Sermon for Rosh Hashanah Morning, Day 2 – 5768

Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, one of the foremost and most influential Jewish religious thinkers of modern times, was born in 1907. Hundreds of Jewish institutions throughout the world are marking the 100th anniversary of Rabbi Heschel’s birth with seminars, lectures and scholarly endeavours. If Rabbi Heschel could see these activities and react to them, he would probably laugh about them and consider them foolish and unnecessary. Twelve years ago while serving a Conservative congregation, Sara and I attended the national convention of the United Synagogue. With each presentation, with each award, with every miniscule speech, a quote was included from Rabbi Heschel who taught in the Conservative movement from 1946 until his death in 1972. I recently came across a quote from Rabbi Heschel that I did not hear at that convention. Heschel said, “When I was young I used to admire intelligent people, as I grow older, I admire kind people.” Rabbi Heschel was not making a radical statement just a blunt, direct and honest one.

At every Torah service we sing the words of Shimon ha-Tsaddik, a Pharasaic sage who taught us that g’milut hasadim, doing deeds of loving kindness is one of the three required activities that help maintain the world. Rabbi Heschel, the sage of the 20th century, and Shimon ha-Tsaddik, the sage of 20 centuries ago, are saying the same thing. Kindness and compassion are of equal or greater value in Judaism than knowledge or ritual observance. While Heschel was uncomfortable with the disregard for halachah in the movement for Reform Judaism, he was equally dismayed by the inability of the Conservative movement to see the value of working diligently for civil rights and social justice often in partnership with our Christian colleagues. Heschel believed that religion in the Western world declined because it became oppressive and irrelevant within contemporary society. He wrote in his classic work God In Search of Man “when religion speaks only in the name of authority rather than with the voice of compassion, it becomes meaningless.” Rabbi Heschel believed fervently in the authority of mitzvah and halachah yet he could not overlook the overarching human importance of pursuing justice, righteousness and peace, practicing compassion and preserving life. Rabbi Heschel found a balance within this dialectical tension that worked for him yet we who are mere humans need to struggle with this seeming paradox between the ritual mitzvot and the ethical mitzvot found in Torah and the Talmud. Which do we hold in greater esteem, which do we value more, halachic ritual observance or compassionate ethical behavior? Which is a more significant guide for our lives and our Jewish expression?

. Our Torah teaches us not to muzzle our ox while it is pulling our plow. If the ox gets hungry while it is working for us to plow our fields, it would be unkind for us to deny it the opportunity to eat. Later rabbinic sages take this one step further to teach us that we should always make sure our animals eat before we do because it would be unkind for them to have to watch us eat while they are hungry. Last December, on the day before my birthday, our cat died. While I felt sad and guilty for not noticing how really sick she was, I was reassured in knowing that we saved her from an unsafe and dangerous life on the streets of Columbus, GA and that she enjoyed a good life for the ten years she was part of our family. If my cat were alive today and could speak, she would tell you that I always fed her first.

A friend of ours once said that if reincarnation is real, then she hoped in her next life to come back as a pet in a Jewish household. Judaism holds kindness to animals to be of great importance. Aside from the many laws in Torah, which command us to be considerate of the physical needs of animals even if they are our enemy’s animals, we find a Talmudic principle known as tsa’ar ba’alei hayim the distress of living creatures. Our rabbis taught us to be ever cognizant and sensitive to the pain and discomfort of all living creatures. Rabbi Moshe ben Nachman or Nachmanides of 13th century Spain stated that the laws regarding kindness to animals are in the Torah and Talmud to teach us kindness towards our fellow human beings. A person who cannot show kindness for an animal will probably have no compassion for people as well. It is all the more disturbing to find out that some of the most profound recent acts of cruelty to animals were committed by fellow Jews who purport to live lives steeped in the observance and strict adherence to all the mitzvot; ritual and ethical together.

