Jewish Holidays and Festivals

Rosh HaShanah

“Return You Mortals!” — The First Mitzvah

For Rosh HaShanah 5770

1. A Prayer of Moses, the man of God

Adonai, You have been our refuge in every generation

2. Before the mountains came into being

before You brought forth the earth and the world,

from eternity to eternity You are God.

3. You return people to contrition;

You decreed, “Return you mortals!” (Psalm 90:1-3)

According to the spiritual imagination of our people, Rosh HaShanah, the Jewish New Year, marks the anniversary of the creation of the world. The image of the Jewish New Year as being “Yom Harat Olam”, the “Birthday of the World”, poetically claims that the religious and ethical values we celebrate on Rosh HaShanah are rooted in the very act of creation. It affirms that the ways in which we, as human beings, are to relate to God and to each other are part of the fundamental order of the universe.

The opening verses of Psalm 90, express this deep spiritual truth. The poem opens enigmatically, “Adonai, You have been our refuge in every generation. Before the mountains came into being, before You brought forth the earth and the world.” But how could the Lord have been our refuge before creation? The psalmist answers by reminding us that God’s primal utterance is an invitation to teshuvah, repentance. From before creation, God identifies himself as the one to whom we can turn when we go astray.

Psalm 90 addresses the question of what was prior to the beginning? In it, the Psalmist proclaims that teshuvah, the process of returning to the core values that define us as full human beings, existed before the creation of our world.

The Psalmist’s assertion that creation itself required the pre-existence of basic moral and spiritual values captured the imagination of the rabbis of the Talmud. They pictured seven primordial elements, which God used as the spiritual framework in the construction of our world. Each element had a unique purpose and considered together present a Jewish spiritual world-view. They are (1) the Torah, (2) God’s royal throne (3) the Garden of Eden, (4) Gehennah (5) the Beit HaMiqdash (the Holy Temple), (6) the name of the messiah and, (7) the divine summons to teshuvah as described in Psalm 90 (Midrash Tehillim 90:12)

The last element, the summons to teshuvah is the most crucial of the seven for our understanding of Rosh HaShanah as the anniversary of creation’s birth. It tells us that the first mitzvah, commandment, “Shu-vu Ve-nei ‘A-dam, Return you mortals,” went forth even “before the mountains came into being.” Before God said, “Let there be light!” before God revealed the Torah on Mount Sinai and before God’s Divine Presence filled the Temple on Mount Zion, the first mitzvah, was the call to repentance

Thus, Jewish tradition sees teshuvah, repentance is the pre-ordained path back to our divine refuge. Whenever we feel lost, alone, confused, or afraid, teshuvah, the power to restore our world and recreate ourselves, will bring us back home.

The God of the Bible and the God of our Rabbis, first of all, is the loving and forgiving God who pre-programmed creation to included the universal invitation to practice teshuvah. It does not matter where we are or what we have done, we can always respond to God’s call. At the dawn of Israel’s national history, the Torah reminds us that Moses felt the Divine Presence as “the merciful and forgiving God” while hiding in a crack in the cliff on Mount Sinai shortly after the Israelites’ sinful worship of the Golden Calf. (Exodus 34:5-7) Later, after the Jewish people suffered the pain of exile, the prophet Ezekiel reported God’s word as saying, “I do not desire the death of the wicked, but that the wicked should turn from his way and live.” (Ezekiel 33:11) Still late, in the time of the sages, Rabbi Abbahu ben Ze‘era recalled the Psalm’s words when he taught: “Teshuvah, ‘repentance’, is amazing because it preceded the creation of the world. What was the primal call to repentance? It was a heavenly voice which cried out saying, ‘Shu-vu Ve-nei Adam - Return you mortals.’” (Midrash Tehillim 90:12)

Today as we prepare to enter another New Year, we, too, can respond to that primordial summons and return.

Tending the Garden of our Soul

For Rosh HaShanah 5774

It is not surprising that the theme of Rosh HaShanah, the Jewish New Year, is teshuvah – repentance, and renewal. After all, Rosh HaShanah was the first step along the spiritual pathway that guided our ancestors as they celebrated in God’s Holy Temple, the blessings of a successful year. Our great fall festival, Sukkot, marked the end of the agricultural year and, on it, with joy and thanksgiving, our people gathered to acknowledge God’s abiding presence in their lives. The rites and rituals of Rosh HaShanah and Yom Kippur helped them undergo the moral and spiritual cleansing needed to prepare them for their intimate encounter with God on Sukkot. As one year passed, they counted their blessings, offered thanksgiving, and prepared for the year to come.

Today, although few of us are farmers, the vision of bringing in the crops, weeding, clearing the fields, preparing the soil, and planning and planting for the seasons to come still stirs our hearts. From Rosh HaShanah, through Yom Kippur and on to Sukkot, we tend to our souls as a gardener tends to the soil. Teshuvah – repentance, and renewal – is the spiritual process of counting our blessings, clearing our souls, and preparing for future harvests.

The first step in teshuvah is the easiest. As a farmer measures the bushels of grain and the baskets of produce he grew, we review what we have experienced and learned. We give thanks for the strength we had to overcome our challenges and we are grateful for our small, and sometimes great, achievements. While we certainly have not reached all our goals, we see that the year has had its bounteous harvest. Gratitude and thanksgiving rest at the heart of Teshuvah.

The next step is the hard work of weeding and clearing the garden. No matter how careful we may have been in tending the garden of our soul, sins, like weeds, continue to grow. With the spiritual harvest in, the time has come to pull out these weeds and clear away the debris. Now we can clearly see how our sins, errors, and mistakes took up so much precious space in our soul’s garden. Teshuvah is the act of forsaking our iniquities.

Yet teshuvah is more than harvesting and weeding. We also need to examine what we have planted and cared for so carefully to see if all the effort was worthwhile. Could we have had a more successful year? Did we plant the right crops? Did we have the proper balance between fruits, vegetables, and flowers? Did we use our time and our resources wisely? These basic questions represent our desire to learn and to grow. Teshuvah implies discernment, judgment, and understanding.

But teshuvah, like gardening, requires us to ask even more difficult questions as we plan for the coming year. Gardening often requires pruning, replanting, and, sometimes, even discarding beloved plants, bushes, shrubs, and trees. Often we spend too much of our time and energy on worthwhile activities that slowly take over too much of our lives. Occasionally, some aspects of our lives, no matter how beautiful and full of meaning and memories, are no longer useful or productive. They may even get in our way. Sadly, we need to cut them down and dig them up. Teshuvah directs us to reorganize our spiritual garden and reprioritize our lives.

Finally, there are times when we must move on and plant new gardens. We need to leave all behind and start again with new beds and freshly turned soil. We have to put aside our past with its pains and pleasures and begin anew. When we enter into our new lives, we bring only our memories, wisdom, knowledge, and hope. As we continue on our life-journey, teshuvah means knowing when to stay, when to leave, what to abandon, and what to keep

As we end one year and begin the next, teshuvah – the renewal made possible by repentance – guides us on our journey. On Rosh HaShanah, we feel humbled by its life-renewing potential. On Yom Kippur, we are awestruck by the opportunity it grants us to restart our moral and spiritual lives. On Sukkot, celebrate its power to open our hearts and homes to God’s abiding presence as we begin the plowing and planting for the next harvest of our life.

WE WANT GOD TO STAY ABRAHAM'S HAND

February 27, 2022

We want God to stay Abraham’s hand. No, we do not only want God to stay Abraham’s hand, we need God to do it. If God did not call out to Abraham, we would be lost.

We need God to stay Abraham’s hand, we know that Abraham would sacrifice his son as we hope that we would as well. We know that because he was a good parent, and that we, too, aspire to be good parents.

Good parents give their children something to live for, and by doing that, good parents give their children something to die for. We teach values. We implant principles. We encourage visions. We build relationships. We create a world for children, and strive to make it a better world for them, for our children and all children. We take risks for them, and, we teach them how to take risks for themselves.

So we need God to stay Abraham’s hand and we pray that when the moment comes when our children are called to risk all that they will have the courage to stand up and that they will receive the grace they need to survive. We can’t give them that.

We can provide the values. We can teach the principles. We can create the visions. We can even help build the relationships they need to thrive in the world. But, we cannot provide them the protection they will need as they live out the values we have taught them.

We want our children to be truthful, but the truth can hurt. We want our children to be curious, but curiosity can be risky. We want our children to be loyal, but loyalty requires sacrifice. We want our children to be loving, but love is dangerous.

We want God to stay our hand, because we cannot and should not. We want to be good parents, who raise good children. We want to righteous people, who raise righteous children. But we know that doing good and seeking righteousness in this world is a frightening task.

The Akeida is a myth – a values story – that is so distant from us that its connection to real people and real places has long been severed. That’s the nature of such stories. If they live, they live not because they relate what really happened, but because when we tell them and retell them, we hear the abiding truths of human existence. The Akeida was already ancient when it was first written down.

When we read the story, there is no real Abraham. We are all Abraham, all of us who raise and care for children. There is no real Isaac. We were all Isaac, all of us who have tried to take in, understand, and build on the best values our elders have taught us. We either risk our lives for the values we hold or we put our children’s lives at risk for the values we have taught them, And we pray that God stays Abraham’s hand, our hands, and lets all of us live.

For Jews, the Akeida is a foundational story. It is the story of Jewish life. For generations, we have given our children a heritage of moral and spiritual values transmitted by our families and our communities through ancient practices, sacred rituals, and shared memories. We have tried to teach our children how to live out these values and cherish this heritage in a world in which we have always been a very small minority. We know the risks of being Jewish so well, that we feel obligated to inform anyone seeking to be part of our family of the inherent risk of being a Jew has presented and continues to present to anyone who professes a Jewish identity. We want our children to be proud Jews and virtuous people and we want them to survive and to thrive. But we also know that we might be leading them up Mount Moriah and we do not know if they will or can come back to us.

So we need God to stay Abraham’s hand. We can bring our children to the top of the mountain, Mount Moriah, the place where God is seen, but we cannot bring them down alone, We hope and pray that they have embraced the life-giving, life-affirming values we have taught them, and that the challenge to live by those values will not overcome them. But hopes and prayers have their resolution in God, so we need God to stay Abraham’s hand or else our lives would be unbearable.

We need to hear this story, over and over again, each year, at the beginning of the year, as we guide our children into an unknown future. We are the Abrahams, we are the Sarahs, we are all the parents who, though far from perfect, have tried to do our best for all our children. And we need to hear God’s messenger telling us that we did a good job and that our children, all children, are safe right now.

AS TREES PLANTED BY STREAMS OF WATER

Tashlich at the JGH

Rosh HaShanah 5761

Rosh HaShanah, the Jewish New Year, is a time of renewal, of rebirth and regeneration. According to our tradition, the festival commemorates the beginning of all things. Our tradition holds that it is the day on which the Holy One called the world into being and it is the day on which we are called to begin our lives again.

The promise of Rosh HaShanah is the promise of life renewed. We are challenged to examine our lives and rediscover our true selves. We are given the opportunity to cast away the spiritual burden of our sins, to rebuild the bonds of love and friendship that have been weakened during the past year and to be the best that we can be. It is a holiday filled by hope and sustained by memories.

These are the promises that make the holiday so meaningful for Jews all over the world and so meaningful for our very special congregation at the Jewish Geriatric Home (JGH). As our elderly residents gather in our synagogue, often joined by family and friends, the chapel is filled with a sense of excitement and expectation. Our prayers are strengthened by our understanding of the preciousness of the moment. This is our opportunity to reclaim our lives.

The words of the Rosh HaShanah prayer, Unetane Tokef, resonate deeply in our services — not, as one might think, the prayer’s dreadful declaration, “who shall live and who shall die”, but its promise that through repentance, prayer and righteous deeds of love, our lives can fulfill their highest potential. Our residents know how much friendship and family, love and kindness add beauty and meaning to life.

But not all of our worship on the High Holidays takes place in our chapel. Many residents eagerly anticipate participating in our Tashlich service. Tashlich is an ancient custom that has recently regained its popularity. On Rosh HaShanah Jews gather alongside of lakes, rivers and streams to symbolically cast away our sins by emptying our pockets over the flowing waters, holding in mind the words of the prophet Micah that God will cast all our sins into the depths of the sea (Micah 7:19).

At the JGH we postpone our Tashlich service until after the holiday. We fill our bus with residents, pack a picnic lunch and travel to Challenge Grove in Cherry Hill. We assemble at the bridge that crosses the river and as we blow the shofar, we throw away our sins by tossing bread crumbs into the water. Tashlich expresses serious concerns but it is not a solemn ceremony. It is a youthful, playful experience. As we cast off our sins, we also cast off our spiritual inhibitions, and laugh with pleasure at the opportunity to be outdoors, in a beautiful park, feeding the fish and the ducks, and thanking God for the blessings of the day and of the year to come.

As I watch our residents gathered near the waters, tossing away their sins and rejoicing in the beauty of the moment, I see them renewed and restored, full of happiness and joy. As they celebrate life and life’s promises standing together by the river on an early autumn afternoon, they bring to life for me the vision of the Psalmist who describes good people as “trees planted firmly by streams of water, which yield their fruit in due season, and whose leaves do not wither.” (Psalm 1)

Rosh HaShanah and the holidays that follow bring a renewed sense of hope and joy to all of us at JGH. It is our deep wish that everyone in our community will be able to share in the blessings of the season and proceed through the new year with faith renewed and hope restored, and with an abiding sense of joy in life itself.

Choosing Life – Sanctifying God’s Name

For Rosh HaShanah 5773

How would we respond to the story of the Akeida, the Binding of Isaac, if Abraham discovered the ram caught in the thicket after he successfully sacrificed Isaac? Perhaps, we would feel a deep sadness. Perhaps, the irony would be unnerving. At best, we might see Abraham as a tragic hero, and, at worst, we might consider Abraham to be a crazy old man. In any case, what we would probably miss is the understanding that Abraham did not act in any way unusual. The story of his sacrifice of Isaac would be a common human story.

We are always all too willing to sacrifice our children for some “higher” ideal – for God, for Country, for the Party, for the people, for honor, for something other than for life. Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori – How sweet and proper it is to die for one’s country. Every city has statues of generals who lead their men to death. Every nation has a “Memorial Day” to honor those sacrificed in battle. Badges, ribbons, and speeches consol parents and reassure us of the values of sacrifice.

But, we do not have to send our children to war to present them as sacrifices to our dreams and visions. We can steal their childhood by pushing them to fulfill our needs and wishes. We can drain their spirits by forcing them into life choices that we may have wished for ourselves but do not fit them. Whenever we bind them to our limited dreams, we take something from their own. For our values to thrive, we need our children to reach beyond what we can teach them.

How would Abraham have understood the meaning of the ram if he discovered it after he sacrificed Isaac? Perhaps, he may have seen it as a reward for his piety – God’s simple acknowledgment of his great sacrifice. It is also possible that the ram could have triggered a moment of reflection.

When it comes to life, we are much better as historians than as prophets. We are presently commemorating the two hundredth anniversary of the War of 1812, and the one hundred and fiftieth of our Civil War. In two years, we will be marking the one-hundredth anniversary of the First World War. What was seen as inevitable in 1812, 1860, and 1914, does not appear as such through the perspective of history.

Perhaps, it is not so unusual that Abraham obeyed God’s summons to sacrifice his son, Isaac. What is unusual is that Abraham responded to the softer voice of God’s angel who told him to spare the boy. Abraham only passed God’s test when he put aside the knife.

Our world is a dangerous world. There are people who are evil. There are visions of human destiny that include the death of those deemed to be “other” and, therefore, “dangerous”. There are individuals who see compromise are defeat. There are leaders who draw strength for fear and hate. We cannot let them succeed.

We need to give our children the skills and values to survive in our world. We need to show them that in spite of all, life is worth living. They need to know they are and that includes knowing from where they have come, where they live, and where they can go. We need to give them the insight and knowledge they will need to live life despite all of its complications, to be brave in the face of danger, perhaps, even to be willing to die for something. Most importantly, we need to give them the wisdom to be always open to our highest values, and the strength to bear witness to those values by choosing life and not sacrificial death.

The story of the Akeida presents us with a paradox – in a world filled with dangerous people and ideas – we can only live fully human lives if we are willing to sacrifice ourselves and children to our highest vision, yet, we can only succeed in doing so if we turn away from sacrifice to life. Abraham’s faith may have brought him to Mount Moriah. Abraham’s wisdom, insight, and vision enabled Isaac and him to return home and continue on a journey that still brings blessing, healing, and hope to our world. May we and our children find the same wisdom as we follow their path into the New Year.

Living Today -- Living Forever
for Rosh HaShanah 5765

A distinctive element of Jewish spirituality is the focus on the here and now. Although we share similar conceptions of the world to come with Christians and Muslims, images rooted in ancient Jewish speculations concerning the end of time and visions of heaven, otherworldly concerns play at best a secondary role in Jewish religious life and spiritual aspirations. As Judaism unfolded visions of heaven and hell, judgment, resurrection, reward and punishment served as a way to deal with the unanswerable question of divine justice but did not become the primary goal of a Jew’s religious and spiritual life.

Jews preserved the humanistic biblical insight that the focus of human life is living in the present and not some future, heavenly reward. The insights of our prophets and sages direct us to cast our attention on where we are and what we are doing right here, right now. Their wisdom teaches us to value our moment in this world as a precious opportunity to achieve spiritual greatness.

Their insights still form the foundation for our people’s spiritual striving:

The reward of doing a mitzvah is not a place in paradise but the opportunity to do another mitzvah.
Jews praise God on earth. Angels praise God in heaven.
We, the living, glorify God by what we say and do, not the dead.
The Torah is not in heaven. It is with us and within us. It is God’s living world for God’s living people.
One moment of spiritual fulfillment in this world is more valuable than all of the world-to-come.

Even in times of trouble and persecution, our this-worldly spirituality built on these and similar insights was an abiding source of strength and sustenance.

The goal of our people’s spiritual quest was to live a meaningful life in this world rather than obtaining eternal life in the coming world. Life is for the living and we have the choice of whether or not we will be fully alive. The blessings of heaven were not forgotten, but at the same time, they were not at the heart of the Jewish experience.

The Jewish spiritual commitment to the here and now appears most clearly in the reevaluation of the idea of the Day of Judgement, Yom HaDin. Over two-thousand years ago, in the days of the Second Temple, Jews came to understand the Day of Judgement as God’s final end-time judgment of God’s enemies, wicked individuals, and nations. It was to be one of a series of events that would take place when God again entered history, redeemed God’s people, and established God’s dominion forever. These were a powerful set of images and have remained an important part of Jewish messianic and eschatological (end-time) reflections. While the vision of an eschatological Yom HaDin, Day of Judgement, has never fully disappeared in Jewish thought, already by the time of the rabbis of old the notion of Judgement Day began to lose its otherworldly, end-time significance. It began to be understood not as a final judgment but as an ever-present opportunity for spiritual growth.

Yom HaDin, Judgement Day, shifted in the prayers and thoughts of our sages from the end of time to the beginning of the year. The three traditional Hebrew descriptions of Rosh HaShanah illustrate this change. These images which once pertained to the end-time final judgment became part of the poetry of our New Year’s observance.

Rosh HaShanah is Yom Tikiah, the Day of Sounding the Shofar. Just as Gabriel’s trumpet was to call all creatures to account on the eschatological Day of Judgement, now, at the beginning of the year, the shofar, the ram’s horn, summons all to assemble before God for judgment.

Rosh HaShanah is Yom Ha Zikaron, the Day of Remembering. The opening of the heavenly ledgers is an annual event, not an end-time occurrence. Each year on Rosh HaShanah, God reviews our account. We are responsible for all that we have done since the last audit. Nothing for good or for evil is missing.

Finally, Rosh HaShanah is Yom Ha Din, Judgement Day. The great reckoning no longer is postponed to the end of time. It is right here, right now. Every Rosh HaShanah, God summons us to appear before the heavenly court for a spiritual and moral audit.

This rethinking of Jewish eschatological images, particularly, Yom HaDin, Judgement Day, underlies our celebration of the Days of Awe. It appears most strongly in the Hebrew piyyut, poetic prayer, Unetane Tokef, a central feature of our High Holiday liturgy. This poem comes from an epoch in which Western Civilization had a powerful otherworldly focus. It was composed at the time of the First Crusades. Visions of heavenly reward impelled the Crusaders to seek to recapture the Holy Land from the Muslims.

For European Jews, these times were particularly brutal. Our people suffered persecution and martyrdom at the hands of the Crusader armies. The history of the Unetane Tokef reflects these troubled times. According to legend, the poem represents the last words of Rabbi Ammon of Mainz as revealed by the rabbi’s spirit in a dream to the poet Kalonymous ben Meshullam shortly after the rabbi’s death as a martyr.

This poem, rooted in an era of suffering, has an amazing this-worldly focus. Yom HaDin, the Day of Judgement is no longer some hoped-for future event. It is not a time in which God’s enemies will be judged and God’s people redeemed. In spite of the terrible conditions of Jewish life in the Crusading centuries, this poem converts Judgement Day from an end-time occurrence that marks the renewal of creation to a present day reality in which each individual has the opportunity to renew himself. On Rosh HaShanah judgment is pronounced and on Yom Kippur it is sealed -- “who will live and who will die.”

This is a worldly judgment. The poem asks us to consider our possible fates in the coming year so that we may redirect our lives. The Unetane Tokef does not frighten us with the threat of hell nor bribe us with the gift of heaven. It directs us to consider how fragile our hold on the blessings of life really is. It reminds us that we begin each year not knowing whether we will live or die, prosper or perish. It teaches us that the circumstances of life are unpredictable. Each year brings something new and if we live long enough we will experience many, if not most, of life’s blessings and troubles.

In a practical sense, the Unetane Tokef teaches us that what will happen, will happen but what it will mean depends on us. In some unexpected way, the poem flips the entire notion of Judgement Day upside down. Although our fate might be cast in some heavenly courtroom on, the poem asks us to see the Yom HaDin, the Day of Judgement, as a day we judge ourselves, the day on which we take stock of our ability to find purpose and meaning in whatever lies ahead.

In its powerful conclusion, the Unetane Tokef declares, “Teshuvah, ‘redirecting our lives to higher values’, Tefillah, ‘living prayerfully in the presence of God’, and Tzedakah, ‘performing acts of love and righteousness” temper judgment’s severe decree. It presents teshuvah, tefillah, and tzedakah as endowments of the human spirit. They are to be our essential tools for living. It is up to us to use them to deal with whatever we will face in the coming year. It is our task to live lives worth living.

What is most inspiring is that this poem comes from a time of turmoil and tribulation. It is not a poem written in quiet contemplation. It is the voice of a persecuted people living in uncertain times. It expresses the strength of our this-worldly, humanistic Jewish spiritual vision. Our medieval ancestors, those who first heard and preserved this poem, believed in a heavenly reward. Such beliefs were enshrined in our religious literature and shared by Jews and non-Jews alike. However, the belief that sustained our ancestors in the time of trouble and the vision they imparted to us in our sacred liturgy was not the dream of eternal life in paradise. They gained strength from their belief that within our very souls we have the tools to make our lives worth living in the world God gave us. They knew as we know that life can be hard but if we live it right, it is surely worth living. They also knew that the values expressed in our tradition were worth pursuing, that living itself could be a prayer and that tzedakah, deeds of love and righteousness, are their own reward. May such wisdom sustain us in the year to come as it sustained our ancestors in years gone by. May we, too, have the courage, hope, and insight to live lives that manner in the days, months, and years to come.

The Day The Satan Hid in the Shofar

ROSH HASHANAH 5750

One of my favorite High Holiday legends, a legend that I first read as a child and think about each year is the story of how HaSatan, the "accuser", hid in a shofar.

It is well known from rabbinic midrash, that on Rosh HaShanah, Holy One, Blessed Be He, seats himself down on the throne of judgment to judge all creation. At this moment, even the heavens and all their inhabitants tremble. When God judges us according to the middat hadin, the measure of justice, all creatures, above and below, fall short.

Yet, the rabbis of old teach us not to despair because God's justice is tempered with mercy. When the people Israel, the Jews, sound the shofar, God recalls the special relationship he had with our ancestors, Abraham and Isaac, and moves from his throne of judgment, the kissei hadin to his throne of mercy, the kissei harachamim.

