged from a variety of sources, and expressed in myriad ways.  So some people don’t come on Rosh HaShanah—but they may take Adult Education Academy classes, send their kids to Religious School, attend Seder or Hanukkah or Purim events, bake for an Oneg Shabbat instead of coming to the service itself; some stand up for Israel, donate for Religious School scholarships or the capital campaign or High Holy Day Appeal, or help build the Sukkah, or buy Jim Click tickets or ride in El Tour de Tucson for the shul.  Aren’t these all ways to meaningfully express Jewish identity? 

Isn’t all of that part of being a Jewish community?  Yes, I admitted.  That was all true.

So, then, just what is it that creates a true community of people?  What brings people together into a meaningful kehillah, a congregation?

In one sense, community is about shared experiences: we go to temple together, our kids attend the same school and we see each other at drop off or pick up, we volunteer at the same food kitchen or Habitat House once a month.  We sing in the same choir, are in a writing group together, or work with them preparing food for Oneg Shabbat or Kiddush.  Maybe we live on the same block, or play on their softball team, or go to the same exercise class, or bicycle or run with them; we are in Rotary Club or Chamber of Commerce together, or maybe we just always invite the same people for holiday dinners each year.  Perhaps we work on a community issue on a committee or board or a political campaign.  Or maybe it’s just that we see the same folks all the time and they become a kind of habit…

These are the soft ways community is formed, in which we get to know others and see who we like and enjoy or who we wish to hang out with, or whom we end up grouped with the most.

Now sometimes these connections of community are based on shared belief and ideology, or shared religion; sometimes not.  But even among similarly-minded people—other Jews, if we are Jewish; or hiking enthusiasts, or dancers, or Wildcat basketball fans, or Swifties, or whatever the connection is—just how those ties of community are built can seem a bit mystical.  Is it shared experiences?  Respect?  Shared responsibility? Liking the same stuff?  Disliking the same stuff?  Doing things the same way?  What is it that ties us to other human beings we aren’t related to, and binds us into a genuine community?

The Hebrew word for community is Kehillah, which is pretty much just an assembly of folks.  Hakheil et haAm, the Torah instructs Moses: gather the people together.  The larger term for a synagogue is Kehillah Kedoshah, a sacred community or community of holiness.  So, does that mean the whole group of people who happen to belong to a congregation at any one moment?  I mean, a congregation is an ever-changing thing; people join a congregation, new people are born, people die, people move away, people switch congregations, get mad at the rabbi or another congregant, and so on.  Does the current membership of a synagogue—or a church or a mosque—really form a true community?  

And how are we to think of today’s virtual online “communities,” the hundreds of “friends” on Facebook, the Instagram broadcasters, the millions of people following influencers on TikTok and YouTube, the Reddit subthreads, and so on?  If everyone is watching the same thing, passively, does that make them into a community?

This question of community is not exactly a new challenge for a congregational rabbi.  After all, if you are growing a synagogue, something I have been focused on in three different congregations over my career, you seek, always, to build community.  At its best, it should be a community dedicated to the same vision, a temple, synagogue or congregation where people care about and respect one another, that seeks to offer the finest religious services, the best and most caring Jewish education for children, inspirational learning and service for adults, social action work, Jewish music, cultural and intellectual experiences, fun, and relationship-building opportunities.

But how does that equate with what really happens? 

These High Holy Days are an interesting time to explore this.  In some ways, they are a wonderful time to see our Jewish community active and involved.  In another sense, they are an exception to what our communities really are.

I remember doing a sermon on Rosh Hashanah back at the beginning of the reality TV craze, over 20 years ago—you know, back when everyone seemed to attend—in which I compared the Jewish Days of Awe, Rosh HaShanah and Yom Kippur, to a reality TV show; the Yamim Nora’im, the High Holy Days, like “Survivor” or, God-forbid, “The Apprentice.”  Here were a few days a year when the entire congregation suddenly appeared, as if out of nowhere, all dressed up in fancy duds, in order to pray, sing, read together out loud in English, and chat with people we hadn’t seen in 12 months, ever since the end of the previous Yom Kippur.  On the Day of Atonement we even fasted, going without food and water, some of us, anyway, for one whole day. 

And we all acted like this was the norm for our synagogue community, on this High Holy Days’ Island in which we had to survive until Ne’ilah, from Kol Nidrei until the closing blast of the shofar ending Yom Kippur—when, released from the reality experience, we could go back to our normal lives and do none of the things we had just spent those special days doing.

That is, after surviving long services and fancy clothes and elaborate music and sermons and pleas for social action and tzedakah for the congregation and for Israel, everyone got to leave the island, not to return for 12 months.

Ah, but while we were at temple on the Days of Awe we acted as though we all were present like this all the time and would be there for the whole year like that.  Like this was real.

Now, we know that reality TV is anything but real; imagine pretending you are living a normal life while film crews tape your every conversation, and an editor assembles it all into something quite different than what you just lived.  Not real.  Just as we know that TikToks and Instragram posts and Facebook minis and YouTube shorts are fabricated ways to make it seem like community exists between people who have no real relationships.  It’s ersatz, imitation community.

Not real.

But you know what is real?

An actual congregational community in which we support each other, care about each other, and pray and work together.  A synagogue community in which we come together not once or twice a year on the High Holy Days—I mean, we do need that, of course—but in which we work together all the time to make a difference in our lives and in the world.  A community in which we study and learn together, celebrate together, grieve together, cook and eat together, help each other and those in our larger world who need assistance.  An actual intentional experience of sharing joys and sorrows, of seeking meaning and understanding, of repairing the damage we see around us.

That’s what community is and can be.  That’s what Jewish community should be, based around the congregation.  Not limited to services—although surely it would be nice to attend—nor even to studying together.  But a true community of connection and commitment.

We have much of that right now at Beit Simcha.  This is a congregation that can always be called on to help, to roll up its sleeves, to move tables and chairs and prayerbooks.  We are a genuinely generous community, willingly assisting those who are struggling, giving without needing applause.  We demonstrate care about each other, and enjoy just sitting and talking and, of course, eating.

Sorry to mention that on Yom Kippur… 

But there is always room for great growth here, always the possibility for deeper and more vital community.  There are already so many opportunities to join together in prayer, study, social action, and joy at Beit Simcha.  And there are at least as many chances to help, to give of time and resources to help shape who we are and who we will become.  I can tell you something powerful about the process of giving in this way: the more you give, in a true community, the more you will receive. 

There is one more important element, highly appropriate on Yom Kippur, that I believe we can improve upon.  Community is made up of human beings.  That means we make mistakes, all of us; it means we will, on occasion, cause offense, unintentionally.  It means we must have tolerance for our foibles and follies, our errors and accidental insults.  Because a perfect community, which always says or does the right thing for all its members, has never yet existed, and likely never will; lo hayah v’lo yihyeh.  But a truly good, generous, loving, supportive community?  That exists right here, and can only be enhanced by a generous helping of forgiveness.  Be kind to each other; everyone is a volunteer, and does what they do out of the goodness of their hearts.

My friends, on this Day of Atonement, of teshuvah, of return and repentance, may you seek and find true community, both give and receive the love and support that we all need.  And may you receive a g’mar chatimah tovah, be sealed for a good year of life, of health, of communal dedication and blessing.

Ideas Not Images

Rabbi Sam Cohon, Kol Nidrei Eve Yom Kippur 5785 

About three hundred years ago a new scientific characteristic of our natural world was discovered.  A professor named Johann Schulze from the town of Coblenz in the Duchy of Magdeburg in what is now Germany demonstrated that light, not heat, darkened silver nitrate and produced images on a surface.  The images created by this process were at the time only temporary, an intriguing but useless phenomenon.  It wasn’t until 1822, over a century later, that a French inventor named Joseph Niépce [“nyeps”] applied this idea in a new way.  He created the oldest surviving photograph, taken in 1826, almost two hundred years ago.

Niépce’s [“nyeps”] process used a camera obscura, an upside-down reflected image, to capture images exposed onto coated pewter plates. Exposures took hours due to the limited light-sensitivity of available materials, but they were permanent, if faint.  A few years later, in 1829, another inventor and artist, Louis Daguerre, partnered with Niépce to improve what was then called the photography process. After Niepce’s death, Daguerre continued his work, and the process evolved into the daguerreotype, shown publicly for the first time in 1839, which quickly became a sensation.  That same year a man named Robert Cornelius took the first self-portrait, and studios using daguerreotypes became immediately popular.

