Rabbi Rutberg's Sermons and Articles

2010-11-07T14:33:00.001-08:00

Sermon for Rosh Hashanah 5771 – Day 1, (over) Repentance

So the other day, I was sitting in my office and in walks Ted. He looked both terrified and exhilarated. He said to me, “Rabbi, the most amazing thing just happened to me. I was outside touching up the paint on the outside of the Temple to make it nice for the holidays. I was up on the ladder; I had just about finished painting when I noticed that there was a little space right under the roof that needed some more paint. I looked at my bucket and it was practically empty. I hated to have to go all the way down the ladder, get more paint and come back up again. So I poured a little bit of water in the bucket, it was latex paint; I mixed it around and applied it with my brush covering that space under the roof and came back down the ladder. All of a sudden, the skies darkened, there was thunder and lightning and I heard the voice of God and you know what God said to me? Repaint and thin no more!!!”

But seriously folks, what exactly is repentance? Like with so many things, that answer depends on who you ask. Back in 1979 and 1980, I taught in the High School program at the religious school of Stephen Wise Free Synagogue.
One of my brightest students Aaron Panken went on to be a rabbi with Ph.D. and is now the dean of the Hebrew Union College in New York. Another exceptional student Oren Etzioni went on to get a Ph.D. in Computer Science and is now a tenured professor at the University of Washington, a venture capitalist and one of the foremost authorities on Artificial Intelligence and information technology. At the time I taught them, Aaron was just a very smart kid but Oren was already semi-famous for being the son of Amitai Etzioni, a Ph.D. in sociology who was serving as a domestic policy advisor to President Carter. In 1997, along with David Carney, Amitai Etzioni edited a book entitled Repentance: A Comparative Perspective. This is an exhaustive study of repentance in all its sociological and religious manifestations. Certain basic aspects of the civic and religious forms of repentance remain the same yet there are considerable differences in the theoretical underpinnings and the practical applications of it.

Before we get into Etzioni’s theories on repentance and the common elements within civic and religious repentance, let me tell you what inspired me to begin researching repentance. First of all, these are the High Holidays, the Days of Awe, the Ten Days of Repentance. The preceding month of Elul with the daily blowing of the Shofar and the recitation of the Selichot prayers prepares us for these days. During Elul, we should perform a heshbon nefesh, an accounting of our self, to review our actions over the past year so that on this day, the first day of the year 5771, Rosh Hashanah, we can begin to repent our misdeeds, apologize, make amends, and seek forgiveness. In other words, today is all about teshuvah, repentance. But there was another reason as well for this topic. Over the summer, I heard a news report that astounded me and caused me to wonder, “What exactly is repentance and what are its parameters?”

Keith Oberman from MSNBC gave a report about an article written in the July 24th issue of the Wall Street Journal. In that article, Stephanie Simon wrote from Colorado Springs, CO about the return of the Reverend Ted Haggard to the pulpit of a church. Four years earlier Reverend Haggard resigned as president of the politically powerful National Association of Evangelicals and from the megachurch he founded after admitting that he had bought methamphetamines and had a sexual encounter with a homosexual prostitute. While he was one of the most prominent church leaders in the U.S., Reverend Haggard would decry homosexuality and drug use from his mighty pulpit. In his tortured letter of confession, he called himself “a deceiver and a liar” who wrestled with “repulsive and dark” desires. He left town and he left the state with his wife promising to follow a new path and stay away from ministerial work. In the past few months, Reverend Haggard has moved back to his former community and launched a new church that has grown to a congregation of 200 people. Enthusiastic as ever, Reverend Haggard says he is back doing what he was born to do. As he put it, “Tiger Woods needs to golf. Michael Vick needs to be playing football. Ted Haggard needs to be leading a church.” Why he chose to explain his divine mandate to minister a church by comparing himself to an adulterer and an animal abuser, I do not know but the rest of his comments are the most revealing. As Ms. Simon wrote, ‘He acknowledged some grave lapses of judgment in the episode he refers to as “my crisis” but Mr. Haggard also said that in his sorrow and shame, he accepted too much guilt after the scandal broke. “I over-repented,” he said.’ When I heard that, all I could think of was that bank commercial with the little kid with glasses trying to put the eggs into the basket who says, “What does that even mean?!” I over-repented. Is that even possible? How can one over-repent? In Jewish terms, repentance is not over until forgiveness is achieved and the sinner does not repeat the sin when given the opportunity. Was Ted Haggard forgiven for the sin of misleading his mega-congregation? Perhaps. Has he found himself in a similar situation and resisted the temptations? I do not know. I am sure that in our communication crazy society someone would have put it on facebook or youtube if the situation presented itself. How can he say he over-repented? Is he implying that his repentance is over, that he no longer needs to feel sorry or ashamed, that it is totally gone and forgotten? Or is he saying something else.

Now we know that certain words can mean one thing to one person and something else to another person. This is especially true of people in different cultures that speak the same language. If you were in South Africa and you were told that you would get something “just now,” expect to wait a while. And if you were in Mexico and you used the word “cojer” that in Panama is a perfectly acceptable Spanish verb meaning “to take,” you might get some very strange looks. So before I judged, I wanted to see if repentance meant the same thing in other cultures and religions.

Amitai Etzioni begins his book on repentance by writing about civic or secular repentance. When you punish a child for wrongdoing, there is the time out, the penalty phase, which is then followed by a period of apologies, making amends, and reconciling with those who were hurt or offended by the child’s actions. Once the apologies and other actions to repair the damage viewed as sincere and sufficient, the child is returned to his or her former status. Dr. Etzioni laments that this last phase of repentance is currently absent from today’s civic society. He uses the example of Senator Gary Hart who suffered public ridicule and shame for his extramarital affairs and was summarily deposed from his front running position as the 1988 Democratic Presidential candidate. In 1995, seven years after having suffered defamation and loss, being forced out of the national political scene and paying the price for his brazen infidelity, Gary Hart tried to run for a seat in Congress and was roundly derided and discredited and unable to resume a career in politics. In other words, once guilty, always guilty, once an ex-con, always an ex-con. The process of repentance in secular and in religious society must have a conclusion that involves full reconciliation and full restoration of the guilty to his or her former position. Professor Etzioni laments that in today’s society, there are criminals who have gone through the full process of sincere repentance and yet they are still branded as criminals; without closure, without reintegration into society.

We know that in Judaism as in civic society the quality of the repentance, the sincerity of the remorse, the heartfelt sense of loss and the suffered punishments and chastisements should lead towards atonement and forgiveness. Our Talmudic sages teach us that it is forbidden for us to say to a penitent person, “Remember your past misdeeds.” On the contrary, we must do everything in our power to encourage a person to engage in true repentance. As we read in our High Holiday prayer book, “It is not the death of sinners that God seeks, only that they turn from their former ways and live!” In Judaism, only the cruelest and most evil people who feel no guilt and lack all remorse for their actions would never have a chance at full atonement yet it seems that in our contemporary secular culture, society is always skeptical about a person’s sincerity in repentance and never seems to be satisfied by a person’s payment for his or her sin to grant them atonement or forgiveness.

Is that what happened in the case of Ted Haggard? In his claim of over-repentance was he trying to say, that he had suffered more than enough and that civic and religious society were never going to judge him favorably despite his sincere repentance and remorse? No, I don’t think so. He did suffer for his misdeeds but his current statements make it clear that he does not feel true remorse for his sin. He speaks about the homosexual affair as a massage that somehow went wrong and that he does not have same-sex attractions. He says that some church leaders went on a witch-hunt accusing him of engaging in a pattern of misconduct including inappropriate relationships and sordid talk. He laughs this off by saying that his only fault was cracking a few crude jokes. He tearfully confessed his sins in front of a national television audience on the Oprah Winfrey show but now he downplays them as if they were no big deal and along with his insincere remorse, he ignores the fact that his real sin was in misleading the congregation. It seems clearly evident that he has not yet repented and surely has not over repented for that sin.

Amitai Etzioni breaks down repentance in to three crucial elements, the three R’s of repentance. The first one is true remorse. It is hard to describe what true remorse is but we can identify what it is not by examining its polar opposite. False remorse is characterized by transferring guilt to others; for example, Eric and Lyle Menendez accusing their parents of abuse to exonerate themselves for murdering them. False remorse also involved trivializing the crime and disparaging the law. Professor Etzioni uses Lyn Nofziger, an aide to President Reagan who trivialized his conviction for influence peddling calling it tantamount to a parking ticket. Had Dr. Etzioni written his book today, I am sure that he would have used Ted Haggard’s example of calling his inappropriate behavior and sordid speech as just “cracking a few crude jokes.” Offering apologies with defeating qualifications as in the case of Senator Packwood of Oregon who in response to the accusation of repeated sexual harassment said, “I’m sorry if I did those things they say I did,” is a further symptom of false remorse. Along with true remorse not bearing any of the above symptoms of false remorse, the truth of a person’s remorse is the most convincing when it does not sound faked, rehearsed or devoid of emotion but said with sincerity and, although this is rarely the case, when there is little or nothing to be gained directly from its expression.

The second crucial element that must be part of any process of repentance is restitution i.e. doing penance or making amends whether by means of punishment, monetary compensation to the victims and/or to the community, or any other appropriate suffering or humbling experience. Religious suffering, at least within the monotheistic religions, can range from social isolation, self-affliction through fasting and other abstentions, to corporal punishment usually administered through self-flagellation. These are not meant to be ends in themselves but merely the pathways towards atonement and ultimately forgiveness. Eztioni points out that in civic society this phase of repentance usually involves isolation through incarceration. The problem is that imprisonment often short circuits the restorative reconciliation part of the process of repentance because the sinner or shall we say the criminal now associates him or herself with the alienated part of society, is not given a real chance at rehabilitation and cannot reestablish his or her position within law abiding society. This is why we have so many repeat offenders and why recidivism keeps our prisons crowded, which further inhibits the rehabilitation process for incarcerated criminals. Following a June 2006 study by a bi-partisan government commission on America’s prisons, we learned that to reduce overcrowding in our prisons 95% of prison inmates are released back into society after the completion of their sentence. Within three years of their release, however, 67% of former prisoners are rearrested and 52% are re-incarcerated. This high recidivism rate clearly calls into question the effectiveness of America's corrections system. Prisons might keep the criminals off the street which prevents them from committing crimes while imprisoned but, in most cases, they do not help a criminal do a full teshuvah and return to being a law-abiding citizen once they are released.

What is missing in the process of civic repentance today is the critical third step; restructuring one’s life. This element of repentance is often overlooked. In contemporary society, we focus on the sincerity of the remorse expressed and the proper punishment and penance paid by the sinner but we miss this third and most essential element without which repentance is not complete. Our Talmudic sages and the great medieval scholars and thinkers such as Saadia ha-Gaon, Bahya Ibn Pakuda and Rabbi Moses Maimonides described this third step as the quintessential acid test of true repentance. In the Talmudic tractate about Yom Kippur, the third century Babylonian teacher Rabbi Judah teaches us that a true penitent is defined as one who twice more encounters the object or person that led to his or her original transgression and does not repeat the transgression. Professor Etzioni writes that it is not enough for an adulterous person to show remorse and be punished. That person must never again commit adultery otherwise those first two elements of repentance, remorse and restitution, will be insufficient and ineffective. True reintegration into law-abiding, moral society must not be granted until a period has passed in which the guilty parties have had a chance to demonstrate that they have restructured their lives and themselves. Therefore, in the case of Ted Haggard, the jury is still out, his repentance will be deemed sincere and true if and when he finds himself in the position to commit his former sins again and does not do it. Only then will his repentance be over. Until then, it is morally offensive and grossly inaccurate for him to declare that he over-repented. According to Dr. Etzioni, remorse, restitution and restructuring are the critical, unavoidable, and essential steps in the process of repentance. Repentance in Judaism follows that path but does Dr. Etzioni’s theory of repentance hold true in other religions as well.

On August 6, sixty-five years after the US dropped an atomic bomb on the civilian population of Hiroshima, Japan, I was coming from a visit at Harbor Place, and as I was turning from Jennings Road onto US 1, I looked over at the guy who stands there on that corner every day proclaiming the gospel and calling all people to come to Jesus and I saw written on the big wooden cross that he leans against the traffic light pole the words “Repent and be saved.” I wondered what kind of repentance would lead to salvation and not to forgiveness or atonement. Does repentance means something different in Christianity?

The late evangelical theologian and scholar Reverend Dr. Harold Brown wrote a chapter in Dr. Etzioni’s book on Christian views of repentance. He wrote that in Christianity, repentance depends on the redeemer and not the individual. Belief and allegiance to Jesus is the key to repentance and forgiveness rendering free will and individual responsibility of lesser consequence. While Christianity and all religions teach the need for people to follow the rules and behave within the moral constraints just as civic society expects its citizens to abide by the laws, the stress on personal responsibility found in Judaism and in civic society is not the same for Christians. While in Judaism we must personally repent of our actions and ask forgiveness from our fellow human beings before we can ask God to forgive us on Yom Kippur, there is no such requirement in Christianity. For Christians, there is no distinction; a sin against God is a sin against our neighbors and vice versa. Dr. Brown describes the elements of Christian repentance as genuine remorse, determined resolution to never repeat the sin, evidence that the person has begun to live in a new way and full restoration and reintegration into the community. Notice that the element of doing penance, making amends, or suffering some kind of deprivation or punishment is not included in Dr. Brown’s description of Christian repentance. Could that be the key to understanding Reverend Haggard’s remarks? Perhaps.

I researched a little further and read the chapter in Dr. Etzioni’s book about repentance in Islam written by Dr. Mahmoud Ayoub, a Lebanese Muslim who received his Ph.D. from Harvard University and served for ten years as the Director of Islamic Studies at Temple University. Professor Ayoub writes that Islamic repentance is known as tawbah, an Arabic word similar in meaning to the Hebrew word for repentance, teshuvah, which means returning. In Islam, tawbah is returning to God with contrition, supplication and penitence eager for salaam submission to God’s will. The word tawbah and its derivatives appear 87 times in the Quran. In Islam, God (Allah) is ready to forgive if the sinner turns with complete faith in God alone. Notice once again, an absence of any need to seek forgiveness from your fellow human being, let alone your fellow Muslim. For Muslims, repentance is an act of divine grace. Suffering or self-affliction, especially within Sunni Muslim tradition, is not part of the process of repentance. Aside from absolute faith in Allah, human actions have no influence or effect on repentance or forgiveness.

While it may be interesting or even fascinating to discuss and discover other religious or secular traditions about repentance, we are here today on the first of the Ten Days of Repentance to fully commit ourselves to the process of repentance. Truth be told, there really isn’t a starting point to repentance and it cannot be completed within ten days. Our daily prayers include a plea for forgiveness for our multiple sins and transgressions. The Talmudic ideal is for a person to spend each day in repentance. In the Talmudic tractate on Shabbat, Rabbi Eliezer is quoted as saying, “Repent one day before your death.” When the late Rabbi Albert Lewis quoted these words of Talmud to Mitch Albom, his eulogist and the author of “Have A Little Faith,” Mitch Albom replied “But how do you know it’s the day before your death?” and Rabbi Lewis raised his eyebrows and said, “Exactly.” Rabbi Eliezer and all our sages are teaching us that since none of us know the day we are going to die, we should repent everyday. Consequently, for us, no one can ever over-repent but we can certainly repent insufficiently or inadequately or insincerely.