Rabbinic midrash is theology in narrative form. Obviously, in the midrash, the rabbis speak figuratively not literally. They use poetic and, even, mythic images to describe the spiritual realities of Jewish life, the deep sense of judgment and forgiveness we experience on the High Holidays. The symbol vocabulary of Rosh HaShanah includes images of God as judge and sovereign and employes the language of the courthouse and palace. There are witnesses and attorneys, observers and reporters, defendants and prosecutors. In the mystic imagination of our people, the heavenly prosecutor is an angelic figure who bears the Hebrew title, HaSatan, "the accuser" and is called Satan, in English.

The story goes as follows. The HaSatan, Satan, knew quite well that when the Jews sound the shofar, God turns from justice to mercy. Therefore, he realized that if he wanted his well-prepared accusations against us to stand, he needed to stop the blowing of the shofar. One Rosh HaShanah, HaSatan, Satan, fixed upon the following plan. He decided that he would descend to earth and enter a congregation against whom he had an excellent case, a case he did not want to lose. On Erev Rosh HaShanah, he entered the synagogue and after all the worshipers went home, he made himself as small as a pea and crawled into the shofar to plug it up.

After the Torah reading, the next morning, the congregation all rose to fulfill the mitzvah of listening to the sounding of the Shofar. The baal tekiah, the shofar blower, took a deep breath, put the shofar to his mouth, puckered his lips and blew. Nothing happened.

HaSatan, Satan, in his minuscule form giggled with glee. After all these years, his prosecution of this group of Jews in the celestial court would finally be successful.

The baal tekiah tried once more. Again, he took a deep breath, put the shofar to his mouth, puckered his lips, and blew. Not a sound came out. He tried again and again, but still with no success.

HaSatan, Satan, was enjoying it more and more. Victory was to be his at last. This miserable group of petty sinners would soon be getting their just desserts. His conviction record would soar.

The rabbi became impatient. He took the shofar and put it to his lips but could not force out a weak note. Then the cantor tried and he, too, had no success. The president of the synagogue seized the shofar and blew until his face was as red as borsch, but not a sound. All the notables and leaders of the congregation each came forward but they, too, were unsuccessful.

The entire community was in a panic for they knew that they must call on God to move to his seat of mercy. They knew that their lives were far from blameless. They understood that they needed mercy rather than strict justice if they were to be inscribed for a good year.

HaSatan, Satan, on the other hand, was joyously rolling around inside the shofar. He could almost taste success. He felt that he was about to have succeeded in bringing another group of transgressors to justice.

Finally out of the midst of the congregation, a small man came up to the bima. He was a greengrocer, a man of little account in the large and wealthy community. Being somewhat overwhelmed at being in the presence of so many leaders of the community, he said, "Sirs, I do not know if I am worthy to try to sound the shofar, but let please, permit me. I know that I am not learned and I dare not call myself righteous but I try to do my best. My scales are accurate and I give a full and honest count to my customers. I try to offer only the best products and sell it at a modest price."

Not knowing what else to do, they gave the shofar to the little grocer. He held the shofar and shook it twice. He took a deep breath, put the shofar to his lips, and blew. There was a moment of silence, then a loud pop, and then a clear, heaven piercing tekiah.

To this day, it is said, that when we visit the synagogue, and we look carefully at the ceiling, there is a little hole that marks the spot HaSatan, Satan, hit when the little grocer shot him out of the shofar.

I will not swear to the truth of this story, but it comes to mind every time I hear a shofar that does not sound quite right. Who knows?

The association of Satan and the shofar, in Jewish lore and legend, is much older and much more sophisticated than it is in the story I just told. In this story, the Satan appeared as a puckish imp. In the imagination of the rabbis, he is a more serious character, an important figure in the heavenly assembly. Yet, whether he appears as a comic character in a story for children or as a serious figure in a mythic vision of heavenly justice, I believe that in the life and beliefs of the Jewish people, HaSatan, Satan, is of slight consequence.

In their attempt to describe the grandeur and power of God, earlier generations of Jews found it useful to imagine God as an imperial figure surrounded by a host of angelic servants and retainers. They pictured God as the king of kings and attributed to him all the attributes of a human monarch. Although this imagery generally fails to impress contemporary Jews on both a spiritual and an intellectual level.

Just as the holiday of Pesach has its cast of legendary characters – the four sons, Elijah the Prophet, the five rabbis at B'nai Brak and the little kid worth two zuzim – the High Holidays have their own cast – Jonah and his whale, the ten martyred rabbis and Abraham, Isaac and the ram caught in the thicket by his horns.

Satan finds his place in their company in the midrash, the Talmudic rabbis's narrative commentary, on the story of the Akeida, the binding of Isaac which formed this morning's Torah reading. Put simply, Satan, the heavenly prosecutor, being an angel, and thus, being in possession of some prophetic insight, knew that if Abraham and Isaac remained faithful and loyal and past the awesome and awful test God set before them, his ability to prosecute the sinful Jews would be limited.

The theological concept behind this mythic retelling of the story of the binding of Isaac in Hebrew is called zechut avot – "the merit of our ancestors." Zechut avot refers to the corporate nature of the Jewish people. The covenant made between God and Abraham and, later, renewed at Sinai, was not an agreement between God and individual Jews but represents the eternal covenant between God and the Jewish people. We see ourselves as a covenanted community. Each Jews is tied by bonds of faith and history to all other Jews past, present, and future.

Just as the wicked among us have the ability to degrade Jewish life, the righteous among us are able to elevate Jewish life. Even if we, as individuals, may be less than admirable in our behavior, the life, and deeds of the righteous may raise the general level of Jewish life to such an extent that even we sinners are carried upon the rising tide.

According to the rabbis of the Talmud, the loyalty and faithfulness of the first Jews, Abraham, and Isaac, as reported in the biblical legend of the Akeida, are an abiding source of zechut, merit. Through their merit, they have been able to exert a lasting influence on the general level of Jewish religious and moral life over the long centuries of our people's existence.

Leaving for a while theology and returning to the world of rabbinic imagination, when Satan saw Abraham and Isaac on the way to Mount Moriah in order to offer sacrifice there, he attempted to place various moral and physical obstacles in their path. First, in the guise of an old man and then disguised as a youth, he vainly attempted to prove first to Abraham and then to Isaac that their journey was foolish.

Failing to convince them not to proceed by verbal argument, Satan attempted to block their way by force. He transformed himself into a raging river. Abraham and Isaac, however, were not to be stopped. They proceeded to ford the torrent. When God saw their dedication, the legend tells us, he dried up the flood, and Abraham and Isaac continued on dry land.

Finally, as the rabbis inform us, Satan knew that the ram was predestined to be Isaac's substitute. Therefore, he tried to delay the ram's arrival by trapping him by his horns in the thicket. This, too, failed, and Abraham was able to sacrifice the ram in Isaac's place.

Therefore, each year, we sound the ram's horn to remind God of the great zechut, "merit," Abraham and Isaac earned for the Jewish people by the faithfulness to God's command. We hope that the special relationship God had with our ancestors influences the relationship God has with us, their less worthy descendants.

In Hebrew, the word satan/Satan is not a personal name. It is a professional title. It generally can be translated as "adversary" or "opponent." (1 Sam 29.4; 2 Sam 19.23) In the legal context, however, it bears the meaning of "prosecutor" (Ps. 38.20; 109.4,20,29).

From biblical times, the title, HaSatan, Satan, was given to the angel whose job it was to prosecute sinners before the celestial tribunal (Zech. 3). The rules of investigation in the heavenly court, particularly in regard to what we entrapment, are somewhat different from those down on earth. We are warned against "placing stumbling blocks before the blind." This biblical ordinance has been interpreted in our tradition to imply more than the vile and callous sin of tripping sightless people. Our rabbis teach us that it also forbids us to place temptations before those whose moral insight is severely limited.

In biblical as well as in later Jewish literature, however, Satan has the authority to tempt. But although he has this authority, he is neither evil by nature nor is he an independent agent. In the opening chapters of the book of Job, Satan appears as a member of the heavenly entourage. He approaches God and suggests that Job's reputation for righteousness be tested, a suggestion to which God quickly agrees to.

This understanding of the role of Satan continues in rabbinic midrash. In another midrash on the story of the binding of Isaac, we see Satan appearing before God and requesting that he test Abraham's faith. Here the apparent cruelty of the test is tempered because the conflict is really between the sovereign God and his overzealous prosecutor. Although Satan is an aggressive and creative prosecutor of sinners, in the Jewish imagination, he remains part of the heavenly entourage and is clearly subordinate to God. Naturally, Satan is not well regarded in Jewish folk belief. Although he is an angel, he has a dreadful job. Like the angel of death, the malach ha mavet, with whom he is often associated, HaSatan, "Satan" is not a welcome visitor in our lives. On the spiritual level, he engenders the same feeling that I.R.S. agents, government inspectors, and the assistant principal for discipline engender on the secular level.

The figure of Satan is not restricted to Jewish mythology. The Christian image of Satan has its roots as well in the biblical heritage of ancient Israel. But very early in Christian history, even before the completion of the New Testaments, the image of Satan informative Christianity diverges from the one in rabbinic Judaism.

Unlike the Jewish Satan, who at best is a faceless bureaucrat, a celestial functionary, whose only credit is that he does a distasteful job well, the Christian Satan is a charismatic figure and a worthy opponent of God himself.

In popular Christian belief, although surely not in the faith of the religiously sophisticated, the image of a powerful, charismatic Satan has led to a practical dualism in which the conflict between good and evil is cast into a cosmic struggle between God and Satan. The image of Satan –the god-like demon – that circulates in American culture, draws its power from centuries of popular preaching, from Christian devotional classics, and from literary masterpieces on the order of Dante's Inferno, Milton's Paradise Lost, and Goethe's Faust.

Both the Jewish and Christian images of evil, reflect the human experience. The history of our century has been marred by both the evil wills of charismatic leaders, such as Hitler, made active by the evil deeds of bureaucrats who blindly follow orders, such as Eichmann.

The mythic worlds of Judaism and Christianity share as well the concept of fallen angels. Both draw their understanding of the fall from the Hebrew Bible and its early Jewish interpretations. Yet, descriptions of and reasons for the angel's fall are radically different in the two faith traditions.

In the Christian myth, the sin of Satan, who at one time was called Lucifer, the morning star, was the desire to be like God, that is to enjoy power. He and his host challenged God's authority and was cast down from heaven's height. Evil has its origins in a cosmic struggle and can only be overcome by a cosmic figure, the Christ.

In the Jewish legend, the sin of the angels was their desire to be like us, to be human, that is to enjoy pleasure. While there is a perverse grandeur in Lucifer's fall from grace, it is the image of a star thrown in blazing glory from the celestial heights, the Jewish version of the fall of the angels is embarrassingly mundane. The angels desired pleasure. They wanted to covert with human women. They wanted to be like us but failed in the attempt.

In the Jewish myth, evil is not the result of a great cosmic struggle rather it is a human option. The choice between the sanctification of the pleasures available to us on earth or their degradation, is a human choice. Angels, even HaSatan, if they exist at all, do not exist in the world of good and evil, of pain and pleasure.

Although the psalmist claims that humans a but a little lower than heavenly beings, their superiority over us is only in reference to their elevation. In his vision, they are physically closer to God. In most ways, angels, including the angels we traditionally fear, the angel of death, and the accusing angel, HaSatan, Satan, are weaker than we are.

Thus Satan is an impoverished figure in the Jewish religious imagination. The real action is not in heaven but here on earth. In heaven, Satan does the paperwork, he prepares the cases, but the argumentation takes place on earth, a place where he has no more stature than a pea.

We make choices. We are actors. As Jews, we do not understand the choice between good and evil in this world as a reflection of a great cosmic struggle. Rather, we see it as a human challenge, a challenge that we face each and every day as we wend our way through the many and varied temptations of everyday life, as we strive to enhance our lives and the lives of those we touch, both far and near.

Angels, including Satan, have no choice but to do their jobs, as pleasant or as unpleasant as they may be. In the mythic world of Jewish legends, angels do not envy God or God's power but they are jealous of our freedom – our freedom to choose, our freedom to grow, and our freedom to enjoy life's pleasures and make them holy. Angels though they stand illuminated by the radiance of the Holy One, can in no way comprehensible to us be described as alive.

Today, Rosh HaShanah is Yom HaDin, the Day of Judgement, does not mark a cosmic struggle between good and evil, God and Satan. Rather, it celebrates our human potentials. Our ability to choose good over evil. Our power to determine the moral content of our lives.

Stripped of its mythic imagery, today's judgment does not take place in the heavenly court but in our hearts. In that very private place, HaSatan, Satan, has no more weight than a pea in a tube which we shoot out across the room when we muster all the good within us and sound the shofar of our hearts.

THE HINENI - A JEWISH MEDITATION ON LEADERSHIP

September 20, 2024

A high point in our High Holiday liturgy occurs immediately before the Musaf (Additional) service. Just after the Torah is returned to the Aron we may hear a small, penetrating voice as the Chazzan (Cantor) slowly walks forward. We rise and listen to the pleas of the Hineni – the chazzan's meditation – as the chazzan prepares to lead us in prayer.

The chazzan humbly prays to be able to guide our prayers despite the chazzan's limitations. The chazzan acknowledges the awesome responsibility of representing us before God in this season of reckoning and forgiveness. The chazzan is humbled and strengthened by our trust and the seriousness of the hour.

While the Hineni focuses on a specific moment in our service, it is also a Jewish meditation on leadership and the values a leader must possess. Leaders serve others and not themselves. Leaders trust themselves but aren’t overconfident. Leaders are responsible both to those they lead and to the values that guide them. And leaders always have their moral GPS set to life and peace.

Hineni is the prayer of one who has been called to lead. The chazzan, the Shaliach Tzbur (the one sent by the community), opens by asking both us and God to be aware of his or her presence – Hineni / “Behold I am here” – and then acknowledging his or her own "lack of accomplishments". Leaders possess the talent, knowledge, and training to accept their call, and yet, are aware of the limits of their learning and experience. This is not false humility but deep wisdom. The more we know, including self-knowledge, the more aware we become of the depth of our ignorance.

Despite this, leaders courageously take on the task. They willingly stand even in the presence of God to present their case, not with pride but with humility. They step up not to forward their agenda but on behalf of those they serve. The chazzan continues; "I have come to stand and petition You (God) on behave of the people who sent me.”

Leaders understand that they are no different from those they represent. They have the same needs, concerns, and hopes as those they lead. They need the same blessings. They stand with their people. They know that their failures will harm others. The chazzan prays, “Please do not consider them sinful for my sins … nor should they be shamed for my sake.”

Leaders take responsibility for their limitations and failures. They do not blame others. They see themselves as actors, not victims. In the Hineni, the chazzan understands the ramifications of chazzan’s shortcomings.

Leaders have a vision and offer hope. The chazzan prays for the transformation of our circumstances and our souls; “Please turn all our troubles and hardships … to joy, happiness, life, and peace, and may we love truth and peace." Leaders know we succeed only when our hearts are turned to higher purposes.

Leaders do not work for themselves but for others and for high principles. As the Hineni draws to an end the chazzan asks God to accept our prayers not for the chazzan’s sake but “for the sake of all the righteous, loyal, pure and upright ones" and for the exalted values God's name represents.

Finally, leaders know that success ultimately rests in powers beyond our capacities – in the love and grace we manifest in this world and in our ability to hear the prayers of others. The Hineni concludes with that affirmation that God’s blessed nature rests in God’s ability to hear all our prayers.

Leadership is a gift and a responsibility. When we are called to lead, let us respond in the spirit of the Hineni – with courage and humility.

WHAT WE DO NOT KNOW

Spiritual Skills for Living in this World

February 9, 2024

Summary: Above all, life is unpredictable. We all live with uncertainty. To thrive in our world, live a meaningful life and achieve a sense of serenity, we need to cultivate the spiritual skills that can guide us. The sages of the Talmud ask us to consider what these skills might be.

The second century sage Rabbi Eliezar said, “Repent one day before your death!” His students, somewhat perplexed asked, “But who knows that day?” He quickly responded, “One should repent today because tomorrow may not come.” (b. Shabbat 153a). Thus, he taught that every day provides us an opportunity to repent.

Repentance, teshuvah, in Hebrew, is more than an activity, it is a state of being, an attitude on life. It reaches beyond feeling regret for one’s mistakes and misdeeds and striving to be better. It is how we should drive along the highway of our lives. Teshuvah means watching the road, knowing the terrain, following the map, avoiding obstacles, avoiding detours and focusing on the destination. While sometimes we may make a wrong turn, teshuvah allows for course correction. Sadly, it does not, however, make up for lost time and missed opportunities.

Living in a state of teshuvah requires us to be present. We need to be aware of ourselves and alert to what is around us. Where we have been is a source of information, and where we can go, a source of inspiration. But teshuvah means being attentive to the here and now – the eternal present.

But we do not only live in moment. We live in time. Our lives are enriched by our memories. Our lives are guided by our dreams. Teshuvah allows us to enhance every moment, to evaluate our past and contemplate our future. But it does not change what has happened nor does it control what will be. It does not tell us the day we will die.

Even the righteous are blind to the future. Biblical prophets were not fortune tellers. As best, they offered options and suggested possible results. Teshuvah may hone our skills in dealing with what may occur but it does not protect us from the uncertainties and troubles life presents.

We all live with uncertainty. Rabbi Eliezar told his students, “Repent one day before your death!”. But our personal ethical state is not all that we need to be concerned about. We worry about our family, our community and our world. We may have the spiritual resources to handle life’s turbulence, but who of us wants to test them. The more grounded we are the more alert we are to the uncertainties of life and better able to plan for the unexpected and the inevitable. But even our best plans can be overturned. Life is uncertain and obscure.

Our sages were aware of our essential ignorance in matters most close to us – matters which us on the personal, familial, communal and existential levels. In the Midrash (Genesis Rabba 65:17) we read that our sages taught: “There are seven matters that are hidden from people: ‘[1] The day of [their] death; [2] the day of consolation; [3] the profundity of justice; [4] a person does not know through what he will profit; [5] a person does not know what is in the heart of another; [6] a person does not know what the woman is carrying in her pregnancy; and [7] when the evil empire will fall.”

In other words - We do not know when our lives will end, nor when we will be comforted in times of sorrow, nor when we will experience justice in the world, nor what are the best choices for ourselves and those we care for, nor another’s thoughts and feelings, nor the fate of our children, nor the time of redemption and liberation.

As the sages then proceed to support each of these claims with biblical verses, we get the sense that to them these matters are solely within the divine preview. But if only God knows, that matters little for us. We are still left in the dark. We still have to live with uncertainty. We do not know when we will die.

It is not that we are completely in the dark. We know that someday we will die. We understand that people can recover from grief. We sometimes find justice. We have a sense that life is risky. We can share our ideas and feelings with others. We can give our children our love. We can envision a better future. And with this bit of knowledge we can peer, however dimly, into the darkness.

If the knowledge that someday we will die can cultivate a life enriched by teshuvah, “repentance through introspection”, what other spiritual qualities can we cultivate to address these other areas of uncertainty? Perhaps – For suffering, compassion? For risks, caution? For justice, righteousness? For others, openness? For children, nuture? For redemption, hope?

Despite our deepest wishes, we cannot get the clarity that we believe will remove the anxiety of not knowing what will be. Knowledge of the future and the secrets of living have not been revealed to us. Our sense of the Divine One is murky and elusive. Neither God nor the universe responds clearly and directly to our desires and our needs.

But, we have tools to navigate the darkness and find some clarity in our confounding world. Despite of our ignorance, we are able to find wisdom. We can cultivate the spiritual resources that strengthen us as we deal with life’s challenges – both those we see as detrimental and, surprisingly, also those we may thank are beneficial. They do not provide us with bulletproof armor but with them, and particularly along with a community that cultivates them, we will make it through until the day we die and, hopefully, leave a legacy to guide others on life’s journey.

Yom Kippur

A NEW BEGINNING – YOM KIPPUR IN CONTEXT.

The high holidays of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur do not stand alone in the Jewish calendar. Like all of our other holidays, the High Holidays part of a larger cycle of festivals and commemorations that help us re-live and reenact the great stories that capture the deepest spiritual insights of the Jewish people. As we move through the Jewish year, celebrating our festive seasons, and marking the days of commemoration and sorrow, we attune our hearts, souls, bodies, and minds to the rhythm and harmonies of Jewish life.

Over the course of the Jewish year, we encounter and celebrate the two great foundation epics of the Jewish people. The first and easiest to understand is the story of freedom celebrated by the winter and spring holidays of Purim, Passover, and Shavuot. The second, more theological, and more spiritually challenging, is the story of sin and forgiveness, exile and return, and death and resurrection commemorated by the summer and fall holidays of the Ninth of Av (Tisha B'Av), Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, Sukkot, and Shemini Atzeret / Simchat Torah.

In this cycle, a great fast of Yom Kippur, marks the transition between the experience of death, destruction, loss, and exile – the themes of the summer fast day of Tisha B'Av, and the expression of joy, happiness, rebirth, prosperity, and restoration – the message of Succoth. On Yom Kippur, we open our hearts to accept the divine gift of forgiveness. We put aside and leave behind the sinful deeds and wicked thoughts that separated us from our true spiritual home, from our God, and from our true selves. By the end of the day, we cannot wait to celebrate our rebirth with family and friends as we break the magic experience of the fast with a lavish feast. As a people, we look forward with joyous anticipation to the conclusion of the fall holiday season with the weeklong celebration of Sukkot followed by the day on which we rejoice in our special heritage and unique destiny, Simchat Torah.

Tisha B'Av commemorates the destruction of the First Temple in 586 B.C.E. by the Babylonians and the destruction of the second Temple in 70 C. E. by the Romans. Succoth, on the other hand, celebrates the building of the desert sanctuary, the Mishkan, shortly after our ancestors left Egypt, and the dedication of the First Temple by its builder, King Solomon. Although we understand the cultural, political, social, and economic settings of these events, we do not cherish them merely as historical events.

Throughout our history, our people discovered spiritual meaning in the successes and failures of daily life and in the triumphs and disasters of our national experience. From a religious and spiritual point of view our people claimed that it was not the Babylonians and Romans who destroyed the two temples. It was our sins that undermined our holy sanctuary. From this perspective, Solomon did not build the temple as part of a well-considered political and social program. He built the temple as a place in which our ancestors could experience God's presence. The temple bore witness to God's grace, love, forgiveness, and mercy.

The trials and tribulations of the national life of the Jewish people reflect the struggles and challenges facing every individual Jew. As the sins of the Jewish people destroyed our temple and exiled us from our homeland, the sanctity of our homes and the peace of our communities can be shattered by our mistakes, indiscretions, and wrongful behavior. Our people long for a time of peace and restoration in which the divine presence will return to Jerusalem and all people will be blessed with tranquility. As individuals, we also pray for a time when we can reconnect with those we love – our neighbors, our friends, our coworkers, and our relatives – and let go of our anger, frustration, misjudgments, misstatements, mistakes, and disappointments. Only then, can we, once again, restore peace and harmony to a small world in which we, as individuals, live.

Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, the day in which we have the opportunity to be free of the burdens of the past and re-create our people and ourselves, plays the central role in the drama of spiritual restoration. As we take part in the rituals of this holiday, we imagine ourselves being transformed and our world being changed. We know that we have stumbled and fallen. We have found ourselves in places and situations where we know we should not have been. We have lost our way and wish to return to our spiritual home. On Yom Kippur, we learn once again that we can pick ourselves up, find a way, and return to where we truly want to be.

In our holiday cycle, we must wait five more days for the festival of Sukkot to celebrate our return to our spiritual home. However, through our participation in the rites and rituals and customs of Yom Kippur we realize that gifts of return, restoration, and rebirth are there for us if we choose to accept them. On Yom Kippur our sins are forgiven and the promise of a life full of purpose, meaning, and love is God's gracious gift to each and every one of us. On Yom Kippur, we put aside our sadness, our regrets, and our disappointments, and turn to welcome the New Year and all it promises with joy.

RETURN - THE SEVEN ELEMENTS OF CREATION

90:1. A Prayer of Moses, the man of God

O Lord, You have been our refuge in every generation

2. Before the Mountains came into being

before You brought forth the earth and the world,

from eternity to eternity You are God.

3. You return man to contrition;

You decreed, "Return you, mortals!" (Psalm 90:1-3 NJV)

According to the religious imagination of our people, Rosh HaShanah, the Jewish New Year, marks the anniversary of the creation of the world. This is a spiritual assertion and not a scientific proposition. As such, it reflects a theological understanding that the religious and ethical values we celebrate on Rosh HaShanah are rooted in the very act of creation. The ways in which we, as human beings, are to relate to God and to each other are part of the fundamental order of the universe.