Now, it shouldn’t come as any surprise that some of the first photos ever taken were self-portraits.  It seems clear that the ultimate invention of the selfie, and the selfie stick, was perhaps inevitable…  At first, these 1840s era daguerreotypes were nearly as expensive as having a portrait painted, the old way of immortalizing yourself, something only aristocrats and other rich people could afford.  But the process got faster, and prices came down quickly.  Soon, it cost just $5 to get one made, equal to roughly $200 today.  Not exactly free, but within the reach of middle-class customers.

By the start of the Civil War, in 1861, photographs were much less expensive and easier to produce. New technologies brought the price of the new glass-backed and tintype emulsion plates down to 25 cents in the Union states; it was more in the Confederacy, but still, the average Civil War soldier, who was paid $11 a month, could afford his own personal photograph, and nearly everyone had one made and sent it home.  The portraits of most soldiers were small—about three inches squarish—and often it was the only photo these men ever had taken of themselves.  Many thousands of these photos survive today in museums and in some homes.  They are often the sole record of their subjects, whose names we often don’t even know, and some of whom never made it back alive from war.  But their images remain.

Keeping a record of your existence became a standard feature of life by the late 19th and 20th century.  Especially in Old Country Jewish families in the Pale of Settlement, where most people lived in shtetlach lacking a professional photo studio, it was common to have family photos made by an itinerant photographer, and these durable black-and-white images still decorate many an American Jewish hallway today. These were often large families—eight, ten, even twelve children were common—of multiple generations, the Zaidies and Bubbies in traditional garb, the teens in the most contemporary clothing, everyone staring stiffly at the slow-moving lens. 

The cost of photos kept going down; in the 20th century new processes and cheap cameras like the Brownie made it possible for people to take a new form of photo, the snapshot.  The development of the Polaroid instant photo, and of inexpensive consumer cameras and film eventually put color images in everyone’s hands—after you dropped your roll of film for developing and printing at the local photo shop or drive-through Fotomat kiosk.  It wasn’t so easy to take photos of yourself back then; you needed to own and carry a tripod to do it.  Of course, you could always inveigle a passerby to shoot a quick pic of you and your significant other, and hope that your eyes were actually open in the final print when you got around to having it developed.

The first hand-held digital camera was invented by a man named Steven Sasson, an engineer at Kodak, in 1975; it weighed 8 pounds, was the size of a toaster, and took black and white images in a mere 26 seconds for each shot. Sasson had to invent a technology to look at the photos, too.  Of course, over the next four decades digital technology improved so dramatically that it has taken over the production of images.  As Sasson says, “I have been very fortunate… to know that I was dealing with something important to people, which is their memories, which are precious to all.”

The very first phones that contained cameras date from the year 2000, just 24 years ago.  Those cameras were more a novelty than a useful device.  But within four years, by 2004, half the mobile phones sold had cameras, with Sprint leading the way.  Soon smartphones all had cameras, which got better with each new generation of phone.

Fast forward to today, and you will not be surprised to learn that more photos have been taken in the last few years, the years of digital photography on cellphones, than in the entire 200-year history of photography that preceded it.  Last year it is estimated that 1.8 trillion pictures were taken: that is 5 billion pictures each and every day, approximately 225 photos annually for every human being, man, woman and child, on the planet. 

In the interests of full disclosure, I admit that I have contributed many photos of our toddler daughter, Ayelet, to that 1.8 trillion photo number…

It makes you wonder: who has time to look through all of those millions, billions, and yes, trillions of photos, when everyone is so busy taking more?

Since you no longer require a tripod to take your selfie—just long arms or a selfie stick—the number of self-portraits has undoubtedly exploded. We do not know exactly how many of those 1.8 trillion photos were taken of the photographers themselves, but some estimates are that only about 5% of all photos taken are selfies; some estimates, however, say that 58% of all photos are selfies!  That’s a crazy range.  Taking the lowest number, that means that a mere 92 million selfies are taken every single day.  Wow.

In essence, a selfie is just a vastly more ubiquitous form of a very popular form of art, the self-portrait, something painters have been doing for a long time.  It is an attempt to memorialize how we are at that very moment, or at least how we wish to be seen.  Some truly great pictures take the form of self-portraiture: from Leonardo da Vinci to Raphael to Velazquez to Rembrandt to Van Gogh to Frieda Kahlo, great painters have rarely resisted the impulse to paint themselves.  Some of them painted themselves many times.

Still, the explosion in the taking of selfies is a little daunting.  My favorite statistic is that millennials are projected to take, on average, 25,000 selfies over their lifetimes; that is, 25,000 pictures of… themselves.  Put simply, we love taking pictures of ourselves, and then sharing them with the world.  Nowadays, every moment is a Kodak moment.

Wow.  We all seem to be incredibly busy taking our own pictures.  But what exactly are we seeing there?  

Or perhaps the right question is a different one: how are all those images we experience—not just the selfies—this constant parade of visual distraction we all experience, how are these images affecting us?

Exactly 40 years ago, in October 1984, a Jewish academic and author named Neil Postman gave the keynote address at a conference on George Orwell’s famous futuristic book, 1984, which had given that year existential importance.  As I recall, we read 1984 in Jr. High School, along with Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, two contrasting, dark views of the future.

While this 1984 conference was supposed to be about the book 1984, Postman declared that it wasn’t the important reference point for people even then.  Western liberal countries did not live under the shadow of Big Brother, as those in the Communist world did.  No, the book that mattered more was the other book, Brave New World.  Robert Zaretsky wrote about Postman recently in the Forward.

In Huxley’s novel, Brave New World, people were constantly exposed to televised images, nonstop entertainment, and lived under the influence of “Soma,” a mind-numbing pleasure drug.  While George Orwell feared a world that banned books, Huxley feared a world where no one bothered to read books. In Orwell’s world, pain was used to terrify the populace; in Huxley’s world, pleasures were used to sedate it — both worlds shaped a citizenry that, either too deadened or too distracted, complied with the powers that be.

Forty years later we have some perspective to evaluate Postman’s insights. His 1984 address was turned into a book, Amusing Ourselves to Death, published the next year. It rocked both academic and popular culture.

Postman, who died in 2003, was born into a Jewish family on the Lower East Side, and in many ways he was a product of the deep Jewish love of text, from the Torah to today.  Postman’s book was written to explore what the television screen had done to the world.  Mind you, he was writing long before the advent of the Internet, iPhones, social media, and influencers.

In Amusing Ourselves to Death, Postman agonized over the rupture in human history between the written word and the televised image.

During what Postman calls the Age of Typography, the medium of the printed word cultivated the skills required to manage knowledge. There was nothing inevitable or natural about our direction towards the written word and reading. Reading entails the hard but essential work of staying still and focused while we draw meaning from markings on a page. Reading trains us to follow a line of reasoning and know when that line has been crossed, to distinguish between false and true propositions and to identify holes in logic before we trip and fall into them. 

While Postman took this development from the beginning of movable type in the 1400s, he could have traced it back much further in Jewish experience—he did attend Hebrew school as a kid—since we Jews have been focused on the written word since the creation of the Torah, at least 2500 years.  Reading has shaped our thinking throughout our entire history.

You see, the decoding of the markings on a page, drawing meaning from words sentences, and paragraphs, forms our perception of the world. But this particular form of understanding changed, perhaps forever, with the spread of the screen. The problem with television, Postman argued, is not that it is entertaining but that “it has made entertainment itself the natural format for all representation of experience.” 

Think about the consequences of this dizzying pivot in human history. Serious activities like news reporting and long analyses, political debate and topical discussion — all essential for a healthy democracy — have been undone and made unserious by the nature of the medium of television. For Postman, the two most terrifying words uttered in this medium are “Now…this.” This phrase, uttered by talking heads on the evening news, marks the shift from one subject, even the most despairing, to another subject, even the most delightful. 

This rupture in logical and ethical reasoning has widened with new forms of content providers like TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram. Coming of age in this fragmented world of images cascading non-stop across personal screens and disconnected from what precedes and what follows, many people today have given up reading entire books. And all of us struggle to make sense of the explosion of disconnected events unfolding across our various screens.

At Beit Simcha, every year we ask our Religious School students if they can name the 10 Commandments.  They usually get just a few of them initially, and with some prompting they eventually can guess most of them.  But one commandment nearly always escapes them. 

But you know which commandment truly stymies both groups? 

You might expect that they wouldn’t remember “Don’t covet your neighbor’s wife” or “Don’t take God’s name in vain.”  Some of them are definitely challenged by “Honor your mother and your father.”  But after a few hints, they always get all of the Ten Commandments. Except one.

That is the Second Commandment: You shall have no other gods before me, nor make any image of any of those gods, in the form of any depiction or reproduction.  This prohibition, repeated many times in the Torah, and perhaps even more often in the various books of the prophets, simply doesn’t make sense to students today.  Why can’t we have images?  Why can’t we create visual icons—& emojis, and videos—for that matter?