Most of us have committed acts over the past year for which we are now sorry. Whether through acts of omission or commission, willfully or by mistake, we have done things that were hurtful or misguided for which we need to repent, express remorse, and ask for forgiveness. In “Have A Little Faith,” Rabbi Lewis teaches us of a little known Jewish traditional practice at a funeral of going up to the coffin and asking the deceased to forgive everything you have ever done to hurt them. Rabbi Lewis comments that he doesn’t want to wait that long and so he uses his last High Holiday sermon to his congregation to repent and ask them to forgive him for all the things he should have done that he did not do and all the mistakes he made which he should not have made. Thankfully, this is not my last High Holiday sermon to my congregation although it might be my longest but I wanted to take this opportunity to repent and ask you all to forgive me for all the things I should have done but failed to do and all the mistakes I may have made that I should not have made.

In Judaism, we can never over-repent. It is not possible. True repentance can bring lasting change to people and communities but it will not happen overnight. Repentance and therefore forgiveness is a process that takes time. In 1995, on the fiftieth anniversary of the US bombing of Hiroshima, the first use of nuclear weapon which killed 140,000 people, only 50% of Americans felt remorse and a desire to apologize over the dropping the atom bomb on the civilian populations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August of 1945. Then President Clinton decided not to offer a public apology to the people of Japan nor did he believe that one was necessary. Fifteen years later in 2010, for the first time, a representative of the US government, Ambassador John Roos, attended the ceremonies in Hiroshima commemorating the event. It was not exactly an apology or an expression of true remorse but maybe it was the first step towards healing. Repentance takes time and we cannot and should not try to speed up or inhibit the process but it must be allowed to proceed and hopefully reach its ultimate conclusion of forgiveness, reconciliation and restoration. Like Yogi Berra used to say, “It’s over when it’s over.”

May it be God’s will that we eagerly embrace the opportunity given to us today and all these ten days of repentance to acknowledge our wrongdoings, sincerely express our remorse, seek to reconcile and reunite with friends, family members and fellow congregants, perform a true repentance and pursue forgiveness, healing and peace. And let us say, Amen

2010-11-07T14:32:00.001-08:00

Sermon for Erev Rosh Hashanah 5771

My wife and I love to play tennis, just not together. Across the net from each other, in doubles or in singles, we are okay, but as a team in doubles, un-unh, way too stressful. One day some friends of ours invited us to play tennis with them and sure enough, Sara and I had to play as a team against them. It was a disaster. I kept missing shots and serving into the net and every time I would mess up, I said, “Oops, I’m sorry.” I said I’m sorry so many times that one of our opponents jokingly said, “I thought love meant never having to say you’re sorry.” To which I replied, “Yes, but in tennis, love means nothing.”

In tennis and in life itself, there are many kinds of love. As most of you probably know, the last Friday night of every month is our time for “Ask the Rabbi.” On those nights, members of the congregation have the opportunity to ask me any question about Judaism or anything for that matter. At a recent “Ask the Rabbi” session, one of the younger members of our congregation asked me which mitzvah of the 613 commandments did I think was the most important one. Without hesitation I answered, “Ahavta l’reakha qamokha, love your neighbor as yourself.” Even though I had answered the question instinctively, the more I thought about it, the more I realized it was true. From that mitzvah flows all the ethical laws about society, about justice and fairness and helping those less fortunate, about feeding the hungry, housing the homeless, clothing the naked, and being caring and compassionate to all people acknowledging that each person is like us sharing our common humanity, sharing that divine spark of creation, and therefore should be treated no differently than us. Our greatest sages and teachers had similar opinions. The great teacher of the second century Rabbi Akiba ben Joseph taught that loving our neighbor was the greatest principle in the Torah. Hillel taught that it was the very essence of Torah and that all the rest was merely commentary. And one of the greatest rabbis of the twentieth century, Rav Kook, held the same belief and more importantly, he lived his life and practiced his rabbinate guided by that principle, the principle of ahavah, love, especially ahavat yisrael, loving each and every member of the people of Israel.

Rabbi Avraham Yizhak Kook was born in 1865 in Latvia and died in Israel in September 1935. Rav Kook was greatly revered in his lifetime and still is to this day seventy-five years after his death. Many Jewish organizations and institutions, most notably the educational and mystical ones, organized special tributes to Rav Kook on the occasion of his seventy-fifth Yahrzeit. Rav Kook was an exceptional student at his yeshiva in Latvia. He did not limit himself to merely studying Talmud but he studied Bible, Hebrew, philosophy and Kabbalah. The head of that yeshiva once said that it was worth founding the yeshiva if for no other reason than to educate and ordain Rabbi Kook. In 1888, he was appointed rabbi of Zaumel and then in 1895 Rav Kook began to serve the Jewish community of Bausk but soon felt his heart drawn elsewhere. Rav Kook immigrated to Erez Yisrael then known as Palestine under Turkish rule. He arrived in Jaffa in 1904 and immediately began to engage in qiruv-outreach, bringing people closer. With his openness to new ideas, Rav Kook drew many religious and non-religious people to him. He fostered close ties with people of all origins and beliefs, he built bridges of communication and political alliances between secular Zionist leadership and more traditional non-Zionist Orthodox Jews, and he freely spoke out and criticized non-religious Zionists and non-Zionist religious Jews, even the most ultra-Orthodox among them. Kook’s perspective was panoramic and all encompassing affirming the legitimacy of different approaches. He advocated outreach and cooperation, strove for Jewish unity and preached ahavat Yisrael, love of your fellow Israelite.

Rav Kook did not merely speak about Jewish unity especially over the issue of Zionism. He tirelessly worked for it. He saw the Zionists as agents in the divine plan of Messianic redemption and he wanted his fellow Orthodox and ultra-Orthodox Jews to share his vision. In 1914, he traveled to Europe to attend a conference of the ultra-Orthodox organization Agudath Yisrael to convince them to support the Zionist plan. While he was there, World War I broke out and he could not return to Eretz Yisrael. He spent the war years in England serving an Orthodox congregation in London and continued to urge the Jews in England to support the Zionist cause. He returned to the Land of Israel after the war under the auspices of the British Empire who were given a mandate by the League of Nations to rule over Palestine. By virtue of his scholarship, his mystical leadership, and most importantly by his openness and his ability to build bridges between deeply divided groups, Rav Kook was appointed the chief rabbi of Jerusalem and with the formation of the chief rabbinate in 1921; he was elected the first Ashkenazic chief rabbi of Palestine. Rav Kook would often quote the rabbinic axiom that one should embrace with the right and rebuff with the left. Kook said that he was fully capable of rejecting but since there were more than enough rejecters, he was taking on the role of embracer. As we read in Ecclesiastes, there is a time to embrace and a time to refrain from embracing. Now is the time for embracing.

King Solomon, who is purported to be the author of Ecclesiastes, is famous for his wisdom. In the Book of Kings, we read the story about King Solomon and the two mothers. Each of the two women had a baby. The baby of one mother dies during the night. When she discovers it, she quickly switches her baby for the other mother’s baby. As soon as the second mother wakens, she looks at the dead baby and knows it is not hers yet the first mother claims that it is. The case goes before the king and he has a radical suggestion, cut the baby in two and give one half to each mother. The first mother whose actual baby was already dead said “Okay, that’s fair” but the second mother said, “No, let the baby live with her.” That is how Solomon wisely determined that the live baby belonged to the second mother. Rav Kook makes an analogy of this story and compares the live baby to the community of Israel. The one who wants to split the community is not the true mother and should not be given any legitimacy. Rav Kook taught us, “After a time of tension, it is critically important not to divide, not to develop hatred, but to spread love and embrace.”

For Rav Kook, ahavat yisrael, loving and embracing our fellow Israelites was not just theoretical. It was real. One day, he went to a brit milah ceremony in the Old City of Jerusalem accompanied by dozens of his students. On his way back, a small group of hotheaded ultra-Orthodox extremists suddenly attacked him, showering him with wastewater. The chief rabbi was completely drenched with malodorous, filthy water. The Rabbi’s supporters were outraged. By the time Rav Kook had arrived home, news of the attack had spread throughout the city. The legal counsel of the British Mandate came to his home and advised Rav Kook to press charges against these hooligans and promised to have them promptly deported from Palestine. Much to the legal counsel’s astonishment, Rav Kook responded by saying, “Do no such thing. I have no interest in court cases. Despite what they did to me, I love them. I love every Jew.” Shortly after that event, he wrote in his poetry “In every single Jew young and old / The light of the living God burns and shines.” He believed that it was our obligation to see a unique, divine spark inside every Jewish woman and man.

Seven years ago, our congregation hosted the investigative journalist and author, Edwin Black as our Scholar-In-Residence for our Library Dedication weekend. Edwin Black is the author of a number of controversial books such as The War Against the Weak documenting the American Eugenics movement and its influence on the Nazi scientists, The IBM and the Holocaust showing how the computerization of personal records achieved by IBM’s technology enabled the efficiency of the Holocaust, and The Transfer Agreement detailing the 1933 secret arrangement by the Jewish Zionist leaders in Palestine with the Nazis to bring 60,000 German Jews and their property, worth about $100 million, into Palestine in exchange for an end to the Jewish-led boycott of German goods.
The chief architect and negotiator of this infamous transfer agreement was Chaim Arlosoroff, a leader in the Labor Zionist movement, a person destined to be the first Foreign Minister of the as yet unborn State of Israel. The agreement was concluded in May 1933 and the very effective Jewish-led boycott, which could have economically crippled Nazi Germany, was terminated. On the night of June 17, 1933 unknown assailants assassinated Dr. Chaim Arlosoroff while he was walking with his wife by the seashore in Tel Aviv. Two right-wing Zionist Revisionists were arrested; one named Abraham Stavsky was convicted. Stavsky vehemently maintained his innocence, a young Arab twice confessed to the crime and twice retracted his confession. It was a terribly divisive episode in the history of the Zionist movement. Surprisingly, Rav Kook stood up in the pulpit and proclaimed Stavsky innocent. The ultra-Orthodox already despised Rav Kook and now the Labor Zionists became his enemies as well. Despite the vitriol thrown at him from his detractors on all sides, Rav Kook never gave up his love for the whole of the Jewish people. As he wrote then, “After a time of tension, it is critically important not to divide and hate but to love and embrace.”

Tonight is Rosh Hashanah, tonight we begin a new year. In the old rabbinic parlor trick known as gematria, every number has an alphabetic equivalent; e.g. aleph equals one, yud equals ten, taf equals 400 etc. When you write out the Jewish date, you use Hebrew letters. So tonight begins the day of aleph tishrei taf shin ayin aleph, the first day of the month of Tishrei in the year 5771. But if we take those letters that spell out the number of the year 5771 and see them as an acronym perhaps they can tell us something about the coming year. The letters taf shin ayin aleph could spell out the phrase t’hiyeh sh’nat avodah v’ahavah, which means it will be a year of service and love. And in Hebrew, the word “avodah” which is translated as service implies not only worship in a religious service but also work in service to our community. Truth be told, t’hiyeh can also mean, “may it be,” which tells us that it is up to us to make this a year of service and love.

Many of our congregants and our leaders have been speaking about the need for healing and I could not agree more but unlike the story of genesis, it cannot be created ex nihilo, out of nothing. Healing comes from our active love of our fellow Israelite. Healing comes from repentance, from asking for and attaining forgiveness. Healing comes from focusing on the words and actions of the revered Rav Kook who understood that the key to it all was the unconditional love and acceptance of each and every member of the household of Israel especially this house here that we lovingly call our home, Beth El Israel, the house of God and Israel. If we want healing, we must accept all. If we want healing, we must open our doors to all. If we want healing, everyone must be included. If we want healing, we must treat each person the same. If we want healing, we must love our neighbors as ourselves. If we want healing, let us follow the teachings of Rav Kook who taught us that we live in a world of chaos. Not only do we need to perform tikkun olam, fixing the world through our righteous actions, but a tikkun elyon, a healing and a fixing at the highest level, repairing and transforming through uniting all living beings and their diverse tendencies and attributes. In the words of Rav Kook, “As long as each one exalts himself claiming ‘I am sovereign, I and no other’ there cannot be peace in our midst.” And what is peace? What is shalom? It is a state of being shalem; whole, united, healed. It is when we realize that there is no other in the house of Israel. There is no enemy. There is no “us and them.” It is all us. As Rav Kook said, “In the gathering of everything, everything is good.” As we come together, goodness prevails. As we grow towards wholeness sh’leimut goodness increases. As we follow Rav Kook’s example and practice ahavat yisrael, the love and acceptance and respect of every member of the house of Israel then the healing will come and we will have a very good year.

Ken y’hee ratson – May this be God’s will and let us all say, Amen

2010-11-07T14:30:00.001-08:00

Sermon Kol Nidre 5771

Three senior Jewish women get together one afternoon. The first one sits down and goes, “Oy!” The second sits down and exhales “Oy!” And the third one says, “I thought we had agreed not to talk about the children!”

Children can bring us great nachas and they can also give us tremendous tsuris but, as in the case of all relationships, it can go both ways; we can give our children nachas or tsuris as well. Before we judge our children’s actions we have to ask ourselves, what do we give our children? What values and lessons should we impart to them as they live their adult lives; lessons and values that we hope will stay with them even after we are gone. Sociologists, educators and behavioral scientists all agree that the most lasting lessons taught by parents to their children are taught at home and are taught by actions and not by words. Do as I say and not as I do is a hypocritical cop out because children emulate the example of their parents. As parents we are role models for our children and they will more likely do as we do rather than as we say.

Back in 2002, our Temple and Temple Beit ha-Yam in Stuart shared a Scholar-In-Residence, Rabbi Jack Reimer. One of Rabbi Reimer’s main areas of interest is ethical wills. Ethical wills are first found in the Torah with the blessings given by Isaac to his son Jacob and by Jacob to his twelve sons and continued on as a significant part of a Jewish family life in the rest of the Bible and in the Talmud as well as medieval and modern Jewish life. Rabbi Reimer has written several books on the subject and has become somewhat of an expert not only providing the history of ethical wills but, in addition, a guide to writing your own. The title of one of his books on Ethical Wills is “So That Your Values Live On.” While a will is a final statement by a person regarding the sharing or apportioning of his or her property and other worldly goods to family and friends, an ethical will is a final statement by a person to his or her family, not of property or wealth to be left for the children but about the ethical ideals and practices that the person wants his or her children to continue. An ethical will is our last chance to leave our children a message of the values that we want them to maintain in their adult life especially after we are gone. It is our last chance to teach our children the ethics we have tried to impart throughout their lives. It is our last chance to leave our children with a legacy of critical life lessons that we hope will continue to guide them, sustain them and give them strength.