In Middle America, in the state of Iowa, there is a little town named Postville with a population of 1,465. It is literally in the middle of nowhere, 160 miles southeast of Minneapolis and 220 miles northwest of Chicago, even the nearby small city of Dubuque, Iowa is 65 miles away. And yet for some reason, Postville, Iowa is where in 1987 a kosher butcher from Brooklyn named Aaron Rubashkin bought the town’s abandoned slaughterhouse and turned it into a kosher meat packing plant. By 1996, the packinghouse had become the world’s largest kosher met packing plant owned and operated by Lubavitcher Hasidim or as they prefer to call themselves Chabad. Each week nearly 2 million pounds of kosher beef, lamb and poultry came out of the plant in refrigerated trucks bound for New York, Los Angeles and every kosher meat market in between. According to journalist Stephen Bloom who researched and documented an exhaustive study published in 2000, the kosher meat was so prized that some was even flown to Jerusalem and Tel Aviv.

For the ten years we lived in Georgia, we bought our meat in Atlanta. Kosher ground beef was often hard to come by until we found the convenient one-pound packages produced by Aaron Rubashkin in the kosher department of the Toco Hills Krogers. Those of you who know Atlanta know that Toco Hills is at the center of Atlanta’s Orthodox Jewish community. So we brought home our neat little one-pound package of frozen ground beef and a week or so later when we thawed out a couple of them, we saw this surprising pink liquid.
Wondering why we found blood in kosher ground beef, we talked to the mashgiach at the Toco Hills Krogers. He explained that it wasn’t really blood but something called shir, a by-product of the grinding and freezing process. Needless to say, we did not believe him. We did not understand how blood, albeit diluted blood, was not blood. We no longer bought frozen kosher ground beef from Mr. Rubashkin’s plant in Iowa.

This past May, I came across a story about Rubashkin’s kosher meat plant in Postville, Iowa that was far more disturbing. Rabbi Henry Jay Karp, a Reform rabbi from Davenport, commented on a NY Times article about a campaign conducted by Rabbi Morris Allen, a Conservative rabbi from Minneapolis-St. Paul called “Heksher Tsedek.” A heksher is that symbol or seal on a package of food that tells us that a council of rabbis has declared it as kosher. The Lubavitcher Hasidim have their own heksher. Their rivals the Satmer Hasidim have their own heksher. Perhaps the most recognizable heksher is the one from the Union of Orthodox Rabbis, a U inside an O. And even some cities have their own rabbinical council with their own symbol; the symbol for the Atlanta kashrut council is a peach. A hecksher is essentially a certification and a hecksher Tsedek is a certification of justice.

The concept of this Heksher Tsedek campaign led by Rabbi Allen and adopted by the Rabbinical Assemblu of the Conservative movement is simple and beautiful. The philosophy behind this campaign is grant a heksher for the food produced and packaged by a particular company not based solely upon how the animals are slaughtered and the meat prepared but more importantly on how the employers treat their employees. Many of the kosher meat processors abuse the immigrant workers they employ paying them substandard wages and offering them limited health care. The Torah and the Talmud are very clear on the immorality of this kind of exploitation of employees and Jews are strictly forbidden from doing this yet here we have ultra-Orthodox observant Jews doing just that.

Rabbi Karp goes on to say in his commentary on the Heksher Tsedek campaign of our Conservative colleague, “As an Iowa rabbi, it pains me to admit that perhaps the most prominent of these abusers is AgriProcessors, the Lubavitch run kosher meat packing plant in Postville, Iowa.” In case you were wondering AgriProcessors is the same as Rubashkin’s. In fact, the whole Hecksher Tsedek campaign began in response to an investigation of the AgriProcessors slaughterhouse. Aaron Rubashkin’s son Shlomo may have changed the name but not their disregard for Torah and Talmud’s insistence on ethical behavior, compassion and the pursuit of justice. AgriProcessors is the largest producer of kosher beef and markets its product under Aaron’s Best and Supreme Kosher labels. Kosher meat is marketed as being safer and healthier because it is under stricter supervision by both government and kosher inspectors