Lance Strate, a professor at Fordham, made a nuanced case for the Judaic worldview of Neil Postman, his late teacher and friend. He highlighted an early passage in Amusing Ourselves to Death, where Postman references the Second Commandment. Postman writes, “I’ve always been perplexed that God would insert a prohibition against the making of graven images in what otherwise is a series of ethical laws.” Perhaps, he suggests, “God knew that to accept an abstract and universal deity, the Israelites first needed to break the habit of drawing pictures or making statues. If the God of the Jews was to exist in the word and through the word, iconography had to become a ‘blasphemy.’”

Whether the images are graven or pixelated Neil Postman taught us forty years ago, through the printed word, to grasp just how blasphemous these images have become. 

Because life is not about surfaces and superficiality, not about photos and images and video clips of us.  Life is about who we are fully, completely.

The High Holy Days arrive each year to teach us, yet again, that we are more than the sum of our many photographs or videos.  We are in reality—not reality TV, but you know, actual real reality—we are the sum of our actions, the depth of our emotions, the grandeur of our ideas, the beauty of our creativity, the courage of our convictions.  We are something much better and holier than any selfie can capture, or any Facebook short or TikTok or Instagram feed can reflect.

We are each fallible human beings, but we are also each created in God’s own image.  Partially we are the ego-centered, self-serving creatures we appear to be in our posts and webpages.  But we are also sacrifice and love, sacredness and service, loyalty and dedication.  We are true accomplishment and noble failure.  We are holiness and happiness, mourning and remembrance.  We are the first cry of a baby and the last sigh of a dying man.  We are, each of us, much, much more than electrons displayed on video screens.

And Yom Kippur comes every year to remind us of that fact.

For twenty-four hours we are commanded to look inward, to compare our lives with our dreams, to measure our actions against our ideals.  We are compelled to look hard at who we are and who we wish to be, our successes and our failures, our bullseyes and our missed targets.

On Yom Kippur we are all, in a way, taking a selfie. But it is not the posed, artificial image we create with a phone.  The image we seek to capture is deeper and more complex than that—it is the whole person, the reality of each of our lives, the person we each meet in the private sphere of the soul.  That is who we each seek to find tonight and tomorrow.

The very real you. 

What God wants to see tonight and tomorrow is not the selfie—it’s the self.  It’s not the constructed, posed, photoshopped version of you.  It’s just you.  Without makeup. Without pretense.  Without shtick.  Without Instagram or TikTok.  Just you.

You know, the real you.  The one who has to apologize directly to the human beings you hurt in the past year.  The one who didn’t pray enough, study enough, breathe enough, give enough, care enough.  That one.  The one who was selfish and thoughtless and narcissistic.  The one who didn’t really work hard, just pretended to, who overcommitted and underperformed, who wishes he or she was a better person but didn’t make the effort to actually become that better person.  The one who was often passive aggressive, who engaged in gossip, who let anger get the best of him.  The one who let helping herself get in the way of helping others.  The one who let himself be too busy to help his wife.  The one who ignored her husband.  The one who spent more time shopping than visiting the sick, more time on sports than supporting friends.  The one who gave more money to Amazon than to tzedakah, who pretended he couldn’t afford to help when he just didn’t want to, even though it was the right thing.

That you.  The one in the mirror each morning.

Over this Day of Atonement may we each come to know that person well, and help that person grow in teshuvah and holiness.  May we drop our obsession with self-presentation and focus instead on self-awareness.  May we shed our preference for self-absorption and remember how to reach out to those we love, to reconnect with them, to help them find their best selves, too.

If we can do that, tonight and tomorrow, if we can find our truest self and resolve to repair it, if we can honestly evaluate our lives and put our moral houses in order, if we can search our souls and seek the spark of divine sanctity implanted within, then we will need no selfies to remember the moment.  We will need no posts to prove our moral merit.  We will require no tweets to tell our tales.  

Instead, we will find God, who takes no selfies at all.  And in that finding we will discover goodness and holiness, comfort and redemption.   

May this be our resolve on this Yom Kippur, and may our wills unite with God’s own will to make this a day of authentic and very real teshuvah.

Gmar chatimah tovah—may you be sealed in the Book of Life for a good year.

The Jazz Singer and Kol Nidrei

Opening Kol Nidrei Eve 5785

Rabbi Sam Cohon, Congregation Beit Simcha, Tucson, AZ

“Dear God, so far today, I haven’t gossiped, haven’t lost my temper, haven’t been greedy, grumpy, nasty, selfish, or over-indulgent.

“Thank you, God, for lending me the strength to do that.

“But in a few minutes, God, I’m going to need a lot more help, because I’m getting out of bed…”

Ah, the challenge of teshuvah, the difficulty we each face trying to change.  Returning to being the best person that you can be isn’t as easy as you would like.  Once we interact with other people, it’s infinitely more difficult to maintain our repentance, isn’t it?  Perhaps you have discovered that fact already in the nine days of this 5785 year. 

But Kol Nidrei is here to help.  And here’s a story about that.

On October 6, 1927, 97 years ago this week, on the day before Yom Kippur, a magical film premier took place in New York. “The Jazz Singer” starring Al Jolson electrified the audience as the first feature-length film to contain a sound score, sound effects – and actual dialogue.  Mind you, the dialogue amounted to less than three minutes of on-screen “talking”; the rest was shown on the usual silent film caption cards. But six songs were sung aloud.  5 jazz tunes, and… Kol Nidrei.

If you don’t already know, the movie “The Jazz Singer” dealt with Jewish assimilation and culminated on Yom Kippur. 

On April 25, 1917, Samson Raphaelson, who was from New York City's Lower East Side and was a student at the University of Illinois, attended the musical “Robinson Crusoe, Jr.” which starred Al Jolson, a Russian-born Jew.  Samson Raphaelson said he only experienced this level of emotional intensity among synagogue cantors.

Five years later, Raphaelson wrote a short story called “The Day of Atonement” based on Al Jolson’s life. He adapted it into a stage play called “The Jazz Singer” that premiered in 1925 starring Georgie Jessel. It was a hit, and Warner Brothers bought the film rights. As a result of contract issues—including how much money he wanted to be in the picture—Jessel did not star in the movie. The studio offered the role to Eddie Cantor, who turned it down, and then finally to Al Jolson—ironically, who the story was originally written about. Jolson was at the height of his huge popularity, but he hadn’t yet made a film. Jolson took the part, signing a $75,000 deal (about a million dollars today) in 1927.

This was the era of silent films.  In the Jazz Singer the audience, for the first time, could both see and hear Jolson. And what they heard was his rich voice, shuffling feet, and the sobs punctuating his high notes that reverberated with a fervor never before imagined on screen. The effect was thrilling.

The audience was mesmerized in a way that forever changed filmmaking. Even Jolson was so overcome at the premiere he couldn’t say his signature line: “Wait a minute, wait a minute, you ain’t heard nothin’ yet!”  The Jazz Singer was responsible for ending silent films, and beginning the era of talkies.

But there was much more to it. The story, which reaches its climax during Yom Kippur services, took on the issue of assimilation in America. The timing of the premier was intentional. Yom Kippur, of course, is our holiest day of the year, when we ask God for atonement from our sins. It demands introspection. At the film’s core lies the dilemma of maintaining Jewish identity in a changing world. Jolson’s character, Jakie Rabinowitz, son of a cantor, descended from generations of cantors, wrestles with honoring the traditions of his ancestors or grabbling hold of modern American life as a jazz singer, the rockstars of the day. The plot reflected the views and experiences of the four Jewish Warner brothers and its Jewish star, Al Jolson—born Asa Yoelson.

“The Jazz Singer” tells the story Jakie, the youngest Rabinowitz, American born, groomed from birth by his Orthodox father to devote his life to carrying on Judaism and the spirit and music of his ancestors.  Jakie’s passion, however, beats to the rhythm of American jazz. Instead of learning chazzones, his chants, he’s in cafes singing jazz tunes.

His heartsick father finds out and on Yom Kippur, Cantor Rabinowitz mournfully says, "My son was to stand at my side and sing tonight – but now I have no son." Jakie leaves home and forges a successful career with his jazz singing, taking on the name Jack Robins.

The dramatic climax occurs years later on Yom Kippur Eve. His cantor father is dying and calls his son to come back to shul the same night Jakie is supposed to make a critical appearance in a new Broadway show. His mother Sara wants him to take his father’s place at Kol Nidrei Eve services, to sing Kol Nidrei. His girlfriend warns Jakie that failing to appear opening night will ruin his career.