As Rav Kook taught us, we live in a world of chaos. This is not a world of ease and relaxation but of world of disorder, stress and fear. My generation grew up with the fear of nuclear war, which like a hurricane can be foreseen. This generation has grown up with the fear of terrorism, which is more like an earthquake able to strike anywhere and anytime without any forewarning. This generation not only lives in fear of terrorism but in fear of a total economic collapse as well. Small wonder that we have an epidemic of sleep deprivation, which is especially rampant among young people ages 20 to 50 that are trying to maintain their own homes and feed their young children. Recent studies have shown that one out of three adults suffer some form of sleep disorder leading to sleep deprivation. There are approximately 84 different diagnosed sleep disorders in today’s world. Sleep deprivation along with the many neurological problems it can cause is a sure sign of stress and fear and even depression. For an older person to have trouble sleeping is not so unusual, but for our young adult and middle-aged children to suffer sleep disorders is very disturbing. There are approximately 100 million Americans who cannot get enough sleep. What can we do about it? What lessons can we learn that we can impart to our children to give them more peaceful and healthier lives?

Many children are taught to say their prayers before going to bed at night. Every culture and every religion has their rituals and their sayings but they all come down to the same basic desires; protection and safety, peace and rest. About four weeks ago at our Thursday morning minyan service, I was asked if Jews believed in angels and I answered by saying that angels in Jewish literature are considered messengers of God, in fact, that is what the Hebrew word for angel malach means, messenger. But we do not believe in angels as divine beings that can intervene with God on our behalf. Then another minyanaire opined and said, “I remember as a child saying something about the malach that watches over me at night.” So I pulled out the Orthodox prayer book and sure enough in the reading of the Sh’ma that we are supposed to say at night, as we are about to go to sleep, there is a passage about the angel who redeems us and protects us. And at the end of the prayer it says, “In the name of the Lord, the God of Israel, may Michael be at my right hand, Gabriel at my left, in front of me Uriel and behind me Raphael and above me the Shechinah, the nurturing, loving, protecting presence of God.” In our Talmud, Rabbi Ben Zoma teaches, “Who is wise? One who learns from all people” as it says in Psalm 119, “I have learned from all my students.” That day, I learned something about Judaism that I had not known before and I understood the consoling and reassuring power of that nighttime prayer and how it could give children and adults alike a sense of peace at night and allow them to get the rest and the sleep they need. However, most of our children are no longer innocent children, they are knowledgeable and possibly skeptical adults. Belief in protecting angels will not reassure the majority of today’s young and middle-aged adults. There needs to be a profound paradigm shift in today’s society for that to happen and the prevailing paradigm in today’s society post 9-11 is the paradigm of fear. Charles Blow in OP Ed piece in the September 10th issue of the NY Times wrote about the current wave of fear. He stated that according to an ABC News/Washington Post poll released last week the percentage of people who say that the country is safer now from terrorism compared with before Sept. 11, 2001, has reached a new low. He writes, “We seem to be experiencing a new sense of paranoia about these extremists and the threats they pose.”

Case in point; I am sure that many of you received this political propaganda in the mail before the recent primary elections. This is a picture taken at the height of the most recent Palestinian Arab uprising during 2001 and 2002, which is referred in Arabic as the intifada. In this picture, angry Palestinian Arab youth are throwing stones, clumps of concrete and other objects. Although we cannot see them, their most likely target were Israeli soldiers who were patrolling the occupied territories of either the West Bank or Gaza. Above their heads are the words, “Has there ever been a more important time to stand with Israel?” and over here in the upper left hand corner are the words ‘Paid for and authorized by Jeff Greene for Florida.’ Ultimately, Jeff Greene lost the Democratic primary election for the US Senate seat being vacated by Bill Nelson but what is so reprehensible about this propaganda is that Jeff Greene was trying to manipulate the Jewish vote. He promoted himself as a nice Jewish boy from Florida who had a Bar Mitzvah, taught at a Hebrew School, has lived in Israel, can speak Hebrew fluently and consequently is the best choice as our Senator because he will defend Israel better than his opponent. Jeff Greene was using our concerns for Israel, playing on our fears and counting on them to get him into the US Senate. What happened to the days when politicians spoke positively and reassuringly and said things like, “We have nothing to fear but fear itself.” Our society is overwhelmed and consumed by fear. No wonder that we and our children cannot sleep well at night. And yet our leaders, and those who want to be our leaders, are not doing enough to alleviate our fears. Well we know, that fear is a dangerous thing to have because it leads not only to sleep deprivation but also to poor judgment, hasty actions, anger and hatred, division and ultimately destruction. As Rav Kook taught us, “In a time of tension, it is critically important not to divide, not to develop hatred, but to spread love and embrace.”

My generation expressed this sentiment with the phrase, “Make love not war.” In our daily prayer book, the Gates of Prayer, we find the same idea expressed on page 52. There we find a quote from the Mishnah, the first book of rabbinical law, where it says “these are the commandments whose fulfillment provides rewards in this world and in the world to come, honoring father and mother, welcoming guests, visiting the sick, rejoicing with bride and groom, accompanying the dead to the grave, comforting the mourners, and making peace where there is strife.” Make peace where people are fighting, make peace where people are struggling, make peace where people are hurting, make peace where people are afraid; make love not hatred, make peace not war. It is incumbent upon us to lessen the fears of our society; the fears of economic collapse, the fear of unemployment, homelessness and hunger, the fear of war or terrorism. We must not encourage fear. We must encourage understanding. We must not promote anger and hatred. We must promote peace.

We can help our children overcome their fears and teach them to promote peace in the ethical wills we leave them but why wait that long. Those words of the nighttime prayers reminding us that we have angels all around us and God’s presence above us protecting us gives us and our children comfort and a sense of security and the assurance that we are not alone but those prayers might not be sufficient for today. Our society is going through a very tough time right now. It is important for our children to know that they are not alone and that even though we may not be able to help them out financially, we are with them, standing with them, offering them our unconditional love and support.

We may have unresolved issues with our children. There may be a lot of hurt feelings and things left unsaid. While we know that our tradition dictates that we forgive a person once they approach us in true humility and remorse and ask us to forgive them but in the musar literature we find the ethical teaching that we should forgive someone even if he or she does not offer an apology. As we read in the Talmud tractate dealing with the laws of Yom Kippur, “If a person forgives others, he will merit forgiveness for his sins.” We have to let go of our anger at our children, let go of resentments, of our frustrations with them, let go of our desire to control their lives. We cannot and we should not try to control their livers but we must be there for them when they are in need, when they are afraid even though they are probably too proud and stubborn to express their fears to us. When the prophet Malachi spoke about the coming of the great and terrible day of the Lord, the day when all the wicked will be judged and punished and all the righteous rewarded, he said that Elijah the prophet would return before that day to reconcile parents with children. Imagine that! Before the people of Israel and the world are judged by God, no less a personage than Elijah the prophet, God’s second greatest champion and advocate, will devote his time to reconcile parents with children. Messianic redemption is only possible when parents reconcile with their children; when there is shalom bayit peace in the family and in the home. In the stirring words of U’netaneh tokef, the prayer that asks us “Who shall be tranquil and who shall be troubled?” and that reminds us that our fate is sealed on Yom Kippur, we find the words declaring “Hineh yom hadin – This is the Day of Judgment.” With Malachi’s prophecy about Elijah and the coming messianic age, there can be no stronger indication that on this Day of Atonement and judgment we must reconcile ourselves with our parents and with our children.

Rabbi Reimer loves to tell this story about a guy who lived in New Jersey and would frequently travel on the NJ Turnpike. Every time he would get close to Exit 9, he would get angry. He would get so angry that his wife was sure he was going to have a heart attack. It turns out that many years earlier, a guy who lived off Exit 9 had been a friend of his and had betrayed his trust and had cheated him out of a very lucrative business opportunity. So for years afterwards, every time he would get near to Exit 9 he would remember the sin committed and experience intense anger. One day, he happened to run into somebody who had been a mutual friend of his and the guy who lived off Exit 9. So he casually asked him, “What do you hear from Chaim Yankel who lives off Exit 9 of the Turnpike?” And this friend tells him, “Oh, he died ten years ago.” He suddenly feels so ashamed and so foolish for wasting all that energy and time pointlessly holding on to anger and hatred. It is better to let go of old anger and resentments, jealousy and frustrations; it is toxic baggage, which cannot help or heal anyone or anything. Let go of your anger at your children and teach them the value of forgiveness and love and the lesson of making peace where there is strife. Before Elijah comes, reconcile with your children, make peace with your children. Teach them that they are not alone and that you love them. Maybe then, they can sleep at peace and finally get some rest.

They say that charity begins at home; so does peace. We say at the end of the tefilah, “As God brings peace to the heavens above, so may God bring peace to us and all Israel and all the world.” But let’s look at it more personally, as we reconcile parents with children, as we lessen our children’s fears, as we reassure our children of our love and devotion and try to help them get the rest and tranquility they so dearly need, and as we bring peace to our home and to our family, may that peace spread to all our congregation, to all our community, to all our country, and to all our world. And let us say, Amen

2010-11-07T14:25:00.000-08:00

Sermon Yom Kippur 5771

A Jewish couple was hosting a lovely dinner party at their home. There were three other couples at the dinner and they were all having a grand time eating and drinking. All of a sudden, the telephone rings. The host excuses himself and goes to answer it. After a few minutes, he comes back to the table and apologizes to his guests and tells them that there is an emergency board meeting at the Temple and he has to attend. His guests do not understand the urgency. They say to him, “Why must you go? You’re not the President, or Treasurer or an officer of any kind. Why can’t you miss this meeting?” and their host responds, “Because I’m the against vote.”

In 1994, Harvard Law School Professor Lani Guinier wrote a scathing critique of the contemporary American political system entitled “The Tyranny of the Majority.” That title came from the words of one of the Constitution’s framers, James Madison, as he tried in 1789 to craft our country’s legal system so that all parties and opinions were properly and proportionally represented. Dr. Guinier claimed that minority rights were not being properly represented and that the current legislative and electoral system was blatantly unfair to minorities. In the sixteen years since that book was written, we have seen a major shift in American and international politics. It might be more appropriate today to write a book about the tyranny of the minority.

President Kennedy once remarked that he would never be remembered as a great President because he could not get his bills through Congress. He envisioned and proposed bold legislation trying to drastically change housing laws, voting laws and many civil rights laws but he was met with constant resistance often suffering filibusters from members of his own party. President Truman referred to his Congress as the Do-Nothing Congress because of their inability or unwillingness to pass legislation. But in both of those cases, the legislation was proposed regardless of the possibility of a filibuster or fear of failure and these laws were supported or rejected by bi-partisan groups of Senators and Congressmen. Today we have a Congress that is not a do nothing Congress but a Congress that will not embrace bold legislation and make the changes necessary in our society for us to function in a healthy political system and with a sound economy. What has happened is that the minority party, which happens to be the Republican Party in today’s Congress, has become the party of “No!” When Nancy Reagan taught the country to Just Say No, she was referring to drug abuse but today’s Republican Party sees it as a rallying cry to resist and deter any bold legislation proposed by President Obama or the Democratic Congressional leadership. The tyranny of the majority is no more. Now it is the minority party that determines and drives the agenda. The against vote has taken center stage. Like Groucho Marx sang in the 1932 classic comedy movie “Horsefeathers”, “I don't care what you have to say: It makes no difference anyway. Whatever it is, I'm against it!

Lately we have heard about something called The Tea Party. This is a very vocal, superconservative right wing group within the Republican Party. It began as a fringe group, a minority constituency within the Republican Party. For this group, even George Bush wasn’t conservative enough. And yet, in the recent primary elections, candidates supported by this Tea Party movement have won the Republican nomination in significant states and have a good chance of winning in the general elections in November. Is this the trend for our society and our world that the small but vocal negative minority gets to control the political landscape and significantly affect the outcome while the majority does nothing. As Karen Tumulty of the Washington Post asks in her article of September 14th, “Is the moderate northeastern Republican in danger of going completely extinct?

And lest you think that this is only an issue in American politics, take a look at Israel. Israel’s political system is a parliamentary system based on the British system but with only one legislative body, the Knesset, rather than two. In the Knesset, you have 120 seats. For a political party to rule, they must have a majority of those seats. Whether it is Labor or Likud or Kadima or any party, they must control 61 or more seats in order for their party leader to be appointed the head of government by Israel’s president. In Israel’s 62 years of existence, there have been very few times when one party won all 61 seats. Most times, the leading party had to put together a coalition of minority parties to form a large enough block to control the majority of the seats in the Knesset. Benjamin Netanyahu’s government, like others before him, had to include the ultra-Orthodox parties including the super right wing Sephardic party of Shas, which has 11 seats, as well as the ultra-nationalist party of Yisrael Beiteinu, Israel our home, which has 15 seats.

This past July, Knesset Member David Rotem of the Yisrael Beiteinu party who serves as the chairman of the Knesset Law and Justice Committee, initiated a bill that would make the ultra-Orthodox Chief Rabbinate of Israel the sole power to authorize and supervise conversions to Judaism. Not only would that have further de-legitimized the Conservative and Reform movements in Israel and prohibited conversions under their auspices, it would have legally nullified conversions performed outside of Israel by non-Orthodox rabbis should that person desire to make aliyah and become a citizen of Israel. Sadly, this is not the first and will probably not be the last time that the nationalist and religious parties in Israel will try to use the Knesset to outlaw Reform and Conservative and even Modern Orthodox conversions. Yet each and every time, it is a minority party in the government that uses its leverage to try and fulfill its own agenda contrary to the general perspective of the majority party or parties. The issue came to head this year around Tisha B’Av, the 9th day of the 11th month of Av, the anniversary of the destruction of the First and Second Temple’s in Jerusalem; an event, our rabbis taught us, that occurred because of the internal strife and division within the Jewish people at that time. Thankfully, the law did not pass but it was tabled for further study and will come up for discussion and a possible vote in January. The reason why this bill came so close to passage was that David Rotem wrote it in vague language and made it sound like it was a law designed to centralize and simplify the conversion process and lessen the court cases about who is and who isn’t a Jew. In addition, David Rotem had the support of his party Yisrael Beyteynu and worked in collusion with members of the ultra-Orthodox Sephardic party known as Shas and the ultra-Orthodox Ashkenazic party called United Torah Judaism. Together with David Rotem’s party that amounted to a voting bloc of 31 seats, three more seats than the majority Kadima party. Once the bill did not get passed, the Sephardic Chief Rabbi Shlomo Amar lashed out and claimed that the liberal and Reform Jews now “have their claws in Zion and are trying to impose on Israel the lifestyle of other nations with rampant violence, immodesty and assimilation at a very high rate.” The Chief Rabbi went on to say that the Reformers have “established legions of warriors in Israel whose purpose is to remove Torah from Israel “ and that every Jew must try to influence Knesset members and ministers and pray for these lost sons to return to the right path. Truth be told, the only reason the bill did not pass is because the non-Orthodox Jews of America spoke up and protested and convinced Prime Minister Netanyahu to speak out against the bill. But here again, we were seeing the vocal, narrow-minded minority controlling the legislation and driving the agenda of the governing body.