The opening verses of Psalm 90, express this deep spiritual truth. The poem opens enigmatically, “O Lord, You have been our refuge in every generation. Before the mountains came into being, before You brought forth the earth and the world.” But how could the Eternal have been our refuge before creation? The psalmist answers by reminding us that God’s first primal utterance is an invitation to repentance. From before creation, God identifies himself as the one to whom we can turn when we go astray.

Psalm 90 addresses the question of what was prior to the beginning? The Psalmist proclaims that teshuvah, the process of returning to the core values that define us as full human beings, existed prior to the creation of our world Rosh HaShanah is the “birthday of the world” not because God created the physical world in which we live on this day, but because the spiritual values that sustain us within this world are inherent in creation. The rabbis of the Talmud explored the proposition that creation itself required the pre-existence of basic moral and spiritual values. They imagined seven spiritual elements existing before the creation of the world. God used them as the building blocks of creation and in them, our world finds its essential meaning Each had a unique purpose and considered together present a Jewish spiritual worldview.

(1) Our sages imagined the Primordial Torah, written with black fire on white fire, resting on God’s lap. God used this supernal Torah as creation’s blueprint. Torah is the perfect embodiment of God's word and wisdom, and in this way, our world embodies God’s revelation.

(2) For our Sages, God was, is, and will be sovereign. God’s dominion commences at creation., Since every ruler needs a throne, the throne of Glory, God's royal seat, had to be ready for God’s coronation.

Our ancient teachers believed that our world needs justice to survive. Therefore, they placed (3) The Garden of Eden, paradise, by God's right hand and (4) Gehenna, hell, on God's left. These two mythic places of reward and punishment represent God as judge of all creation.

To our sages, the spiritual and physical realms are connected. Drawing on the insight of the book of Psalms that the Beit HaMikdash, the Holy Temple in Jerusalem, stands before God's throne as God's footstool, the rabbis understood our ancient Temple as the point of contact between God and humanity. (5) The sages’ vision of the pre-existent Heavenly Temple indicates their understanding that God’s desire to be present in our lives is rooted in the very act of creation. Our rabbis claimed that creation is inherently meaningful.

There is a goal and a purpose for our world. This idea underlies Jewish messianic thought. (6) Building on an image from the prophet Zechariah, the sages proposed a precious stone engraved with the name of the messiah as one of the seven basic elements. By identifying the name of the messiah, the person whose presence marks the beginning of Olam HaBa, the coming world, as one of the fundamental building blocks of creation, the sages claim that before the creation of this Olam, this world order, its purpose, and goal was already devised.

(7) The last but most crucial of the pre-existent elements is the divine voice that summons us to experience “teshuvah”, “returning”, or “repentance.” God’s commandment “Shu-Vu Ve-nei 'A-dam, Return you mortals,” went forth even before the mountains came into being. Long before God revealed the Torah on Mount Sinai and the Divine Presence filled the Temple on Mount Zion, the first mitzvah, God’s first directive, is the call to repent. Before God said, “Let there be light”, God had already invited us to return to God. God’s voice, the same voice that calls creation into being, calls us to respond.

Teshuvah, repentance, is basic to the nature of creation. No matter how far we may have strayed, we are always invited back home. We are not forced to travel on a highway that leads to pain, sorrow, and destruction. As individuals and as a people, we can turn to a better path.

Our refuge rests in the power of teshuvah, the power to change our world and ourselves. To the rabbis of old, this power seemed so essential and meaningful in their view of the world that they described it as the last of the seven basic elements of creation.

At an earlier age, in a different world, the prophet Ezekiel reported God's word as saying, I do not desire the death of a sinner, but that he repent and live."

At a later age, Rabbi Abbahu ben Ze`era taught: Great is repentance, for it preceded the creation of the world. And what was the call to repentance? It was the voice from heaven which cried out saying, Shu-Vu Ve-nei 'Adam - Return you, mortals.

Today as we prepare to enter another New Year, we can respond to the cry and return.

Sacrifice and Martyrdom

Thoughts for Yom Kippur 5766

Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, is never an easy day. Fasting, however, is not the real problem. Rather, the day’s challenge comes from its demand that we confront deep spiritual, theological, and philosophical issues we would often wish to avoid. We are asked to consider, for example; the tension between sin and forgiveness, the relationship between suffering and redemption, and the emergence of hope out of tragedy. The prayers and readings of Yom Kippur demand that we meditate on these themes as personal challenges, but present them to us in grand images on a mythic scale. The entire day is challenging but, the most challenging hour on Yom Kippur is the one dedicated to the Mussaf service.

It is early afternoon on the Day of Atonement and Mussaf is half over. The hazzan has just completed reading the lengthy poetic retelling of the worship service in the Beit HaMiqdash, the ancient Temple in Jerusalem. In our sacred imagination, we left our synagogue and joined our ancestors in that holiest place as we participated spiritually in the worship service conducted by the Cohen Gadol, the High Priest, that carried our prayers for forgiveness and our hopes for a year of blessing to God.

We trembled with awe as the High Priest sent the scapegoat out into the wilderness symbolically carrying away our sins. Reverently we bowed low as the High Priest proclaimed the Holy Name of God as he beseeched the Eternal three times for forgiveness. The ancient sacrifices no longer seemed strange and off-putting because we were in another place at another time.

Then our liturgy drew us back into our time and space. It jolted us, once again to face the great spiritual mystery that lies at the heart of the Yom Kippur experience – the tension between our propensity to sin and God’s ceaseless offer of forgiveness – our experience of exile and God’s promise of redemption. Although our transgressions destroyed the Holy Temple and brought its rituals to an end, the path to open our souls to God’s gift of forgiveness and restoration remains unimpeded, particularly on Yom Kippur, the day set aside for prayer and reflection.

Now, just as we are about to offer thanksgiving for this life-affirming, life-sustaining gift, our liturgy confronts us with another kind of sacrifice in the great medieval poem “Eleh Ezkarah” – “These are the Things I Remember.” But here, what is remembered is not the orderly and dignified Temple sacrifices offered to God by the High Priest, but a human sacrifice. The poem recalls in terrifying detail the martyrdom of ten of our greatest sages almost two thousand years ago during the reign of the Roman Emperor Hadrian.

“Eleh Ezkarah” is not, however, a simple history legend. There is a certain timelessness to its retelling. The details that tie its story to a certain time and a place are removed. The place of execution is not identified. The events are conflated. The emperor is named “Belial” – “The Evil One” – and the empire is called “Malchut” – “The Wicked Kingdom.” The poem glosses over many of the details of the slaughter so clearly recalled in the midrashim, legends, that form its sources.

In “Eleh Ezkarah” the martyrdom of our ten sages assumes a universal quality. They have become victims of a vicious regime whose leader bears a demonic name. To the poem’s anonymous author and to generations of Jews, the price paid by the ten sages to preserve the culture, wisdom, and dignity of our people reflected their own struggles. The sage’s brave but bitter deaths gave transcendent meaning to the daily challenges faced by generations of Jews. Like the sacrifices in the ancient Temple, our teachers’ self-sacrifice had a redemptive meaning. The recalling of their martyrdom – their deaths “al pi kiddush haShem” (for the sanctification of God’s Holy Name) – had the power to guide us on the path to God’s gift of forgiveness and restoration.

But beyond our personal need for forgiveness, the recollection of both the worship in the Temple and the sacrifice of our sages reminds us of the price and the glory of being citizens of a dominion that is far beyond the all too often cold and ruthless earthly regimes that have and continue to oppress the bodies, minds, and souls of countless human beings.

Although our sages died as Jews for their desire to preserve Judaism, we have always known that our struggle for religious and cultural freedom and self-determination is part of a greater human struggle. In prayers such as the Aleinu, we dream of a time when all humanity will be united under God’s Dominion. Our prophets envisioned a time when all would stream to Jerusalem to call on God in their own voices. Our martyrs rarely died alone. The same wicked regimes that attacked Jews all too often directed their hate to other people and other groups with varying degrees of hostility.

It is the mid-afternoon of Yom Kippur. The Mussaf service has come to an end. We have a short break. Perhaps we’ll take a walk or sit quietly in the sanctuary. It’s been a challenging day. In our prayers and meditations, we have made a spiritual pilgrimage. We have twice witnessed the opening of heaven; the first time over Jerusalem’s Temple to receive the prayers of our people and the second time over an unknown arena to accept the souls of our martyrs. Once again we have faced the deep spiritual questions of the Day of Atonement and, perhaps, all the days of our lives; the tension between sin and forgiveness, the relationship between suffering and redemption, the need for hope to emerge out of tragedy. We may not, as yet, found a full answer, but, with God’s grace, we have gained some insight, grown in wisdom, and discovered new meaning in our personal struggles and triumphs.

Often life’s deepest spiritual questions do not ask for answers but demand responses. The quality of our response is proportional to the seriousness in which we consider the question. May we be blessed this Yom Kippur to have the courage to confront our spiritual challenges and gain the strength and insight we will need to enjoy a year of a meaningful and rewarding life.

A Time for Prayer

As I prepared from the Yamim Noraim, the High Holidays this year, I found myself particularly concerned with prayer as an individual and communal experience. Over the past four months, I have spent much time thinking about and writing about Tefillah, Jewish prayer. I completed a manuscript exploring the Sh’ma, the prayerful declaration of the Jewish faith, from a spiritual and theological viewpoint. I complied a new Machzor, High Holiday Prayer Book for the residents of Lions Gate, our community’s continuing care retirement community. The theme of the educational program at Lions Gate this summer has been the history and meaning of Jewish prayer.

Thinking about prayer, editing liturgical materials, composing prayer books for the Jewish holidays, and discussing prayers and praying with senior adults, has made me aware of the depth of spiritual resources available to us as Jews and the breadth of Jewish prayer experiences. It has also awakened me to the blessings and challenges in balancing the needs of the individual and the community we face as Jews.

I found the opportunity to explore the Jewish prayer with our residents especially rewarding. They brought to our discussions the insights and wisdom acquired by a lifetime of engagement with the rewards and challenges of personal prayer and community worship. Together we found the “how”, “where”, “what” and “when” questions concerning prayer interesting, but the “why” question captured our imaginations. We came to understand that although prayer has cognitive and emotional components, spiritual transformation lies at the heart of our worship experience.

Particularly in light of the spiritual goals of the upcoming Jewish High Holidays, it seemed to us that the purpose of prayer was to support an individual’s and a community’s spiritual growth. Prayer helps us develop as human beings by bringing us closer to God, reinforcing our highest values, connecting us to our fellow Jews, challenging our complacency, and reminding us of our intimate bond with all who share our world. Although we discussed many, different answers to the question of “Why Pray,” the statement, “Whoever leaves prayer a better person knows that his or her prayer has been answered,” won common accord.

I tried to reflect our study in the prayers, which I composed for our new Lions Gate Machzor, such as the following – an opening meditation to the Neilah or Concluding Service for Yom Kippur. This prayer, introducing the climactic end of the Day of Atonement, expresses my wish for all of us this and every High Holiday season.

I have only one request from the Eternal One,

I only wish for one small thing;

It is that I may dwell in the Eternal’s house all the days of my life,

Beholding the Eternal One’s beauty,

Seeking God in God’s holy place. (Psalm 27:3)

To live forever in God's house;

To remain in God's holy place;

To let our very being be overpowered and transformed by the overwhelming beauty of the Divine Presence;

To dwell in peace, security, love, joy, and happiness forever;

This is our prayer. This is our dream. This is our hope.

Our holy day of Yom Kippur is drawing to an end. Soon the sun will set and stars will emerge against the dark background of space. We will lift up our eyes and see the almost full moon announcing the arrival of the Festival of Sukkot, our season of rejoicing.

We have spent a long day together seeking God in this place made holy by our prayers and petitions. Neilah, the last service of Yom Kippur, the fast of light, purity, and joy, the day of forgiveness, reconciliation, and peace, is about to begin. The intimate bond between the congregation of the people of Israel and the heavenly angelic host will last for one more short hour.

Today, we have dressed ourselves in purity. Today, we have put aside the desire for food and drink and found sustenance and strength in prayer, meditation, and holy songs Today, we sang with the celestials and danced with the cherubim. Now, as today’s sun enters the gates of eternity, we pray that our prayers will be answered and we will enter tomorrow better people than we were last night.

LeShanah Tovah – May we all be blessed with a good new year!

“The Secret of Yom Kippur”

For Yom Kippur 5782

September 16, 2021

The secret of Yom Kippur is simple. It is that forgiveness is a gift freely granted and, hopefully, well received. Forgiveness is not earned nor can it be earned. Yet, seeking it, granting it, and receiving it, all require courage to examine our thoughts, feelings, and deeds.

Forgiveness does not cancel the past but allows for new beginnings. It is an act of liberation which shifts our focus from punishment to restoration, from hurt to healing, from weakness to strength, and from shame to self-worth.

Yom Kippur’s secret is not complicated. Making it part of our being, however, is a life-long spiritual practice.

Forgiveness, like love, cannot be earned. We can no more make a person forgive us than we can make a person love us. The best that we can do upon becoming aware of our sins is to act in such a way as to show that we can be forgiven. If forgiveness is granted, then we are free to restore the connection severed by our sins. If not, then we will have at least gained a new level of self-awareness that will strengthen our bonds with others in the future.

Forgiveness is freely granted. It needs to be unconditional. It is a gift that we offer to others who have offended us. It is letting go of the pain, anger, frustration that burden us and it is offered without any expectation that it will be received. Forgiveness allows us to separate in peace from the ones who have harmed us. It may open the door to a renewed relationship but it also may open the gateway to other pathways.

Forgiveness reconnects us to ourselves as well as to others. To be able to forgive, we need to feel that we are in need of forgiveness. We need to be aware that while others have sinned against us, we, too, have sinned against others. We need to know that the gift we offer is also the gift we need.

To accept forgiveness is to accept the fact that we have offended. The hurt we caused others to feel is real. It matters little if it came about by our ignorance, negligence, or deliberate action. We need to acknowledge our involvement in another’s pain and use that knowledge to understand ourselves better.

Forgiveness does not allow us to forget but requires us to remember what shattered the relationships that should have brought us closer to another, and how and why we let that happen. Forgiveness enables us to transform the misdeeds and mistakes that have separated us from others and from our better selves, into opportunities for growth, renewal, and rebirth.

Everyone sins and everyone is sinned against. It is part of being human. But we are often unaware of our sins and how they undermine our relations with others, our connection to our community, our ties to family and friends, and to our sense of self. All too often, we focus on those who have sinned against us more than on those against whom we have sinned. We are not so perfect that we have not sinned, but knowing what sin is and how it changes us, empowers us to forgive.

Forgiveness asks us not only to be cognizant enough to know our sins but also wise enough to know that our sins need not define us. Forgiveness, granted and received, frees us to redefine ourselves and our place in the world.

Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, is the day on which a forty-day process of exploring forgiveness reaches its climax. We begin the day with Kol Nidre in which we acknowledge our inherent ability to fail. We end the day at Neila with the understanding that despite who we were, what we have done, and what was done to us, Heaven’s spiritual gates will remain open to us through the power of forgiveness.

The secret of forgiveness is simple. The practice is hard. The rewards are great and it is a life-long journey. May the New Year be one of growth, understanding, happiness, and peace as we forgive each other and strive to be worthy of the gift of forgiveness.

"THE CHEER AND CHALLENGE OF YOM KIPPUR

“There were no happier days for the people of Israel than the 15th of Av and the Day of Atonement” – Rabbi Simeon Ben Gamliel (Ta'anit 4:8)

Of all the days in the Jewish year, Yom Kippur is both the happiest and most serious. It bears the cheerful yet daunting message that the gates through which we need to pass on our way to a meaningful life, the Shaarai Teshuvah, the Gates of Repentance, will always open for us if we have the knowledge, wisdom and courage to knock. The good news is that the opportunity to repent is a manifestation of God’s love. The challenge is that it is our responsibility to take advantage of God’s gracious offer.

To accept the transforming gift of forgiveness, we need to appreciate our need for it. To remake ourselves, we need to know ourselves – our strengths as well as our weaknesses. To redirect our lives, we need the courage to examine our hearts and wisdom to assess our minds.

From antiquity, the generations of our people crafted the rites and rituals of Yom Kippur to help us find the spiritual distance we need to seek this deep understanding. Fundamentally, on Yom Kippur we try to stretch the bonds that tie us to our physical existence so that we may explore the manner in which we interact with our world. We forgo the pleasures of the body – eating, drinking, bathing – and fast. We put aside our everyday clothes and dress as if we were angels. We leave our homes and workplaces and spend the day in synagogue and in prayer.

Even these basic steps are not easy. As we feel discomfort when we stretch unused muscles during physical exertion, we feel a similar discomfort when we extend ourselves during this long day of spiritual exercises. This is the experience, which the Torah describes as “afflicting our souls”.

Yet, by stepping outside of our physical world, we can understand how we use it to sustain our lives and abuse it to satisfy our desires.

By fasting, we explore our relationship with food and drink. Do we grab more than we need - gluttony? Are we aware of those who are hungry - callousness? Do we seek escape in food, drink and drugs – addiction?

By changing our dress, we review our connection to our bodies. Does our pursuit of style, hide us from our true selves – vanity? Does our need to project an image, keep us from what we need – pride? Does our acceptance of other’s standards, keep us from showing us who we are – self-deception?

By leaving our homes and putting aside our labors, we study the ways in which what we own, owns us. Have we chased after more wealth than we need to allow us to pursue our highest aspirations – greed? Have we retreated from life behind our own walls – isolation? Have we sought security only in what we can count and measure – materialism?

As tradition and practice guides us to face these aspects of our existence, we gain a deeper awareness of who we are and of who we want to be. As challenging as this confrontation may be, by meeting it, we take account of our essential beings. We begin to know ourselves as we are and as we can truly be and we are ready to pass through the Gates of Repentance on our way to a better life.

The rites, rituals, customs and practices of Yom Kipper bring us to the Gates of Repentance, the point where God’s overflowing grace, in Hebrew – chein, chesed and rachamim, (love, loyalty and mercy) touches our awareness of our individual, personal identity. Yom Kippur offers us the opportunity to step through those gates so that we may transform ourselves and bind our limited lives to the fullness of creation and its boundless Foundation.

Sukkot

WHY THIS SUKKAH?

Our fall holiday season reaches its climax in Sukkot, the Feast of Booths. The sukkah, its central feature, is a temporary shelter roofed loosely with branches so that star-light might enter. For generations, our people, following the directives in the Torah (Ex. 23:16; Deut. 16: 13, 15; Lev. 23:42-43), have spent at least a moment each day in the sukkah during the week-long festival.

Many Jews find the sukkah to be a potent expression of Jewish identity. Constructing a sukkah creates lasting memories for children and grandchildren. In a sukkah, friends can gather for an outdoor meal before the weather gets too cold. After a busy day, in a busy time, a sukkah is a quiet sanctuary. Above all, a sukkah is a powerful reminder of our people’s heritage, hopes, and values.

As part of our people’s cultural and spiritual tradition, which abounds in symbolic objects and gestures, the sukkah is one of the richest. Biblically, it recalls the Exodus from Egypt. The Torah instructs us to dwell in booths for seven days so that we remember that as refugees from Egyptian bondage, God provided us with temporary housing. In the sukkah we consider the struggles of our people to find shelter whenever we faced homelessness from the time of the Babylonia exile to the DP camps of post-World War II Europe. Today, it is a key to open our hearts to the needs of the unending flow of people fleeing war and oppression.

In ancient Israel, the sukkah was the simple booth that farmers set-up during the harvest to provide shade in mid-day and shelter at night. Today the sukkah, as harvest booth, reminds us of the effort needed to provide food for our world’s growing population. We take pride in the advances in agriculture that come from Israel, but we also remember the manual labor of farmworkers, many of whom are migrants, who harvest our crops.

On Sukkot we leave our homes to spend time in a simple hut. We step away from our sense of security to connect to those whose homes are no more secure than our sukkot. On Passover, we eat matzah, the unleavened bread of the poor, and on Sukkot, we dwell in sukkot, shacks, the substandard housing of the impoverished. As we offer thanksgiving for our blessings, we think of those throughout the world who are not as blessed.

The sukkah is a symbol of courage. The living in booths during the forty years in the wilderness fortified the generation that first entered the Promised Land. The booths evoke the memory of Jews who struggled for freedom from the Maccabees to the Jewish partisans and of the courage of the Zionist pioneers. The sukkah reminds us of the willingness of American Jews to defend our nation’s liberty.

The sukkah represents the unity of the Jewish people. In ancient days, Sukkot was the central festival. Jews from all over the world poured into Jerusalem. Temporary booths were needed to house the innumerable pilgrims. Sukkot was a time when all Jews would try to gather together as one people. In the vision of our prophets, Sukkot will be the time in which all people will celebrate our shared kinship under the gaze of God.

The simple sukkah we set up in our yards recreates the Mishkan, the portable shrine Moses built in the desert. As our ancestors could experience God dwelling in the midst of the Israelite encampment, we can envision God living within our homes and our hearts. The sukkah’s roof shows us that in order to sense God’s presence in our lives, we must open our hearts to all creation. The fragile nature of our sukkot demonstrates our dependence on God’s grace revealed in the world around us.

For seven days our sukkah is a tangible reminder of fundamental Jewish convictions and values. Our sukkah creates indelible memories that we carry throughout our lives. Although we put away our sukkah at the end of Sukkot, these values remain with us. Sukkot ends with another holiday, Shemini Atzeret / Simchat Torah which calls on us to return to the unending study of the foundational statement of Jewish life, heritage, and values symbolized by our sukkot, the Torah itself.

TAKING DOWN THE SUKKAH

Thoughts for the day after Shemini Atzeret / Simchat Torah

These days, it doesn’t take me very long to put up my sukkah. When it was new, it took me a while to figure out how the parts fit together, but now I have it down to a science. I lay the poles on the ground and connect them one by one to make the frame. Then I hang the tarpaulins that form the walls and place the bamboo mat on the top for the roof.

When that’s all done, I ask the kids to come in and decorate it. I am not entirely sure how it stays together each year but somehow the roof stays on, the decorations stay up and it is always a wonderful retreat to share with family and friends during the festival of Sukkot. After all, there is something about a sukkah that is miraculous.

More and more Jews are building sukkot these days. I guess they have come to the same realization as I that when we build a sukkah, we are creating something for ourselves and our families far more lasting than a temporary harvest festival booth. We are making memories.

I know that this is true for me because it now takes me much more time to take down my sukkah than to put it up. My sukkah has become a memory album and the day after Simchat Torah, that joyous festival that brings the fall holiday season to an end, has become a day on which I add this year’s new memories to those of years gone by.

My sukkah, like most everyone else’s, is not professionally decorated, but I find it beautiful. The knots and strings that hold it up also tie my life together. I hang the same plastic fruit from its roof that my family used for our sukkah when I was a child. Besides being reusable, plastic fruit has the advantage of neither rotting nor attracting bees, the bane of many sukkot.

I bought the sukkah itself the first Sukkot I spent in my old house in North Jersey about ten years ago. That house had a beautiful garden that gave my family and me great pleasure. But a sukkah is a timeless place and now when I enter my sukkah, part of me feels that I am still in that garden.

My sukkah is truly a place in which the years come together. I drape decorative chains of Rosh Hashanah cards from years gone by from the ceiling. I hang my children’s artwork from pre-school on the walls, and although the sukkah isn’t very big, there always seems to be room for their most recent work as well. I also hang up favorite illustrations from an old Jewish art calendar that I used when I did graduate work at Hebrew University in Jerusalem almost twenty-five years ago. I often think of the box in which I store all these decorations as a treasure chest.

There is a custom that during Sukkot we invite our biblical ancestors to join us in the sukkah to celebrate the holiday. I have found, however, that while I am in my sukkah, I am not only visited by such biblical heroes as Abraham and Sarah but also by all those, friends, and family, who have celebrated the holiday season with me in the past. Now, even though time and distance have taken them away from me, they still come, at least spiritually, to join me and my family in my sukkah. As I take down the walls of the sukkah, I feel as if I am saying good-bye to them for another year.

Dragging everything back into the garage, I think of the holidays that have just passed and realized how much strength and support I received during this sacred season. It is always thrilling to see so many of us gather together in the synagogue to celebrate the New Year. The sound of the shofar, the ancient melodies of Yom Kippur, the lulav and etrog of Sukkot, and the dancing and singing on Simchat Torah remind me that I am not alone. I am part of a small but wonderful people who have a glorious tradition and a wonderful outlook on life. The underlying message of our fall holidays is that it is great to be alive, the world is full of promise and God’s loving presence is never far away. The spirit of hope we bring to our worship and celebrations is very much part of my sukkah memories.