At first Jakie refuses his mother. But then, unable to deny what’s in his heart, he rushes to his father.  Jakie kneels at his father's bedside and the two finally talk with passion and affection. His father says: "My son–I love you." What will he do? Sacrifice his American music career or his responsibility to his father and Judaism?

Jakie sings Kol Nidre in his father's place and the Broadway opening is delayed. His father listens from his deathbed and speaks his last, forgiving words: "Mama, we have our son again." His girlfriend is there, too, and sees how Jack has reconciled the division in his soul: "A jazz singer – singing to his God."

The risk taken on by the Warner Brothers was rewarded. “The Jazz Singer” was a hit. The film that cost the studio $422,000, a fortune back then, made a huge profit, and won its producer an Honorary Academy Award at the very first Oscars.

Now the date this pioneering film debuted was not an accident.  Its premier was October 6, 1927, 97 years ago.  That year, Kol Nidrei Eve was October 7, 1927.  October 7th, a date we know for other reasons now.  Warner Brothers premiered the first talking—and singing—motion picture the night before Yom Kippur began, with the singing of Kol Nidrei included.  No doubt they wanted to attract the Jewish audience, although the film soon became an international sensation, drawing people of all ethnicities and nationalities. Being Jewish—at least ethnically so—the Warner Brothers, like Al Jolson, certainly knew when Yom Kippur was. What could be more of a tug at the heart than to have the prodigal son, as it were, come back and chant Kol Nidrei on Yom Kippur Eve while his dying cantor father listens?  And to do it the day before the real Yom Kippur Eve?  The Jazz Singer isn’t called “The Kol Nidrei Chanter”; it’s about American assimilation, yes, but with a Jewish soul still very much in evidence.

I don’t know if tonight’s chantings of Kol Nidrei will bring you back to that Jewish soul within you, that pintele Yid, that yiddisheh neshomah, as they say in Yiddish.  But I do know that it has that power.

My friends, there is something about this melody that has always tugged at Jewish hearts.  It’s called, in Jewish musicology, a miSinai tune, unchanged since Moses climbed down from Mount Sinai.  That’s not literally true; the text itself first appears in machzors around the sixth century, the melody perhaps appears in the Middle Ages.  But hearing it chanted three times, as Jewish legal formulas are required to be, brings the power and beauty of this melody a unique prominence in Jewish music.  It’s remarkable combination of sweetness, depth, and power can wash over you in ways that no other composition can.  Kol Nidrei is designed to capture your soul.

Only one night a year can you hear Kol Nidrei.  Tonight.  Here.  Now.

Statistics

Sermon, Shabbat Shuvah—Ha’Azinu 5785

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

Shabbat Shalom, and L’shanah Tovah, and Gmar chatimah tovah.  This is Shabbat Shuvah, the Sabbath of return, between Rosh HaShanah and Yom Kippur, which is never the best attended service of the year in any synagogue.  I’m not saying that people can feel in this period of time that they have become “Too Jewish”, but returning to shul the day after Rosh HaShanah might be an acquired taste.  And so, no surprise if our numbers are down tonight.  The Sabbath of Return, Shabbat Shuvah, sometimes feels like the Sabbath of emptiness, instead…

Of course, there is a danger in simply counting heads as a measure of achievement, or accepting statistics as a means of spiritual success.  Each of us matters, and how we live our lives, and how sincere our prayer is, is more important than the number of returnees seated in shul at any one moment.  Still, statistics can tell us something…  

Nobel Prize Winning poet Wislawa Szymborska, a favorite of mine, wrote a poem, 'A Contribution to Statistics'.  I think it illuminates, in a simple and not entirely subtle way, some essential truths about humanity—that is, us:

Out of a hundred people

those who always know better

-fifty-two [percent]

doubting every step

-nearly all the rest,

Glad to lend a hand

if it doesn't take too long

-as high as forty-nine [percent],

always good

because they can't be otherwise

-four, well maybe five [percent],

able to admire without envy

-eighteen [percent],

suffering illusions

induced by fleeting youth

-sixty [percent], give or take a few,

not to be taken lightly

-forty and four [percent],

living in constant fear

of someone or something

-seventy-seven [percent],

capable of happiness

-twenty-something tops,

harmless singly, savage in crowds

-half at least,

cruel

when forced by circumstances

-better not to know

even ballpark figures,

wise after the fact

-just a couple more

than wise before it,

taking only things from life

-thirty [percent]

(I wish I were wrong),

hunched in pain,

no flashlight in the dark

-eighty-three [percent]

sooner or later,

righteous

-thirty-five [percent], which is a lot,

righteous

and understanding

-three [percent],

worthy of compassion

-ninety-nine [percent],

mortal

-a hundred out of a hundred.

thus far this figure still remains unchanged.

According to the poet Szymborska, we are all clearly fallible, self-interested, self-justifying, mostly decent when untested, not so strong when tried, once in a while inspirational, often confused—and all of us have a limited shelf-life.  

It strikes me that the Torah portion for this Shabbat, HaAzinu, is just about perfect for people like that, for human beings trying to find a way to goodness and knowing, in a sort of dim way, our own limitations.  For this week we have the final song of Moses, a poem of soaring imagery and fairly brutal self-justification, of love and frustration.  It is, in its own way, a revealing masterpiece of a great orator, Moses, singing of the greatness of God, of the plain fact that his was a generation of Jews who were “crooked and perverse”, who were “foolish and unwise”—a nation “devoid of counsel” with no understanding.  In other words, a fallible and self-interested group, not so much evil as ungrateful and not too bright.  Just like the people Szymborska is talking about; just like, well, more or less, most of us.

There is hope here, too, however, albeit in small doses: Remember, Moses says, the days of old, “Zchor Y’mot Olam”, ask your father and your elders and they will tell you what you should know—that God is Eternal, and we are the ones who will pass.  God will ultimately make expiation, atonement, for our people.

This passage is Moses’ valedictory speech, but it is also his own funeral oration—for Moses is singing of his own end here, and he knows that he, too, is mortal.  God has done so much for this ragged group of slaves, and now that they are on the very brink of entering the Promised Land he, Moses, will only be permitted to gaze on it from afar—ki mineged tireh et ha’arets—but he will not be permitted to go in.

Moses, our greatest teacher, our leading rabbi, perhaps the greatest figure in all Jewish history, can only come to the border of the Promised Land.  His lesson is one of both word and example: we, too, can come close but never quite enter the Promised Land.  Perhaps only at this last moment does Moses come to realize that the journey to the Promised Land was really all about the journey, not the arrival.  How he took the trip, how he passed along the way, was what mattered.

So if even Moses is not going to get to his Promised Land, and we are, at best, more than bit like Moses, we should already be fully conscious of the fact that we ain’t really gonna’ get in to our own Promised Land, whatever that might be.  We just might get to the border—mineged ha’Arets—but we will never really make it.  There is that statistical problem: we are, 100 percent of us, human and fallible.  

So if we aren’t able to make it, why bother to try?

The lesson of Ha’Azinu comes in the fact that we are still reading the great story of Moses, and finding inspiration from it.  Moses was a hot-head and, in his youth, a killer—and yet he brought not only himself but an argumentative people of great stubbornness— some things don’t change all that much!—to the very border of the Promised Land.  He helped create Teshuvah for himself and for so many others.  If Moses could do it, can we?  

If we look at it properly—reasonably, I guess—the answer is yes.  Our job is simply to make this journey our own, and undertake it with honesty and effort—to get to the border, if you will.

And the truth is that you, personally, are already on the right path.  You are here tonight, on this Shabbat of T’shuvah.  You are part of the good side of the statistics; you have defied the irony, on this night, and you bring some holiness with you by doing so.  

May you come to appreciate, and treasure, the journey—and so, even inadvertently, find the borders of your own Promised Land.

Zionism Reclaimed

Sermon, Rosh HaShanah Morning 5785

Rabbi Sam Cohon, Congregation Beit Simcha

“What’s in a name?” Juliet asked long ago in Shakespeare’s play of love and tragedy.  “That which we call a rose/ By any other name would smell as sweet.”  But as young Juliet did not yet understand, names can have their meanings changed, and the most mellifluous terms may be twisted into epithets, just as the sweetest smelling scent can be fouled by corruption.   

I’ve been thinking about the way that names, really any words, become tainted, and turn from simple descriptions into insults.  Sometimes this is accidental, an ordinary word becoming negatively charged because of events.  Sometimes it’s the result of a concerted campaign to take a perfectly normal term and use it against someone you don’t like or want to defeat in an election.  And sometimes it’s because an underlying level of bias emerges in the way that words are used, and there is a deliberate effort to hide a malign design using a cover word to signify negative qualities without revealing the hatred hidden behind the usage.