I am trying to figure out the group dynamics and psychological and sociological factors at work here. Why does this seem to be happening in institutions and organizations across the board? How is it that a one or two issue minority group can derail an entire governing body? How did the Tea Party get to exert so much influence that the recent Republican primaries had so many of their candidates winning? How did the minority Shas party that controls only 11 seats in the 120-seat Israeli Knesset become the power broker? How does a small yet vocal minority with a negative and self-centered agenda get to control any institution or organization from a major national government to a congregation? What is the common thread? What is the social or psychological dynamic evident here and can we change it? Does it mean that Richard Nixon was right that the strident minority calls the shots because the majority is silent?

Over the past few months, my wife Sara and I have been reading the trilogy of books written by the late Swedish journalist Steig Larsson. Before his death in 2004, Larsson wrote mostly about the racist, ultra-nationalist right wing in Sweden. After his death, he became most famous for his trilogy of novels written about the Girl with the Dragon Tattoo known as Lisbeth Salander and the investigative journalist Mikael Blomkvist. But what is happening in Sweden today and the national election scheduled for tomorrow would have fascinated Larsson and would have been a huge topic for his earlier writing. Once a minority party, the “Sweden Democrats” is poised to amass an impressive number of votes in tomorrow’s elections to assure them of significant representation in Sweden’s parliament. While it is fascinating to watch a small political party gain a following and succeed in politics, it is frightening to watch 1933 happen all over again. The Sweden Democrats are a virulent anti-immigrant party that for 15 years walked the walk and talked the talk of neo-Nazi skinheads but have recently shed their jackboots and uniforms to gain greater political legitimacy. With the growth in the immigrant Muslim community in Sweden, the ideology of this minority, marginal party has achieved broader appeal and acceptability. Anders Sannerstedt, a political scientist at Lund University acknowledges that while the Sweden Democrats began as an outright racist organization, "In our neighboring countries, the parties of discontent began life as classic tax revolt movements." I

As long as we allow the minority’s agenda to influence or derail the majority’s goals, we run the risk of having the minority agenda becoming the majority agenda. We cannot allow that to happen in our congregation, in our community, in our country, in Israel or anywhere in the world. The special interest group has become the trendsetter and the guide for our government. We cannot focus on the interests of small groups. We must focus on the larger picture. It is impossible to please and appease each and every small group; it will ultimately tear us apart. We have to focus on the greater whole and not the particular interests of individuals and small groups. If it is a national issue, we must ask first and foremost is it good for our country and for the majority of its citizens? If it is a Jewish issue, we have to ask if it is good for the Jews both in Israel and in the Diaspora? If it is a Temple issue, we must ask ourselves if it is good for the current and future life of our congregation and the majority of its members.

This year of 5771 must be the year that we no longer focus on self-gratification or self-aggrandizement or settling old personal scores but we must focus on putting the greater interest of the whole body first. We cannot affect the outcome of Sweden’s election tomorrow although it does seem that allowing the minority party of The Sweden Democrats representation in the parliament would not be a good thing for the world.

We can affect the attempt by a minority party in Israel’s government to turn back all our advancements of legitimacy and acceptability of the Reform and Conservative movements in Israel. We must remain vigilant and watchful this coming December and January when the Rotem bill might resurface in the Knesset. Our voices and the voices of our representatives within the Reform and Conservative movements in Israel can stop this bill from reaching the Knesset floor for a vote.

By exercising our Constitutional right to vote in November, we can affect the attempt by the minority Tea Party to derail Congressional legislation so that it only deals with their agenda. We can certainly affect change in our Temple by redirecting ourselves away from individuals and small groups and towards the whole of the congregation. If it benefits the whole Temple in the short term and the long term and benefits the majority of its congregants, young and old alike, then it is an agenda worth pursuing.
Ken y’hee ratson – May it be God’s will that this New Year of 5771 be a year of broadening our perspective, a year when we dedicate ourselves to the greater good and not the individual or small group need, a year when we look at the big picture and do what is right and necessary to affect the greater good of the entire body. Let this be the year that we embrace the noble and honorable ideal that it is right and just and praiseworthy for the individual to sacrifice his or her needs or desires for the sake of the many.

And let us say, Amen

2007-12-04T11:35:00.000-08:00

Sermon for Shabbat Vayeshev 11-30-07

About five years after the end of World War II, Ed McCurdy, a singer, songwriter, who had performed in vaudeville, on radio and on television wrote an anti-war folk song while he was living and working in New York City’s Greenwich Village. It has been recorded by recording artists as diverse as Simon and Garfunkel and Garth Brooks. It has been sung at anti-war rallies by John Denver in 1974 and by East German school children near the Berlin Wall in 1989 and lately by many amateur singers on YouTube. It has been translated into 76 languages and has become an anti-war classic. The lyrics and the message are very simple. The song says, “Last night I had the strangest dream I'd ever dreamed before. I dreamed the world had all agreed to put an end to war. I dreamed I saw a mighty room filled with women and men, and the paper they were signing said, ‘They'd never fight again.’”
Since this song was written, our country has pursued war in Korea, Vietnam, Kuwait, Afghanistan and Iraq. Some of these wars were justified, some were not.
Since this song was written, the world has experienced many wars, some major, some minor, some defensive wars, some aggressive wars, some civil wars and some wars between countries. Wars that come to mind are the wars in Cambodia, Kosovo, Bosnia, Rwanda, Angola, Somalia, Ethiopia and Sierra Leone and the wars between Iran and Iraq and between India and Pakistan. But one of the most intransigent and continuous wars in the 57 years since that song was written is the Israeli-Arab war. And no matter if you distinguish the individual battles as the war between Israel and Egypt or Israel and Lebanon, it still boils down to the same thing and the same basic players; the Israelis who want the Jewish state of Israel to survive and the Arabs who don’t.

The song speaks of the end to war as a strange dream, perhaps a more appropriate term would be an impossible dream but it is a dream that all humanity shares nonetheless. Dreams play an important and significant role in this week’s Torah portion and in the history of our ancestors. We start first with Joseph, the first child of Jacob’s beloved wife Rachel. Although he is the eleventh born son of Jacob, Jacob treats him as his favored first born son because of his love for Rachel. In fact, Jacob coddles him and spoils him and causes Joseph to become the object of his brothers’ wrath, indignation and resentment. It was bad enough when Joseph would show off his beautiful multi-colored coat, a fine piece of clothing that none of his brothers would ever get their sheep-shearing hands on but when he began to tell them his dreams, their sibling rivalry and jealousy boiled over into murderous rage.

In the dreams, which he gleefully shared with his brothers, Joseph reveals how he was going to become superior to them and that they and all of the people of Israel would bow down to him one day. These dreams and his superior attitudes cause his brother to attempt to murder him but Judah, the righteous son, encourages them to settle for selling Joseph into slavery. Through a variety of untoward events, which we will not get into now, Joseph ends up in the royal Egyptian jail and dreams again play a vital role in his future.

His two prison companions, the Pharaoh’s wine steward and baker, have disturbing dreams which they share with Joseph. Joseph discovers that God has given him the ability to see the hidden message within the dream and so he interprets the dreams of his cellmates. Not wanting to take away from Matthew’s speech tomorrow, I will not reveal the content of their dreams but suffice it to say that because of those dreams, Joseph is eventually freed from prison. He is brought up from the dungeon and interprets Pharaoh’s frightening dream about the 7 fat cows, the 7 emaciated cows, the 7 full ears of grain and the 7 withered ears of grain. Joseph explains the meaning of the dream to be God’s warning that after 7 years of abundant crops, there would be a severe 7 year famine in Egypt. Joseph becomes the vice Pharaoh in charge of all of Egypt’s food and when his brothers come down to Egypt for food, the family of Israel is ultimately reunited and allowed to live in Egypt. This sets up the Israelite enslavement in Egypt three generations later and leads to the glorious redemption wrought by God through Moses and the birth of the nation of Israel.

In the Bible and in later rabbinical literature, dreams are seen as tantamount to prophecy. Dreams are not simply the idle by-products of our cerebral cortex but they are truly communications from God which must not be overlooked. Dreams are not supposed to be discarded as delusional fluff, fantasies that we can enjoy for a moment but which must ultimately be ignored in the face of harsh reality. Dreams are supposed to give us a pathway towards our future. You need to have the vision; you need to have the dream to provide us with that guiding beacon towards a better future. John Lennon, who was violently gunned down in New York twenty-seven years ago, imagined a world without possessions or greed or hunger, a world without borders or divisions, a world where all the people were living life in peace, he sang, “You may say I’m a dreamer but I’m not the only one. I hope someday you’ll join us and the world will be as one.” To call someone a dreamer, it would seem, is to negate their vision to discard the world and the future they imagine. We need dreamers, we need visionaries, we may not have prophets but we need people who will look at the possibilities in our world and in the words of George Bernard Shaw often quoted by Robert Kennedy will not “see things as they are and say why.” Rather they will, “dream things that never were and say ‘Why not?’”

Just this past week, ironically on the 60th anniversary of the United Nations vote that created a Jewish state and an Arab state in the territory of Palestine, Israeli and Arab delegates met in Annapolis, Maryland to begin again the discussions and negotiations which might ultimately lead to that reality. Many Arab and other Muslim organization and states are vehemently against this. For them any recognition of the right of Israel to exist as a Jewish state within the dar al-Islam the Islamic world is tantamount to blasphemy and an insult to Islam. Many hold that this concept is at the heart of Islamic belief for most Muslims and that recognition of Israel’s right to exist and the honest negotiations to create a lasting peace between Arabs and Israelis is an impossible dream, a fantasy.

The Religious Action Center of the Reform movement, one of the more liberal organizations within the Union for Reform Judaism, posted an online resource site for information about the conference in Annapolis and any documents, statements or indications of progress would be reported via this website. The password to enter this website was “peace.” Rabbi Walter Zanger, a Reform rabbi who lives in Ein Karem near the Hadassah Medical Center in Jerusalem, wrote that the Religious Action Center by using “peace” as the password demonstrates how it is a “victim of its own dreams, delusions and fantasies.” His rhetoric is and always has been rather harsh. I agree with his statement that this attempt at the rebirth of the Mideast peace process is best approached without illusion but I strongly disagree that the hope for peace, the dream of peace is a foolish waste of time. Rabbi Zanger goes on to say, “God bless the dreamers because they want they right things but let us not delude ourselves into believing that this conference will in any way contribute to peace.” I am not ready to give up hope and to despair. I agree that it does not look very promising and that the optimism I felt thirty years ago when Egyptian president Anwar Sadat came to Israel has waned considerably, but I am not prepared to give up hope; I am not prepared to stop dreaming.

Rabbi Dr. David Nelson who sits on the Rabbinic Council of ARZA, the Association of Reform Zionists wrote, “No one knows what will happen in Annapolis but we ought to hope. Even though the chances that any real progress will be made is slim, the risks to Israel are great and the administration’s motivation is questionable, im kol zeh, even knowing all this, we should allow ourselves to hope.” Rabbi Nelson asks, “Why hope when most rational analysis suggests that there is very little that we can realistically expect?” and he answers, “Our goal, our raison d’etre, our reason for being as a people is the repair of the world. This mission is what drives us, what defines us. And in order to accomplish it, we must maintain hope that it can be done. While Senator Barack Obama characterizes hope as audacity, for us Jews, hope is nothing short of a mitzvah, a commandment. Without it, we would quickly give up our dream of bringing the world to perfection. Without it, we could not sing our national anthem Hatikvah – the Hope.”

Od lo avda tikvateynu Our hope has not been lost despite all these years of war and oppression and persecution. Our hope is not lost and our dream will never die. As the poet Langston Hughes wrote, we must “hold fast to dreams for if dreams die, life is like a broken winged bird that can not fly.”

May it be God’s will that our dreams never die, that our hope is never lost and that someday we will be able to see a world perfected and complete where each person can sit under their vine and fig tree and no one can make them afraid.

And let us say, Amen

2007-12-03T08:26:00.000-08:00

Sermon Thanksgiving Interfaith Service 11-21-07

Seven score and four years ago, President Abraham Lincoln stood on the battlefield of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania and offered some brief remarks at the dedication of the military cemetery. The ceremony was originally scheduled for September 1863, just two months after the epic civil war battle, but the main speaker Edward Everett could not compose a speech in such a short time so the ceremony was postponed until November 19, 1863. Edward Everett, at that time, was known as the country’s greatest orator. He was a former Secretary of State, a former US Senator and Representative, the former Governor of Massachusetts and the president of Harvard University.

The program for that day’s ceremony of dedication called for prayers by clergy, patriotic music by the Marine Corps band, and the main oration by the Honorable Edward Everett. Almost as an afterthought, the organizers of the event called upon the President to make a few appropriate dedicatory remarks. The bands played their musical selections, Reverend Stockton offered the invocation and then Mr. Everett got up and delivered his well-written oration. He spoke for two hours detailing the battle of Gettysburg, its critical role in turning back the advance of the Confederate forces and the bravery and sacrifice of the soldiers. More music played and then Lincoln got up to speak.

There was a photographer present to record the event but there is no picture of President Lincoln delivering his remarks. It took so long for the photographer to set up his equipment for each picture that by the time he was ready, Lincoln was done with his address. His speech contained 272 words written into ten sentences and it took him a little over two minutes to deliver his remarks. The next day, the Honorable Edward Everett wrote a letter to Abraham Lincoln where he said, “I should be glad if I could flatter myself that I came as near to the central idea of the occasion in two hours as you did in two minutes.”

In that brief but exceedingly eloquent speech, Abraham Lincoln reminded the listeners and the entire American nation that in the civil war, in fact in any war, the single most important component is the soldier, on the ground, fighting for his country. As Lincoln said, “We cannot consecrate this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here have consecrated it far above our poor power to add or detract.” While he incorrectly stated that the world will not “long remember what we say here,” he correctly stated, “the world can never forget what they did here.” We, the ones living in freedom, must dedicate ourselves to “the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced.” Lincoln challenged us to honor those who died by increasing our “devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion” and for us to “highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain.” The suffering and sacrifice of the soldier demands our dedication and devotion to their noble cause, the cause of freedom. The suffering and the sacrifice of the soldier demands our devotion and dedication to the physical, financial, emotional and spiritual well being of the soldier and his or her family.

At the entrance of Infantry Hall in Fort Benning, Georgia, the home of the US Army Infantry, there is a quote from General George C. Marshall who served as Commandant of Fort Benning before he went on to be the Army Chief of Staff and Secretaries of Defense and State. The quote states that in all battles, conflicts and wars, the primary focus must be on the soldier. He is the one that leads the charge. He is the one that puts his life on the line. He and now she is the one that brings the fight to our enemies and defends our country, our rights and our freedoms. As an active duty US Army chaplain, I served four years at Fort Benning as the chaplain for the Infantry Training Brigade, a Combat Engineer Battalion, a MASH unit, and the Officer Candidate School. Our teachers at the chaplain school in Fort Monmouth New Jersey, our supervisors and commanders in Fort Benning drove General Marshall’s lesson home to us on post and in the field. The soldier must be our primary concern as well as the soldier’s family especially during times of deployment. Above all else, we must care for the soldier and the soldier’s family. Always remember it is the soldier who suffers the most, it is the soldier who sacrifices the most. More than anybody else, it is the soldier who craves peace while he and she defends our country and our rights and fights so that we can remain free. To paraphrase Abraham Lincoln who wrote a heartfelt letter on November 21, 1864 to Mrs. Bixby, a mother who had lost her sons in battle, it is the soldier and the soldier’s family who lays “so costly a sacrifice upon the altar of freedom.”