For many years the United Food and Commercial Workers Union, which represent 300,000 food production workers, have tried to unionize AgriProcessor’s employees to improve their working conditions but they have always been met with stiff resistance. In response to a request by the United Food and Commercial Workers Union under the Freedom of Information Act, the US Department of Agriculture released documents showing that the USDA cited Chabad’s meat packing plant for excessive cruelty to animals and serious health and sanitation violations. In fact, AgriProcessors received 250 non-compliance reports from the USDA in 2006; 5 were for inadequate safeguards against mad cow disease and at least 18 were for fecal matter in the food production area. A USDA inspector was quoted in the Jewish Forward to say, “a very serious non-compliance had occurred.” The entire beef, poultry and egg industry had 34 recalls in 2006, Agriprocessors had two. One was a recall of 35,000 pounds of beef that contained egg albumin and the other was a recall of 2,700 pounds of hot dogs due to possible under processing. Both were Class 1 recalls meaning that there was a “reasonable probability that use of the product will cause serious adverse health consequences or death.” AgriProcessors is not alone in these and other more heinous violations, the entire kosher meat business is in need of an overhaul. As Rabbi Allen, the head of the Hecksher Tsedek committee said, “There shouldn’t be any Jew that isn’t concerned about this.”

Focusing on the animal cruelty violations committed by AgriProcessors, Davenport, Iowa Rabbi Henry Karp commented that these acts violated the laws of kashrut as well. The laws of shechitah, kosher slaughtering, require that the animal be killed as painlessly as possible and as quickly as possible with one cut across the throat with a very sharp knife. When the animals did not die from the initial cut, the folks at the Chabad slaughterhouse did not stun the animal and sell the meat as non-kosher, they made a second cut and sold the meat as kosher. In so doing they gained the higher profit by selling it as kosher rather than non-kosher, they cheated and religiously corrupted the international kosher meat eating public by passing off halachically non-kosher meat as kosher, and most importantly, they inflicting unnecessary pain and anguish upon an animal in gross violation of the laws of Torah and Talmud and everything that we hold sacred in Judaism. And while AgriProcessors corrected many of its 2006 offenses in order to comply with the requirements of the US Department of Agriculture, it still mistreats its 800 employees who are mostly from Mexico and Guatemala.

While Chabad’s AgriProcessor kosher meat packing plant is an egregious example of this wanton disregard to the ethical imperatives of Judaism, it is not the only one. There were other meat packing plants condemned in the Heksher Tsedek study and we all know of countless similar cases of ethical lapses among the very Orthodox. Back in the 1970’s in New York, Orthodox Rabbi Bernard Bergman was notorious for owning a series of nursing homes all of which were guilty for violating health standards and showed a flagrant disregard for the care of the elderly, which had been entrusted to them. In the 1980’s, a prominent Orthodox yeshiva accepted funds from a source that was linked to the Contras in Nicaragua and drug trafficking. And how many of the diamond merchants on 47th Street in Manhattan and the other industries and markets dominated by our Hasidic and ultra-Orthodox brethren are rife with dishonest and dishonorable business practices. The list would be too long for this sermon. To quote Rabbi Karp, “It seems that our Orthodox and especially our ultra-Orthodox and Hasidic co-religionists have forgotten that there is an indissoluble bond between the ritual and ethical mitzvot.” Ritual mitzvot carried out in the absence of ethical behavior are nothing less than abominations in the sight of God. Rabbi Heschel, descended from a long line of pre-eminent and well-respected Orthodox and Hasidic rabbis, would certainly agree.

I mentioned earlier how Nachmanides, Rabbi Moshe ben Nachman, stated that the laws of Torah and Talmud regarding the need to be sensitive to the pain of all living creatures and to avoid emotional and physical cruelty to animals are designed to teach us compassion towards our fellow human beings. Does it stand to reason that those who do not demonstrate kindness towards animals will be uncaring and dispassionate towards human beings? We know that many serial killers demonstrated their tendencies as young children by showing a predilection for torturing animals but does that apply here?