An example of the first way a name changes meaning is the word “steroid.” It was originally just a category of drug prescribed for inflammation and illness.  But during the baseball scandals of the early 2000s it became clear that some players, and athletes in other sports, too, were using steroids to gain an unfair advantage over their non-steroid abusing peers. “Steroid-user,” originally a medical description, became a hostile phrase, a way to name-call someone a cheater, a bad apple.  Steroid-users can’t get into the baseball Hall of Fame, and when they retire or die the fact that they were identified as “steroid users” is always included in their obits. “Steroid” became a kind of evil name, not quite as bad as “Opioid” in recent years, but for similar reasons: people abusing a substance led to the word itself becoming understood as a representation of evil.

An example of the second kind of name transformation, in which a normal name is deliberately transformed into something negative, is the way our politics turned the term “Liberal” into an epithet.  Originally, there were liberals and conservatives and moderates, and no one thought any of those terms were moral judgments, just political orientations. They simply meant you had differing perspectives on politics and economics and perhaps social norms.  Then, in the 1980s, political operatives discovered they could snearingly say someone was a “Liberal,” and if they did it with enough attitude and frequency the idea it meant something bad would stick to it.  The terms conservative and moderate weren’t treated the same way, and so being called a “liberal,” once a non-judgmental way to recognize ideology, became a harsh criticism.  This wasn’t a logical change, or something based in policy; it was a way to take a normal word describing people on the other side of a political issue and make it sound as though they were evil.  Soon obviously liberal people were running away from the name.  All you had to do was label someone a “liberal” and they were in political trouble.  It was a way to turn a normal word into a weapon.

The third way that a name changes meaning is when people use it as a code word to express deep antipathy, even hate, without saying the words they would really like to use.  That usage is what we address today, the coded recalibration of a term so that it hides a malign intent behind a clever effort to re-brand something good into something officially evil.  It is the fiendishly designed desire to take a word and twist it into a weapon.

The word “Zionism” has gone through this awful transformation several times over the years, but particularly so since October 7th.  As we learned in our recent class on the history of Zionism, the word “Zionism” simply means we Jews have a right to return to our homeland in Israel and create our own country, as nearly every other people on earth has its own nation. 

The name “Zionism” has a peculiar pedigree; it turns out that the word “Zion” itself predates Judaism, and it is not of Hebrew origin. Tziyon may have been a Jebusite word—they were Canaanites living around Jerusalem—meaning tower or fortress.  “Zion” worked its way into Hebrew after King David’s general conquered Jerusalem 3000 years ago, and David made it his, and our, capital city. 

Generally, “Zion” referred to a small mountain or, really, a hill.  In fact, the precise location of “Mt. Zion” moved around the region of Jerusalem over the centuries.  At first, Mt. Zion referred to the hill on which the Ir David, the City of David was constructed. It was just south of the current city walls of Jerusalem, near where the king built his royal palace.  Later, after his son King Solomon constructed the First Temple around 950 BCE, the term was enlarged to embrace what we call Har HaBayit, the Temple Mount, and “Zion” came to broadly mean the central shrine area of Jerusalem.  After the destruction of the First Temple nearly four hundred years later, and then the destruction of the 2nd Temple 600 years after that, around 2000 years ago, Mt. Zion ended up referring to a different, more western hill just outside the current walls of the Old City of Jerusalem. 

Today’s Mt. Zion is a few hundred yards south and west of its original location in the City of David.  It’s the location these days of the Dormition Abbey, of a place imaginatively called “King David’s Tomb” and the room where the Last Supper supposedly took place. 

So how did this peripatetic hill, this movable mountain of a place come to mean the national aspirations of the Jewish people? 

Again, it’s a little obscure.  What is clear is that after all these relocations, the term “Zion” became a poetic way of referring to the general area of Jerusalem, and the whole land of Israel.  It implied an emotional attachment to the Promised Land, a deep desire to return to it.  It was a word that evoked not just a specific spot, but a kind of general longing for home.

Now long before the modern Jewish nationalist movement came to be called Zionism there was a profound desire among Jews everywhere for a return to Israel and reestablish the Jewish nation there.  Remember, from 1200 BCE until about 70 CE, close to 1300 years, there was Jewish sovereignty in Israel—a Jewish state, and sometimes, two Jewish states, in the land of Israel.  That’s more than five times as long as the United States has existed as a nation.  Yes, as the Hativkah says, we dreamed of returning for nearly 2000 years; but we had a nation there for 1300 years before that.

Now from the time of the forced exile of Jews from Israel at the hands of various conquerors—most notably the Roman Empire, but that disaster was followed by many other invasions, persecutions and forced expulsions from Israel—Jews everywhere in the world prayed to God three times daily for the Jewish state to be restored.  Those prayers remain in the Siddur and Machzor, the prayer books of our people, and have been there for nearly 2000 years.  The return to Israel might not often have been a realistic goal, but it was surely an aspiration, to restore us to our lost land and sovereignty.

And there was never a time when there wasn’t a Jewish community living in the Land of Israel, whether in the Galilee, or in Jerusalem, in Hebron, on the coast, or in other parts of Israel.  We never fully left Israel, no matter who held power over it at any one time or how miserable the conditions were. Today, when you go to Israel every tour guide likes to tease tourists into reciting a litany of the conquerors of the Land of Israel after we were forced out: the Romans, the Byzantines, the Persians, the Arabs, the Crusaders, the Mamluks, the Ottoman Turks, the British.  Zion wasn’t always the center of the Jewish world that it had been, because that wasn’t politically possible.  But some of us always lived there, and the rest never gave up the dream of returning to our eternal homeland.

Now the modern term “Zionism” was not applied to that dream until the year 1890.  “Zionism” was coined by a 26 year old Austrian-Jewish journalist and activist named Nathan Birnbaum, and it quickly stuck.  He used it in his translation of the Hebrew phrase, hovevei tzion, that is, “lovers of Zion.”  The name was rapidly adopted across the spectrum of all who wanted a Jewish state in the land of Israel, especially Theodore Herzl and the Zionist Congress he convened.

For the next fifty eight years the term Zionist meant someone who wished to see the revival of a Jewish nation in Israel.  While the idea of a modern, democratic, secular-but-Jewish nation was controversial even among many Jews in the years leading to the creation of Israel, the term “Zionism” was not particularly so.  It simply meant the Jewish dream and movement to create a real country for our own people, a homeland where we would be safe from the brutalities inflicted on us so many times in so many places over our long and challenging history.

You know the modern history: in the mid-20th century the Holocaust destroyed most of European Jewry, and the survivors who had no place to escape from it, still had no place to go at the end of it.  In 1947 the United Nations approved the creation of Israel as a state in a partition plan that pleased no one, but was accepted by Zionists in the Yishuv, the Jewish parts of the Land of Israel; it was violently rejected by the Arabs everywhere.  Then, in 1948 the British withdrew from their colonial hold on the Middle East, Israel proclaimed independence, and all the neighboring Arab countries declared war on the new Jewish state, as did the local Arabs.  Against all odds, and at a high cost, the new nation of Israel survived that war aimed at destroying the “Zionist entity” and “pushing the Jews into the sea.”

After the creation of Israel, Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Iraq and the other Arab states continued to promise to each other, and the world, that they intended eventually to annihilate and murder all the Jews in the “Zionist entity.” Note that term, “Zionist entity”—all Arab countries swore they would never recognize a Jewish state called Israel, and used the word “Zionist” as an epithet.  After the 1967 Six Day War, when a real opportunity arose to make peace in exchange for territory lost to Israel’s armies, the Arabs again affirmed their no’s: “no peace, no recognition, no negotiation with the Zionist entity”, still refusing to call the Jewish state “Israel.”  They sought to demonize the Jews who had recreated our nation, and to make Zionism a dirty word. 

These 20th century Arabs were simply reviving a use of the word “Zionist” invented by the Czarist Secret Police in the bad old days of the Russian Empire, when they forged the evil book “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.”  That created the conspiracy theory that there was a secret society of Jews that controlled everything—an insane justification for the vicious antisemitism of the failing Russian regime and its sponsored pogroms, massacres, and arrests.  Of course, that same anti-Zionist insanity has been adopted by lots of antisemites ever since, and here in America too, from Henry Ford to Hitler to people like Kanye West, Nick Fuentes, and Ilhan Omar.

For decades, the word “Zionist” continued to receive abuse; after the Yom Kippur War, in the midst of the Arab-generated oil crisis of the 1970s, the United Nations was convinced—with OPEC holding it at the point of the oil weapon—to pass a resolution in 1975 that equated Zionism with racism.  This was quite like calling all nationalism of every nation racist.  But it gave international imprimatur to the lie that the desire for a national homeland for Jews is somehow a different enterprise than everyone else’s nationalism, and morally worse. 