In October 1993, my unit, the Combat Engineers Battalion, was deployed to Mogadishu, Somalia. I had suffered a herniated disc a few months earlier so I traded places with the chaplain from our brigade’s MASH unit and he went with the soldiers to Somalia. Along with my duties with the Jewish community on post and with the soldiers of the MASH unit, I was responsible for family support for the families of our soldiers that were deployed to Somalia. That year, Thanksgiving was a very difficult time for those families; they were hurting financially, emotionally and spiritually. I remember making tons of phone calls asking every first sergeant and every company commander to find out which families needed help to properly celebrate Thanksgiving. I then called supermarkets and food banks and encouraged every chaplain to raise funds from his or her congregation. And then on the day before Thanksgiving, using my chaplain assistant and any body I could find, we set up dozens of tables and countless numbers of boxes in the chapel and proceeded to create an assembly lines of turkeys, canned cranberry sauce and sweet potatoes and some miniature pumpkin pies to put together meals for all the families of the soldiers in our brigade who were in need and who were deployed to Somalia. From then on, Thanksgiving always took on an additional significance for me. It provided me with a unique perspective and it reminded me of our blessings and our freedoms and why we need to be truly thankful.

A week after Abraham Lincoln’s memorable Gettysburg Address, the nation celebrated its first national Thanksgiving decreed by presidential proclamation. In his proclamation of October 1863, President Lincoln called upon the nation to offer thanksgiving and praise to our almighty Father for all our blessings and while doing so with humility “commend to His tender care all those who have become mourners and sufferers in the lamentable civil war in which we are unavoidably engaged.” Here again we see that Thanksgiving is immoral and arrogant without concern and compassion for the soldiers and the families who are suffering. A true thanksgiving is impossible without supporting the soldiers and their families.

Today we are not in the midst of a Civil War or a World War but we have thousands of soldiers deployed in Asia and we have thousands of soldier’s spouses, children and parents suffering emotionally, financially, and spiritually. We have lost nearly 4,000 US sailors, soldiers and airmen in a war that was a mistake; that should never have been fought but no matter how we might feel about this war and its administration and management, we must never lose sight of the sacrifice and the suffering of our soldiers and their families. They must be our primary concern. They are fighting for our country, for our way of life and for our belief that all people have the right to be free from fear, free from persecution, free from oppression and free from tyranny.

This is what Thanksgiving is all about. This is what we have to be thankful for this holiday; thankful for our homes, thankful for our families, thankful for our health and safety, thankful that we don’t have to sleep in a ditch in the desert as our soldiers do, and thankful for our freedoms which are soldiers are fighting to protect for us and the good people of this world.

Let us never forget, as in the closing words of the anthem of the US Army Officer Candidate School, “freedom’s never free.” It comes with an exceedingly high price. and let us thank God and show our support for the soldiers who have protected our freedoms in wars past and who continue to do so today and let us fervently hope and pray on this Thanksgiving that there will very soon come a day when each person will be able to sit under their vine and fig tree safe and secure without any fear and no one will study war any more.

And let us say, Amen

2007-12-03T08:25:00.000-08:00

TBEI Shofar Article - November 2007

FROM THE RABBI’S DESK

Not too long ago, we all went on a first date. We know what it is like to meet our future in-laws for the first time or to go on our first important job interview. We’re nervous and apprehensive but above all we want to make a good impression. Although as sophisticated human beings, we all try not to make judgments based on appearance, it is an unfortunate yet consistent aspect of human behavior. Consequently, when we go on that first interview or date, we want to look our best. We want to put our best foot forward and give ourselves our most advantageous position. Not only do we hopefully impress our future boss, spouse or in-laws with our incredible charm and good looks but we demonstrate pride in our appearance and ourselves as well. After all, if we do not have pride in ourselves, who will and if we do not offer our best presentation of who we are, how can we be attractive to others.

There is a rabbinic principle known as hiddur ha-mitzvah, the beautification of the mitzvah, which should guide our performance of every public mitzvah as individuals, as families and as a congregation. In practice, this principle is quite simple. In every mitzvah we undertake the obligation to fulfill, we put every effort in to fulfilling it with as much beauty, grace and pride as is reasonably possible. For example, when we have a Passover Seder or a Shabbat dinner, we use the best of what we have, the best food and wine we can afford, the good plates and cutlery, and the better tablecloth and napkins. We practice the rituals with sincere intent and celebratory majesty. We do not abbreviate the Kiddush, rush through the Seder rituals so we can eat, or give the lulav and etrog a mere perfunctory shake. We imbue each ritual, ceremony and event with greater spiritual significance and lasting beauty when we abide by this principle.

When we apply this principle of hiddur ha-mitzvah to the congregation, it takes on added significance. We are the Jewish Center of St. Lucie County, serving the greater Treasure Coast Jewish community. In fact, we are the only Jewish institution in all of St. Lucie County and therefore the only place where mitzvot are performed in a collective, public fashion. We, the congregation, so much more than individuals or households, have to be diligent and always incorporate hiddur ha-mitzvah into every Shabbat and festival service and every religious ceremony and celebration. Temple Beth El Israel is the face of Judaism and the Jewish community for St. Lucie County and as such we must demonstrate pride in our Temple and our faith with every religious event that occurs here by practicing hiddur ha-mitzvah putting our best foot forward and making a positive and attractive first, second and third impression.

L’shalom,

Rabbi Arthur Rutberg

2007-12-03T08:24:00.000-08:00

Sermon for Yom Kippur 5768

Marc Angel, rabbi of Congregation Shearith Israel in New York, the oldest congregation in North America, told the following story in 2002. A Jewish man was riding on the subway reading a Nazi newspaper. An acquaintance of his, who was sitting nearby, noticed this and became very agitated. He approached him and said, “Moishe, have you lost your mind? Why are you reading a Nazi newspaper?” Moishe replied, “You know Avram, I used to read the Jewish newspapers but what did find? Jews being persecuted, Israel being threatened and attacked, Jews living in poverty, so one day I looked at the Nazi newspaper and what do I find? Jews own all the banks, Jews control the media, and Jews are all rich and powerful. In the Nazi newspapers, Jews rule the world. That’s why I switched; the news is so much better!’”

For Rabbi Angel the message of this story is that despite the fact that history has not been easy on the Jewish people, “we have managed to keep our sense of humor.” He wonders if we are foolish or if we are hopelessly naïve. He discounts these possibilities, expresses his pride in our survival despite all the years of persecution and victimization, and concludes his message by saying, “The mystery of Jewish survival is one of the mysteries of human civilization but an even greater mystery is how we Jews have managed to survive a brutal history while remaining optimistic, idealistic and dedicated to building a better world.” My friends, it is not a mystery; it is the reason.

The fact of the Holocaust begs the question of Jewish survival; how did any of the Jews of Europe survive that? Back in August, I caught a fascinating program on the Discovery channel. It was about a family of dwarves, the Ovitz family, who survived the Holocaust. While I know there is no hard and fast rule for us to predict who was more likely to be a Holocaust survivor, but common wisdom would expect most survivors to be stocky, strong young men whom the Nazis kept around for forced labor. How odd it is that not one or two of these dwarves survived but the entire family of the seven Ovitz dwarves survived. One factor in their survival was their musical skills. They were professional musical performers and could entertain all audiences. Secondly, they merited the bizarre fortune of landing in Auschwitz and being singled out by Dr. Josef Mengele as his dwarves. Thus they were spared the gas chambers. Before Mengele could carry out any of his diabolical experiments on the Ovitz family dwarves, Auschwitz was liberated. In all the transfers from ghettoes to camps that the Ovitz family endured they always insisted on staying together and because the Nazis valued their uniqueness and their entertainment potential, they were able to stay together. Lena Ovitz, the last surviving member of this family, credits their survival with staying together. This can and should be used as a model for the Jewish people in its entirety. Our rabbis tell us that the loss of the second Temple in Jerusalem was brought on by the infighting among the Jewish people. If the Jewish people in Europe in the 1930’s and 40’s had more communication and more interaction and less prejudice of German Jew versus Litvak and Litvak versus Galitzianer, many more lives could have spared during the Holocaust. And for the present and the future Jewish people, staying together is key to our survival. When the Orthodox and the Reform Jews in this country work together, accepting each other’s differences and acknowledging our common peoplehood, then our chances for survival are greatly enhanced. When the Ashkenazic and Sephardic and the religious and the secular Jews in Israel work in common purpose at all times and not only during times of war, Israel’s survival for many more than her current 60 years is all but guaranteed. But we have not been a people known for great cooperation, for sharing and pluralistic acceptance of each other’s different beliefs and practices. If staying together were all that mattered for our survival, then we would not have survived all these years. “Two Jews, three opinions” is not a joke.

In my first congregation in Steubenville, Ohio, my wife and I had the pleasure of knowing and befriending a Holocaust survivor from Hungary named Gabor Adler. Gabor was an amazing individual. Having survived Auschwitz, he was captured by Soviet soldiers and spent time in a Soviet prison camp. After being released from the gulag and living for a number of years in Hungary, he came to this country barely escaping Hungary with his life during the Soviet invasion of 1956. Gabor once told us a story that seems almost incredible but is frighteningly true. In advance of the Soviet onslaught, the Nazis took many of the camp’s inmates out of the camp, lined them up by a pit, and shot them all leaving them all for dead. Gabor was shot but the shot ricocheted off the bridge of his nose. He fell unconscious into the pit and was covered by dirt. Miraculously, nobody fell in on top of him and when he came to, he brushed the dirt off of him, got out of the mass grave and crawled back to the camp. He told me that he found the will to go on every day and not succumb to despair by telling himself, “Tomorrow, I’ll smoke a cigarette. Tomorrow, I’ll eat a good meal. Tomorrow, I’ll drink a glass of wine. I may not have it today but tomorrow I will.”

Rabbi Hugo Gryn was born in 1928 the town of Berehovo in Czechoslovakia. When he was 10, Hungarian troops took over Berehovo. The following year, as a result of the Munich Pact signed by Hitler and British Prime Minister Chamberlain, the German Army replaced them. In 1944, the Jews in the town were forced into the ghetto. Six weeks later the Gryn family were deported to Auschwitz. Hugo and his mother survived but his brother and father both died in Auschwitz. After the war Gryn emigrated to the United States where he trained as a rabbi. He later moved to England where he served as a rabbi for 32 years in a London synagogue. Rabbi Hugo Gryn died in 1996 but he left us this lesson from his life in Auschwitz.

One time when he and his father received a small bit of margarine, they did not use it on their piece of bread instead they set it aside and saved it to be used on Hanukah as fuel to light the menorah. Hugo and his father zealously protected that bit of margarine until Hanukah came. They tore some cloth into thin strips to use as wicks, dipped them in the margarine but the wick would not light. The flame sputtered out; margarine is not an effective fuel. Sixteen-year-old Hugo Gryn was angry, he could not accept that they wasted the margarine, their precious food, for the sake of a ridiculous, naïve notion that it could light the lights of the menorah. His father patiently counseled him that he should not be angry. He reminded young Hugo of the haftarah for the Shabbat in Hanukah where God tells the prophet Zechariah that things will not be accomplished in this world by might or by power but by God’s spirit. He taught him never to lose his faith in God’s spirit, that God’s spirit always provides, and that while the margarine could have given them more sustenance for one or maybe two meals, the hope that they could use the margarine to joyfully celebrate Hanukah in the barracks of Auschwitz helped them survive for months.

The word hope in Hebrew is “tikvah” as in Hatikvah, the national anthem of the State of Israel. It is related to two other Hebrew words, kav, which means a line, and mikveh, a special reservoir of living water. Hope, tikvah, is like a line thrown out to a person at risk of drowning that saves them. Hope is like a reservoir of support which we can draw from in times of trouble. Rabbi Angel wondered how we could survive all these years and still be optimistic. We survived all these years because we are optimistic, because we hope, because we grab on to that safety line, we hang on by a thread, we dig deep into that reservoir reaching out to connect to others, our families, our friends, our ancestors and our descendants, and we hold on with all our might – and we survive.

The Holocaust is in our past, the pogroms and expulsions are facts of a bygone age, and the State of Israel has existed for the past 60 years. The embodiment of all the hope of the Jewish people, our hope of nearly two thousand years, stands in defiance of all the persecutions and all the propaganda leveled at us by Nazis, Cossacks, Crusaders and Romans and everybody else in between. Yet we can still find anti-Semitism rearing its ugly head.

At the end of the nineteenth century, Theodore Herzl had a brilliant idea; an idea he felt sure would eradicate the nasty problem that plagued the Jewish people since the days of Alexander the Great; the 2,300-year-old specific form of racism and xenophobia known as anti-Semitism. It was Herzl’s theory and conviction, as he emphatically stated in his 1896 work “The Jewish State,” that we are a nation and we will rid ourselves of our abused and victimized status once and for all when we become a nation like the other nations with our own land, language, government and international political standing. His theory, which came to be known as Zionism, proposed the end to anti-Semitism in our time. There was an undeniable logic to his proposition. Since the bulk of our Diaspora existence took place in Europe and it was in Europe that we were never allowed to fully integrate into the general society and were treated as outcasts and non-citizens, once we became citizens of our own state, left Europe and the rest of the Diaspora to live in our own land and under our own government, we would be equal to the French, British, Germans and other nations and we would not be persecuted any more. The theory failed because it did not take into consideration the fact that Arabs who also wanted and deserved a state of their own inhabited the land of Israel and that the vast majority of the Jewish people especially American Jews would not choose to leave their homes and live in the Jewish state. So while the European anti-Semitism that Herzl was familiar with is a thing of the past, Zionism did not end anti-Semitism. In fact, current political realities and myths have given rise to a new form of anti-Semitism; anti-Zionism.

This new anti-Semitism began in the late 1960’s following the Six Day War, became the mantra of the UN in the 1970’s, the underlying theme of media reporting from the Middle East since the 1980’s and over the past two decades, it has become widespread in the Western world especially in many intellectual, liberal institutions and social circles. Darling of the Saudi Arabian elite, ex-President Jimmy Carter, is one of the leading spokesmen for this newfound, socially acceptable and politically correct form of anti-Semitism. We have seen undercurrents of it in media reporting for many years but the most shameful and abominable display came in the form of the special CNN report on God’s warriors.