As I place my sukkah in a safe place in my garage, I know that I am also placing my memories in a safe place in my heart. I always have a sense of sadness as I put away my sukkah that day after Simchat Torah. But that sadness is tempered by the hope for a good new year, by the love of family and friends, by the memories I have stored in my sukkah, and by the understanding that Chanukah is really not that far away anymore.

L’Shanah Tova — May we all be blessed with a good 5760.

A WITNESS TO PEACE– Friday, September 25, 2015

Reflections on the Multi-Religious Gathering with Pope Francis

Erev Sukkot – Sunday, September 27, 2015

I was beyond excitement when I opened the invitation I received from Cardinal Dolan, the Archbishop of New York, to attend the interfaith service, “A Witness to Peace”, with Pope Francis on Friday, September 25 at the 9/11 Memorial Museum. I felt incredibly grateful that I would be sharing prayer with inter-faith leaders from America at service in which the homily was to be delivered by the Pope, himself.

The prayer service took place on the Friday morning before the Jewish festival of Sukkot. The message of the gathering, in fact, one of the powerful themes of Pope Francis’ visit to the United States, complimented the message of Sukkot – the vision of a time when humanity will become together in all its diversity out of a sense of love and respect for each other and their Creator. Being at the 9/11 Museum, listening to the Pope, meeting people who have dedicated their lives to this great hope, motivated the following response taken from my Sukkot Sermon to my congregation at Lions Gate, a continuing care retirement community in Voorhees, NJ.

Jews envision Sukkot not only as a holiday for the Jewish people; but it is a holiday for all the world. In the vision of our prophets, Sukkot will be the day when all people will come to worship in Jerusalem, each in their own language, each according to their own custom; each acknowledging in their own way the sovereignty of God, envisioned traditionally as “the King of the King of Kings” – the one before whom even emperors submit. The hope is not that everyone will become Jewish or that everyone will be the same. Rather, the dream is that in some wonderful way each of us will come and celebrate God and creation in our own language and according to our own way. We will all be together and will love, respect, and honor each other and rejoice in our diversity. That day will be the moment when in the words of the Prophet Zachariah “God will be one and God’s name one.”.

This vision became a reality, at least for a moment, at the gathering of the religious leaders of Friday morning, September 25, at the site of the World Trade Towers, at the Ground Zero, in the Foundation Hall of the 9/11 Memorial Museum. Approximately 600 representatives of all the religious traditions in the United States joined Pope Francis in an hour in prayer and reflection. This beautiful service expressed the Sukkot message that we can all gather worship to celebrate our unity and rejoice in our diversity.

What was said was beautiful, but what the symbolism of the event was far more powerful. The hall was full of faith leaders from all world religions, many dressed in their traditional vestments – Hindus, Buddhists, Sikhs, Christians, Muslims, Jews, and Native American spiritual leaders

On the bima, the podium, were representatives of all the major traditions. Each tradition presented a reading on peace from its sacred scripture, first in the original language and then in English translation. Then, Cantor Azi Schwartz, of the Park Avenue Synagogue chanted a special version of the Jewish memorial prayer, “The One Who is Full of Compassion”, for those who died on 9/11/2000 and all the victims of terror – people who died at the hands of people blinded by hate.

At the end of the prayer, the cantor sang Oshe Shalom, a well-known Hebrew melody asking God to grant peace to the world. His magnificent voice filled the room, but under his voice and unheard by those watching TV was the quiet undertone of the entire congregation of religious leaders singing softly with him – a quiet prayer for peace.

And then Pope Francis rose to speak. The Pope is a plain speaker. When he speaks, he speaks from his heart, in his native Spanish. His words are simple and direct. His voice is a quiet but powerful voice.

He spoke to us in Spanish – simple words expressing basic truths – the beauty of people from so-many faith traditions praying together, the sadness that the memorial expressed, our pain at the loss of so many souls, and the fact that all the people who perished on that day were represented by the various religious traditions that were gathered that morning at the Memorial Museum.

Although I cannot remember the Pope’s exact words, the message that I heard was that peace for which we so earnestly seek can only grow out of a celebration of our unity as members of the human community – all children of God and of our wondrous diversity – testimony to the power of the Creator.

As I left the Memorial Museum with the words of the closing hymn “Let There Be Peace On Earth” sung by the Young People’s Chorus of New York City in my ears, the crowds outside the museum reinforced this message.

The street was full of people gathered to see the Pope. It was very clear that I was not a Catholic, I had my yarmulke on. But people ran up to me and asked “Did you see him?” “Has he left already?” When I told them that I did but that he had already gone, they were sad. Then they asked, “What was it like?” So I showed them the program and they took a picture of the program. Then I showed them my ticket and they wanted a picture of that as well. But I said I said, “Why don’t you hold the ticket, and I will take a picture of you.” The desire to be connected to Pope Francis’ a message of peace, of love, and of concern for the world and all its inhabitants, brought us together and brought us joy.

One final note: To get to New York, I took the New Jersey Transit train from Hamilton. I arrived early at the train station very early. While I was waiting on the platform, I met was a mother with a young girl about five or so. I asked the girl, “Where are you going?” She enthusiastically said, “I am going to see the Pope.” When I said, “So am I”, a smile filled her face. She was so happy. It seemed as if the entire world was on this journey with her. It was as if she intuitively shared the Pope’s vision of humanity at peace.

This is now Sukkot. On this holiday we commit ourselves to the vision of the world at peace, in which all people learn to understand each other, to respect each other, and to love each other in all our diversity. This is also the message that I took home from my encounter with Pope Francis at the multi-religious gathering at the 9/11Museum. Far beyond the real thrill of seeing the Pope, was the thrill being with teachers and shepherds of all America’s religious traditions as we together with Pope Francis bore witness to the promise of peace. May this promise be fulfilled right away and very soon; Amen.

"BEING OPEN TO GOD'S LOVE"

Each of the three pilgrimage festivals has its own distinctive theme. Passover honors God’s power to redeem and to liberate. Shavuot proclaims God’s revelation. Sukkot celebrates God’s nurturing and abiding love for us and for the world in which we live.

The Jewish people take these themes to heart and on each festival we try to make its theme a real part of our lives. At the Passover seder we reenact the great story of the Exodus from Egypt through story and song. On Erev Shavuot, we commemorate our receipt of the Torah at Sinai by dedicating the night to the study of Jewish literature with a tikkun, a night-long study session, and vigil. On Sukkot we focus our souls on God’s protecting love for us by erecting and spending time within a sukkah, a temporary, outdoor booth that reminds us of our dependence on God’s abiding and sustaining love.

In ancient days before the destruction of the Temple, Jews from all over the world would try to make a pilgrimage to Jerusalem for each of these holy days. But the most beloved of the three in Antiquity was Sukkot, with its message of God’s nurturing and sustaining love.

Our ancient ancestors called Sukkot, “HaChag”, meaning “The Festival”, as if it were the only festival. They celebrated it with solemn rituals and with festive abandon. The days and nights of Sukkot were a time for torchlight processions and childlike pranks. Learned rabbis would juggle and perform other tricks. In the Holy Temple, the priests would conduct impressive rituals, such as sacrificing seventy oxen, one for each of the seventy nations of humanity according to the count in the book of Genesis, in thanksgiving for God’s loving care of our world and all its people. The spirit of rejoicing was so great that even today we describe this holy season in our siddurim, prayer books, as z’ man simchateinu, “the time of our joy.”

Despite the pomp and ceremony, display and grandeur that marked the celebration of Sukkot during the days of the Second Temple over two thousand years ago, the enduring symbol of the festival that reminds us of God’s unceasing and unconditional love and affection for us as individuals and as a people is the humble sukkah. The sukkah, the beautifully decorated but fragile structure, which graces many Jewish homes and all Jewish institutions in our community and throughout the world, connects us to our people’s past experiences and future expectations. It reminds us of the times in our history when we experienced God’s sustaining love and it marks our belief in a coming time when all people will find peace and security under God’s benevolent care. It also expresses our wish to experience God’s love within our own small worlds.

Our sukkah is a harvest booth. It reminds us of the simple, temporary shelters our ancestors in the land of Israel erected in the fields while they harvested the fall crops. It symbolizes for us our sense of thanksgiving for the blessings of food and sustenance provided for us by God’s good earth.

Our sukkah is a wanderer’s shelter. The time we spend in our sukkot during this festival ties us to our people who dwelt in booths during the forty years we wandered in the wilderness on our way to the Promised Land.

Our sukkah is a sacred space. It reminds us of our ancestors’ desert dwellings and represents the portable sanctuary they erected in the center of their camp to mark God’s abiding presence in their midst throughout all their journeys.

Finally, our sukkah is a place of hope. It is a symbol of that fragile canopy of peace, the sukkat shalom, that we beseech God to spread over us, over Israel and over the world each evening as we recite the Hashkiveinu prayer, our prayer for God’s protecting love.

Some have applied the image of the sukkah to the broad issues of war and peace, arguing, persuasively, I believe, that true security does not lie in ever more elaborate and destructive weapon systems but rather in the seemingly more risky task of breaking slowly and carefully through the walls of distrust and fear that separate us from our enemies. As we turn enemies into friends, we are slowly erecting God’s sukkat shalom, sukkah of peace. It is a structure that will ultimately provide more security than any military deterrence.

Our sukkah also bears a personal meaning for us as individuals. The structure represents the opportunity to experience shalom in our lives if we reach inward to ourselves and outward to others. We discover ourselves in God’s sukkah of peace when we run our lives honestly and creatively. Our hearts need to be open to others as our sukkah, with its loosely thatched roof, is open to the sky.

Our sukkah also reminds us that though there are risks in living in the open, there is also much joy. For many it is difficult to open their hearts and let other people share their lives. The sukkah is, therefore, a place to mingle with family and friends and to rejoice within its beautifully decorated walls.

In spite of all its spiritual significance, the sukkah also teaches us that we are to be modest in our spiritual claims. It reminds us that we are incapable of seeing and grasping everything. The sukkah allows us a view of the heavens, but the sukkah’s walls and roof allow us only a partial view.

The sukkah shows us that the possibility of experiencing divinity is always with us. Each year, as we enter into the physical sukkah to fulfill the mitzvah, commandment, of dwelling within the walls, we are reminded once again to enter into the spiritual sukkah in which we can discover God.

The sukkah, our abiding symbol of God’s nurturing love, confirms that the experience of that love is not far away from our usual dwellings. We do not retreat into the wilderness or go out into the fields to celebrate Sukkot. Our sukkot, festival booths, are just a few steps from our back door.

Just as on the festival we go out from the comfort of our homes to enter the sukkah, we need to leave the comfort of the settled land of our well-programmed concepts and well-patterned images and enter the uncharted wilderness of the spirit. We have to leave the security of the well-known dwellings of our hearts and minds to live in the beautiful tabernacle of new opportunities and growth. We have to come out from under the solid roof that normally shades our heads to catch a glimpse through the loosely placed branches that cover our sukkah of what is really lasting and ultimately valuable: God’s sukkat shalom, the shelter of peace and love that sustains and nurtures all.

MISHKAN AND MIQDASH / TABERNACLE AND TEMPLE

October 1, 2024

The High Holiday season culminates with the Sukkot, the weeklong Feast of Booths. Our spiritual journey has taken us from the heartbreak of Tisha B’Av, the commemoration of the destruction of the Beit HaMiqdash, the Temple in Jerusalem, through a period of self-reflection and moral purification to the Month of Tishri. On Rosh HaShanah we stood facing God's judgment and, then, ten days later on Yom Kippur, we experienced God's forgiving love. Now, cleansed of our sins, we are able to enter into God's place symbolized by our humble sukkah. Joyfully we celebrate being in God’s presence. Then, at the end of Sukkot, we gather again to bid farewell to the sukkah and to reenter the routine of life. But we don't leave empty-handed. We depart rejoicing in the Torah, the abiding record of our response to God’s word.

Traditionally, Sukkot celebrates the second great event in the journey from Egypt to the Land of Promise – the building of the Mishkan, which served as the center of our ancestors' spiritual life. There they worshipped God with song and sacrifice. It journeyed with them and was found in the center of their encampments. Later, when Solomon built the Miqdash, the Temple, in Jerusalem, he dedicated it on Sukkot, binding together our memory of both holy places – the portable Mishkan and the permanent Miqdash.

We commonly see both as a reflection of the same spiritual reality – a testimony to God’s enduring presence. The Biblical tradition understands that the rites and rituals performed in the Mishkan continued in the Miqdash. The two structures shared the same basic blueprint, decorative scheme, and furnishings. The cohanim, the descendants of Aaron, the first High Priest, served in both. But, as similar as they seem and despite the cultural and historical connections between them, the Mishkan and the Miqdash, as seen by our mystics, reflect different spiritual sensitivities.

While both were places where God’s glory rested and God’s presence could be felt, they represent different aspects of the Divine-Human encounter. As our people wandered through the wilderness, God journeyed with them, setting up a dwelling place, the Mishkan, wherever they rested. Once they built the Miqdash, giving God a permanent home, our ancestors journeyed to God by making pilgrimage three times a year. Only the memory of both structures survives, but in that memory, we see two complementary spiritual ways. The Mishkan points to an internal path, the awareness that God is within us wherever we go and the Miqdash indicates an external one, the awareness that God is in a place we need to reach.

Both are necessary. The Mishkan reflects God’s imminence. The word means “dwelling place”. It directs us to discover God living within ourselves, our communities, and our institutions. It teaches that we can be vessels for the Divine by cultivating moral and spiritual values and making them real in our interactions with others.

The Miqdash, the “Holy Place”, marks God’s transcendence. The Miqdash was God’s palace on a hill above Jerusalem. To enter one had to climb up and pass through massive gates. The Miqdash shows us that our life is a pilgrimage. We can go to a better, more caring, loving, and aware place. God’s house is open to all but we need to take the journey.

On Sukkot two aspects of our spiritual lives come together – the sense of Divine imminence and the sense of Divine transcendence. We begin the holiday by building our own little Miqdash, our sukkah, and we end the holiday by holding our Torah close to our hearts and using its insights to build a Mishkan in our souls.

Shemini Atzeret / Simchat Torah

“FOR A BLESSING AND NOT FOR A CURSE”

On the festival of Shimini Atzeret, Eighth Day of Assembly, which immediately follows Sukkot, the Feast of Booths, Jews throughout the world celebrate our historical connection to the Land of Israel by praying for rain to fall in our ancestral homeland. From Shimini Atzeret in the Fall until Pesach in the Spring we insert a verse in the second blessing of the Tefilah, the cycle of blessings that form the heart of our services, for the gift of rain. The theme of that blessing is God’s life-restoring power. So, for our ancestors this was the appropriate place to pray for the winter rains, which brought life back to the Land of Israel parched dry by the long hot summers.

Unlike the Egypt and Mesopotamia where the regular annual flooding of the river valleys insured the fertility of the land, the land of Israel depended on the less predictable rains. Our ancestors related rain in its due season with their covenantal relationship with God. Disobedience of the covenantal injunctions to be loyal to God and supportive of each other could lead to the withholding of rain and a period of hunger and dearth. Therefore, they associated their prayers for rain with the penitential theme of the High Holidays, the time in which Jews recommit themselves to our tradition – its values, practices and insights

In the Ashkenazi tradition, we introduce the prayers for rain with a piyyut, a religious poem, by the great poet Eliezer Kallir called “Geshem – Rain”. In this poem, the poet calls upon God to recall the loyalty of our ancestors and grace us, on their behalf, with the gift of rain. At the end of the poem and after the recitation of the additional verse which will be part of our Tefila for the next six months – “For You are the Eternal One, our God, who causes the wind to blow and the rain to descend” – we add a short litany:

For a blessing and not for a curse. Amen.

For life and not for death. Amen.

For plenty and not for famine. Amen.

These three lines could be a reflection on the unpredictably of nature Although rain is necessary, too much rain in the wrong place at the wrong time can be a disaster. Our ancestors were aware of the danger from flash floods in the wilderness, drenching rains that wash away seeds, late rains that the rot standing grain and tempests that sink ships and destroy buildings. Rain could also be a hindrance to commerce and an incontinence for pilgrims. Too little or too much rain, rain too early or too late could be a sign of Divine displeasure.

However, these lines could reflect the unreliability of human nature and how we use and, all too often, misuse the blessings we receive. While life requires that our basic needs be met, material wealth does not guarantee a meaningful and purposeful life. Jewish ethical teachings from the Bible on warn us of the spiritual challenges posed by prosperity – selfishness arrogance, and indulgence. To counter them, our tradition enjoins us, as individuals and as a community, to cultivate the middot (“qualities”) of gratitude, humility, and responsibility.

With Shemini Atzeret we bring our High Holiday season to a close. Our focus over the last few weeks has been on our moral and spiritual development. While we have celebrated the blessings of our world, we have sought to reconnect with creation’s ethical and spiritual foundations, which give meaning and significance to our lives. It is fitting, therefore, that we end the poem “Geshem” not with a prayer for the gift of rain so that we may be prosper but for the gift of wisdom so that we may employ our blessings for good. To reinforce this lesson, we dedicate the second day of Shemini Atzeret, which we call Simchat Torah, as our celebration of the Torah as our people’s overflowing source of this life-enhancing wisdom.

THE GOAL IS TORAH

On Simchat Torah, the fall holiday cycle comes to an end. It has been a long journey. Over the last month and a half the focus of Jewish spiritual life has been on gaining an awareness of who we are -- where we've been and where were going.

We began in the middle of the summer mourning the destruction of Jerusalem, the loss of our religious and communal center, with the dark fast of Tisha BeAv, and began our pilgrimage to rebuild the spiritual superstructure that supports our lives as members of Am Yisrael, the Jewish People.

We spent the month of Elul, the month before Rosh HaShanah, repairing and reinforcing the bonds that connect us to friends, family and neighbors. After we firmly anchored ourselves in our social world, we turned our attention to our connections with the spiritual world. On Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, we stretched beyond ourselves to reconnect with the Source of All.

Our spiritual pilgrimage, then, brought us to the festival of Sukkot. We erected sukkot, booths, re-creating in our backyards the Mishkan, the portable desert shrine, built under Moses’ direction that was the religious center of our people throughout the forty years of wandering in the Sinai and the home to the ark of the covenant from the encounter at Mount Sinai until King Solomon erected the Beit HaMiqdash, the Holy Temple, in Jerusalem to be its dwelling place and our people’s spiritual center.

Now we have arrived, once again, at Simchat Torah. The holidays are ending with a joyous celebration. We return to the synagogue as we gather to hear the concluding verses of the Devarim, Deuteronomy, the fifth of the Five Books of Moses, and the opening verses of Bereisheet, Genesis, the first of the books. Just as we conclude the Spring Holiday cycle, which commemorates the story of redemption, with Shavuot, the celebration of the gift of Torah, we conclude the Fall Holiday cycle with Simchat Torah as we rejoice in the Life of Torah.

On Simchat Torah we re-discover the basic Jewish understanding that Torah is, as it always was, the goal of our spiritual journey. The great passion play of the Jewish people that opened with the despairs of Tisha BeAv, the commemoration of the expulsion from Jerusalem, that guided us through the weeks of reconciliation that brought us to the Rosh HaShanah, through the spiritual purification of Yom Kippur, and finally to the rebuilding of a small sanctuary, the Miqdash Meiat, in our backyards on Sukkot, now concludes with the celebration of Torah.

Through our rites, rituals and customs, we have re-enacted the biblical principle, Ki miTziyon tezei Torah, u-devar Adonai mi-Yerushalayim — For Torah shall go forth from Zion and the Eternal’s word from Jerusalem (Isaiah 2:3). We have carried Torah, our precious inheritance, throughout the world and whenever and wherever we feel lost, we can draw meaning and direction from its overflowing font of wisdom.

Torah is goal of Jewish life. Torah is what binds us spiritually, historically, religiously, and culturally as a people. We, the Jewish people, are the people who, as individuals and as a community, have committed themselves to a way of life that makes Torah, the living Word of the living God, real in this world.

While we have rarely been in total agreement as to the particulars of Torah, we have always understood that even our discussions as to what the Torah is, and what it requires of us is, also, Torah. For us, Torah is not a word nor a physical object but a way of life. Its foundation is the ancient record of the encounter between our ancestors and our God enshrined within the Pentateuch or the Chumash, first five books of our Bible. But it also includes the revelations of our prophets, the wisdom or our sages, the teachings of our rabbis, the songs of our poets, the visions of our mystics and the hopes and dreams of Jewish men and women throughout the world and over the centuries.

Now on Simchat Torah, the day or rejoicing in and with the Torah, we lift the precious Sifrei Torah, the handwritten scrolls which contain the foundational words of the Chumash and dance with them inside and around our synagogues. We celebrate more than just our ownership of these books. We celebrate the end of a wonderful pilgrimage. We celebrate our discovery. We celebrate our Torah — the pattern of life, the values, the moral principles, and the folk traditions and customs — that connects to each our, our people and our God. We celebrate our Torah the ever-living Word of the ever-living God in the lives and the life of our people, Am Yisrael, the Jewish people.

GOD'S ABIDING PRESENCE

Spiritually, the high point of the Jewish people’s Fall holiday cycle is the Festival of Sukkot. In ancient days, we called Sukkot, “HaChag”, the Festival, as if there were no other to compare to it. On Sukkot we celebrated God’s gracious, providential care of us and of all creation, and rejoiced in God’s abiding and perceptible presence in the heart of our community and our land. Thus, we called, and still call, the Festival of Sukkot, “Zeman Simchateinu – the Season of our Joy.”

Sukkot commemorated the building of the Mishkan, the portable shrine build by divine guidance during the period of the Desert Wandering and the dedication of the Beit HaMiqdash, the Holy Temple in Jerusalem, which provided a home for God in the midst of the Land of Promise.

The great gatherings of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur were part of the spiritual preparation for Sukkot. The weeks before Sukkot were a time of spiritual, moral and ritual purification so that our hearts and souls would be freed of all that would keep us entering into the Holy One’s presence. With our sins confessed and forgiven and being cleansed from ritual impurity, we could enter the Holy Precinct and joyously celebrate, with all Israel, our experience of God’s loving care.

On SukKot, rejoicing in God’s presence, we looked forward to a better world. As they envisioned the future, our prophets saw Sukkot as the time when in the hopefully not-to-distant future all nations would come to Jerusalem to acknowledge God’s gracious sovereignty over all creation. The day which commemorated the moment when God’s royal presence first became fully manifest in Israel was to become the day on which all people will call upon the unique God with a common voice.

Even today, Sukkot serves as the high point of Jewish spirituality. It is the joyous reward for our intense soul searching of Rosh Hashanah and our courageous decision to enter the unknown future armed only with hope and faith on Yom Kippur.

On Sukkot we recreate the Mishkan in our backyards. Our sukkot, holiday booths, become small sanctuaries in which we celebrate these special days. The sukkot, the booths, connect us to our people’s history, to our ancient home land, to the beauty of creation and to the obligations we have to care for the vulnerable and protect our world. We invite family and friends to join us in our sukkot, our booths, and invoke the presence of our saints, sages and heroes.

But on Shemini Atzeret / Simchat Torah all this comes to an end. This special holiday marks the transition between our joyous communion with God’s Holy Presence and our return to the patterns of everyday life. Just as our ancestors had to return home from Jerusalem at the end of the festival, we have to leave our sukkot, our sacred booths, and return to our homes.

Our great spiritual challenge in the weeks and months ahead, is to discover where will we be able to experience God’s presence in our lives now that the festival is over. What will be our abiding point of contact with God? How can we find deep spiritual joy and satisfaction now that the festive season has passed? The answer is in Torah, the ever-renewing word of the everlasting God.

Simchat Torah, which means “the joy of the Torah”, reminds us that the celebration of God’s abiding presence never ends. The nature of the experience may change, but our core awareness of the Divine Presence resting in the heart of all being endures. By reading Torah, studying its teachings and making its values real in our lives, we are in constant contact with the Holy One whose message to us has been nurtured by our people over the generations. There is great joy in living our lives informed by the wisdom, insights and directives of our people’s sacred traditions.