In effect, the UN poured gasoline on the fire of anti-Jewish anti-Semitism.  Those darned Jews cooked up an entire ideology based on being better than everyone else, the UN implied, and have decided they deserve their very own country!  A tiny country to be sure, with no natural resources, and yes, we, the UN, actually voted to create it—but still, why should the Jews have one?  That’s racist!

Daniel Patrick Moynihan, then US ambassador to the UN, warned, "The United Nations is about to make anti-Semitism international law." He delivered a speech against the resolution, including the famous line, "The United States does not acknowledge, it will not abide by, it will never acquiesce in this infamous act ... A great evil has been loosed upon the world."

It took 16 years for that infamous resolution to be revoked, this time in a massive vote of the same United Nations, under the leadership of US President George H. W. Bush.  As he said, when sponsoring the revoking resolution, “the so-called "Zionism is racism" resolution, mocks … the principles upon which the United Nations was founded… Zionism is not a policy; it is the idea that led to the creation of a home for the Jewish people, to the State of Israel. And to equate Zionism with the intolerable sin of racism is to twist history and forget the terrible plight of Jews in World War II and, indeed, throughout history. To equate Zionism with racism is to reject Israel itself, a member of good standing of the United Nations. This body cannot claim to seek peace and at the same time challenge Israel's right to exist. By repealing this resolution unconditionally, the United Nations will enhance its credibility and serve the cause of peace.”

Of course, that did not end the effort to use the word Zionist in devious and derogatory ways, nor did it reform the UN permanently.  That was over thirty years ago.  And the effort to demonize Jews as evil and manipulative, and to blacken the word Zionist, continues.

Particularly since October 7th, 2023, the term Zionist—again, a word that simply means we Jews have a right to our own country, like every other people on earth; that the nation we have must be in our ancestral home of thousands of years; and that Israel should not be destroyed and its Jews all murdered in a second Holocaust—the term Zionist has become a highly controversial term. It is again being turned into a negative epithet, and rational people who should know better are running from being called “Zionists.”

That’s simply wrong.  Being a Zionist is a proud label.  It is a positive statement of Jewish identification and identity.  It is not about genocide, except to prevent another genocide of the Jews.  And when an evil, racist, totalitarian, theocratic Islamist regime like Iran condemns “Zionists,” and foolish people accept that on face value, they are being duped and conned.  When young people find it fashionable to condemn Israel for defending itself, and claim “anti-Zionism is not antisemitism” they are simply wrong.

To be an Anti-Zionist, or even a Jewish non-Zionist today means to oppose the Jewish right to our own nation.  It is advocating for the destruction of a vital democracy with a thriving culture and civilization, a country of 9 million people, because you don’t think Jews deserve their own land.  And to call it colonial and racist is simply mendacious, that is, a big lie. 

Names can be dragged through the mud; but they can also be redeemed, reclaimed, cleansed and healed from that experience.  So it must be with the word Zionist.

My friends, wear that word, Zionist, proudly: to be a Zionist is something powerful, positive, and meaningful in a world in which those labels are hard to come by.  It is an affirmation of Jewish identity, a statement that we deserve our own dynamic nation, and the right to one Jewish nation on the globe. 

It is time in this 5785 year to move the word Zionist, and Zionism, back into the positive, and use it to recognize all the incredible good that Israel has accomplished in its mere 76 years of modern existence.

Mind you, this does not mean accepting that everything an Israeli government does is right or perfect.  That’s an unrealistic expectation for any nation, especially a nation at war.  It does not mean endorsing Israeli leaders with whom we disagree, or who we believe are leading in the wrong direction.  It simply means agreeing that being proud that we Jews have our own nation, that it must be protected from destruction, that it is our eternal homeland, is a good, legitimate and essential ideal, and a core element of Jewish identity today.  It means being proud to be a Zionist, because you believe in our people, in our right to live and thrive in our own land, to seek to control our own destiny.

In this new 5785 year may we see the term Zionist embraced not only by all Jews, but by all honest people, as a proud statement of Jewish national identity, and of love for our homeland of the heart.

Let The Old Year End!

Rosh HaShanah Eve 5785 Sermon

Rabbi Sam Cohon, Congregation Beit Simcha, Tucson, AZ

L’Shana Tova Tikateivu v’Teichateimu.  May you be written and sealed in the Book of Life for a better year in 5785.

Ok, so what’s the difference between a Jewish pessimist and a Jewish optimist?

The Jewish pessimist says, “Things can’t possibly get any worse.”

The Jewish optimist says, “Sure they can!”

I’ve felt that way many times over the last twelve months, during this extremely challenging 5784 year.  Frankly, it will be easy to say good riddance to a rough year indeed for Israel and for Jews everywhere.  Now, as a rabbi, I would normally not say such a thing; every year is a combination of good and bad for nearly everyone, and Judaism teaches us to understand that both come from God.  In fact, there is an important prayer, based on a quotation from the prophet Isaiah, that has become part of the prayer service, the Jewish liturgy, every morning: “Baruch Ata Adonai Eloheinu Melech Ha’Olam, Yotzer Tov Uvorei et Hakol, Blessed are You, God, Ruler of the universe, who makes good and creates everything.” 

Actually, in Isaiah’s original quotation, it reads “God who makes good and creates evil,” Yotzer Tov Uvorei et HaRa.  The rabbis who constructed our Siddur, our prayer book, determined that this might be just a little too painful to recite for people to pray regularly, so they softened it a bit.  I mean, it’s not exactly natural to thank God for the bad things that happen to us.  Still, in Judaism there is only one God who has created everything, and there is no secondary anti-God, no devil or god of darkness who makes the evil that exists.  Mostly, it is we human beings who either work for good or cause or create evil.

And so, we are enjoined to accept the good and blessing we receive along with the misfortune and challenges we experience, and are taught to make choices that will allow goodness to grow and bad to be as limited as it can be.  As is typical of all Jewish thought, it is always our choice to make between those two alternatives, although of course we don’t control the end results fully. What we do control is our own actions. 

Well that’s all well and good, but this 5784 year we concluded tonight at sundown was incredibly difficult for Israel and for Jews everywhere.  Think back twelve months, if you would: a year ago, it was easy to believe that Israel was moving towards ever greater diplomatic and economic acceptance in the Arab world, and would soon sign a peace treaty with Saudi Arabia.  Iran continued to exist as an anti-Israel bastion of terrorism, but there were apparently no true existential threats to the Jewish State’s continued flourishing.  American Jews, in particular, could easily believe that we were fully accepted in this nation, and that the long history of antisemitism even in the US was near historic lows.  Look, considering the lessons of Jewish history we should never should get overly happy about the inevitability of acceptance and success anywhere, even in America, where we generally have been experiencing a golden age of acceptance.  Still, it certainly appeared as though we were in a good place, both here and mostly, in Israel. 

The end of the Jewish autumn holiday cycle was in view October 7th on the Saturday morning of Shemini Atzeret, final day of Sukkot, preceding the celebrations of Simchat Torah that night.  It is typical that as we approach the last days of this elaborate fall festival season we rabbis and cantors are exhausted by the speeches, songs, rituals and gatherings that have dominated our days and nights for a month.  Last year was no different.  My own thoughts were on the details of the final complicated services and celebrations, the preparations and performances that complete the long run of holidays from Selichot through Rosh HaShana, from Yom Kippur through Sukkot to Simchat Torah. 

And then the strange, shocking news began to filter in: southern Israel was under a horrific terrorist attack, by land, sea, and even air.  Hundreds of Israelis and those of many other nations were dead, wounded, captive.  There was terrible destruction, fires, explosions.  At first no one seemed to know what was happening, or perhaps even believe it.  Something this terrible could not possibly have occurred, could it?

Simchat Torah will never seem quite the same.  That night’s festivities were, at best, muted.  We did our Hakafot, more out of duty than joy, chanted the end and beginning of the Torah, drank a little and called it a night.  It was far from the raucous, fun celebration it usually is.  Even worse, we had a bit of a security concern that night, and had to hang out until it was resolved an hour or so after services concluded. 

Man, that was not the best Simchat Torah.

More to the point, that rough ending to the fall festival season began perhaps the most difficult year in Israel’s history, and one of the most difficult imaginable for Jews around the world. 