The term God’s warriors is a despicable term, a term that was used to grotesque excess in the Middle Ages with the Crusaders and the Inquisition and one that has no place in the vocabulary of the 21st century. The last time Jews saw themselves as God’s warriors was in our desperate and doomed rebellion against the oppressive, corrupt and pagan Roman Empire nearly 2,000 years ago. Yet Christiane Amanpour of CNN uses this term to lump together Orthodox Zionists who settle in the occupied territories, Orthodox American Jews who raise money to support the settlements and the rebuilding of the Jewish Quarter in the Old City of Jerusalem, pro-Israel lobbyists in Washington, DC, Israeli government officials who overlooked the settlement or tacitly encouraged their expansion, American Jews that attend Zionist camps and are active in the Zionist youth movements, and Yigal Amir who assassinated Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in 1995, Baruch Goldstein who massacred Arab worshippers in Hebron in 1994 and the Jewish Underground that put bombs in the cars of several Palestinian Arab mayors of West Bank towns in 1980 and tried to blow up the Dome of the Rock.

One of the people that CNN highlighted in this program and defined as one of God’s Jewish warriors was an Orthodox American Jewish woman named Sondra Oster Baras who now lives on the West Bank. Sondra’s parents are Holocaust survivors who taught her that Israel was essential in case there is another Holocaust and that was the basis for her beliefs. She conducts tours in Israel for American groups especially fundamentalist Christian groups and speaks to churches and other Christian gatherings galvanizing financial support for Israel and the settlements, taking money from fundamentalist Christians and ignoring their theological view of Israel as a prerequisite for the second coming of Jesus when all non-believers are damned for all eternity. We understand that Sondra represents a small fraction of American Jews and for that matter Israelis but not only did Ms. Amanpour gloss over that fact and misrepresent our connection to Israel as a strident and extreme nationalism but she did it in such an underhanded way that nearly 50% of American Jews could be seen as guilty of fostering these extreme attitudes in their children. In telling Sondra Oster Baras’ story, Ms. Amanpour mentions that she grew up with a strong attachment to Israel because of her parent’s influence and went to a Zionist summer camp. She never said which one or to which Zionist organization it was affiliated. It could have been Tel Ha-Shomer, Ha-Bonim, Ayelet Ha-shachar or even Young Judea. She quickly zips through her early adult life, mentions that she was a successful Wall Street lawyer who left all that behind her to make aliya in 1984 and settle on the West Bank. Sondra then makes a statement, “I never felt fully American, I’m Jewish and I need to live here to strengthen the Jewish presence in Samaria.” And I am watching this and listening to this and I realize that Christiane Amanpour has implied that sending our children to Zionist summer camps leads to strident, ultra-religious, nationalism. She was essentially equating support for Israel with violence and terrorism. It was Zionism equals racism all over again and this time it was not in the limited arena of the United Nations but it was on national television for millions to see and be misled. How diabolically ironic and despicable it is that the very ideology designed to free us from the scourge of anti-Semitism is being turned upside down and misrepresented and used against us to engender anti-Semitism. Our 2,000-year-old hope defined and framed by Zionism for the past 120 years has become the very thing used by our enemies to vilify us.

Zionism is not a new phenomenon. In fact, it started long before Theodore Herzl gave it a name. Zionism, the attachment to the land of Israel and the desire to return to it and claim it as our homeland goes back 2,500 years to days of the prophet Ezekiel. Then the exiled children of Israel were languishing in Babylon. They were despondent and despairing. They though all was lost until Ezekiel shares with them his vision of the dry bones. A vision that is frightening yet inspiring, a vision that depicts the people of Israel as a pile of dry bones in a valley, and as Ezekiel watches, God talks to him and tells him that these bones can come back to life. And Ezekiel sees the bones growing muscles and tendons and skins and coming together and becoming people, and the people cry out “avda tikvateynu” our hope is lost. And God says, “od lo”, No, not yet for I will bring you out of your graves, I will bring you out of your despair and bring you back to your land once more.” And every year for the past 60 years, on Israel Independence Day, this Biblical passage is read over Israeli radio to inspire our brothers and sisters in the land of Zion and Jerusalem that our hope is not lost, that we still hold on to the dream of living in our land with freedom, security and peace. As the great American poet Langston Hughes said, “Hold fast to dreams for if dreams die, life is a broken winged bird that cannot fly.”

In spite of condemnations from the United Nations, in spite of anti-Israel bias throughout the world media, in spite of continued lies and accusations hurled at us by supposed world leaders, in spite of terrorism and violence against our people, we, the Jewish people and the people of Israel remain an idealistic, optimistic nation, committed to a brighter future. Our spirit has not been broken by the thousands of years of persecution, torment, death and destruction; we will not be broken now. In spite of it all, we will survive. Am yisrael Chai – the people of Israel lives. We will survive not because of power or might but because of God’s spirit working within us, the spirit we call hope - tikvah

Anne Frank wrote in her diary, “In spite of it all, I still believe that people are good at heart.” In spite of it all, we believe in the bright positive future for this world and all humanity. We dedicate ourselves to the purpose of tikkun olam, to making the world a better place for all through our righteous actions. All Jewish men, women and children, Reform Orthodox and all stops in between, should devote time and energy to improving our world and hoping for a better day. A popular song in Israel in the late 1960’s entitled “Machar” – tomorrow, sang about a day when Israel and the entire world would live and peace, sharing and celebrating together. The chorus said, “All of this is not a parable or a dream. It is as real as sunlight at noon. All of this will come true tomorrow, and if not tomorrow then the day after.”

In spite of it all, this is how we view the world. In spite of it all, we will laugh at our selves, we will believe in a bright possible future for all people, we will work together despite differences of opinions or levels of observance or places of origin and most of all, no matter what, we will hope that tomorrow will bring a day of security and safety for all our people, a day of cooperation and communication for all the world to share, and a day of justice for all people, freedom for those in emotional, physical or political chains, and a day when all people can live in peace sitting under their vine or fig tree without fear of anyone. We fervently hope that day will come tomorrow and if not tomorrow then at least the day after.

And let us say, Amen

2007-12-03T08:23:00.000-08:00

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

2007-12-03T08:22:00.000-08:00

Sermon for RH Morning Day 1-5768

Six years ago we knew right from wrong. Six years ago there was no doubt in our minds that we were right and they were wrong. Six years ago we had an unshakeable sense of moral certainty. The terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001 were barbaric and evil, designed to inflict the maximum amount of death and destruction and to harm the maximum amount of innocent human life. Whatever our national sins or failings may have been, we had done nothing to deserve that, on that we were clear. On that, we knew we were right.

As human beings, we intuitively know right from wrong. Primatologists have long argued that the roots of human morality are evident in the social behavior of apes. Harvard biologist Marc Hauser who conducted research based on this idea proposed in his new book “Moral Minds” that people are born with a moral instinct hard-wired into their brains by evolution. He demonstrates as evidence of this the instant moral judgments we make in response to life-or-death situations. We are unable to come up with plausible rationalizations for our quick moral decisions because they are generated subconsciously. Dr. Hauser bases his theory on evolutionary biology, which explains these moral restraints on our behavior as skills required for societal living and have been reinforced by natural selection because of their survival value. To prove his point, Dr. Hauser presents the philosophical dilemma of the runaway trolley car.

Suppose you are standing on a bridge overlooking a trolley track and you see five people walking on the track up ahead. You hear a runaway trolley car fast approaching which will surely kill those five people. Beside you is a lever, which you can throw to switch the train to a sidetrack; one person is walking on that sidetrack. When asked if it is okay to throw that switch and save the five people even though one person will die, most people in Dr. Hauser’s study would say it is. Then Dr. Hauser had his subjects suppose that you could save the five people crossing the track by throwing down a heavy object into the path of the approaching trolley car but the only thing available to you is a person standing next to you. When asked if it would be okay to push that person off the bridge and save the five, most people said no although the number of lives saved and lives lost would be the same. Our hard wired moral programming forces us to see a difference between a foreseen harm of the train killing the person on the track and the intended harm of throwing a person off the bridge despite the fact that most people could not articulate why they saw the death of one to save five as okay in one instance and undeniably wrong in the other. Dr. Hauser uses this to demonstrate that our knowledge of right and wrong is inherently in our brains and that our parents and our teachers merely reinforce and shape that knowledge. We do not need a horrific event such as the attacks of 9-11 to teach us right from wrong. We do not need Torah or Talmud to teach us right from wrong, we know.
Knowledge without accompanying action is empty and useless. Knowledge of right and wrong without upholding right behavior and chiding wrong behavior is a disservice and a disgrace. In the Torah reading for Yom Kippur, Leviticus 19, we find clear instructions on how to practice right behavior and avoid the wrong. Honoring parents, observing the Sabbath, and caring for the poor, orphaned and widowed are just a few of the instructions found in this rich Torah text. Yet these are mitzvot which guide the individual and not necessarily society towards moral, righteous living; the more significant passage is found in verse 17 where the Torah teaches us “hocheach tocheah et achicha” you will surely rebuke your fellow and not bear sin on his account.

We who know right from wrong have an obligation to speak out against a wrong that is committed, not to do so would be a sin. Our rabbis state in the Talmud tractate Shabbat page 54b, “Anyone who is able to protest the wrongdoing of a member of his or her household and does not protest is held accountable for the wrongdoings of the members of his household, as well as the members of his community, his city and the entire world.” To paraphrase Rabbi Tarfon who said, “lo alecha ha-m’lacha ligmor” it is not up to us to reprove the entire world but we have to do our part.

Tokhekha, rebuking others when we see wrong committed, is a critical commandment; one whose fulfillment and practice has been lacking. Rava, a great Talmudic sage of the 4th century, argued that we must always rebuke wrongdoing even when confronting a person to whom we owe great respect such as parents, teachers, rabbis and even political leaders. He explained the double emphasis on tochecha in Leviticus 19 to teach us that we must rebuke under all circumstances. (Baba Metzia 31a) While the manner of rebuke may differ, tochecha remains our obligation all the same. Menachem ha-Meiri, a rabbi of 13th century France who wrote an extensive commentary on the Talmud taught that the greater the power of the rebuker, the greater his obligation to rebuke. He wrote in his commentary, “the king is punished for the wrongdoings of his people if he does not protest their actions and the people are punished for the wrongdoings of the king if they do not protest.” In a democracy such as ours, it is the people who have the greater power; therefore it is the people and their spokesmen who have the greater obligation to rebuke. Rabbi Menahem concludes, “the more powerful are more severely punished with regard to that which they should notice but choose instead to avert their eyes.”

In the second book of Samuel, chapter 11, an infamous incident is recorded. The Israelites are fighting a long protracted war against the Philistines. Yet in the midst of this justified war of self-defense where the death of soldiers is a foreseen and unavoidable tragedy, King David interjects intentional harm. David instructs his military chief of staff to put Uriah, the husband of Bathsheba whom David desires, in the front lines and thus assure his death. Although David would have liked it to appear that Uriah died as an unavoidable consequence of war, the prophet Nathan saw through that.

To fulfill his obligation of tochecha, Nathan tells David a story about a man who owned a lamb. The man loved the lamb and made it a pet giving it the finest of grass and food and water. Near this man lived a great noble with a huge palatial estate with plenty of sheep grazing all over his land. One day, this noble decides to entertain a very special guest. Rather than slaughtering one of the sheep from his estate, the noble takes his neighbor’s one beloved lamb, has it slaughtered and prepared for dinner with his guest. Upon hearing this story, David flies into a rage and says to Nathan, “The man who did this deserves to die!” To which Nathan replies, “atah ha-ish! You are that man!” Nathan the prophet becomes the voice of moral certainty, speaking truth to power and rebuking the king for his exceedingly wrong actions.

The prophet Nathan had moral clarity and clear vision; he knew right from wrong, he was not swept up in the culture of deception that surrounded the king instead he spoke truth to power and took the path of integrity and honesty by properly and forthrightly rebuking him. In today’s society, the people and the press should occupy that role yet the obligation of tochecha remains unfulfilled.

Bill Moyers, a journalist and ordained Baptist minister raised in Texas, who served as President Johnson’s press secretary at the height of the Vietnam War, produced and directed an investigative report within his long-running PBS series The Bill Moyers Journal. This scathing report entitled “Buying the War” first aired in April of this year. In it he revealed that the press or more precisely the media in general had been co-opted. Newspapers and the electronic media are both designed to serve the people, to speak truth to power, and to rebuke the moral inconsistencies. Bill Moyers reveals that not only did the mass media not point out what was wrong; they accepted the government’s claims as fact and promoted them essentially declaring what was wrong to be right. In the six months leading up to the March 2003 invasion of Iraq, nearly every media outlet be it electronic or written participated in this massive misinformation campaign. Intelligence that raised doubt on a Saddam Hussein – Bin Laden connection was suppressed and put on the back pages if at all. Information coming from the UN inspectors themselves that there were no weapons of mass destruction was ignored or ridiculed. Every major network and every major newspaper including CBS, The Washington Post and The New York Times abdicated their journalistic integrity. According to Bill Moyers, most of these network reporters and newspaper journalists were told by their higher ups that dissent is not only unpatriotic, it would be bad for business and they did not want to run the risk of being a liability to their business; that would lead to only one thing. Only Knight-Ridder newspapers were willing to stand up and say, “Wait a second, there is reliable information out there that things may not be as they seem, that maybe we do not need to invade Iraq and to do so would only bring more death and destruction.” But they were a small outfit; their voice was miniscule compared to CNN, the major networks, and the big city papers. Their voice was like that of the lone voice in the wilderness and not the righteous voice of rebuke. The voice of the media should have been like the voice of Nathan the Prophet holding up the mirror of truth and integrity to the government and forcing all of us to see right from wrong.

While it angers me to consider that over 3,000 American lives have been lost as well as tens of thousands of Iraqi lives because of this misguided military intervention against a sovereign nation that was not a threat to us, I am more concerned about seeing this repeated with its eastern neighbor. The current administration recently disclosed that it is considering naming elements of the Iran Revolutionary Guard Council as terrorist organizations. This would give us the right to attack an integral component of Iran’s government under the authority given the President by Congress after the 9-11 attacks. Much of the incentive for this coming policy declaration comes from the deadly attack on five US soldiers at the Iraqi Police Compound in Karbala this past January 20th. Every article and news report that I have seen either in print, on television or online has stated that Iran was behind that attack. I will not go into the details of the attack but although I was initially skeptical of the government officials stating the firm position of Iranian involvement; it seemed plausible and credible. But then I found one article in the August 6 issue of TIME magazine that gave me pause. The reporter Mark Kukis interviewed LT Nathan Diaz, the only officer to survive the attack in Karbala. LT Diaz witnessed the Iraqi security police trained by US forces do absolutely nothing to deter the attacking force. In every other confrontation, the Iraqi security police and the Americans fought together against the Shi’ite militias or other enemies yet that night, according to SFC Michael King, “No one twisted an ankle. No one jammed a thumb. No one lifted a finger. Nothing was done.” The Iraqi police chief al-Quraishy was deeply apologetic yet LT Diaz was considerably less than convinced of his sincerity. In this article, TIME magazine states that the Americans interviewed in the military investigation support the view that the Iraqi police were complicit in this attack either in advance of the ambush, during the fight or after when the attackers escaped but neither the US nor Iraqi authorities have brought any charges against the Iraqi police choosing instead to point the finger of accusation at the forces of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard. I have yet to find another news report challenging the administrations assertion that Iran is to blame for this attack and that the Revolutionary Guard should be considered a terrorist organization; our lethal enemy. Are we seeing our media repeating the mistakes of 2003 refusing to challenge the government’s claim, to investigate the truth of the matter, to clearly state what is wrong and what is right? I hope not.