On Simchat Torah we conclude the annual cycle of reading the Torah and begin it again as we read the closing verses of Deuteronomy followed immediately by the opening passages from Genesis. We acknowledge, once more, that God is never far from us. Holiness of being – living a virtuous life, making Torah real in our daily existence – replaces the holiness of place – the Mishkan, the Beit HaMiqdash, or even our humble sukkot – in our lives. Simchat Torah teaches us that no matter where we are, God is not far away. We can hear God’s voice calling to us through the traditions of people whenever and wherever we stop and listen.

Holy time – our Sabbaths and festivals – and holy places – our shrines, our synagogues, and Eretz Yisrael – continue to play an important role in our spiritual lives. However, Simchat Torah, the festival at the end of our festive season, teaches us that our ability to celebrate God’s presence in our lives is not bounded by the limits of time and space.

Chanukah

MATT OF MODEIN

December 6, 2000

Al Ha-Nissim

Don’t forget,

Old men are dangerous!

With little to lose,

And a world to gain,

And not a lot of space in between,

They’re stronger than you’d think

If you get them angry

Or cross their path

You’d know it

I guess.

Not in the little things

They’re beyond that stuff

But for things that really matter

Like truth and honor

Family and home,

And love and God,

They might even kick a king

In his ass.

Mattathias is not a good name for a hero. It is too long. It sounds too soft. It lacks punch and verve. Though it may be an accurate English rendering of the Greek form of the Hebrew name Mattityahu, the power of the Hebrew name is lost in the translation.

I prefer calling the first hero of the Chanukah story, Judah Maccabee’s father and the first successfully to mobilize the Jews to revolt against Antiochus’ oppressive regime, “Matt of Modein.” Now that is a good name for a patriarchal figure who reminds me of Ben Cartwright of the old television western Bonanza — a wise, powerful, action-oriented, community-minded man with a household of strong and brave sons. Like the fictional Ben Cartwright, Matt of Modein could size up a situation and take decisive and inspiring action.

The name “Matt of Modein,” far more than the name “Mattathias,” captures the full force of the Hebrew name, “Mattityahu” — “Gift of the Lord” — and changes the way we picture this courageous old man. Envisioning Mattathias as “Matt of Modein,” the old man who wielded God’s mighty staff, helps us see him as our ancestors saw him, and gives us a model of aging from within the Jewish tradition that is not that of the sage or of the zadye.

The historical Matt of Modein, Mattityahu of the Hasmonean family, was the de-facto leader in the Judean town of Modein, a small city between Jerusalem and the Mediterranean Sea. Although the family did not live in Jerusalem, where the Beit HaMikdash, the Holy Temple, was located, the Hasmonai family were cohanim, members of the priestly tribe, and were loyal to the traditions and customs of the Jewish people.

At this time, the land of Israel was one of many provinces of a kingdom centered in present-day Syria, ruled by descendants of one of Alexander the Great’s generals. At the time of the Chanukah story, the ruler of the kingdom was Antiochus IV. The king sponsored reforms throughout his dominion. His goal was to promote unity in his wide-flung empire by imposing Greek cultural, political, and religious forms on the various cultural and ethnic groups under his rule. For the Jews of the land of Israel, this primarily meant that Greek-style polytheistic worship would replace the worship of our One God, that Greek educational institutions and curricula would replace the traditional Jewish ones, and that Greek administrative practices would replace the Jews’ traditional political autonomy.

When Antiochus’ soldiers came to Modein to implement the reform program, they naturally approached the town’s leading citizen, the aged Mattityahu. Matt refused to participate. Moreover, when another man, who hoped to curry favor with the occupiers, stepped forward to lead the town in the worship of the Greek gods, Matt of Modein stepped up and struck him down. Calling on all those who were loyal to God and the Torah, Mattityahu raised the banner of revolt (I Maccabees 2:19-28). He was truly God’s gift to the Jewish people.

Matt of Modein was not the first to resist Antiochus’ reforms. There were others, such as a brave mother and her seven sons and Eleazar, the old priest, who accepted martyrdom rather than submit to the king’s demands, but Matt’s involvement changed the nature of the revolt. He had inspiring leadership skills. It was he who gathered the guerilla army, with which, after his death, his son Judah Maccabee liberated Jerusalem (I Maccabees 2:42-48). He was also an inspiring religious figure. He had the courage to change Jewish law to fit the needs of the time. For example, he decreed that Jews must defend themselves with weapons when attacked on the Shabbat (I Maccabees 2:39-41).

Although Mattityahu died in 166 B.C.E., during the first year of the revolt, his bravery and leadership inspired our people during their long struggle for freedom. Of all the Maccabees, only Mattityahu, Matt of Modein, is mentioned in our liturgy (cf. the prayer, Al HaNissim, “For the Miracles”) and cherished as a courageous and loyal Jew by our sages (Exodus. Rabba 15:6; B. Megillah 11a).

For us today, Matt of Modein remains an inspiring figure. He teaches us that age is no barrier when it comes to physical bravery, spiritual courage, and charismatic leadership. No matter how old we may be or feel, Matt of Modein reminds us that we can change our world — that what we do, matters. His bravery shows us that we consist of stronger stuff than we may think. We are blessed that there are still people today who, like Matt of Modein so long ago, still exhibit the strength of a guiding, protecting, and inspiring “Gift of God.”

WHO CAN RETELL?

The American Rabbi, June 1988, Vol. 20 #6

The popular culture of the Jews often provides us a powerful tool with which to understand the Judaism of any age, including our own. Chanukah, the Festival of Lights, is one of the most popular Jewish holidays in Israel, in the U.S.A. and throughout the world Jewish community. A view of the ways we Jews today celebrate this popular holiday should give us some insight into what Judaism means to us.

We often dismiss the heightened interest in Chanukah as a Jewish copy of the important Christian festival of Christmas. Though this may be correct for many Jews, such an attitude clouds our ability to see clearly the deeper meaning Chanukah has for Modern Jews and Judaism. It is my contention, that in many ways, Chanukah is the holiday that captures the spirit of the Judaism of our time.

Let us look at the popular Chanukah song, “Mi Ye-ma-leil.”

Who can retell the things that befell us,

Who can count them?

In every age a hero or sage

Came to our aid.

Hark! In days of yore, in Israel’s ancient land,

Brave Maccabeus led his faithful band.

And now all Israel must as one arise,

Redeem itself through deed and sacrifice!

For me, this song brings up a number of questions. The first: for a holiday song, is there something wrong with the lyrics? It is clearly not a playful children’s song such as "I had a little dreidel” or the beloved Yiddish melody, “Oy Chanukhah, Oy Chanukhah a yontov, a sheiner.” It sounds religious, but something is wrong. What is it? Who is missing in this song? Who is the hero?

God is what is missing from this song. The hero of this song is Judah the Maccabee, “Brave Maccabeus,” and the “hero or sage” that in every age come to our aid. What is striking is that these lyrics present an exclusively anthropocentric view of the story of Chanukah. Chanukah celebrates the Maccabees’ success in liberating the Jewish people.

The second question is what can you tell me about the song? When do you think it was written? What are the circumstances that may have led to its composition? This is a harder question to answer. The song sounds old. The words, especially the opening phrase, are modeled on Biblical verses. The melody has an ancient Mid-Eastern flavor. It seems that it has been a song we Jews have sung for generations. However, this is all deliberately misleading.

The song is recent. It is perhaps no more than sixty years old. We do not know the author of the lyrics, but the composer of the melody is well known. He is Menashe Ravina (1899-1968), a Jew from the Ukraine who made aliyah to Eretz Yisrael in 1924. Ravina was a composer, a music educator and a music critic for the Hebrew newspaper, Davar from 1925 until his death in 1968. He was involved in the popularization of music and arranged music and singing courses for workers. Ravina was one of the pioneers in the movement to create Hebrew folk songs for the Jews of the Yishuv, the ,Jewish population of British Mandate Palestine.

What does this suggest to us? Because of his work with Jewish workers and his association with Davar, the newspaper published by the Histadrut, the General Federation of Labor in Israel, we can safely assume that Menashe Ravina was affiliated with the Labor-Zionist movement. This accounts in part for the secular nature of the song. His interest in developing a new Jewish folk culture in Eretz Israel, explains the slightly antique, Mid-Eastern tone of the music.

Mi Yemaleil can, therefore, be seen as a Zionist anthem. It reflects the Zionist hope that in our days, as in the days of the Maccabees, the Jewish people will unite and redeem themselveS in a renew Eretz Yisrael. It captures what was so radical about Zionism and, perhaps, all of modern Judaism, the idea that it is up to us, the Jewish people and individual Jews, to redeem ourselves. We are no longer waiting for God.

Eugene Borowitz writes the following concerning this song and the radical nature of Zionist program in general in his book on modern Jewish thought, “The Zionists set about secularizing Judaism. The holy tongue Hebrew, became the language of everyday speech. Redeeming the land became the purchase of real estate. The Psalmist’s cry, ‘Who can retell the mighty acts of God!’ became the Zionist song (now associated with Chanukah) Who can retell the mighty acts of Israel. The mystic credo. Israel, the Holy One, Blessed be He, and the Torah are one likewise became a song — omitting God. The examples could be easily multiplied, for the strategy largely succeeded. Much to the surprise of many American visitors who think of Judaism primarily in religious terms, the State of Israel remains substantially secular and most of its Jewish citizens have a nationalistic interpretation of Jewishness.” (Eugene Borowitz, Choices in Modern Jewish Thought, A Partisan Guide, Behrman House: New York, 1983, p. 84)

The obvious reference in this song is to the desire of the Chaluzim (pioneers) in Eretz Israel to rebuild the land and restore the Jews by their own efforts. The deeper issue, however, is of Jewish self-empowerment -- Jews save themselves. They do not wait for God.

This idea of self-empowerment is what separates modern Judaism, the Judaism of the last two hundred years, from previous forms. The individual Jew and the Jewish people have the ability to take control of their own destiny. The Jew does not have to wait for God. For Modern Judaism, Jewish destiny is in Jewish hands. This does not necessarily remove God from the range of Jewish concerns, — though the modern period has been marked by secularist movements within Judaism — but it places God in a different position.

It is the Jewish people who make God active. We, in our days, are those who as one must arise to redeem ourselves through deeds and sacrifice. Self-redemption — whether it is articulated ideologically in Reform Judaism’s stress on individual autonomy, in Conservative and Reconstructionist Judaism’s emphasis on the peoplehood of the Jews, in the influence of existentialist approaches to Judaism that are found even among Orthodox Jewish thinkers, or in the Zionist’s political program for Jewish survival, or whether it is lived subconsciously as part of life in an open society — it is the Jew’s own individual will and desire that makes him or her live a Jewish life, seek salvation in Judaism.

No one makes any one of us Jewish. We do it ourselves. No one is going to force us to light the lights of Chanukah. We light them ourselves. It is our choice.

Chanukah is the holiday of Jewish self-determination or self-redemption. The brave Maccabees rose in revolt against the Syrian-Greek Empire. Though they fought for Jewish freedom and for Jewish faith, their victories are not marked by the miraculous intervention that is noted in the Talmud. The traditional miracle of the oil that lasted eight days does not bring on the Maccabees’ victory but, rather, indicates God’s approval of what they had done.

When the Psalmist asks, “Mi ye-ma-leil ge-vu-rot A-do-nay?” “Who can retell the mighty acts of the Lord?” He retells the great, saving acts of the Eternal One in Egypt and in the Desert and pleads with God to forgive his now exiled people from the lands of their dispersion. When the unknown Zionist lyricist asked, "Mi ye-ma-leil ge-vu-rot Yis-ra-eil?” “Who can retell the mighty acts of the people Israel?” he does not recall the Exodus from Egypt but rather the revolt of the Maccabees.

Unlike the Psalmist of Old who pleads, “Ho-shi-ei-nu A-do-nay E-lo-hei-nu, ve-qab-tzei-nu min-ha-goi-im” “Deliver us, 0 Eternal, Our God, Gather us from among the nations.” The twentieth century Jew calls out to us, "U-ve-ya-mei-nu kol am Yis-ra-eil yit-acheid ya-kum le-hi-ga-eil!” “And now all Israel must as one arise. Redeem itself through deed and sacrifice!”

We no longer wait for God’s redemption, we redeem ourselves. Our destiny is not in God’s hands but in our own. And yet God is not so far away, but stands, we hope, with us as we negotiate this new and often frightening path. The Maccabees did not wait, but took decisive action. Their act of liberating Jerusalem and rededicating the Temple received God’s blessing. May the decisions we make, the paths we follow, and the Judaism we build for our generations be so blessed.

PURIM

PURIM'S MESSIANIC MESSAGE

Purim 5766

February 22, 2006

“And the Jews experienced light and happiness, joy and honor” (Esther 8:16) this short verse near the end of the Megillat Esther, the Scroll of Esther, captures the abiding promise of hope our ancestors found in that biblical book. To our people, the Scroll of Esther is more than a historical romance set in the early years of the Persian Empire and even more than the account of a miraculous tale of our deliverance from a heartless aggressor. We cherish our history and the sacred legends that tie us to our past, but as Jews, it is our tendency to look forward rather than back. At best, the great events of our past serve as a source of courage and inspiration as we use our experience over time to train ourselves to face the future with faith and trust.

As a people, we are survivors and Purim is one of the many Jewish holidays that celebrate survival. We read the story of Purim in the Scroll of Esther, rooting for Esther, cheering Mordechai, laughing at King Ahasuerus, and drowning out the wicked Haman’s name with boos and noisemakers. We send gifts of sweet treats to our friends. We reach out our hand to the needy. We rejoice until our spirits transcend the confines of this passing world. We pray that as the Jews of ancient Persia “experienced light and happiness, joy and honor”, we and our children should be so blessed and be freed of our enemies forever.

Purim is a holiday that expresses our hope in a better world. It is a holiday with a messianic vision. Our sages of old promise us that in the Messianic Period all of the holidays except for Purim will be abolished and all the prophetic books and the sacred writings in our Bible, the Nevi'im and Ketuvim, except for Megillat Esther, will disappear.

The story of Purim is the eternal story of God’s saving care for Israel and the good people of the world and the Megillat Esther can be read as an apocalyptic allegory. Haman the descendent of Agag, a king of the Amalekites, our archetypical enemy, is overthrown. Mordechai, dressed in royal robes, becomes king of the Jews, a messiah, and with his cousin, Esther, Queen of Persia, the Shekinah, God’s abiding presence, rules the world on behalf of the Ahasuerus, the hidden king of the king of kings. On Purim, we celebrate our ultimate deliverance and feast and rejoice, as we will do at the banquet, which, as our sages assure us, will introduce the messianic age.

Purim is not the only day during the year in which we stress the messianic vision hidden in the Megillat Esther. We recall this hope and dream every week as we say farewell to the Shabbat with Havdalah, the Ritual of Separation.

We understand the Shabbat as a foretaste of the World to Come. As our Shabbat comes to an end, we look forward to a time when the peace of Shabbat will fill all creation, and love and mercy will reign throughout the world. Through our prayers – the gestures and the words – we rededicate ourselves to this commanding commitment. We hope that our experience of the Shabbat, the day of rest, and the foretaste of the world to come, will carry us through the coming workdays until the next Shabbat or the beginning of the messianic age, whichever comes first.

Our Siddur, prayer book, is filled with passages from the TaNaK, our Holy Scriptures. Verses from the Torah, the Prophetic Books, the Book of Psalms fill our prayers. However, we rarely cite the Megillat Esther in our prayers. One noticeable exception is in the series of Biblical Verses that introduce the three blessings of Havdalah; the blessings over the wine, the spices, and the twisted candle. As we recite that prayer we read the passage from the Megillah that describes our ancestors’ exhilaration at being saved from Haman’s plot, “And the Jews experienced light and happiness, joy and honor” (Esther 8:16).

We do not end our prayer there, however. We add the phrase “so may it be for us” expressing the hope that soon we may experience the joy of the final redemption. Then, perhaps with a subtle reference to the custom of enjoying wine on Purim, we take the wine glass and say, “I lift the cup of salvation and call upon the name of the Eternal (Psalm) and begin the first of the three blessings, the blessing over the wine.

The Megillat Esther is a wonderful story. It is filled with intrigue and suspense, lust, love, and violence. It gives a glimpse into the court life of ancient Persia. It is a story of bravery and daring. It tells of great danger and great deliverance. It contains some of the most memorable characters of our Bible. It is a story that thrills young and old. But beyond its literary merits and its historical significance, it is a story, as it has been read by our people over the centuries, that tells us not only of events in the distant past but strengthens us with hope for a better future for us, for the people Israel and for all the world.

Tu B’Shevat

Tu B’Shevat — Celebrating the Goodness of Creation

On the sixth day of creation, after God had created light and darkness, day and night, sun and moon and stars, earth and sea, birds, beasts, bugs and fish, men and woman, God reviewed all that he had done and declared that it was “very good”.

The goodness of the natural world is a constant theme in Jewish literature, liturgy and life. Although there is no Jewish consensus, Biblical or otherwise, on exactly how the world was made, Jews have always held as a moral affirmation the belief that God created the world and that the world God created is good.

Although the tower of Israel’s faith teaches towards the Divine, its foundation is in the world. One can describe the spiritual quest of the Jew as the process of discovering the goodness of the world and experiencing its holiness.

Jews are aware that God speaks to us through nature. Creation is a form revelation. As we see in the opening chapter of Genesis, God’s command called the world into being. The first act of creation was God’s directive, “Let there be light!”

Therefore, in the Jewish tradition, creation, like the Torah is holy. Creation, too, needs to be treated with respect and honor. As we recite blessings when we encounter the Divine in the words of the Torah, there are blessings for us to recite when we discover the Holy One in the wonders of nature. We have blessings for oceans and mountains, earthquakes and lightning, trees in bloom and rainbows and many other natural phenomena.

Like the Torah, the world is to be studied. We need to learn how to read God’s word and listen to God’s voice as it is expressed in nature just as it is found in Torah. As we recite a blessing when we see a person of profound knowledge of the Torah, we also recite a blessing when we see one who possesses deep knowledge of the world.

Our holidays remind us of the goodness of creation. On Sukkot, Pesach and Shavuot we recall the agricultural year of ancient Israel. On Rosh Hashanah and Shabbat we give thanks for the miracle of creation. And once a year we give honor to the glory of creation by marking on the 15th day of the month of Shevat, Tu B’Shevat, the Birthday of the Trees.

Tu B’Shevat, once a minor commemoration recalling the ancient custom of dedicating the first fruits to God’s Holy Temple. in our lifetimes has taken on new and deeper significance. It is a holiday that ties us to our people’s greatest adventure, the return to the Land of Israel. It is also a holiday that reminds us of the ancient Jewish insight that the world, which God created for us, is good and holy.

In a time in which our once healthy world seems frail and ill, Tu B’Shevat reminds us of our people’s commitment to preserve and honor nature. The contemporary celebration of the holiday reinforces our commitment as Jews to the mitzvah of preserving and improving our earthly homes.

The belief that the natural world expresses the power of God is poetically expressed in an insight of Rabbi Schneur Zalman of Ladi. Almost two hundred years ago, he noted that the letters of the Hebrew words “Elohim” (God) and “HaTeba” (Nature) have the same numerical value, 86. By calling our attention to this coincidence, Schneur Zalman reminded us of the deep spiritual power our people have found in our world, God’s creation, which we celebrate this week on Tu B’Shevat.

PLANTING TREES - DISCOVERING THE MESSIAH WITHIN

Ani maamin be'emunah sheleima..., "I believe with perfect faith in the coming of the messiah...." So begins the twelfth of Maimonides' Thirteen Principles of Jewish Faith.

This principle, this belief in the coming of the Messiah, a figure, whose arrival will mark the beginning of a new order of existence, has been one of Judaism's most heartfelt dreams and one of the Jewish people's greatest gifts to Western culture. Jewish imagination has pictured the coming messianic era as a period of peace and harmony among nations, and as a time when the Jewish people will be restored to Israel, their land, and the sacred service, to the Temple in Jerusalem.

The hope for a better time and a better world fills our worship and underlies our world view. Over the centuries we have come to the understanding that our ritual and moral behavior helps bring us and our world closer to the messianic age and in our daily devotions we express our hope for the restoration of the Davidic kingdom. We pray, "Bimeheirah Be-Yameinu, "May the time of the messiah come speedily and in our days" and to that we say, "Amen."

Yet, for all this, our attitude toward the messianic figure is strikingly ambivalent. The classic expression of this ambivalence is found in a teaching of the rabbis of old. They teach us that if we were to hear that the Messiah was coming while we were planting a tree, we were required to continue planting the tree before we were to go and see what all the commotion was about.

Continue planting the tree -- what a shockingly nonchalant attitude toward the central figure of human history. How could our sages of blessed memory expect us to remain cool and composed upon hearing such good news? How could we be so reserved so that we would not stop our hard labors to greet the mark the arrival of the one whose coming marks the end of history?

This directive -- "continue planting the tree" -- is a hard nut to crack. Why did the rabbis of old de-emphasize messianic hopes to such an extent that they advised us to continue planting?

The usual explanation is an historical one. The desire to defuse messianic speculation and to de-emphasize the importance of the messianic figure in the teachings of the rabbis is a response to a series of false and failed messiahs and messianic movements in the first two centuries of the Common Era. The destruction of the Temple in 70 C.E. and the slaughter and dislocation that followed Bar Kokba's defeat in 135 demonstrated to the rabbis the danger of uncontrolled messianic hopes.

History establishes the context of the directive, but it does not reveal its meaning and significance for us. "Continue planting the tree" is as good advice to us as we approach the end of the second Christian millennium as it was to our ancestors at the end of the second Christian century. On one level, it urges us to be cautious in declaring that we are living in messianic times. On a deeper level it tells us where the messiah is truly found.

As in earlier times of stress, messianic expectations are on the rise among Christians, Jews and Muslims. Ever accelerating social, political, economic and technological change coupled with the sufferings of this century have shaken traditional belief systems to their roots. The failure of secular western culture to cure the distress of the third world, has led many Muslims to support utopian movements based on a refined version of traditional Islamic teachings. As we have already seen, the beginning of the third Christian millennium, has raised hopes among certain Christians that the Parousia, Christ's glorious return, is soon to happen. The tragedy of the Shoah and the re-establishment of Jewish independence in the land of Israel has led certain Jews to belief that they can hear the approaching footsteps of the Messiah.

Deeply embedded in our people's historic, religious consciousness is the conviction that God's promises to us are trustworthy, God's love for us never diminishes, and God's word is true. In every age, in times of trouble and tribulation, when God's promises seemed to fail and God's love felt distant, belief in a redeeming figure has been for us a source of strength and of meaning. When we felt that the world had become utterly evil, we knew, or so we thought, that redemption must be just around the corner. We felt that our travail could only have been the birth-pangs of the messiah.

But although the messiah's arrival has been proclaimed, the messiah still has not come and the world is still unredeemed. So we continued to plant trees and to hope, pray and imagine.

Even in earlier ages, there have been those of us who have stressed the messianic age over the messianic figure. They have argued that what will happen is more important than who might do it. In the modern world, liberal Jews have often turned away from the what seemed to them to be a supernatural messianic figure to a more naturalistic messianic time. Yet even here, the rabbis' directive rings true. Continue planting, whether we hear the shouts of the revolution or the footsteps of the messiah.

In spite of or perhaps because of the rabbis' instructions, Ani Maamin, I believe in the Messiah as a person, but even more so I believe in the Messiah as something personal, that is as something belonging to each one of us. I believe in two aspects of the messiah -- the Private and the Public, the Concealed and the Revealed, the Inner and the Outer. Of the two, the private, personal, concealed and inner messiah is the most important.

Thus, the rabbis teach us that we are to continue planting a tree, even if we hear that the messiah is coming. They knew that the messiah within us, our internal messianic drives, are more important than any human figure. They knew that it in the act of planting a tree that we do more to bring on the messianic era than in running to greet the messiah himself.

In their directive to continue planting, the rabbis teach us that the power to bring on redemption rests in our hands. We can plant trees. We can reforest the world. We can feed the hungry. We can free the enslaved, cloth the naked, aid the afflicted. By instructing us to continue with the work that rebuilds and restores the world, they make us aware of the understanding that the revealed messiah does not redeem. It is only the hidden, inner messiah, concealed in each of us, who has the power to reshape the world.

The revealed Messiah at best is but the leader of the redeemed. The revealed Messiah is, at best, the symbol of and not the cause of redemption. The revealed Messiah merely characterizes the age in which we all actualize the messiah within us.