October 7th happened, and everything changed.  Immediately.  Suddenly, Israel appeared shockingly vulnerable, and its revered intelligence agencies and much-hyped military seemed incompetent to protect its own citizens.  The highest levels of the Israeli government, particularly long-time Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, had failed as badly as any leaders of Israel ever had. 1200 people were dead, murdered in horrific ways.  250 were kidnapped, including babies and the very elderly.  Civilian women and girls were raped brutally and then murdered, all by Palestinian terrorists so elated by their barbarities they filmed themselves as they committed these acts and posted them online.

And of course, the international response, and the response here in America, particularly on college campuses, was shocking, and devastatingly immoral.  Some denied that what was so well documented by the perpetrators themselves actually happened.  While Israeli families were still being massacred by Palestinian terrorists, while concert goers at a peace festival were being murdered or stolen from their lives into brutal captivity in Gaza, while the elderly were being burned alive, while babies were slaughtered, far too many young people and their professors cheered the murderers, rapists and kidnappers as some sort of sick heroes.  Long before Israel responded to the outrages and perversions of the Palestinians with a guided military campaign, many, many voices rose condemning Israel’s very existence.  Jews were threatened and physically attacked in New York, in California, in Toronto, on college campuses everywhere. Israeli and Jewish academics were assaulted.  Photos of the hostages were defaced and torn down, Jewish stars scrawled with swatikas.  Everything we believed about our acceptance was suddenly put into question. 

Old friends, particularly on the left of the political spectrum, abandoned us in droves.  Longtime collaborators refused to show any solidarity with the attacked.  Suddenly, being Jewish meant you were some kind of colonial oppressor—in your own land, where your nation thrived for over 75 years, where your ancestors lived for thousands of years.  Idiots chanted “From the River to the Sea, Palestine shall be free”, seeking a second Jewish genocide eighty years after the Holocaust.

The Gaza War has dragged on now for a year.  Hamas is essentially destroyed, but over 300 Israeli soldiers died fighting there, not counting the ones murdered on October 7th and the Israeli civilians killed in rocket attacks.  War with Hezbollah in Lebanon has just exploded from a dull roar into a full conflagration, in time for Rosh HaShanah.  Distant Yemen fired missiles that have hit Israel.  Iran has directly attacked Israel twice now—mostly for show, but with real ballistic missiles and exploding drones.  The number of Israeli wounded and those impacted by post-traumatic stress disorder is far greater than we or Israel has acknowledged; it is definitely in the thousands, likely tens of thousands.

While some sanity has returned here in America—Ivy League and other college presidents have resigned for failing to address genocidal antisemitism on their campuses; strong campus antisemitism watchdogs have emerged finally, the Federal government is suing a variety of school districts and universities for failing to protect Jewish students, “encampments” that blocked Jewish students from accessing classes were eventually disassembled, some forcefully, things have certainly not returned to pre-October 7th norms.  Most of us think they never will, really.

So, yes: the Sephardic piyyut, the liturgical poem for the High Holy Days rings true this year in particular: Let the old year and its curses end; let a new year and its blessings begin.  When Lindsey and I sing it with Hsin-Chih and Niles it will be more than another one of my dad’s great musical compositions: it will evoke a deep feeling that many of us have that we need a much better year.

The atrocities perpetrated by Palestinian terrorists somehow gave license to all the antisemites in the world to reveal their true colors.  While people of all ages were still being murdered and carried off into Gaza tunnels as hostages by the Palestinians, protests broke out on college campuses all over the world, especially here in America—and they were aimed not at the murderers, rapists, torturers, kidnappers and arsonists of Hamas but against Israel and, in a broader sense, Jews. 

Lest we forget how bad it got, and how quickly, students at some of the most prestigious American universities joined campus marches to “Free Palestine,” unmoved even slightly by Hamas’s inhuman, savage killings of Jewish babies, children, and elderly men and women, or by the mass hostage taking. There was violence against Jews on campuses, followed by advice not to display obvious signs of Judaism such as Stars of David; on Halloween three weeks after the massacres, Jews wondered about taking down or covering the mezuzahs on their doorposts for the night.

Police seemed unable to restore a sense of security to many American Jews as anti-Semitic incidents skyrocketed. On campuses, especially the most famous ones in America, leadership was often stunningly unhelpful. Deans and provosts and presidents who leap into action to support fashionable causes and punish “microaggressions” could not find their voices now in the face of murder and obvious, overt Jew-hatred. Instead, they issued morally blind calls for “restraint” and wrung their hands about “all forms of violence.” Others, including the Secretary General of the United Nations, “contextualized.” You see, Hamas’s actions “did not happen in a vacuum,” and one must understand the complex background. Hundreds of college professors signed petitions condemning Israel’s self-defense. All those campus offices of inclusion and diversity were dead silent when it came to the safety of Jewish students, who were attacked, and later blocked from classes and forced out of campus organizations.

And most of the mainstream media turned on Israel just a few days after the attacks.  When a rocket fired by Palestinian Islamic Jihad five days after October 7th struck near a hospital in Gaza the world immediately blamed Israel for “targeting a hospital” and killing Palestinians, when it was Palestinian terrorists killing their own people. 

Antisemitism on the left and on the right skyrocketed in the wake of October 7th, by the way; the ADL documented this as the single worst year in decades for such acts.  Efforts were made to demonize Israel in city councils, in school districts, to blackball Israeli and American Jewish academics and artists and musicians and comedians and actors. 

And it didn’t really calm down much as the war ground on in Gaza, as hostages were mostly not released after an initial exchange, as Israel worked its way through the terrorist armies arrayed against it.

Wow.  And we all thought that 2020 COVID year was really bad…

So, tichleh shanah v’chil’loteha—let the old year and its curses end.

Of course, the conclusion of that Piyyut, which you have in your Rosh HaShanah leaflet, says, tachel shanah uvirchoteha, let a New Year and its blessings begin!  Which means it’s time for some blessings to start to accrue, for our luck, as it were, to change.  And that prayer I mentioned, the Yotzer, insists that good and evil both come from God. Which means we are due a great deal of good this year, right?

Now, I suppose I personally am something of an optimist; not exactly like the optimist of that Jewish joke, “things can always get worse.”  But about the ultimate triumph of the Jewish people, and our incredible resilience, I remain an optimist, as I remain an optimist about our remarkable synagogue, which has overcome so many unexpected challenges in our six years or so of existence and somehow, in our unique, scrappy, way we have overcome them all.

So what are the positives we can take from this, well, crummy year?

I’ll start with Israel: When I visited on a solidarity mission in January and February, there were many reminders that Israel was at war.  There were posters and electronic displays and signs and songs and tableaus reminding us, constantly, of the hostages.  There were shivas for soldiers killed in Gaza, and a steady flow of news and concerns about the war.  But the cafes and restaurants were full; traffic and work and the incredible energy of that amazing country were on full display.  Much of life seemed, well, normal.  That’s amazing, and incredibly reassuring. 

And just as clearly, in the news from the various military fronts Israel is faced with, the tactical successes it has had are remarkable.  From the dark depths of October 7th, and the harsh realities the hostages have been forced to experience by the Palestinian terrorists, Israel has turned the tide, taken the initiative back, and appears to have the upper hand, aided by American support and cooperation from many other nations. 

In America and around the world, friends of Israel have come forward, too, forcefully and effectively.  I wear my Kippah and the dog tag signifying solidarity with Israeli hostages everywhere—and have received so many assurances of support, so much friendship and solidarity from people everywhere. 

In Tucson in banks and restaurants and on the street; in airports and at events; when visiting relatives in Texas and Massachusetts and California and Colorado; at ballgames and concerts; really, everywhere people have expressed their support, and their disgust at the antisemitism that has arisen.  For all of the hostility we see publicized, the vast majority of people seem to understand that Israel is not in the wrong here; that Jews are fellow citizens who make a positive difference in society; that all the noise being generated against us is just that, noise.  Our hosts here at Church of the Apostles have come forward with friendship and generosity and support, each member of the church signing a huge card supporting us after October 7th.

I also believe the tide of American public opinion is changing.  Some of this is the result of Israel’s recent intelligence coups and military success against its enemies, Iran’s proxies.  Americans prefer victors to victims, and the horrors of October 7th demonstrated tragic levels of both arrogance and complacency, even weakness.  There was heroism by many Israelis, but it was a disaster.  The destruction in Gaza is tragic and sad; but the elimination of Hamas as a fighting force is not mourned by anyone who cares about human life or the potential for peace long-term.

And, in truth, we American Jews have long been experiencing a golden age in America, and it isn’t over.  The potential of this Jewish community, it’s relative security and wealth and significance, remains tremendous.  We are broadly accepted, involved at every level of American society and culture, and we have the ability to overcome the issues that have arisen in the past year.  These challenges are not permanent; they will fade, and sanity, at least for Jews, will return.