Honesty, integrity, and accountability are disappearing qualities in our society but let us not be mistaken; our government and our media are not the only carriers and purveyors of this malignant societal condition. Thirty-one years ago, I was very proud to be able to participate in a presidential election. I was also proud because I believed the person I was voting for to be a person of integrity, honesty and dependability. In fact, he even said so, “I will not lie to you. You can depend on it.” This past November, thirty years after he was elected as the first post-Watergate president by idealistic minded people like many of us on a platform of honesty and integrity, Jimmy Carter claimed, “everything in the book is completely accurate.” The book he referred to is of course his infamous anti-Israel and anti-Semitic diatribe entitled “Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid.” Accurate is usually understood to mean truthful or factual; his book is neither. He makes the false claims in his book that the US policy has always been that Israel should return to the pre Six Day War borders; untrue. On June 19, 1967, President Johnson called for a new set of secure and recognized borders different from the ones that existed before the Six Day War and every US president after that, Republican and Democrat, has reiterated that basic tenet of US foreign policy. Carter claims that there would be peace if Israel returns to those borders. Not only have all US presidents disagreed with that claim but so has the UN Security Council and to further demonstrate the fallaciousness of Carter’s statement, the Palestinian Liberation Organization whose charter calls for the complete annihilation of the State of Israel was founded in 1964, three years before the Six Day War and the conquest of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. There are many more factual distortions in this book written by the man who appeared to personify integrity but I will decline from enumerating them all. Many Jewish supporters of Jimmy Carter and members of the Carter Center resigned in light of this book. The Central Conference of American Rabbis cancelled its visit to the Carter Center that had been scheduled during their recent convention in Atlanta. But by far the most insightful protest and righteous rebuke came from Harvard Law Professor Alan Dershowitz.

Professor Dershowitz begins by saying that when he first met Jimmy Carter in 1976, he considered him a man of principle and integrity. For years, he retained that positive image of President Carter even when he disagreed with some of his actions or opinions. When he heard that Jimmy Carter had accepted a monetary reward from Sheik Zayed of Saudi Arabia and his Islamic think-tank even after Harvard University had returned money from the Zayed center because of its anti-Semitic history, Professor Dershowitz could not believe it. How could a man of such apparent integrity enrich himself with such dirty money. This Zayed Center has hosted speakers who called Jews the enemies of the nations and attributed the assassination of President Kennedy and the attacks of 9-11 to Israel. Carter called Sheik Zayed his personal friend when he received this monetary reward. It turns out this was not the only time that Carter took dirty money. BCCI, a bank controlled by the Saudi Royal family and heavily financed by Sheik Zayed, gave Carter money to bail out his failing family peanut business and help him establish his center. Carter accuses US politicians of being beholden to the Israeli side of the Middle East conflict if they are enriched by Jewish lobbyist money. If money determines political views as Carter insists Jewish money does, then Carter’s views on the Middle East are not based on personal although misguided conviction, they are influenced and dictated by the vast sums of dirty Saudi money that he has received. Professor Dershowitz concludes his article by saying, “It pains me to say this but I now believe there is no person in American public life who has a lower ratio of real to apparent integrity than Jimmy Carter. The public perception of his integrity is extraordinarily high. His real integrity, it now turns out, is extraordinarily low.”
It would be one thing if his anti-Israel views were based on a strong personal conviction, which he truly believed and felt compelled to state not intending to harm anyone, but given the Arab money connection, it is clear that his statements are clearly not those of a passionate true believer but of a cold, calculated attempt to appease his financiers with no regard for the people he offended and harmed and the trust and faith in his integrity that he destroyed.

Our society is poorer today for the lack of integrity in public life. We are poorer today that there is no prophet Nathan to speak truth to power and say, “atah ha-ish,” You are the one guilty of this crime.” We are poorer today that there is no Emile Zola to stand up and say J’Accuse! The free press is an American right, a right guaranteed by our Constitution, a right we depend on. There are three branches in the Federal government that govern us, two we choose and one appointed, but it is the fourth estate, the press, that is supposed to speak to the people and for the people. It is the one considered to be far more important than all other branches of government. The press is to be accountable to no one save its readers; the press is the means of communication in a free society. If the press is constrained from challenging authority, from questioning integrity, from seriously and intensively investigating claims and statements, then is it truly free? If the news programming on major networks is now under the department of entertainment, then is it unbiased barebones reporting or is it spitting out what is popular, what is not confrontational, what is easy and therefore good for business rather than the factual, accurate truth. The reports of weapons of mass destruction should have been thoroughly examined and analyzed before we went to war. The Karbala incident must be thoroughly investigated and researched before we accuse Iran and use it as an excuse for military action against Tehran. And Jimmy Carter’s outrageous claims and financial ties to anti-Semitic Saudi oil money should be spread across the pages of our nation’s newspapers for it is a gross violation of the people’s trust. George Mason, one of our founding fathers and the author of the Virginia Bill of Rights, stated “the freedom of the press is one of the great bulwarks of liberty and can never be restrained but by despotic governments.” Monarchies, theocracies, and dictatorships deny freedom to the press and in those countries the press is eager to write the truth and they have to go underground to get their message out but in this country where we have a free press, truth is conquered by entertainment.

We are our own worst enemy. We have censored ourselves. We have stifled our obligation for tochecha. We have closed our eyes and refused to acknowledge what we intuitively know to be wrong. Our is a government by the people, of the people and for the people and once we allow the press to be ruled by corporate issues of profit and loss and not by truth and honesty than we, our society, our government and our nation suffer immeasurably.

This is Rosh Hashanah, hayom harat olam, the day the world came into existence, the day our rabbis taught us that Adam and Eve committed their sin and were banished from the Garden. That day when our eyes were opened up and we knew the difference between good and evil was the day when the fantasy ended and civilization began. My friends, we are not in the Garden of Eden anymore. We have not been there for nearly six thousand years. We know right from wrong. We must use that inherent human quality. We must use our innate moral compass to chart the right course and pursue integrity and honesty from our public figures and ourselves. We must resist insincerity, immorality and deceit and insist on truth, honesty and integrity from our fellow human beings, our fellow congregants, our families and ourselves. And we must rebuke those who do not uphold these values. Our society will not long endure if we continue to ignore the basic human necessities of truth, honesty and integrity.

Rabbi Shimon ben Gamaliel, one of our greatest teachers who perished during the ill-fated Jewish rebellion against the Roman Empire said, “The world is maintained by three things, by truth, by justice and by peace.” If you do not have truth, then you cannot have justice and without justice, there can be no peace. We are the government, we are the people, if we demand truth then we can pursue justice and if justice is truly served than we will achieve peace.

And let us say, Amen

2007-12-03T08:21:00.000-08:00

Sermon for Kol Nidre - 5768

At a party in 1961, two men, one a comedy performer and the other a comedy writer began a legendary conversation that became a classic comic skit. The party was hosted by Dick Van Dyke and the two men were Carl Reiner and Mel Brooks. Mel Brooks had just undergone painful surgery for gout and feeling some discomfort he quipped, "I feel like a 2000 year old man," which led Carl Reiner to begin questioning him what it's like to be a 2000 year old man and to describe the history that he had witnessed.
During the interview, Carl Reiner asks Mel Brooks, the 2,000 year old man, when did theology start, when did people begin to develop an awareness of God and believe in the Almighty. The 2,000 year old man answered, “Well, I’ll tell you. First there was this guy named Phil and Phil was big and Phil was strong. We were scared of Phil. Every day we would pray. ‘O Phil, please don’t hurt us. O Phil, please don’t hit us with that rock.’ And then one day, a bolt of lightning came out of the sky and struck Phil dead. It was at that moment we knew, ‘There’s someone bigger than Phil!’”
In ancient human history, we can see how people used theology to try to make sense of their world, the randomness of it and the order of it. They saw order and patterns in the movements of the sun, moon, stars and planets. They saw it in the tides and in the seasons and in every living thing. Yet death, disease and injury were random events which the innate human sense of ethics and fairness had trouble understanding. To explain the unexplainable in their world, they developed the idea of God or more accurately gods. Primitive man ascribed supernatural qualities to the sun and moon and all celestial bodies as well as to the major natural forces on earth such as wind and rain. As we became a more agrarian society, gods of rain and sun and gods of fertility became increasingly more important and their worship came to predominate religious life. The fear was that if we sinned, if we failed to appease these gods then we were condemned to drought and famine and ultimately death. The Canaanite religious cult which our ancestors encountered in the earliest days of Israel’s existence focussed a great deal of energy on worshipping these gods through fertility rites and cultic prostitution. When comparing Judaism with paganism, my medieval theology professor Rabbi Kravitz would make note of these Canaanite practices and jokingly begin to sing, “Give me that old-time religion.”
Back in July, Pope Benedict the 16th made a similar call for bringing back the old-time religion but it had nothing to do with pagan fertility rites and orgiastic rituals. What the Pope called for was the restoration of the antiquated Mass of the Council of Trent. The Council of Trent was the 19th ecumenical council of the Roman Catholic Church convened during the 16th century at a time of crisis for the Catholic Church. Catholic means universal and the Catholic church believed it was the embodiment and sole authority for Christianity. The Protestant Reformation, especially the Lutheran aspect, was a very serious threat to the authority of the Catholic church. The Council of Trent met on three distinct occasions over the years 1545-1563 and dogmatically restated Catholic doctrine, reasserting its primacy among Christian denominations. This reactionary council galvanized its followers, eliminated theological confusion among many Christians, and prompted a Counter Reformation which severely limited the spread of Protestant Christianity. The origins of catechism and the traditional theological doctrines of Catholicism especially those dealing with heaven and hell, original sin, resurrection, and salvation are found in the documents from the Council of Trent.
James Carroll, a Catholic and the author of the 2001 bestselling book Constantine’s Sword, an historical expose of the Catholic Church and their treatment of the Jews, wrote in the Boston Globe that the Council of Trent Mass that the Pope is advocating proposes a theology and an image of God that “more and more believers, including Catholics, simply do not recognize as the God we worship.” He goes on to say that the Pope is totally mistaken and misguided by taking this stand. James Carroll compares it to the Church’s stance in the days of the Council of Trent against Copernicus and scientific thinking. He equates it with the Pope denying science and claiming the Catholic Church’s exclusive position as the only authentic way to God. In his July 16th article, James Carroll chastises the Pope for failing to see that “the contemporary religious imagination has been transformed by understanding born of science. Once a believer has learned to think historically and critically, it is impossible any longer to think mythically.” He concludes his article by saying that the Pope’s call for a return to the Mass of the Council of Trent with its antiquated theology and anti-Judaism is a naive retreat into a fundamentalism that most believing Catholics in the 21st century have rejected.
One of the theological ramifications of the Council of Trent was the strengthening and soldifying of the doctrine of original sin. The Catholic concept of original sin is based on the story found in Genesis of Adam and Eve committing the grevious sin of eating of the fruit from the Tree of Knowledge. As punishment for their sin born out of temptation and lust, Adam and Eve were banished from the garden. Adam was forced to work for a living, Eve had to endure labor pains and human mortality became an eternal fact. In the letter to the Romans, Paul refers to Adam as the man who brought death into the world. The early church fathers interpreted this verse as equating sin with death and that Adam was guilty of bringing sin, what they called original sin, into the world. Although there were a series of debates for over a thousand years of church history regarding original sin and if it truly was sin and how it affects Catholic theology and liturgy, the Council of Trent dissolved all debates about original sin and repositioned it into one of the cardinal beliefs of the Catholic church linking it to all the sacraments especially baptism.
Comedians joke about Jewish guilt versus Catholic guilt. There is no contest. While Jews might feel guilty for not having achieved well enough in school, for not pleasing our parents, for not being good Jews, Catholics are guilty of original sin as soon as they are born. It is not a guilt caused by a transgression committed, a mistake made, a offense incurred; it is a guilt that is inescapable. It is not dependent on a misbegotten, misguided, or misinformed act, original sin is a state of being. And it becomes the constant lifelong struggle for Catholics to keep from returning to that state of being. Baptism washes it away but each Catholic person has to work their entire lives, pursuing confession, seeking communion and fulfilling the sacraments to keep oneself cleansed of the inherited stain of original sin. We say ‘schver tsu zein a yid’ it is tough to be a Jew but when it comes to sin, I think its tougher to be a Catholic.
For Judaism, sin is a mistake; whether committed voluntarily or involuntarily, whether by volition or by accident, it is still a misdeed for which we must repent, apologize and seek forgiveness. The word itself for sin, chet, comes from the sport of archery where it means to miss the target. A sin in Judaism is an act that requires a readjustment, a course correction, a reacquisition of the target. It is not an ineradicable stain on our soul. It is not a finite flaw in our character that will mark us and haunt us forever. It’s a mistake, it’s a goof, it’s a screw-up. Sin in Judaism is admitting that all of us are human, fallible and prone to faults and failings. None of us are expected to be perfect and none of us should aspire to be perfect. It is not possible. That is why we have the Ten Days of Repentance, that is why we have Rosh Hashanah, that is why we have Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement.
Rabbi Harold Kushner, who is perhaps best known for his inspirational and healing book from 1980 entitled, “When Bad things Happen to Good People,” wrote about sin, guilt and forgiveness in his 1996 book “How Good Do We Have to Be?” In this book, Rabbi Kushner again tackles very profound universal human issues in a calm and healing fashion. He writes, “Life is not a spelling bee, where no matter how many words you have gotten right, if you make one mistake you are disqualified. Life is more like a baseball game, where even the best team loses one-third of its games and even the worst team has its days of brilliance. Our goal is not to go all year without ever losing a game. Our goal is to win more games than we lose, and if we can do that consistently enough, then when the end comes, we will have won it all." God does not expect us to be perfect; this is not part of human nature.
Kushner also explores the concept of original sin. He suggests that the Biblical story about original sin describes the discomfort God felt when Adam sinned. We are forced to feel the same stress when our children fail as when God sees us fail. Despite our children’ failings, we still love our children. Rabbi Kushner uses this fact to teach us that God will love us despite our failings, that humankind's spiritual inadequacies are inherent. Rabbi Kushner retells the Genesis story of Adam and Eve to demonstrate that the imperfections of humankind do not merit the loss of God's love, nor should they foster the guilt and anxiety that they often do in a society driven by a misguided preoccupation with perfection. For Rabbi Kushner, acceptance and forgiveness are the means for overcoming the insidious consequences of a preoccupation with perfection and leading towards wholeness and healing.
As we read in our liturgy for these Yamim Nora’im, these Days of Awe, God does not seek the death of sinners but that they should turn from their misguided ways and live. The purpose of this process of teshuvah is not self-degradation or self-negation. God is not looking for us to spiritually and emotionally beat ourselves up each and every Yom Kippur for the wrongs we have done, for the offenses we have committed, and for the people we have hurt. The end result, the ultimate goal of teshuvah is forgiveness and while that may come from outside ourselves either from our friends, our family members and maybe even God, the most important forgiveness is the one we give ourselves.
The Talmud suggests a numerical limit of three for forgiveness. We are required to ask three times for someone’s forgiveness. After that, the burden of obligation rest with the person who has refused to offer forgiveness. But how can a person offer forgiveness, if he or she has not learned how to forgive him or herself. Self-forgiveness is not a convenient way to excuse all our actions and avoid accountability and responsibility for them. On the contrary, self-forgiveness is the means by which we free ourselves from toxicity and emotional retardation. A person who cannot forgive him or her self will wallow in self-pity, self-recrimination and self-doubt ultimately living a selfish, unhealthy, and less productive life. A person, who cannot forgive him or her self, does not understand the nature of forgiveness and consequently, cannot forgive others.
My rabbinics professor Rabbi Norman Cohen taught me to always read the words of our rabbis with an acute awareness of the baggage they brought to bear on the discussion or interpretation. All of us, even the elite and most sophisticated among us, bring baggage with us. Our self-recriminations, our self-doubts, our resentments are the stuff of that baggage which we shlep around with us each and every day of our lives. How many of us still recall with shame and embarrassment that stupid and careless thing that we said or did that hurt that young man or woman that we liked? How many of us still feel the guilt and pain over an offensive remark or an unintentional slight made by us many years ago that drove away those we loved? What does it benefit us to keep carrying around that heavy, negative baggage? Will that shame or guilt or pain erase our actions? No. They are irretrievably in the past. We need to let them go.
Once we accept the fact that we will never be perfect, once we accept the fact that we are fallible and that nobody, not even God expects us or wants us to be perfect, once we admit without shame or guilt the failings in our behavior, discard the grudges and resentments we hold against ourselves, and take responsibility for who and what we are, then we will have truly practiced self-forgiveness and we can move forward towards wholeness and healing.
Rabbi Kushner wrote that the original sin is not what the Catholic Church says it is nor is it the temptation and lust of Adam and Eve, the original sin is believing that we cannot be loved because we are not perfect, because we have sinned. Adam and Eve believed they had lost God’s love after their sin. Children believe they have lost their parent’s love because they have sinned. And as adults, we carry this forward into every close personal relationship letting our past misdeeds poison us into seeing ourselves as unlovable and unworthy.
On this Yom Kippur, we pray for God’s forgiveness; that’s the easy part. On this Yom Kippur, let us do the difficult. Let us forgive ourselves. Let us wipe our own slates clean. Let us permanently eradicate our original sin. Let us give ourselves atonement and absolution and rid us of those self-doubts and self-recrimination and those feelings of shame and guilt, which we have carried around with us for far too many years. And if we do that, then we can forgive our friends, family members, fellow congregants and all those we love and be truly blessed with a good year of health, happiness and peace.
And let us say, Amen