To believe otherwise is fraught with danger. To believe that the redeemer's arrival is pending, to believe that the messiah will soon be revealed, to think that redemption is at hand, to hold that we can hear the messiah footsteps and to alter our behavior on that belief is to approach idolatry. It means taking a symbol as reality. It means exalting ourselves and our times over the vast expanse of human history. It risks using the ends to justify the means. It implies that we can even push God's hands.

To believe that the messiah is almost here in contemporary Jewish terms has come to mean: that I need not take the Palestinian problem seriously, because it will soon be resolved; that I need not work with Jews who follow other religious approaches to Judaism, because they will soon pass away; that my personal piety takes precedence over other religious demands; and that I can be intolerant because the truth of my positions is soon to be vindicated.

So to protect souls and to cultivate our spirits, the rabbis of old tell us that even if we hear that the messiah is coming, we are to continue planting, that is, continue the nurturing and creative aspects of life. They teach us that the messianic spark is within each one of us. We are all messiahs in potential. Traditionally, at his brit milah, every Jewish boy is held by the sandek, "the godfather," who sits on a chair that bears the designation -- "The Throne of Elijah, the harbinger of the messianic era."

We are to continue planting the tree because when we plant the tree we are discovering the power of the messiah within us. It is the force that impels us to improve our world -- to plant a tree, to aid the sick, to house the homeless, to love a child, to build a better home and better families, neighborhoods, communities, countries and bring on a better world.

So the rabbis of old teach us that when we are planting trees we need not worry about the messiah's arrival because in the moment the messiah is already here

So let us plant and nurture, create, discover and invent, so that when the messianic figure finally arrives, we will not be surprised by his coming, because we already knew the messiah was with and within us.

PURIM: A REFLECTION ON POWER
March 18, 2003

Power of any kind is a dangerous blessing. Individuals and nations need power to ensure their own survival and promote their own welfare and the welfare of those with whom they come into contact. But power can easily be abused. We can employ the same energy that enables us to do good, to do all sorts of evil. We cannot live without power, but power can destroy us. We need to learn how to use our power for the good. This has been one of the abiding goals of Jewish spiritual teachings over the ages and is a focus of the Festival of Purim.

The Megillah, the Scroll of Esther, the biblical book that is the source for our joyous festival of Purim, revolves around issues of political power and military force. It is a story that recalls how the Jews of the ancient Persian Empire drew on their political acumen, their martial power, their sense of shared destiny, and their deep faith in each other to ensure their survival in challenging times. As we celebrate the miracle of Jewish continuity, the Megillah reminds us that economic, political, and military power are important components in our struggle for survival. On Purim we remember that only when might and power are justly employed, can we experience the Holy One’s saving and redeeming spirit.

Unlike all the other great biblical narratives in which God is a central character, the Holy One plays no explicit role in the Scroll of Esther. In the scroll, as it is in life, God’s presence is hidden. In our lives we evoke God’s spirit in the manner in which we respond to life’s challenges. Likewise, in the Megillah we discover God’s saving power not through some great miracle but through the courage of Esther to stand before the wicked prime minister, Haman, and in the willingness of the Jews to stand up to their enemies and defend their homes and families.

At first the Megillah does not seem to be a book about the uses and abuses of power. It begins as a historical romance. We are caught by surprise when it turns from a love story into a story of political intrigue and bloody conflict. The opening chapters, which tell of the expulsion of Vasti, King Ahasuerus’ first wife and the beauty contest worthy of a present-day reality TV show to select a new one, lull us into expecting a story of romantic intrigue. With the selection of Esther as the new queen, we want to know if a Jewish orphan can find happiness as mistress of the royal court. Will the course of true love run true? We will never know.

Almost immediately, the mood of the story changes. New characters come to the forefront -- Mordecai, Esther’s guardian and kinsman, and Haman the Agagite, the new royal vizier. Powerful human emotions of lust, power, pride, and greed come into play as the protagonists struggle to overcome each other. The story ends not with a romantic reconciliation but with a bloody military victory that confirms Jewish power and ensures Jewish survival. Esther and Mordecai expose Haman’s plot to slaughter the Jews and the Jews, dispersed throughout the empire, defend themselves and their families. On the thirteenth of Adar, the very day chosen by Haman for their destruction, the Jews assail their enemies and kill seventy-five thousand of their foes.

Three times the Megillah uses the motif of feasting to help us examine the use and abuse of power. The book opens with a description of King Ahasuerus’ feasts for the elite of his empire and for the people of his capital, Susa. For Ahasuerus great feasts provide him with the opportunity to parade his glory and authority in front of his satraps and people. The Persian king uses power is a tool to support his need for domination and his lusty appetites. Although it led to her dismissal, Queen Vashti’s refusal to dance before the king underscores the shallowness of his concerns.

The two private dinner parties Esther hosts for the King and the upstart prime minister Haman provide a second occasion for the Megillah to focus on the use of power. In his preparations for the feasts, Haman demonstrates his understanding of political power as a means for self-aggrandizement and for revenge. Yet this is his downfall. To reveal Haman’s plot to the king, Esther cleverly exploits Haman’s ego needs.

The festive celebrations of the Jews decreed by Mordecai and Esther in honor of their unexpected deliverance present a third understanding of the uses of power. For the Jews and their leaders political and military power were not implements for domination or personal advancement. They were tools to be used to ensure personal and communal survival in a very dangerous world. Unlike Ahasuerus and Haman who hoped to despoil the Jews for their own personal needs, the Jews, led by Mordecai, sought no material reward from the spoils of battle.

In a highly entertaining manner, the Megillah directs our thoughts to the very serious concern about the use of power. Reading the Scroll of Esther carefully, we can see negative examples in which power was used to indulge one’s appetites and to threaten and oppress others. But we also see a positive example in which political and military power helped overthrow a tyrant and save our people. The Megillah exposes us to the abuses of power and to its benefits. When we use the power we have properly, we are able to transform our lives and the lives of others for the better. As we listen to the Megillah this year, may Mordecai and Esther teach us how to use the power we have not for selfish gains but to help ourselves and others enjoy the blessings of freedom and security.

THE LIMITS OF JEWISH POWER

Reflections on the Ongoing War Against Hamas in Gaza

Purim 2023

The story of Purim as it is often retold often smooths out the details in Megillat Esther, the biblical Book of Esther that shock and challenge us. The simplified versions that are embedded in our childhood memory gloss over the political intrigue, the sexual tension, the cultural conflicts and the violence, proposed and performed, in the short novella. The Purim experience shifts our focus from the subtle but significant details to our joyous celebration of Jewish survival and our deliverance from our foes.

Yet, there are a number of moments in the story in which our sense of happiness and joy needs to confront the reality within the narrative. Like an action movie or a James Bond thriller, the story ends with a bloody battle in which the villains are destroyed and the heroes emerge victorious. Esther’s success in court is due as much to her attractiveness as a woman as much as anything else. Mordechai is closely involved in court intrigues and politics. Vashti is ill-treated and receives an unfair fate. The Jews in the Persian Empire are a vulnerable, powerless group whose destiny depends on the whims of the authorities.

As we are currently witnessing, the cost of war in property and human lives is overwhelming. While we celebrate the unexpected success of the Jews in Mordechai’s time in eliminating those dedicated to their downfall, the death and destruction in the ongoing War Against Hamas in Gaza provides a real-time image to the battles against Haman and his supporters in the cities and towns of Ahasuerus’ kingdom. While, as Jews, our focus may be on the Gaza War, today we can see the dreadful price of war in too many places in our world. War does not discriminate between the good and the bad, the innocent and the guilty, the warrior and the civilian.

Beyond this, the Book of Esther reminds us of the vulnerability of the powerless. Even when Haman’s plot against the Jews was revealed and Haman’s wealth was transferred to Esther and his position to Mordechai, the Jews were still unable to protect themselves against Haman’s associates. Due to certain particularities of Persian law, Ahasuerus could not revoke Haman’s directives. The assault on the Jews would go on as ordered and the Jews needed royal permission to protect themselves. While the Jews were successful and while Mordechai achieved high office, the Jews and their fate remained bound to the desires of the more powerful. Whatever power and authority they achieved, they remained subject to the arbitrary nature of the royal will. (Esther 8)

The Jews’ ability to determine their lives as a community continued to be limited and their freedom of action depended on the needs and concerns of the imperial authorities. Yes, they managed to save themselves but they could not have done so without the king’s approval. Had Haman not overplayed his hand, the Book of Esther would have had a different ending. The Book of Esther reminds us, that Jewish power in this world in both limited and conditional. When we wish to or need to exercise it, it is a limited and tenuous resource. We need to use it carefully and wisely and need leaders like Mordechai and Esther who understand this.

Pesach

THE CHALLENGE OF THE TEN PLAGUES

One of the more challenging moments in the Passover Seder is reciting the Ten Plagues that God inflicted on Egypt and the Egyptians. As we name each plague, we remove a drop of wine, the symbol of joy, from our cup so that our cup is not full for the blessing over the second cup. Some people dip a finger in the cup to take out a drop of wine for each plague, while others may use a spoon or pour out a drop. But no matter how one does it, the cup of our joy is diminished ten times, once for each plague

Each droplet is like a blood stain on our napkins or a tear on our plates. Each drop reminds us not only of the struggle for freedom but of its costs. This ritual challenges us by shifting our focus from the suffering of our enslaved ancestors to the suffering of the people who enslaved them.

The recitation of the Ten Plagues comes at a pivotal moment in our Haggadah. It concludes the lengthy discussion of the formula recited by our ancestors when they presented their first fruits in the Temple (Deut. 26:5-9). After reading our ancient sages’ interpretation of the verse, “And the Eternal freed us from Egypt by a mighty hand, by an outstretched arm and with awesome power, and by signs and portents” (Deut. 26:8), we focus on the destructive nature of God’s battle against Pharaoh and Pharaoh’s gods by naming each assault on Egypt and its people. Following this solemn enumeration, we continue the Seder by joyfully singing Dayenu, expressing our gratitude to God for every step taken on the journey from slavery to freedom.

But for a moment amid our wonder and joy, we stop briefly to acknowledge the pain experienced by our enemies. While we are encouraged to rejoice in our freedom, our tradition also teaches us not to take joy in the suffering of others, even our enemies. We pause to reflect on what occurred. What could have been done differently to achieve the same goals? How do we respond to the needs of those who suffered because of their leaders’ stubbornness? How do we move forward in the spirit of peace? How do we celebrate victory being mindful the costs of war? We pause to remember all the dead children, ours and the Egyptians.

Not all Egyptians oppressed us. Some, like the Egyptian midwives, attempted to defy Pharaoh’s decree. Others, such as Pharaoh’s courtiers, tried to warn him. Many Egyptians did not have direct contact with the Israelite slaves, but Egypt was enriched by our ancestors’ labor, and all Egyptians benefited in some way.

We cannot know how the Egyptians felt about enslaving our ancestors. Did they believe the Pharaoh’s assessment that the Israelites were a possible fifth column? If they opposed the oppression, were they able to protest against it? Was the idea of protesting even part of ancient Egyptian life? If it were, would it have been possible given the authoritarian nature of pharaonic rule?

All we know is that in the process of securing our liberation, many Egyptians suffered and died and our Seder ritual directs us to respond to that knowledge by acknowledging their suffering.

A victory that results destruction, plunder, and conquest ultimately leads to pain, not peace. True peace requires us to confront that pain – both our own and that of our enemies. On Pesach, we celebrate our liberation and the opportunities it has brought us. Our Torah challenges us to remember being liberated from oppression and warns us of the danger of becoming oppressors ourselves.

FOUR CHILDREN — FOUR JEWS

The Passover Seder is a magical time. We sit around the table surrounded by family and friends reliving the epic of redemption through story, song, drama, good food and wine. Each year beloved figures from history and legend join our celebration – Elijah the Prophet, the Five Rabbis at B’nai Brak, Rabban Gamliel, the little goat from Chad Gadya, our heroes, Moses, Miriam, and Aaron, and the villain, Pharaoh.

Among our favorite Seder guests, however, are four children – one, Chacham, (“wise”), one, Rasha, (“wicked”), one, Tam, (“simple”) and one, She’eino yodei’a lishol (who does not know how to ask). We are glad to see them, but as they come in we wonder who they are and from where do they come.

According to the Passover Haggadah, the traditional script for the Seder ritual, these four come to us from the Torah itself. They are not like other Torah characters, however. They do not stand out as individuals in the story. One has to go looking for them behind the text. Like many children, they like hide. Our sages of old, apparently enjoying this game of spiritual hide and go seek, discovered them only by asking why the Torah instructs us four times what to say to the coming generations of our commemoration of our people’s Exodus from Egypt. Since the sages of old believed that there are no superfluous statements in the Torah, each statement must be addressed to a different individual. Using a method similar to that used in the TV game show “Jeopardy”, our ancient teachers took the Torah’s response and asked, “To whom is this answer addressed?” In this way, they uncovered the four children, whom we take to represent four different character types.

The questions; what these character types are and whom the four children represent, have been and continue to be a fertile source for rabbinic preaching and a springboard for lively Seder talk. Illustrations of the four children in Haggadahs over the ages reveal the ever-changing self-understandings of the Jewish people. How Jews have pictured the four children over time gives us an insight into the cares and concerns of our people throughout our history. By looking at the pictures and listening to the stories, we can see how Jews approached such basic issues as: What makes a good Jew? What do we teach our children? How do we connect with our past?

Generally, we assume that the Chacham, the “wise” child deserves our admiration, the Rasha, the “wicked” child, our condemnation, the Tam, the “simple child, our help and the She’eino yodei’a lishol, the one “who does not know how to ask,” our pity. But that need not be the case. One of the joys of a Seder is to find new, creative, and meaningful interpretations to old stories.

For example, from the perspective of spiritual development, the opposite to the commonly held understanding might be the case. In this instance, the Chacham, the “Wise” child represents those people who have to know everything. They need everything to be precise and specific. They appreciate the sense of structure this knowledge gives them. With it they feel “in control.” All too often, they are more than happy to share this information with the rest of us, even when it is not requested. When faced with this child, the Haggadah instructs the parent to teach him or her everything about the observance of Pesach, including all the minor details. Here, the Chacham, the “Wise” child is not full of Jewish wisdom but he is the “budding know-it-all”, the chochom, in the colloquial Yiddish sense.

In some ways dealing with the Rasha, the “Wicked” child is a relief. The Haggadah describes this child as rasha, “wicked”, because he cannot connect to his parents’ experiences. This child wants to know what all this Passover “stuff” means to us. This child does not yet know how to connect to the past. He or she may know the facts of Passover but has no emotional connection to the holiday and to the memories and hopes it honors.

This child represents the challenges every generation has in passing down its experiences to the next. Whatever our generation holds as its defining moments – the Depression, Pearl Harbor, the Shoah, the Birth of Israel, the Kennedy assassination, Woodstock – our children and grandchildren will see as “ancient history.” The Haggadah captures our frustration when it directs us to speak strongly to this child with the hope that we can shock him or her into recognition of his or her past.

The Tam, the “Simple” child deserves our admiration. The Hebrew word “tam” which we often translate as “simple”, as in “neither learned nor bright”, has a much broader range of meaning. “Tam” can also mean “complete, flawless, pure, innocent, and not complicated”. The sages of old gave the biblical character Joseph the appellation “Josef ha-Tam” (Joseph the Pure) because he did not succumb to the allurement of Potifar’s wife. Tam, therefore, can refer to an innocence of soul, and this child can be seen as a righteous individual.

In addition, Pesach celebrates simplicity, newness, and fresh beginnings. What food could be simpler than matzah made out of nothing more than flour and water? Symbols of spring and rebirth decorate our Seder table. This child does not need to know all the minutiae of Pesach. The Tam child can create a deeply satisfying Pesach experience without being overwhelmed by “all there is to do” for Passover.

Of the four children, the She’eino yodei’a lishol, the “One Who Does Not Know How to Ask”, is the most awesome. This child represents the one who has opened his or her heart to the Pesach story. Through this child, we can, perhaps, relive the experience of surviving the plagues, escaping from Egypt, crossing the Red Sea and seeing the “hand of God” in the events of lives. The power of this experience takes the breath away and leaves us silent. At this life changing, peak moment when past, present and future come together, we can say nothing more than the word words first uttered by our ancestors at the Red Sea – “This is my God.” All we need to do is to stand by this child and guide him or her gently back into our place and time. There is little to say and much to feel.

The Seder is a magical time and this child who has seen beyond all questions reminds us of this magic. But the other three have their bit of magic, too. Can we discover it this Passover as they join us along with our other guests, both real and spiritual, as we celebrate the Feast of Freedom, the grand festival of Pesach?

THE GOD OF DARKNESS AND THE GOD OF LIGHT

March 22, 2005

The Shema ends with a brief statement summarizing the Exodus experience from God’s point of view. In it God declares, “I am Y-H-W-H, your God, the One who took you out of Egypt to be your God. I am Y-H-W-H ,your God, ” and explains the how and why we became God’s people. From the passage’s theocentric viewpoint, the “how” is that God brought our ancestors out of Egypt and the “why” is because God desired it. Here the Exodus is a sign of God’s grace and the rest of our story is our response to God’s gracious act.

But what is our response? Liturgically, the traditional response appears in the prayer immediately following the Shema, which, in line with the rabbinical interpretation of the Song of the Sea, quotes the same ancient poem and declares that after the act of liberation, the Israelites in unison acknowledged the Divine monarchy. In our daily liturgy, as in the Pesach Haggadah,, we connect God’s redeeming act with our loyal and loving submission to the yoke of the Dominion of Heaven. With joy we move from being Pharoah’s slaves to God’s servants.

As neat as this response may be, it is also unsatisfying. Our ancestors’ joyous celebration of freedom after the crossing of the Red Sea and their willingness to accept the rule of their redeeming Divine Sovereign does not answer the fundamental question of why did it take God so long to recognize them as His people and free them.

From a human viewpoint, our ancestors’ joyous transformation upon their liberation makes sense. They experienced God in a new way. It is also conceivable that our Israelite ancestors did not recognize God at all during their long years of oppression. Those burdened by great suffering might easily doubt the presence of the Divine One in their lives. In times of hardship and darkness, God’s presence often seems obscured.

But to hear Scripture report God’s words as, “I took you out of Egypt to be your God,” is painful. The question is no longer – Where was God while his people suffered? It is now – Who was Israel’s God before the liberation? Is our understanding of God as the One who is revealed in liberation broad enough to take in the fulness of the human experience?

The Book of Exodus describes the Israelites’ reticence at first upon hearing Moses’s message of liberation. I can imagine other feelings filling our ancestors’ hearts – utter delight at the prospect for freedom and great anger for having been left alone for so long. I can see them turning to God and asking such questions as, “Where were you when we were forced into slave labor?” and “Why did you let Pharaoh drown all our baby boys?”

For us, however, being unable to speak for God, need to reconsider the Exodus from human point of view. The theocentric analysis of the Exodus is ultimately unsatisfactory, but we have few other tools with which to work. One thing is clear. From the biblical text, as it is refracted through the lens of the rabbis, Israel’s acknowledgment of God’s dominion only occurs when Pharaoh’s ability to exert power over them comes to an end. From that moment on, Israel’s God is a liberator and redeemer, the savior of the oppressed and the protector of Israel. Until that moment, however, whatever God was to the people of Israel, God was not their redeeming sovereign. What that relationship was – how our enslaved people envisioned their God – I do not know. Yet if we wish to acknowledge that the Divine is present in times of darkness as well as in light, we need to to go further. We need to understand that the God we wish to envision and adore, worship and revere is both the God of the Redemption and the God of the Oppression, the God of Darkness and the God of Light.

Sefirat HaOmer

April 24, 1996

WHICH WILL IT BE?

According to the Torah, our ancient ancestors were required to bring daily a certain measure of grain known as an omer to the Temple during the forty-nine days between the beginning of Pesach and the celebration of Shavuot. In Israel, in ancient days as today, the period between these two festivals was the time of the grain harvest. At this season at the time when the Temple stood, our ancestors would give thanks each day for each successful day of the harvest and pray that the following days and weeks would remain successful.

The forty-nine days during which our people presented daily an omer of freshly harvested grain was a time of mixed feelings — the joy of fields full of ripened grain and the fear that the grain might not all be successfully brought in. Our ancestors were keenly aware of the hazards of agricultural life at the time of the harvest. Rain, fire, harsh wind, vermin, locusts — all could destroy the crop while it was still in the field and all their labors would have been in vain.

During these forty-nine days, they realized how fragile prosperity could be. The seven weeks between Passover and Shavuot were a time of serious concern. For pious and for superstitious reasons, our ancestors avoided expressions of joy and undue frivolity. Their fate was too uncertain for them to allow themselves to celebrate until the harvest was safely put away.

Shavuot the holiday that marked the end of the harvest was, therefore, a joyous festival. The crop was in. The silos were filled with grain. Our Israelite forbears could face the dry months of summer with a feeling of security. Shavuot was a festival that celebrated the end of a period of anxiety.

Living in a modern, urban world, we have lost touch with the basic human concerns that touched the lives of our ancestors. We no longer sense how closely our lives are connected to the cycles of nature and the seasons of the year. We no longer tell time by the phases of the moon nor search the skies for rain clouds. Just as we can no longer feel the sharpness of their fears, we can no longer share the intensity of their rejoicing. As so Shavuot has become a. minor festival, a passing note on our calendars and in our lives and the counting of the omer, custom only for the most pious.

Yet, the same concerns for economic well being and security that plagued our ruler ancestors still plague us. Like us, they were concerned with putting food on the table, having a cushion for hard times, being able to celebrate the great events of their lives and saving for old age. Their economic system differed from ours. Their vocabulary seems somewhat strange. But the deep, human concerns remain the same.

For the past few years, our country has been undergoing a major economic transformation. Many of our old expectations are being tested and dropped.

We seem, to be working harder with reduced success and reduced satisfaction. There continue to be major, mergers of large firms . Belt tightening, cost control and staff reductions are the words of the day. More of us are looking for jobs and that search is taking longer. The income gap is widening. Many of us are wondering when and if we will enjoy the harvest of our labors.

As a nation and as a world we, are figuratively in the period of Sefirat Ha Omer, the time of counting the omer We have experienced once again the feelings of economic uncertainty and financial worry. As individuals and as a community we have learned that our success and security is often due to factors beyond our control — the rain, wind and fire of modern economic life. We continue to work hard. We hope. We pray.

Shavuot is coming and afterwards the long warm days of summer, a time-of hope and happiness. As we approach the festival and the new season, we look forward to when our worries will be over, when we will all benefit from our new world economy, when we feel secure in our jobs, in our retirement and in our ability to provide-for our loved ones. We anxiously await the time when we can say, “The harvest is safely in, we can relax, rejoice and enjoy” May it come soon.

Lag Ba Omer

THE PLAGUE COMES TO AN END

April 30, 2021

According to the Jewish calendar, we are currently in the period of the counting of the Omer, the time in which we remember the daily offering of grain to the Temple during the weeks of the harvest between Pesach and Shavuot. While this is traditionally a time of restricted activity, avoidance of celebration, and cautious consideration, we take a break on the 33rd day of the count, Lag BaOmer, a celebrate life. Lag BaOmer is a day for picnics, bonfires, nature walks, and happy occasions.

We have long forgotten why the 33rd day of the Omer is significant. We have, however, filled this gap with many stories and legends that express the joys and fears, triumphs and failures of the Jewish people. Many of these accounts relate to events in the tumultuous 2nd century CE through which Judaism as we know it took on its present form. We remember the courage of Bar Kokhba and the failed final revolt against Roman tyranny. We honor the great sage and mystic, Shimon Bar Yochai, and the depth of the Jewish spiritual imagination. We take inspiration from the great sages and their students who preserved Jewish autonomy through their dedication to the study and promulgation of our sacred traditions in a period of persecution.

One well-known Lag BaOmer legend has particular meaning for us as we seem to be emerging from the COVID19 pandemic. According to Jewish tradition, Lag BaOmer marks the day on which a plague that killed 24,000 students of Rabbi Akiva came to an end. (Yebamot 62b; Shulchan Orach, Orach Chayyim 493). Rabbi Akiva was devastated by the loss. He had to rebuild his school. With effort, he found more students, and five of them, Rabbi Meir, Rabbi Judah, Rabbi Yossi, Rabbi Shimon, and Rabbi Eleazar ben Shammua, became some of the most important teachers in the Talmudic tradition.

Plagues were not uncommon in the world of late antiquity. The memory of a disastrous epidemic served as a powerful metaphor for the sense of dislocation felt by our ancestors in the Land of Israel in the 2nd century CE. Plagues do not last forever, but by the time they end, the world is often radically changed. This brief story reminds us that when a challenging period comes to an end we need to balance our sense of loss for the past and concern for the future with acceptance and hope. We cannot return to the world as it was, but we can guide the world to a better place.