I present the following bits of current events for your consideration. Rabbi David Ellenson, president of Hebrew Union College, wrote an article in the Jewish Forward this past spring entitled “Obscene Orthodox Hatred Demands a Clear Denunciation.” In it he details two abhorrent actions by Orthodox authorities in Israel. Around the time of Yom Ha-Shoah, Holocaust Memorial Day, the former chief Sephardic rabbi of Israel, Mordechai Eliyahu, charged that the Holocaust was divine punishment for the sin of Reform Judaism. Rabbi Ellenson charges that this “accusation is infuriating and unleashes unnecessary hatred among Jews.” However, as he continues, it is not anything new. Other ultra-Orthodox rabbis both Sephardic and Hasidic have made similar despicable statements. Yet the event that occurred a few weeks later on Israel’s Memorial Day, which comes the day before Israel’s Independence Day, is indicative of the same unjust and cruel lack of compassion on the part of the ultra-Orthodox. Rabbi Mickey Boyden, a Reform rabbi in Israel, was invited to chant the El Malei Rachamim, the traditional Jewish memorial prayer, at a Memorial Day ceremony in the coastal city of Hod Hasharon in memory of those soldiers who had sacrificed their lives for the State of Israel. Mickey Boyden is the rabbi of the local Progressive synagogue in that town and the father of a soldier who was killed in southern Lebanon in 1993. The local Orthodox Sephardic synagogue threatened to disrupt the ceremony should Boyden be identified as a rabbi at the event. Rabbi Boyden properly insisted that his title be acknowledged and the local secular council in charge of the event caved in to the threat from the Orthodox Sephardic congregation and withdrew Rabbi Boyden’s invitation.

This New Year of 5768 marks the 60th year of Israel’s existence. In 1848, one hundred years before the establishment of the state of Israel in Galitsia, the region of southern Poland and the eastern Austro-Hungarian empire, a progressive rabbi, Abraham Kohn of Lemberg, was assassinated by an ultra-Orthodox zealot. On a November evening in Tel Aviv thirteen years ago, an ultra-Orthodox zealot assassinated the Prime Minister of Israel, Yitzhak Rabin. In this light, the accusations of the Orthodox Sephardic rabbi and the threats by the Orthodox community of Hod Hasharon seem very mild yet they are despicable nonetheless.

Rabbi Ezriel Hildesheimer, the head of an Orthodox yeshiva in Hungary in 1860, vehemently condemned the act by some overzealous Orthodox youth in Amsterdam when they entered a gathering of Reform Jews and stoned the rabbi nearly killing him. Rabbi Hildesheimer declared this attack on the Reform movement and its rabbi as an act of hillul hashem the profanation of God’s name. Hildesheimer wrote that great damage will come to all Jews “if the majority of Orthodox rabbis do not gather together and denounce this action before the Jewish people.” Hildesheimer even circulated a petition among Orthodox rabbis in various lands that stated, “We, the undersigned, declare that this sad episode is a violation of the commandments of Judaism.” Rabbi Ellenson wrote that in light of the present-day acts of hillul hashem by the former chief rabbi and the Orthodox community in Hod Hasharon “the Orthodox rabbinate, which up to now has been silent, ought to adopt Hildesheimer’s stance.” Rabbi Ellenson concludes, “Were Orthodox voices raised in protest against these obscene deeds, it would truly be an act of decency that would sanctify God’s name.”

If the Orthodox rabbinate would decry all the ethical violations perpetrated in the name of halachic observance, it would go a long way towards healing the rifts within the Jewish people. If every Jewish person could feel secure enough is his or her level of observance that there is no reason to discard or ridicule another person’s spiritual and religious choices, then we could face any hardship or crisis united together in spirit and fellowship. If every Jewish person and every person in a Jewish family and community could acknowledge and understand that Judaism demands respect for life, loving kindness, ethical behavior, compassion and the pursuit of justice and peace and values it far and above any strict ritual halachic observance of mitzvot, then we could bring the Messiah. And I don’t mean the Lubavitcher Rebbe who has been dead for 13 years.

We are all part of the greater Jewish community. We are all part of the extended Jewish family. We all follow the ethical and ritual mitzvot. We are all responsible for tikkun olam, perfecting the world. As Rabbi Heschel said, “the meaning of a person’s life lies in his perfecting the universe.” We, members of the Jewish community, here and elsewhere, have to distinguish, gather and redeem the sparks of holiness scattered throughout the darkness of the world. As Heschel says, “This service is the motive for all the mitzvot” Let us work for the day when all of us Reform and Orthodox alike share in this vision and participate equally is this endeavor; a day when all of us acknowledging our wrongdoings working for justice, practicing compassion and righteousness, gather in the sparks and perfect the world. Truly, that will be the great day of redemption and peace.
And let us say Amen