2007-12-03T08:18:00.000-08:00

Sermon for Erev Rosh Hashanah 5768 – Jewish Identity, Jewish Pride

One of the funniest comedy routines ever recorded is Abbott and Costello’s classic routine best known as “Who’s On First?” Costello plays a baseball park peanut vendor and Abbott plays the manager of a baseball team, the St. Louis Wolves. Lou Costello begins by asking Bud Abbott for the names of the players and Abbott, with all sincerity and a straight face answers by saying, “Who’s on first, What’s on second and I don’t know is on third,” and goes on to list the entire roster of the St. Louis Wolves.

Within our American culture, we are all familiar with fictional baseball teams like the St. Louis Wolves. There are the New York Knights from the Robert Reford movie, “The Natural” and the “Mudville Nine” from the famous poem Casey At the Bat and many others. But have you ever heard of the Beit Shemesh Blue Sox, the Netanya Tigers, or the Modi’in Miracles? These are not fictional baseball teams. They are not the stuff of legends and fables; they are real and along with the Petach Tikva Pioneers, the Ra’anana Express and the Tel Aviv Lighting they comprise the nascent Israel Baseball League. The Israel Baseball League, which has 120 players from nine different countries, mostly Jewish with only a dozen Israelis in the line-up began their inaugural season this past June. The last player chosen for the Modi’in Miracles to complete the 120-player league roster was the somewhat reclusive resident of the Treasure Coast, Baseball Hall Of Fame pitcher Sandy Koufax.

Back in February, former member of the 1969 Miracle Mets team and current manager of the Modi’in Miracles, Art Shamsky joked that should Sandy Koufax elect to pitch on opening day he will be well rested having had 14,851 days between pitching starts. He never actually played a game in the Israel baseball season especially as most of the players were 40 to 50 years younger than him. The Modi’in Miracles won the inaugural game on June 24th, played well and made a run for the championship but finished in third place; Tel Aviv came in second and the Beit Shemesh Blue Sox won the championship on August 19th. The selection of Sandy Koufax was of course a symbolic one in tribute for his standing in the history of baseball and more importantly his standing among Jews everywhere.

While American Jews born in the 1920’s might look to Detroit Tigers first baseman Hank Greenberg as their role model and baseball hero because he affirmed his Jewish identity despite the anti-Semitic atmosphere in 1934 by refusing to play on Yom Kippur during a very tight pennant race, for my generation, Sandy Koufax was our hero for refusing to pitch the opening game of the 1965 World Series which coincided with Yom Kippur. It might matter to baseball history that the Tigers won that pennant race in 1934 and that the Dodgers won the 1965 World Series and that Hank Greenberg’s and Sandy Koufax’ brave affirmation of their Jewish identity and religious rights did not harm their teams’ ultimate success. But for us, all that matters is that they took a stand to affirm their rights as Americans and as Jews to worship free from coercion or hindrance and to say loudly and clearly to all, I am Jewish and that truth and reality is at the very core of my being and nothing will cause me to surrender that.

We have been called an am k’shei oref a stiff-necked people, more as a result of our stubbornness rather than our disobedience to God. What Sandy Koufax and Hank Greenberg did was a mild reflection of the obstinacy demonstrated by our forefathers when foreign powers or local rulers tried to force us to give up our beliefs and practices and conform to their religion and their culture. Whenever I have tried to answer the questions of, Why is there anti-Semitism? Why do they hate us so much? Why is it always the Jews? I focus on one constant that can be applied to all forms of anti-Semitism over the ages no matter whether it is Greco-Roman anti-Semitism, religious anti-Semitism, economic anti-Semitism, racial anti-Semitism or the contemporary anti-Israel form. And that one constant is our absolute stubborn refusal to compromise our principles, to abandon our religion, our culture and our way of life and adopt the way of life in vogue at the time. Long before Nancy Reagan made it popular, our policy when faced with an employer, an official, a political or social leader or an entire government compelling us to give up Judaism, God and Torah was to just say no. For centuries, we have said we are Jewish, Jewishness is an integral part of who we are and to give up any part of it be it our culture, our beliefs, our ethics, our practices, our traditions, our community would be tantamount to excising living tissue out of our very hearts and minds, our bodies and our souls. So, no thank you, we choose to remain different, we choose to remain Jewish despite temptation and despite any and all consequences.

This past June, two days before the Modi’in Miracles played their first professional baseball game in Israel, a movie was released in this country entitled “A Mighty Heart” starring Angelina Jolie. The movie tells the painful and troubling story of the 2002 kidnapping and murder of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl from the perspective of his then pregnant wife Marianne. Being a thorough and professional journalist and following leads on Al-Qaida and alleged “shoe bomber” Richard Reid, Daniel Pearl was in Karachi, Pakistan in January 2002 hoping to have an interview with Sheik Gilani, a Muslim spiritual leader with ties to the terrorists. Sheik Gilani had previously declared that he would never talk to Western journalists. The interview never happened, it was a set-up, it was never meant to happen. Daniel Pearl was abducted on January 23, 2002. His Islamist captors accused him of being a spy for the CIA and then for the Mossad and ultimately murdered him. When news of his brutal murder was confirmed on February 21, 2002, the world was stunned. When news of his last words captured on videotape and transcribed for all to read, the Jewish world was simultaneously surprised and shocked, angry and sad, proud and grief stricken. Daniel Pearl’s last words were “I am Jewish. My father is Jewish. My mother is Jewish. I am Jewish.” In a moment of abject despair, knowing fully what was about to happen to him, Daniel Pearl bravely claimed his identity. His parents Judea and Ruth Pearl were initially taken aback by his words wondering why he would choose that moment to make that Jewish affirmation but over time they came to see the power and the beauty of it. A young girl from New York about to become a Bat Mitzvah thought that an appropriate Bat Mitzvah project would be to compile statements about being Jewish and present it as a gift to Daniel Pearl’s son Adam who was born in May 2002, three months after Daniel’s murder. Daniel’s parents enlarged the idea to include written contributions from prominent authors, artists, politicians and thinkers on their reactions and thoughts about Daniel’s last words, “I am Jewish.” The response was overwhelming. The end result is a moving book entitled “I Am Jewish”, published by Jewish Lights publications, a winner of the National Jewish Book Award for Anthologies and a worthy addition to any Jewish library. Daniel Pearl’s last words have inspired many of our co-religionists to look inward, challenge previously held notions, reflect on the nature of Jewishness and Judaism and wonder just as we wonder if we could have the faith of Abraham and follow God’s command unquestioningly, we must wonder if we could do as Daniel Pearl has done and affirm our Jewish identity, declare our allegiance to Judaism and the Jewish people amidst the most horrific and frightening moment of our lives. Could we sing “ani ma’amin” on the way to the gas chambers? Could we say “Sh’ma Yisrael, Adonai eloheinu, Adonai echad” on our last dying breath? Could we say “I am Jewish” while our murderous captors held a knife to our throat? These are the last words of Daniel Pearl, will they be ours?

In 2004, the Jewish community of Pittsburgh of which my wife and I have fond memories, added their words to this subject and responded to Daniel Pearl’s last words and the subject of Jewish identity. Steve Levin, a Pittsburgh Post-Gazette organized the effort and offered these thoughts. He declared that being Jewish is “a feeling and a birthright” a connection to “a religion and a people, a culture and a country, it’s me.” He goes on to say that no matter how many hundreds of Jewish responses there are to the question of what it means to be Jewish, “Beneath it all is the pintele Yid, that Jewish spark that underlies all the religious, social, historical and political complexities that go into being a Jew.” When Daniel Pearl said, “I am Jewish.” “He spoke for himself yet he spoke for all Jews.”

David Shtulman, the executive director of the American Jewish Committee, states that while Daniel Pearl’s last words “I am Jewish” could have been seen by his Islamist captors as an admission of guilt, “To every other Jew it was meant to say, this could have easily been you.” Mr. Shtulman goes on to say that for him “I am Jewish” means that I am the beneficiary of 3,000 years of collective memory, communal experience, wisdom, suffering and joy which inform my world view, my relationship with God and with the world. As he wrote, “my Jewishness cannot be measured by how often I go to synagogue, the foods that I eat or how I experience God. It is part of me and will always remain a part of me. I am Jewish is simply what I am.”

Lee Chottiner, the editor of the Pittsburgh Jewish Chronicle, writes about an experience he had at 15 while on a cruise with his parents. A family who had lost a son needed a minyan to say Kaddish. This experience taught him that no matter how different one Jew is from the next, we are all apart of a religious community. None of us can say, “I’m a better Jew than you.” To Mr. Chottiner, “being Jewish means being part of a community, or, better yet, being part of a family.” Molly Ainsman, a freshmen in college, had a similar experience when she first entered the University of Pennsylvania. It was through the Jewish community on campus, the Hillel center, that she was able to find her “niche at such a large university” and to realize that “as a Jew, she is a member of a larger community that will always embrace her no matter what path she chooses to follow.” Judaism and the Jewish community is a rooting, a grounding, a firm anchor that will never leave us no matter how far we may drift. Teshuvah, returning, is always possible because we are never too far from home.

Howard Rieger, the president of the United Jewish Federation of Pittsburgh, sees Jewishness as an imperative to make a difference in the world, “to help heal the world, to pursue tikkun olam, to serve as a light to the nations.” Joni Rabinowitz, co-director of Just Harvest, said that despite not being raised as an observant Jew she did learn basic Jewish values of equality and fairness from her parents and to work to make the world better. For her, being Jewish means being an social activist.
There are many more written responses compiled by Steve Levin of the Pittsburgh Post–Gazette which highlight different pieces of Jewishness and Judaism such as Judaism’s concern for the poor and underprivileged in our society, Judaism’s rich heritage of history, Judaism’s comforting and familiar rituals and traditions, and Judaism’s reinforcement of a sense of continuity between the generations and connection between people and the unshakeable knowledge that we are part of a community, a greater whole, an extended family.

For me, the most moving response came from Sophie Masloff who was the mayor of Pittsburgh from 1989 to 1994. She wrote, “Being Jewish to me is the core of my being. Being Jewish is about the values of giving more of one’s self, of making the world just a little better than when I came into it. Being Jewish is lifelong learning about our people. Being Jewish is about caring; a celebration of freedom and hope. Even in the darkest times, I was always proud of my heritage, proud to be part of the Jewish people, a people of hope and faith.”

Daniel Pearl’s poignant and simple last words should inspire us with pride and cause us to consider our own response, our own thoughts; to reflect on what it means to be a Jew, to affirm our identity and our heritage proudly despite all the adversity. Clearly, being Jewish is important to us otherwise we would not be here tonight. What is it that motivates us? What is it about Judaism that draws us in? The great German-Jewish philosopher Franz Rosenzweig was ready to defect, to abandon Judaism and convert to Christianity but as his last Jewish act, he entered a synagogue during the High Holidays of 1913 and was drawn back in to the embrace of Judaism and the Jewish community and never again thought to leave. What is this thing called being Jewish which draws us in and becomes such an integral part and parcel of our being that to be rid of it would be devastating if not impossible.

Now at the beginning of this New Year of 5768, let us consider what it means to be Jewish. Let us embrace the opportunity provided by these days of repentance and introspection to ask ourselves these questions, “What does it mean to be Jewish, to be part of the extended Jewish family? Where do I stand as a Jew, as a member of the Jewish community?. Ask yourself what you would do if you were in Daniel Pearl’s situation, would you proudly and defiantly state that you are part of the Jewish people, that you are embraced by an extended family, the Jewish community, and that you stand for high ethical values and a 3,000 year old unbroken chain of heritage and tradition that links us to our forefathers and to the Jewish community of the future and no one no matter how brutal, how barbaric, how inhuman will ever take that away from us!
Let us proudly reaffirm our Jewishness and renew our commitment to Judaism and the Jewish people. Let us re-enter the warm embrace of the Jewish community. Let us reflect on who we are and what we hold most dear and then say hineni we are here, we are ready, we are fully committed and let us begin this new year of 5768 with our eyes clearly focussed on the future.
And let us say, Amen