We do not find a large plague in Holy Land during the lifetime of Rabbi Akiva in reliable historical sources. We do know, however, that he lived in challenging times. He experienced the deep poverty so common under Roman occupation. He struggled with internal Jewish class prejudice. Through great effort, he became a leading scholar. He survived the revolt against Rome and, though he died a martyr in the persecutions that followed, through his students he laid the groundwork for the restoration of Jewish life that a couple of generations later resulted in the completion of the Mishnah, the foundation document of the Talmud.

Today, we are keenly aware of our losses over the last year, not only those who died but losses people felt in their economic, social, educational, and creative lives. We see how the pandemic has accelerated technological and structural changes in our society that were already causing a sense of unease and dislocation. We know that the world we will enter as COVID-19 fades will be significantly different than the one we have left behind.

As frightening as this knowledge may be, Lag BaOmer, through the lens of the legend of Rabbi Akiva, promises us a hopeful future. We are permitted to be thankful that plagues come to an end. We need to acknowledge our losses but we need to know that we can move on. We cannot return to the past, but through effort, we can preserve the best and create a new world that works for us and our children. Rabbi Akiva shows us that this is not easy, that it takes a toll, but great rewards are possible if we move forward.

THE LESSON OF LAG BA-OMER

May 5, 2014

Lag BaOmer, the thirty-third day of counting the Omer, shows us that if we are work diligently, stick to the task, and have a little luck, we will in time realize that although our portion may not include all we desired, we will have a sense of success, security, and safety. We will feel rich. Not only will most of our basic needs have been satisfied, but we will also have a little more to enjoy some of what we want. We will come to embody the wisdom of Pirkei Avot: “Who is rich? The one who is happy in one’s portion.”

This simple but powerful message lies at the heart of our celebration of Lag BaOmer. But, it is not the entire message. Lag BaOmer does not merely review the past; it provides a vision of the future. The holiday also reassures us that our story is not over, there is at least another chapter to write, there is more work to do, and, perhaps, even more, to gain. The celebration reminds us that although we have reached a significant turning point, our journey is not yet complete. Now, however, as a result of going so far, we can make the rest of our trip into an adventure, a vacation, or, even better, a pilgrimage.

Lag BaOmer, the thirty-third day of counting the Omer, a memory of the biblical custom of bringing an omer, a small measure of grain, to the Temple during the harvest season, was a way station in our people’s journey through the year. It is an ancient folk festival whose time-obscured origins have enabled the Jewish people to graft additional spiritual and historical meanings to its agricultural roots. However, its message lies deep in the soil of ancient Israel.

In the seven short weeks between Pesach and Shavuot, our ancestors had to make sure that the grain was successfully harvested. This was a period of intense activity. The Book of Ruth pictures Boaz and his men at harvest time spending nights in the fields so that they would not miss an hour of work. There was no time to take a break for anything but Shabbat. Many things could spoil the harvest – a late rain, a fire, an enemy raid, a locust plague. As soon as the grain ripened, it had to be cut, threshed, and safely stored. Each day was a blessing and each day for forty-nine days our ancestors offered God an omer of grain as a sign of gratitude.

At the end of the thirty-second day, when the harvest was about two-thirds over, our ancestors could take a short break. Although there was still more work to do, by then they had harvested enough to make it through the year. They knew that although life might be difficult, they would have enough to eat and that the rest of the harvest could only bring them the blessings of abundance and prosperity. The thirty-third day of the omer was a day to pause, take measure, and, maybe even, celebrate.

The customs and practices of Lag BaOmer today still recall the bucolic celebrations of ancient times. We mark the holiday with picnics and outdoor games, most traditionally, archery. Today, we take a break in our busy schedules for pleasures as simple as a haircut or as meaningful as a wedding.

Lag BaOmer did not mark the end of the harvest. There were still fields of ripening grain to be cut before Shavout and after Shavuot, through the long, dry summers in Israel until the beginning of the rains after Sukkot, the rest of the earth’s produce needed to be gathered and stored. However, Lag BaOmer marked the end of a period of anxiety and concern. After Lag BaOmer, things could only get better. How good they would become depended still on a great deal of hard work and a little bit of luck, but they would get better.

Lag BaOmer reminds us that we need to stop from time to time on our journey through life and measure how far we have gone. It is not the end of our journey but reminds us that to get to where we are, we have successfully overcome so many of life’s difficult challenges. It reminds us that being rich means not feeling anxious or afraid of the future. Lag BaOmer offers us a short break on the highway of life, when we can pull to the side of the road, have a picnic, enjoy the scenery, remark on how far we have gone, and look forward to the rest of the trip.

THIRTY-THREE DAYS OF BLESSINGS

I would never have thought that the minor festival of Lag BaOmer could be spiritually challenging. After all, who can have a problem with a festival that is primarily celebrated in Israel by a day off from school, a picnic, and a campfire accompanied by singing and dancing.

Lag BaOmer, the thirty-third day of Sefirat Ha Omer, the counting the Omer, is a particularly easy festival to observe. In the United States we treat the day even lighter than our brothers and sisters in Israel. Jewish private schools may hold a field day. More traditionally minded Jews might take time to shave and cut their hair. On Lag BaOmer the tradition of not getting married during the Omer Period is lifted for a day, and many couples take the opportunity to tie the knot.

So why do I find the holiday to be such a challenge? What lasting spiritual message is this festival teaching me?
The problem is that we know so little about the origins of Lag BaOmer and how it fits into the seven week period between Pesach and Shavuot, the days of counting the Omer. They are connected somehow to the counting of the omer, a measure of grain that was brought daily to the Beit HaMiqdash, the Holy Temple in Jerusalem in honor of the grain harvest for seven weeks starting on the second day of Pesach, the Passover, and concluding on the day before Shavuot, the Feast of Weeks.

Traditionally Jews have treated the days between Pesach and Shavuot, the days of Sefirat HaOmer, the counting of the Omer as a period of semi-mourning, in which marriages and other celebrations would be avoided. The earliest references we have to this custom, however, come from the early Middle Ages in the responsa, the legal opinions of the geonim, the leaders of the Jewish academies in Babylon, present day Iraq, not as new legislation but, rather, as a well established practice.

Many understand the restrictions as a way of expressing regret for the destruction of the Beit HaMiqdash, the Holy Temple, which was in Jerusalem. We are sad that we can no longer rejoice, as did our biblical ancestors, as they joyfully offered a measure of grain daily to the Eternal to give thanks the harvest. Accordingly, the days of counting the Omer remind us that the Temple is no more, our people are dispersed, and the dream for restoration of our people and peace for all people remains unfulfilled. But why on Lag BaOmer do we pause for a day of celebration? What makes this day special?

The name of the festival does not provide a great deal of help. The word “lag” is the vocalization of the Hebrew numeral for thirty-three. The letter lamed, “L”, represents thirty and the letter gimel, “G”, represents three. Placed together, these two letters are pronounced as “Lag” and inform us that since a time before memory the thirty-third day after Pesach was considered significant.

Over the centuries our people have endowed this day with various meanings. Jews have understood Lag BaOmer as a day commemorating Jewish cultural and spiritual resistance to oppression. The custom of picnicking in the woods is a reminder of the times when Jewish scholars had to conduct classes in the wilderness when the Romans attempted to shut down the Jewish academies in the land of Israel.

Many of the legends of Lag BaOmer relate to the valiant but unsuccessful Jewish revolt against Roman domination in the early second century C.E. led by the heroic, charismatic figure Shimeon bar Kokhba, the Son of the Star. Thus Lag baOmer is a holiday that connects us to our messianic dream of being a free people in our own land.

Lag BaOmer is also a day on which we honor our scholars and religious leaders. Legend has it that on Lag BaOmer a plague which killed twenty four thousand of Rabbi Akiba's students came to an end and the study of our sacred tradition was able to continue. On Lag BaOmer we celebrate the achievements of our scholars and the potential of their students.
Lag BaOmer is a mystical, kabbalistic holiday. It is the yahrzeit of the guiding spirit of the Jewish mystical tradition, Rabbi Akiba’s student Rabbi Shimeon bar Yochai. The season of counting the Omer is itself full of mystic significance. During the forty-nine days between Pesach and Shavuot, we recall our people’s journey from Egypt to Sinai and our personal journey from spiritual slavery to the liberating experience of standing in God’s presence.

I, however, have found has a more basic meaning for Lag BaOmer. For me it is holiday that teaches us to appreciate our blessings in a difficult and frightening world and to be thankful for what is ours.

For our ancestors, as for so many other people in agricultural societies, the harvest season presented few opportunities or reasons for celebration. First of all, there was no time to celebrate. Everyone had to work from dawn to dusk to bring in the harvest. In addition, the harvest season was not a time full of joy. There was so much to worry about. The fields of ripening grain were very vulnerable. The crop could easily be ruined by unfavorable weather B rain or hail. The fields could catch on fire or locusts could descend and consume everything. Enemies might come and destroy or seize the grain and wild beasts might trample the fields. People could not rest secure until enough grain was harvested and safely stored so that the food supply for the next year was assured. One surely wanted to avoid the “evil eye” by celebrating prematurely in this worrisome season.

Each day of the harvest brought our ancestors closer to the time when they could relax in the assurance that they would avoid famine in the coming months. The bringing of an omer of grain as an offering to God in the Temple daily during the harvest, enabled our people to offer thanksgiving and literally “count their blessings.”

The thirty-third day of the harvest appears to have been a major milestone. By Lag BaOmer, enough food had been safely harvested and stored so that the worry concerning starvation could fade. Our hard-working forebearers could relax and rejoice. Even if they might not be wealthy in the months to come, they did, thank God, have enough to secure their survival for another year. There was still a great deal of work to be done but by then the bare necessities of life were guaranteed for a while.

Most of our ancestors were not blessed with great wealth. They lived a very modest lifestyle. They labored very hard to achieve the physical security we take for granted. They struggled and they worried but they also counted their blessings. Each day presented them the opportunity to give thanks and when even a modest future was assured, they found reason to celebrate.

On Lag BaOmer we can learn from them. Like them, we can be thankful for the small steps forward we have been blessed to take on our journey through life. Like them, we need not wait until we achieve great success to celebrate. We can learn to enjoy our small triumphs, even though we know that the journey continues and there is much more to do.
As we continue the ancient tradition of counting off the days of the harvest during the seven weeks between Pesach and Shavuot, let us also continue the ancient tradition of counting our blessings every day. Let us also pause on our life=s voyage and recognize that even though there is a long way to go and much to do, we have already counted enough blessings to allow a day off for a modest celebration.

A picnic in the park, a walk in the woods, a campfire and some games are not the most elaborate way to celebrate a Jewish festival. They do, however, seem very appropriate ways to celebrate Lag BaOmer and give thanks to the Source of All Blessings for the blessings we have safely brought home.

Shavuot

THE TOUGH COMMANDMENT

Remember the Sabbath day and keep it holy. Six days you shall labor and do all your work, but the seventh day is a Sabbath of the LORD your God: you shall not do any work—you, your son or daughter, your male or female slave, or your cattle, or the stranger who is within your settlements. For in six days, the LORD made heaven and earth and sea, and all that is in them, and He rested on the seventh day; therefore the LORD blessed the Sabbath day and hallowed it.

Exodus 20: 8-11 (the 4th Commandment – New JPS)

Shavuot, the Feast of Weeks, commemorates the giving of the Torah, specifically, the Decalogue. For many, the Decalogue represents what it means to be a good person. People often say that even though they may not be religious, the Ten Commandments guide their lives.. For Jews, this is only a starting place. In our tradition the Decalogue is not the full expression of Jewish spiritual life and moral teaching, but an outline of Jewish concerns.

The Two Tablets of the Law are powerful markers of Jewish presence. Often they stand above the Aron Kodesh reminding us that the Torah scrolls stored within contain the words first heard by our people at Sinai and transmitted over time through a process of discussion and debate. They remind us of God’s unity, the transformative experience of the Exodus, the sacredness of the family, and the choices we need to make to live in peace with our neighbors.

Yet the Fourth Commandment, the commandment designating the Seventh Day, the Shabbat, as a day of rest for all members of our community, presents a description of that community that fundamentally differs from our vision of Jewish community. The commandment to observe the Shabbat was first heard a society in which women and children were subordinate to men and, even more disturbing, that accepted slavery as a norm. Even though Torah law and subsequent Jewish legislation seek to protect slaves from abusive situations, the fact that in the Decalogue slavery appears as a societal institution just as marriage, family, property, and government is inescapable.

The Decalogue is a summary of the Torah, pointing us to many of the significant concerns that will be taken up in the rest of scripture and discussed by Jews throughout the generations. The ways in which we understand basic social structures – marriage, family, property, government – have changed over the centuries, but the wisdom first expressed in Torah still enriches our understanding of them.

Slavery is different. No responsible Jewish thinker today would attempt to justify slavery on Biblical or other grounds. As Jews, a people, more likely to be slaves than to own slaves, and in light of the history of slavery in America, the claim that the core text of God’s revelation, the Decalogue, was concerned only with the welfare of slaves is, at best, historically interesting. The fact that apologists for slavery, among them Jews, used this passage to justify slavery is profoundly disturbing. From our contemporary perspective, it is clear that slavery is prohibited by Torah.

Yet, we cannot excise the uncomfortable verses from the Torah nor insert a new commandment “Thou shalt not enslave another person” into the Decalogue. However, when faced with troubling passages, our tradition calls us to find deeper meanings that overrule a simple reading of the text. Jews read the Torah as a self-critical and self-correcting text.

The understanding that all are free is implicit in the Decalogue. The reasons given for observing Shabbat undercut its apparent acceptance of slavery. If the Shabbat commemorates God’s liberation of the Jews from Egyptian bondage (Deuteronomy 5:15), how can we re-enslave someone already freed by God? If the Shabbat memorializes God’s creation of a world designed for those created in God’s likeness (Exodus 20:11), how can we honor God while holding someone one who bears God’s image, in bondage?

As Jews, we do not read the Torah literally. It has always been an interpreted text. It contains eternal truths embedded in specific human contexts. While we cannot rewrite scripture, we are always re-reading it; finding new passages to cherish and setting aside older choices, which now seem to blind us to the Torah’s higher and deeper truths including the truth that God created all people to be free.

SHAVUOT: RENEWING TORAH'S MESSAGE

On Shavuot we celebrate Torah, the living spiritual and ethical heritage of our people, as a gift given to us freely, to be used wisely and to be passed down lovingly. The Torah’s source is love whether we see it as a gift from God or a precious heritage bequeathed to us from those who have preceded us or both. Within our Torah tradition we discover both the ideals to which we are committed and how we make those ideals real in our lives. Torah provides us with a guide to use as we respond to the blessings and trials of our lives and Torah grows as we use its insights with wisdom and grace.

The spiritual challenge of Shavuot is not how we received our Torah but what are we going to do with it. Generations of Jews have heard the divine voice speaking to them through the Torah tradition. How do we hear that voice today and how are we going to respond to it? How will we employ Torah’s words, insights, images, and metaphors to guide our commitment to Torah’s fundamental mitzvot, “directives”: to love God and to love our fellow human beings.

While this has always been our challenge, the current crisis presents new opportunities for us as individuals and as a community to show that Torah still speaks to us in life-enhancing ways. As we listen to our people’s teachings, we can hear God’s voice in ways that speak to us in terms we understand. In honoring our ancestral traditions, we find the wisdom to follow God’s directions down new and renewed pathways as we respond to the crisis of today

First of all we need to care for ourselves and others. Torah directs us always to be careful and make our homes and workplaces safe. Following the thoughtful advice from medical and public health experts is a mitzvah grounded in Torah. We need to see ourselves and others not as independent actors but as cherished members of communities in which we care for and depend on each other.

Now that for many of us our homes have also become our workplaces and schoolrooms, Jewish visions of our homes as a miniature version of the ancient Temple in Jerusalem direct us to see where we live as places filled with God’s holiness. We need to preserve their physical and spiritual purity. Maintaining Shalom Bayit, “the well-being of our household”, is of utmost importance.

Torah principles of tzedakah, “the directive to restore equity and balance in the world”, and gemilut chasadim, “the imperative to reach out to all in need”, are especially important at this time.

Building and sustaining community is a strong Torah principle. Jews recall the revelation at Sinai as a communal experience. In our shared imagination all generations of our people stood at Sinai. This sense of a spiritual gathering over time and space gives deep meaning to our ability to sustain community thought various forms of remote communications. While there is great power in being together in the same place at the same time, we have come to learn that even a minyan, a “prayer quorum of ten”, can emerge when we share prayer time even though we do not share prayer space.

On this Shavuot, the celebration of the gift of Torah, we can use the challenges of the moment to enhance our timeless tradition. Be safe, Be healthy, be blessed. Chag Sameiach.

SHAVUOT - A FESTIVAL FOR ALL PEOPLE

The festival of Shavuot celebrates the second great event in our people’s epic journey from Egypt to the Promised Land – the revelation of the Torah at Sinai. Although the holiday commemorates a specific event in the history of a certain people, it, like the two other great Biblical festivals, Pesach and Sukkot, have been endowed by our people with universal significance. Pesach teaches us that all people need to be free from oppression. Sukkot’s lesson is that all human beings with all our diversity are part of one world community subject only to the One who sustains all through the power of love. Shavuot's teaching is that the truths of the Torah are part of the general inheritance of humanity.

In the Bible, God revealed Torah, God’s instructions, from the top of Mount Sinai, an unimpressive mountain in the middle of a wilderness. Our ancestors encamped at the foot of Mount Sinai were blessed to experience the revelatory act first hand but the revelation was not theirs alone. According to our sages, God chose Mount Sinai because it was in the middle of no man's land. It did not belong to any nation so that the truths revealed to us there would be available to all people.

At Mount Sinai, they remind us that the Torah was not revealed in Hebrew alone but in the seventy languages of humanity. Accordingly, our sages taught that everyone was able to hear the Torah in his or her own idiom.

This reading of the Revelation at Sinai is beautiful. But how was the Torah translated so that all people could hear it? How did those who knew no Hebrew, who neither experienced our bondage in Egypt nor our Exodus, recognize the power of the revelatory event?

It could not have been a literal translation. That would have required an unattainable level of empathy. Israel’s unique relationship with the Divine grew out of a unique set of circumstances. The details of Israel’s life would have been incomprehensible to other peoples. Those nations involved in the Exodus story as Israel’s oppressors and foes, such as the Egyptians and the Amalekites, would have had a radically different perspective of the events of the Exodus and the Wandering. Those nations further away would see the Israelites’ tale as the story of a distant people in a distant land, if they knew of the story at all.

More likely, it was a dynamic translation in which the words, images, and expressions of one language are recreated to fit the cultural and social patterns of speakers of the other languages. Hearing Israel’s story in light of their own stories, each nation discovered that Israel’s supporting and liberating God could be their God as well. Translated dynamically, the Torah’s account of the unique experiences of Israel was recast in the light of every nation’s own unique experiences.

Jews do not hope that all people adopt Judaism, the traditions, customs, and practices of the Jewish people. We do not want others to be Jewish but want all people, including ourselves, to be Godly, to act according to the life-affirming teachings inherent in our scriptural tradition. We pray for human harmony, not homogeneity

The words spoken at Sinai could be heard and understood around the world. Torah was proclaimed to all people, each in its unique language. In that proclamation, others heard our story translated and transformed in a myriad of ways to capture the memories and hopes of all humanity. If others were to discover themselves and by discovering themselves, discover their singular connection to God, Israel’s story alone would not suffice. They needed and still need to hear through the light of their specific experiences. The mythical voice from Sinai, Israel’s own story, serves as the catalyst for the emergence of other people’s unique narratives through which they can discover their own individual, distinctive relationships with God and with all creation. In this process of spiritual chemistry, Israel’s story allows for other peoples to find the fundamental principles for a good life – loving God and loving people – within their own sacred stories and cherished experiences.

LISTENTING TO THE TORAH DURING THE PANDEMIC

What Torah is precisely in the tradition and imagination of the Jewish people is simultaneously both easy and hard to pin down. As Jews, our use of the word “Torah” ranges from a term referring to the handwritten scroll containing the first five books of our Bible to the entire spiritual and ethical heritage of our people. Yet, central to our understanding of what is Torah is the belief that Torah is gift we received. In traditional language, Torah is a gift from God to the Jewish people. In practical terms, Torah, is a gift from our parents and grandparents to us, the Jews today. But no matter how we view Torah’s origin – the who, what, when, where and how the gift was presented – the Torah which we cherish, the Torah which guides our lives, the Torah which we celebrate on Shavuot, was freely given to us out of love.

The spiritual challenge of Shavuot is not how did we get our Torah but what are we going to do with it. Generations of Jews have heard the divine voice speaking to us through our Torah tradition. Can we still hear that voice and how will we respond to it? How will we use Torah’s words, insights, and metaphors to witness our commitment to its fundamental mitzvot, directives: to love God and to love all people?

While this is always our challenge, today, in light of the current pandemic, we face a set of challenges that presents new opportunities for us to show that Torah still speaks to us in life-enhancing ways – listening to our people’s teachings and hearing God’s voice in new ways; honoring our ancestral traditions and following God’s directions down new paths.

First of all is the need to care for ourselves and others. Torah directs us to take care of ourselves and make our homes and workplaces safe. Following the thoughtful advice from medical and public health experts is clearly a mitzvah grounded in Torah

Now that for many of us our homes have become our workplaces and schoolrooms, Jewish visions of our homes as a miniature version of the ancient Temple in Jerusalem encourage us to see where we live as places filled with God’s holiness. We need to preserve their physical and spiritual purity. Maintaining Shalom Bayit, Peace at Home, is of upmost importance.

Support for the sick and the poor has always played a central role in Jewish life. While many of us are unable to participate in the hands-on activities of care, we can still reach out to others through the miracles of modern electronic communications. Money is still needed to provide food for the hungry and to support those whose livelihoods have been impacted by the pandemic. Torah principles of tzedakah, the directive to restore equity and balance in the world, and gemilut chassadim, the imperative to reach out to all in need, are especially important right now.

Community is a strong Torah principle. Jews recall the revelation at Sinai as a communal experience. In our communal imagination all generations of our people stood at Sinai. This sense of a spiritual gathering over time and space gives deep meaning to our ability to sustain community thought various forms of remote communications. While there is great power in being together in the same place at the same time, we have come to learn that even minyan, a prayer quorum, can emerge when we share prayer time even though we do not share prayer space.

Our Torah is a gift to be shared with all those we touch and an inheritance to be handed down from generation to generation. Each of us has the opportunity to add the wisdom of our lives to this precious tradition. On this Shavuot, the celebration of the gift of Torah, we can use the challenges of the moment to enhance our timeless tradition. Be safe, Be healthy, be blessed.

Yom HaAtzmaut

ISRAEL - BEING LED BY A VISION

The joys and challenges, vitality and anxiety, successes and disappointments of contemporary Jewish life rest on the achievements of the past century particularly the building of a vibrant Jewish diaspora community in North America, the tragedy of the Shoah and, above all, the establishment of a national state for the Jewish people in the Land of Israel. Although the world in which we live is still unpredictable and dangerous for all people, including the Jewish people, we need to acknowledge our people’s success and the challenges such success entails. For the first time in almost two-thousand years, Jews have power and the resources to put into practice the high ideals that have sustained us over the long centuries of dispersion. Our present generations have the opportunity to prove to themselves and the world that we can implement the vision we have chosen for ourselves.

Israel, like our country, the United States, is founded on a vision – that the political institutions people establish to govern themselves need to support and enhance the liberty of all members of the community. For both nations their Declarations of Independence are essentially mission statements. As inspiring as they maybe, they are also a yardsticks by which we can judge ourselves and also be judged by others.

To be reminded of Israel’s hope for itself, I placed the reading of Israel’s Declaration of Independence in the heart of the Yom HaAtzmaut service I compiled for the residents of Lions Gate. Reading it, we recall the historical ties Jews have to the Land of Israel, the historical circumstances, which led to the founding of the State of Israel, and the vision of what that state should be in the eyes of the founding generations. We are both inspired and challenged

In Israel’s Declaration of Independence, the authors claim that the principle of national self-determination, the foundational principle that led to the establishment of so-many national states after the collapse of the colonial empires throughout the twentieth century, applies to the Jewish people as well. They wrote that it “is the natural right of the Jewish people to be masters of their own fate, like all other nations, in their own sovereign State.” If they ended the statement there, then all that one should expect from the new country is that it would like every other nation-state.