It's funny, really: people are actually upset that some of the recent TV streaming shows about Jews—because there are now so many movies and shows on about Jews that we can complain about some of them!  Imagine that—aren’t sophisticated enough.  What’s the latest one—Kirsten Bell as a non-Jewish podcaster who falls in love with a “hot rabbi”?  Amazing.  I don’t think that series gets made ten years ago, or even five.

I’m not saying that we should ignore the very real challenges we face, or should stop supporting the important groups that help Israel and fight antisemitism.  But I am very much saying that being able to live a fully Jewish life openly is a great gift, and that having the opportunity right now in Tucson, Arizona to pray, study, help, celebrate and embrace that in this coming year of 5785 is indeed a promise of blessings.

So Tachel Shana Uvrichoteha: let a new year and its blessings begin!

Perfection

Opening, Rosh HaShanah Eve 5785

Rabbi Sam Cohon, Congregation Beit Simcha

Perfection.  No one can achieve it, right?  I mean that’s what the Days of Awe, the Yamim Nora’im, are all about isn’t it?  We try to do the right thing, much of the time certainly, and being human we are bound to fail, at least some of the time.  Maybe most of the time.  “On earth the broken orb; in heaven, the round complete,” wrote poet Robert Browning, and he was certainly correct.  No one here on earth achieves perfection.  That must be left to God.

But then I was watching a baseball game broadcast from Florida a couple of weeks ago, and at the start of the day Shohei Ohtani of the Los Angeles Dodgers baseball club needed two home runs to reach 50 on the year, and one stolen base to reach 50 of those on the year, creating the very first 50/50 season in Major League Baseball history.  Already regarded as the finest player on the planet, winner of two Most Valuable Player Awards in past years and the only person to ever pitch and hit at these incomparable levels since Babe Ruth—who never did both in full seasons like Ohtani—it seemed inevitable that he would reach these statistical milestones over the last couple of weeks of the season.  But you never know.

Now Shohei Ohtani is not built like most of us.  It apparently wasn’t enough for him that he simply continue to do amazing things no one has ever done before in the 150 years of big league baseball.  And so Shohei, on this September day in Miami, came up to the plate to hit six times.  It is rare for a batter to get up more than 5 times in a game, and much rarer for him to succeed every time.  Hitting a baseball in the major leagues is a very hard thing to do; the greatest hitters in the history of the sport fail to do it successfully about 70% of the time.  Getting 5 hits in 5 trips, going 5 for 5 is a rare achievement; it happens, but not often.  Going 6 for 6 seems nearly impossible.  It has only been accomplished about 50 times in history.  A perfect day, right?  An amazing accomplishment.

Of course, that’s exactly what Ohtani did.  But that’s not all he did.

Needing at least one stolen base to reach 50 on the season, this mythical statistical milestone, he stole two bases, and he did so after his first two hits.  Just because, he doubled again the next time up, although he was thrown out trying to reach third base.  But really, he was just getting warmed up.

He then homered on each of his next three times up at bat; he not only reached 50 homeruns, he surpassed it easily.  Shohei Ohtani had six hits in six trips to the place, three homeruns, two doubles, and a measly single.  He stole two bases.  He drove in 10 runs and scored 4 runs.  It was beyond a perfect day.  Most sports afficionados have called it the greatest day ever for a hitter in baseball history—or perhaps for any baseball player ever.  He broke the Dodgers single season home run record held by a favorite Jewish player of mine, Shawn Green, who hit 49 home runs back in 2001.  By the way, it was Shawn Green who, while playing for the Dodgers in 2002, also went 6 for 6, but with 4 home runs.  But Green didn’t steal any bases that day.  On the other hand, Shawn Green sat out on Yom Kippur one year, representing for Judaism and baseball-loving rabbis everywhere.  Sadly, I don’t think Shohei Ohtani will do that.

Basically, Ohtani capped a pretty perfect year with an incredibly beyond perfect game.

One oddity of that grand Ohtani day: the manager of the Florida Marlins is a fellow named Skip Schumaker.  I took my older kids to see a New York Mets ballgame at the old Shea Stadium back in 2008; they were playing the St. Louis Cardinals, who featured a singles-hitting utility player named Skip Schumaker.  That day, Skip had six hits, one of the other times in history a hitter has had six hits in a game, although all of his were singles.  It was Schumaker who chose to continue to pitch to Ohtani, a courageous decision not to walk him and avoid further humiliation in a game long lost.  I mean, Skip knew what it meant to do something unique at the plate, right? 

Now I know this may seem trivial to those of you who are not baseball fans.  But what Shohei Ohtani did that day—really, all season—can serve as a kind of inspiration for us.  He demonstrated that at least for one day something impossible can be accomplished, and perfection can be achieved by at least one human being.

You see, it’s not that we will all reach t’shuvah gmurah, full repentance over these aseret yemei teshuvah, the Ten Days of Repentance we enter now.  But it is the case that we have something to aspire to: the opportunity always exists for us to become better, to strive for goodness, to take the ordinary and the mundane and make theme sacred.  I can’t promise that we will each go 6 for 6 with three homeruns and two stolen bases; for that matter, Judaism discourages theft of any kind.  But I can promise that if you enter into these holy days with an open heart and mind, if you turn to those you love and ask their forgiveness for your mistakes, if you approach those you may have wronged and try to make amends, you will succeed in making your life, and the lives of those around you, better.

May we each be blessed over these High Holy Days with the ability to seek, even strive for a full return to goodness, to holiness, and to God.  And may our lives then be filled with blessings—if not perfection.

A New Embrace of Zionism: Remembering 10 7 23

by Rabbi Sam Cohon 

It is now one year since the horrific atrocities perpetrated by Hamas’ Palestinian terrorists on October 7, 2023.  The terrible events of Simchat Torah 5784 remain seared into our memories.  1200 human beings were murdered that day, many more were wounded, injured and experienced severe trauma, and over 250 were stolen from their lives and forced into a brutal captivity.  We continue to pray that the surviving hostages will be liberated and able to return home soon.  We pray that the many Israelis exiled from their homes in the south and north of the countries can return in peace safely soon.

The horrors of that awful 10/7/23 are still with us. To this day, the remains of five of the murdered are unidentified, in spite of the finest Israeli scientific expertise being deployed to discover who they were.  On that day, Palestinian terrorists murdered the elderly, they murdered babies, they massacred entire families.  The same Palestinian terrorists committed war crimes of rape, torture, arson and abduction, and often documented their evil actions themselves.  Most of them have now paid for their terrible crimes with their lives.  But the damage they did remains.

Most of the murdered were civilians, and most were Israelis.  But this is a day of remembrance also for Americans, Canadians, the French, Germans, British, Thai, Nepalese, and the citizens of 35 other nations who were brutally killed by Palestinian terrorists on that awful day.

We pray for the souls of all who died on that terrible day, as we offer memorial prayers for those who have died fighting terrorism, and those who have died in further terror attacks in the past 12 months.  May the scourge of violence against Israeli civilians end, speedily and soon.

The dramatic rise in worldwide Antisemitism in the wake of October 7th is chilling and remains a profound concern.  Today the ADL reported that this past year it recorded the highest number of Antisemitic incidents in its history, including a fatal attack. 

Those who cloak their Antisemitism in the claim that they are merely “anti-Zionists” are liars.  Being an anti-Zionist in 2024, in the wake of October 7th, is a blatant form of Antisemitism.  To be an Anti-Zionist, or even a Jewish non-Zionist today, means to oppose the Jewish right to our own nation in our own historic homeland.  It is advocating the genocidal destruction of a vital democracy with a thriving culture and civilization, a country of 9.5 million people, because you think that Jews, alone among nations, do not deserve their own land. 

If there is one way in which we can best memorialize the martyrs of 10/7, it is by embracing the name “Zionist.”  Being a Zionist is a proud label.  It is a positive statement of Jewish identification and identity.  Wear that word, “Zionist,” proudly: to be a Zionist is something powerful, positive, and meaningful in a world in which those labels are hard to come by.  It is an affirmation of Jewish identity, a statement that we deserve our own dynamic nation, and the right to have one Jewish nation on the globe. 

To be a Zionist means being proud that we Jews have our own nation, that it must be protected from destruction, that it is our eternal homeland.  It is a good, legitimate and essential ideal, and a core element of Jewish identity today.  It means being proud because you believe in our people, in our right to live and thrive in our own land, to seek to control our own destiny.

In this new 5785 year may we see the term Zionist embraced not only by all Jews, but by all honest people, as a proud statement of Jewish national identity, and of love for our homeland of the heart.  That would be a true tribute to those who died a year ago today.

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.