But they had a deeper vision. For them, the new State of Israel was to be dedicated to a higher purpose. After declaring that the State of Israel will be open to Jews dispersed all over the world, they said the new state “…will foster the development of the country for the benefit of all its inhabitants; it will be based on freedom, justice and peace as envisaged by the prophets of Israel; it will ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex; it will guarantee freedom of religion, conscience, language, education and culture; it will safeguard the Holy Places of all religions; and it will be faithful to the principles of the Charter of the United Nations.”

This is the vision that inspired the small group of Jewish leaders assembled in Tel Aviv on May 14, 1948 to declare the birth of the State of Israel. Although much has been accomplished, this vision still points to a better future. In challenging times it holds forth the promise which motivates all those whose lives are entwined with State of Israel to continue the effort to make this dream of Israel real.

The prophets of Israel, both the ancient seers and modern visionaries, offer us inspiring goals. The sages of Israel, however, remind us it is often a long and arduous journey to reach them. The State of Israel is a work-in-progress. The words of the 2nd century sage still rings true that we are not required to complete the task, all that we need to do, is to continue working (Rabbi Tarfon, Pirke Avot 2:21). Or in other words, without the vision to guide us, we work in vain. As we mark another milestone in the journey of the Jewish people, may we never lose hope. As Theodor Herzl declared, “It you will it, then it is no dream.”

BEING CONNECTED TO ISRAEL

Yom HaAtzmaut, the commemoration of the birth of the State of Israel, allows us to reflect on the role modern Israel plays in our lives. In Israel, it is a national holiday. It is a day of celebration. For Jews in the diaspora, Yom HaAtzmaut marks an event that repositioned the Jewish people's place in the world and shifted the trajectory of our destiny.

This year I am taking Yom HaAtzmaut as an opportunity to look at the quiet ways in which Israel fills my life. I am stepping outside of the unending political and religious debates that engage so much of my energy and reflect on the deeper ways in which the peoples, cultures, and traditions of the modern State of Israel touch me.

Every morning when I go down to breakfast, I pass a large Jerusalem stone mezuzah at the foot of my stairs. Looking at it, I remember the when, where, and with whom I bought it and how I felt when I was attaching a bit of Israel to my home.

When I walk through the house, I notice how much of our artwork comes from Israel – pieces we bought in Israel and gifts we received. I recall the conversations I had with the artists, the fun I had in the galleries, and the pleasure of spending time in Israel.

Looking at the books that fill my house, I am surprised how many are in Hebrew. Not the traditional religious texts that one would expect to find in a rabbi's study, but books on a range of topics – literature, art, archaeology, history, etc. – not counting the shelves of books I have on Israel in English.

When I review the newspapers I follow online, it seems that I check out two or three Israeli papers daily. That does not include the email lists and Facebook groups I regularly follow nor the postings I read, and the messages I receive from friends and colleagues in Israel.

I work hard on keeping up my Modern Hebrew. I have given up hope of losing my New Jersey accent and I know I will never be up to date with the current slang. In worship, I use a Modern Israeli pronunciation so that even the sounds of my prayers connect me to Israel.

The food I love connects me to Israel. I adopted a Mediterranean diet while spending a year studying at the Hebrew Univerity. I make great hummus and would gladly risk heartburn for a falafel. You can win me over with a piece of baklava and a Turkish coffee as easily as with some strudel and black tea.

Naturally, I worry about Israel, its security, its prosperity, and its people. Worry plays a special place in Jewish life. I get frustrated with people who are on the right and left of me politically when it comes to Israel but I am secretly glad that no real decision-maker comes to me or them for advice.

Israel is a source of spiritual strength for me. Our spiritual tradition focuses on finding the path to holiness in all this world offers. It was an act of spiritual courage to establish a state for the Jewish people based on Jewish values. Israel's daily struggle to apply those values helps me in my struggle to make Jewish values real in my life and the life of our community. It is our commitment to the struggle that makes life meaningful.

It is now Spring here and in Israel. Plants are beginning to bloom. Trees are budding. We are looking forward to better weather and better times. The prayer for the State of Israel pictures Israel as the first budding of our redemption. But not every planting results in a bountiful harvest. We still need to nurture our crops and water our fields.

A good place to start is to see the quiet ways in which Israel has become part of our lives. It is often the little things we have and we do that express our deepest convictions. A serious connection with Israel can only grow when we understand the small ways in which Israel is already part of our lives.

Tisha B’Av

TISHA B'AV - THE JEWISH MEMORIAL DAY

The Fast of the Ninth of the Jewish month of Av, Tisha b’Av, marks the end of a three week period of mourning during which our people remember the series of events that led to the Babylonian conquest of Jerusalem and the destruction of our people’s first Temple on that date in the year 586 BCE. Sadly, it also marks the day some six hundred years later in the year 70 CE when the Roman legions pushed through the crumbling defenses of Jerusalem to desecrated and destroyed the rebuilt second Temple, as they crushed a rebellion that shook the heart of the Empire and drove our people into exile. Over time, our people associated many of the most painful moments with this grim day.

Traditionally, Tisha B’Av was a dark day of mourning as we cried over our losses and bewailed our exile. On Tisha B’Av, we felt most keenly our sense of powerlessness and our feeling of separation from our spiritual center in our ancestral homeland. It was the day on which we acknowledged the emotional and spiritual pain of our people’s exile.

But today, we are no longer in exile. Our people have returned to our ancient homeland and rebuilt our towns and cities. We are no longer powerless. Our world has changed and our needs have changed. To speak to us today, Tisha B’Av can no longer be the day on which we remember all the evil that has happened to us. It needs to become the day on which we understand that despite our setbacks, our struggles, our real losses, and deep suffering, we, the Jewish people, have overcome the obstacles fate has set before us. Our existence today is a triumph of our people’s spirit. Any commemoration of Tisha B’Av that does not acknowledge this reality is inadequate. There is something miraculous about the Jewish people, our culture, and our faith.

We no longer need to find ways to mourn our losses but need to discover new paths to cherish all that we have gained. Thank God, our chief worry is not being crushed in our weakness but becoming arrogant and careless with our success and power. We need to enhance our sense of appreciation for the blessings that we have. We must not take for granted and foolishly lose all that for generations we could only obtain in our dreams. A renewed and transformed Tisha B’Av commemoration can help us greatly in this task.

We need to refocus Tisha B’Av from a day of Jewish mourning to a Jewish memorial day. Let us transform it to a day on which we can solemnly acknowledge all those of our people who over the centuries accepted hardship, experienced sorrow, and even suffered death so that we, the Jewish people, could survive. Let us make Tisha B’Av the day on which we give thanks to them for their loyalty to our people and our faith and the day on which we renew our commitment to the heritage they so lovingly and painfully bequeathed to us.

We, the Jewish people, are survivors and the descendants of survivors. Let us not forget all those who over the countless generations of our people kept the faith in our God, in our Torah, and in each other. Let us not forget to honor their struggles but, also, let us, also, not forget to celebrate their gifts.

THE MIRACLE OF TISHA B'AV

Our people dedicate Tisha B'Av, the ninth day of the Jewish month of Av, as the solemn fast day to honor our martyrs and to commemorate the tragic events of our history. Tisha B'Av plays a special role among the sacred days of the generally upbeat and joyous Jewish year. It marks the end of a three-week season of mourning that focuses our attention on the events that led to the destruction of Solomon’s Temple in Jerusalem by the Babylonians in 586 BCE. As we recall those dark days, our hearts turn to other times of grief in our people’s history. However, despite our dark memory of pain and loss, our grief does not immobilize us. Instead, we marvel at our people’s spiritual strength and creativity. Our ancestors responded to the misfortunes commemorated on Tisha B'Av in ways that expanded the spiritual bonds that connect us to each other, our world, and our God.

The fall of Jerusalem in 586 BCE and the subsequent exile to Babylon impelled our people to consolidate our sacred traditions into the words of the Torah and our prophetic books. The Jewish mystical tradition, Kabbalah, blossomed as a response to a series of expulsions from various Western European lands culminating in the banishment of the Jews from Spain in 1492. The disappointments and tragedies of the modern world gave birth to the rich diversity in contemporary Jewish religious and cultural life and provided the foundations for the return of our people to the Land of Israel.

Of all the calamities we recall on Tisha B'Av, the most significant was of the destruction of Jerusalem’s Temple by the Romans in 70 CE. This catastrophe challenged our people and our teachers. How could Jews, individually and communally, feel God’s presence in their lives after the loss of God’s earthly home? How could a repentant person or nation still experience atonement, the feeling of being once again at one with God?

Even though few Jews had the opportunity to experience first hand the rites and rituals of the Temple, knowing that they were taking place provided the assurance that there was a place in our world where heaven and earth touched. The sacrifices and prayers offered there enabled people to connect to the God who was always ready to welcome all who turned in repentance.

The response of our teachers and sages was so insightful, that we often take it for granted. Drawing on insights embedded in the teachings of our Torah and prophets, they taught us that contact with God continues through acts of loving-kindness. As we incorporate the wisdom of Scripture and tradition into our lives, we transcend those attitudes and actions that separate us from God. Our rabbis showed us that the point of connection between God and the people Israel was not found in Jerusalem’s Temple but in the words of Torah, which we enshrine in our hearts and make real by our deeds.

Once, our sages teach us, as R. Yohanan was walking out of Jerusalem, R. Joshua followed him. When Rabbi Joshua saw the Temple in ruins, he said: “Woe unto us that this place is destroyed, the place where atonement was made for Israel’s iniquities!”

Rabbi Yohanan kindly replied, “My son, do not grieve. We have another means of atonement which is just as effective.”

“What is it?” Rabbi Joshua asked.

Rabbi Yohanan answered, “It is deeds of loving-kindness, concerning which the Scripture (Hosea 6:6) has already said, “I desire loving-kindness and not sacrifice” (from Avot DeRabi Natan 4)T

This is the great wonder of Tisha B'Av. While tragedies have submerged other nations, our people, though challenged, have moved ahead. While not blindly clinging to the past, we drew from our heritage and created new ways of living Jewish lives that responded creatively to the new world into which we were cast. The hallmark of our people’s creative spiritual survival is that once we made the shift, it felt so natural, so true, and so obvious that our spiritual bonds to each other, our world and our God seemed stronger and deeper than ever before.

RENEW OUR DAYS AS OF OLD

On Tisha Be Av, the ninth day of the month of Av, in 586 B.C.E., the armies of Babylon ravished Jerusalem and destroyed Solomon’s temple. Six and a half centuries later, on the same day, in the year 70 C.E. the Roman legions sacked our holy city and burned the rebuilt sanctuary. With the Roman destruction of Jerusalem, Jewish political independence came to an end, and, for almost the next 2,000 years, we were a nation without a state, a people subject to others’ rule even in our ancient homeland.

Ever since then Tisha B'Av has been the national day of mourning for the Jewish people. It is the yahrtzeit for the Beit Ha Mikash, the Temple, and for all our anonymous brothers and sisters who perished in those dark days so long ago. The events we remember on Tisha Be Av were painful turning points in our people’s history and we still carry their scars in our collective memory. But as we mourn our losses, we also remember the courage of those who lived through the tragedies with a renewed faith in the wisdom and traditions of our people. On Tisha Be Av we reach back through time to recall their struggles and their agony and to grasp on to their dreams, their aspirations, their highest values and deepest commitments with the hope that what sustained them in their times of trial will continue to be a blessing for us.

Tisha Be Av is a fast day. As we approach the sad commemoration, we limit our opportunities to rejoice. Starting three weeks before Tisha Be Av, we no longer celebrate weddings. From the first of Av many of us adopt a meatless diet and on the ninth day, Tisha Be Av, we fast. We gather in our synagogues for the evening and morning services and sit barefoot on the floor or on low benches. We read the biblical book of Lamentations, a collection of five psalms, traditionally ascribed to the prophet Jeremiah who lived through the Babylonia invasion, mourning the fall of Jerusalem to the Babylonians, as well as other dirges recalling the other tragedies that befell our people throughout our history.

The psalms of Lamentations are powerful statements of grief and despair. As we chant the verses, we hear our people’s collective pain. The words describe our ancestors’ sorrow and loss, their shame and confusion, and their anger and dismay. The voices behind Lamentations tell us that they have sinned and that incompetent leaders lead them astray. They reveal to us what it means to be abandoned by friends and allies and how it feels to be confronted by God’s anger.

These are difficult words to hear. It is not an easy process to recall our pain, to think about those we have lost, and still cherish the blessings and spiritual resources they passed down to us. But we cannot avoid our past. We cannot hide from our pain. It is part of us. It is part of our history.

The annual commemoration of Tisha B'Av shows us how our people have dealt with national tragedies. The fast directs us to honor our losses but also helps us realize that we are more than our pain. Our anguish has not nor does not define us. Our ancestors found the strength to rebuild Jewish life despite their tribulations. On Tisha Be Av we declare that we have surely suffered but we are not victims. We are the children of survivors and they have given us a sacred vision of a better world.

For our ancestors the loss of the Temple was devastating. For them, our Temple stood for something transcendent and transforming. It was more than the national shrine in the capital city. They pictured Jerusalem and its sanctuary as the sacred heart of our people and the source of Torah, God’s word for us and all people. The Temple symbolized God’s presence in our world and expressed the dream of a time when all humanity would be bound in peace under divine sovereignty and the primal unity of humanity would be restored. The Temple could be destroyed but not their vision of a renewed and restored creation.

Today even though the Temple remains standing only in our spiritual imagination and Jerusalem is a modern city with traffic jams and trash disposal problems, they continue to be a source of inspiration for us as they were for the generations that preceded us. Our sacred books and traditions which have withstood the trials of our history remain grounded in that hope. The struggles of our parents and grandparents and all our ancestors to use our heritage and renew it to build meaningful Jewish lives for themselves and their children testify to the power of that dream.

The final verses of the Book of Lamentations capture that hopeful, healing vision. It concludes with the dream that all the relationships – our connection to our God, our land, our neighbors, and each other – broken by Jerusalem’s destruction will be restored. Even though the Book of Lamentations is rarely cited in our worship service, we recite these hopeful words whenever we return the Torah to the ark. “Turn us to You, Dear God, and let us return, Renew our days as of old.” (Lamentations 5:21) This ancient hope for renewal and restoration is underscored by the vision of our teachers of old that in the time to come, Tisha B'Av will mark the dawn of redemption.

OUR SUSTAINING HOPE

TishaBe’Av and Shabbat Nachamu

The great miracle of Jewish survival is not that we survived great tragedies. It is that we survived as a community ever faithful to its vision of a better world for us and for all people and not as an angry and embittered tribe.

When we look at Jewish responses to the tragedies of our past, the abiding sense emerges that despite the great disasters, the unbelievable suffering, the unbearable pain, the overwhelming sense of loss, we never believed that our God abandoned us. We never gave up hope.

When we asked where our God was, our response was that God is with us in our suffering. We did not feel alone but sensed that even after the fall of Jerusalem and through all the centuries of wandering, the Holy One went into exile with us to comfort us, inspire us and give us hope.

The foundations for this remarkable reaction to suffering appear in the biblical responses to the first great tragedy our people experienced, the Babylonian capture of Jerusalem, the destruction of our Temple and the exile of our people more than twenty-five centuries ago. In the writings of our prophets, particularly Isaiah of the Exile, we see visions of hope rising out of the ashes of destruction.

Of course, we grieved our losses and we still remember that grief. Even today, on the fast day of Tisha B’Av, the Ninth Day of the Month of Av, the anniversary of that tragedy, and of so many others, we sit as mourners on stools in a darkened room and recite the five psalms that make up the biblical Book of Lamentations. We do not pretend that tragedy has not touched our lives, but Tisha B’Av, which marks the end of a period of sadness reliving the events leading up to the fall of Jerusalem, also marks the end of our period of grief. Our Jewish liturgy and calendar do not let us remain in mourning.

We call the Shabbat immediately after Tisha B’Av, Shabbat Nachamu, the Shabbat of Comfort. This name comes from the opening words of the Haftara for that Shabbat which was written by the Prophet Isaiah of the Exile to our exiled ancestors. Isaiah challenged our ancestors to be comforted and consoled and to maintain hope despite their loss. Evoking the Exodus from Egypt, the prophet describes the return of our people from exile to the Holy Land and the Holy City.

We were angry at what had happened to us and, in dark moments, dreamed of revenge. Psalm 137, the lament of the exiles in Babylon, looks forward to the violent overthrow of Babylon, the proud capital of our oppressors. But our prophets helped our people look beyond our anger and desire for revenge. They accepted a mission for themselves to be a light to the nations (Isaiah 49:8) to draw people from idolatry to the worship of God. They envisioned their rebuilt Temple as a place of worship not only for Jews but for all people who turn to God (Isaiah 56:7). They pictured their city of Jerusalem as a city cared for by all nations (Isaiah 60:16) as the spiritual center of God’s dominion.

We are now living in a time of miracles. After centuries of wandering our people have returned to our ancient land and have built a strong and prosperous State of Israel. The prophets’ vision of our people restored in our own land is no longer just a dream. Yet their beautiful vision of our world at peace still seems impossibly distant. Jerusalem itself, though rebuilt by our people’s efforts and cherished by believers of three great faiths, is not yet a city of peace.

We do not have the insight to foresee the final resolution of the many complicated issues that confounded the last round of negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians. We can, however, pray with the words of the Psalmist that our prophet’s vision of a Jerusalem prosperous, secure, and at peace, will someday be realized.

Pray for the well-being of Jerusalem

may those who love you be at peace.

May there be well-being within your ramparts, peace in your palaces.

For the sake of my kin and friends,

I pray for your well-being;

for the sake of the house of the Lord our God,

I seek your good.

Psalm 122:6-9

BRING US BACK!

In our Bible, there are five short books called Meggilot, (literally “scrolls”). Over the course of the Jewish year, we have the opportunity to read and study each one: Esther on Purim, Ruth on Shavuot, Kohelet on Sukkot, and Shir HaShirim on Pesach. We recite the shortest and most challenging of them, Eicha (Lamentations) on Tisha B'Av, the day on which the Jewish people commemorate the tragic events of our people’s history.

Eicha consists of five psalms lamenting the destruction of Jerusalem by the Babylonians in 586 BCE. The tradition honors the Prophet Jeremiah with authorship. Our ancestors saw the fulfillment of Jeremiah’s visions of the troubles that would afflict Judah and Jerusalem if the people continued to reject God’s directives reflected in the sorrowful words of Eicha.

The Babylonians ravaged Jerusalem, burnt down the Beit HaMiqdash, our Holy Temple, and carried our people off into exile. Eicha expresses our ancestors’ sense of abandonment. How could they, feeling lost in a strange land, return to God, now that the physical expression of God’s presence, the Temple, had been destroyed? God, who once seemed so near, now appears very distant.

Eicha ends with a heart-rending plea, “Bring us back, Dear God, and we shall return. Renew our days as of old. . . .” To the psalmist, the once intimate relationship between God and Israel seemed broken and Israel lacked the power to fix it. The Jewish people cried out in despair. What hope could God offer to God’s chastised and repentant people?

The sages of the Talmud, centuries after the Babylonian exile and other devastating experiences including the destruction of the Second Temple by the Romans, suggest a response. Eicha Rabba, a collection of rabbinic homilies on Eicha, concludes with an imaginary conversation between God and Israel, the Jewish people. The dialogue opens with the final verses of Eicha, in which Israel requests that God reach out and bring them back to him

In response, God says that Israel needs to take the first step. Whatever, the Jewish people feel; from God’s perspective, the relationship can never be severed. God is always willing to connect with his people. All Israel needs to do, is to turn back to God as the prophet Malachi already declared, “Return unto Me, and I will return unto you, says the Lord of hosts” (Malachi 3:7).

This, however, still seems difficult for Israel. So Israel replies, “No, it is up to You, God. We have called upon You to bring us back as the Psalmist said, “Restore us, O God of our salvation” (Psalm 85:5).

At this point, the sage’s imaginary transcript ends but the conversation they envisioned continues. The dialogue between God and Israel poetically presents the Jewish people’s response to the great tragedies Tisha B'Av commemorates. Even though our Temple fell to our enemies and our ancestors were exiles from their homeland, the disaster did not sever the bonds, which connect us, the Jewish people, with our God. We may have experienced God’s presence in the Temple, but God spoke and continues to speak to us through the Torah, our “Tree of Life,” and our path towards salvation

The poetry of our Torah service reflects the insights of Eicha Rabba. We invoke God’s presence when we take out the Torah. We hear God’s voice when we read from the Torah. Yet, our spirits are not completely satisfied, so when we return the Torah to the Aron Kodesh, the Ark, we conclude with our ancestors’ plea, “Bring us back, Dear God, and we shall return . . . .”

Living in Galut, Exile, and in some ways, we are always living in Galut, living in a world not yet redeemed, is, to the sages of old, like being lost. We continue to ask God to lead us home. God continues to answer by telling us that we can find our own way by following his voice. We may want more help in our spiritual search, but God’s encouragement is all that we need.

This we know because even though we end the Torah service with the prayer to be restored, we bring it with the declaration that Torah, God’s summoning voice, streams forth from Jerusalem. Following that voice will get us back to Zion.

Lewis John Eron

“THE MOST MOVING STORY”

A number of years ago I was talking to a friend and colleague of mine who is a minister in one of the more conservative Protestant denominations. He wanted to share with me the power of the Christian story which is the Easter story, the story of God joining us, sharing our suffering, and sacrificing himself in atonement for our sins and rising again so that we can receive the gifts of forgiveness, salvation, and life eternal. “Could there be a more moving and important story?” he asked me rhetorically.

“For you as a Christian,” I answered, “there can be no better story. But that story is your story. Let me tell you another story, one of my stories, a Jewish story.” So I told him the story of Tisha B'Av. I told him the story of God who shares in the suffering of God’s people, the story of God who allows God’s own home to be destroyed and joins God's people in exile as they wander far from their homeland so that they never feel abandoned or ever feel alone. “Could there be a more moving and important story than this, the story of a god who is always with us, always guiding us, always strengthening us and always call us in our journey home.”

He answered me in silence. He had never heard this basic Jewish story before. He said, “Oh, I see,” and, at that moment, took a small step in understanding the deeper meaning of religious pluralism.

Every religious tradition recognizes that there is something wrong with the human condition. We are not where we should be spiritually and this is the root of our distress as individuals and as a human community.

The world of the spirit lies outside of the world that we can describe by words and numbers. We talk about this spiritual world poetically. We use metaphors, images, stories, and myths. We embrace it though art, music, and story. We enter it through the traditions and practices of our various faith traditions. Thus it is not surprising that different religions diagnose the problematic human condition differently and offer different paths to spiritual healing and wholeness. We also see that followers of these diverse paths to spiritual wellness have found meaning, peace, contentment, strength, and healing. To each and every one of them, their faith’s basic story is the most moving and important story because within the story is the diagnosis and treatment that has healed them.

Each religious tradition is unique and precious. Each offers a different perspective on our problematic spiritual condition. Of course, there are overlaps and parallels, but if we understand the fundamental viewpoint of each tradition, then we can learn to appreciate each one on its own terms.

We can capture a bit of the unique flavor of each tradition simply but incompletely. For Christianity, the basic human problem is “sin,” so that the solution is “forgiveness.” In Islam, the issue is “rebelliousness” and the remedy is “submission.” In Buddhism, the obstacle is “suffering” and the goal is “release.” To Hinduism the concern is “ignorance” and the resolution is “understanding.” For Chinese traditions, the question is “imbalance” and the answer is “harmony.”

Our Jewish tradition employs two metaphors. One is the story of Passover grounded in our Biblical heritage. In this story we describe the problematic human condition as “slavery” and the solution is “liberation.” The other is the story of Tisha B'Av as it is expounded in rabbinic literature and in our mystical teachings. In this account the human problem is “exile” and the solution is “restoration, return or coming home.”

Thus, the mythic story of Tisha B'Av based on the real suffering of our people that we commemorate on that holy day is one of the great stories of the Jewish people and of human religious expression. It is the story of the loss of our holy Temple, of our home, of Eden, and of innocence. It is the story of searching and wandering. It is the story of finding God is with us in even the most God-forsaken places. It is the story of finding our way home, ultimately to our spiritual home. It is the story of walking not alone, but with each and with of God, through this world to a better place for us and for all people. For us, as Jews, can there be a more moving and important story?”