Remembering is Not About the Past - A Message for Hanukkah 5775

A large part of holiday observance is remembering events that happened in the past – leaving Egypt, defeating Haman, defeating the Greeks.  And then we eat, of course, but even the eating is connected to the remembering.

This morning I want to talk a little bit about how we remember.  Because the way we remember has an impact on us.  We can remember the past in ways that make us stuck in the past.  Or we can remember the past in ways that help us face the present. 

Forgive me if I spend a few minutes talking about Passover before I turn our attention to Hanukkah.  If nothing else, they belong in the same sermon because the two most widely observed rituals among American Jews are the Passover Seder and the lighting of Hanukkah candles.

Passover commemorates the Exodus from Egypt and how do we remember our time in Egypt and our leaving Egypt?

I recently heard a lecture about this by Micha Goodman, a Senior Fellow at the Hartman Institute.  He identified two models for how we remember Egypt – one which gets us stuck in the past and one which helps us face the present.

The Meeting of Desire and Decency: Our Role in a Crucial Conversation

I had a conversation recently with a colleague and friend who ran a Hillel for many years.

He brought up the recent high-profile stories about the harassment and assault of women on college campuses.  And he said that the problem, as he and other university professionals see it, is one of culture – a culture on campus that overtly and tacitly encourages some young men to feel it’s ok to overstep certain boundaries.

We read the Torah year after year because we believe it adds value to our lives.  The more I study, the more I feel that the impact of Torah on us is unhelpful if it’s simplistic.  The Torah says this, so do it.  Jacob did this, so let’s do it.  

Rather, the more carefully we analyze a particular story or dynamic in the Torah, the more profoundly we are likely to impact our approach to modern circumstances and dilemmas.

And so I want to spend some time looking closely at a story that I believe can deepen our thinking and action regarding a current reality that is quite disturbing. 

When Life Makes Us Dizzy

My son texted me recently:  “Did you the guys dangling near the top of the world trade center?”

I hadn’t seen the news yet so I googled it and saw a whole video of what transpired.

For those who may not have seen it, two window-washers at 1 WTC were left dangling in their window-washer contraption over 60 stories above the ground at a very awkward angle because one of the cables holding it up suddenly got slack and so the contraption went practically vertical.

As I’ve said on occasion, I have a particular fear of heights, so I had a sickening feeling just from my son’s text, which worsened the more information I got.  But I suspect that most people sitting here find the thought of dangling 60 + stories above the ground less than comforting.

I would go so far as to say that if I worked in the WTC, I would totally understand if nobody ever cleaned the windows.  My contribution to the psychological well-being of humanity would be to work in an office with filthy windows so no one would ever have to go through what these two men went through.

I want to talk this morning about psychological vertigo.  Now medical vertigo, to be accurate, is not generally connected with heights.  Although we have the association between vertigo and fear of heights through Alfred Hitchcock’s famous film by that name, medical vertigo is associated with loss of balance, sometimes accompanied by a spinning sensation.  It is occasionally associated with heights, though often not.

But I want to talk about "psychological vertigo", the sense that the literary scholar and biblical interpreter, Aviva Gottlieb Zornberg, refers to in her commentary on the passage of the Torah that recounts the death of the matriarch Sarah.  In her book, Genesis:  The Beginning of Desire, Gottlieb Zornberg refers to the feeling we may get when we have a profound sense of how vulnerable we are.  

I want to explore different ways that we respond when we sense how fragile we are, when we experience the “near miss” of how differently something could have turned out in our own lives, when we allow ourselves to acknowledge the dangers and mishaps that we see around us.  When the world in some way feels like it’s spinning around us.

Jacob Becoming Israel: Thoughts Following the Recent Killings in Jerusalem

When you visit Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Museum in Jerusalem, you walk through the series of exhibits and toward the end of the exhibits, you begin to see light shining into the museum.  At the end of the path that you’re walking on, you stand looking out a huge window and you realize that you are looking at the hills of Jerusalem and that, scattered onto those hills, are several residential neighborhoods.

One of the neighborhoods you see, looking out the window of Jerusalem’s Holocaust Museum, is Har Nof.

Har Nof is the neighborhood where four Jewish scholars and one Druze policeman were killed Tuesday morning, November 18, by two Palestinians who entered a synagogue with axes and firearms and brutally murdered and wounded several worshippers.

Rabbi Avraham Goldberg, Rabbi Kalman Ze’ev Levine, Rabbi Aryeh Kupinsky, Rabbi Moshe Twersky and Officer Zidan Saif

The thought of this is downright sickening.  The acts need to be condemned in the strongest possible terms and the families of the victims deserve all of the compassion and comfort we can muster. 

The murders are part of the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians, of course, and this morning, I want to try to put it in a larger context.

Israel is a mature sovereign nation.  I want to reflect on what this means given the recent tragedy

God Loves Us: A Complex Message We Need to Hear

Deanna and I were in the city recently and stopped in a park where a whole bunch of families were playing soccer together.  At one point, the soccer ball was kicked over to where we were sitting and a little boy, probably no older than five, came over to claim it.  He picked up the ball and smiled at us.  I noticed that his T-shirt had the following words on it:  Jesus Loves Me.

I had a burst of clarity and said to myself, now I have my sermon topic for Yom Kippur.  With one change, as you might imagine.

Truth is, even before I saw the boy I wanted to talk about how God loves us.

But when I shared the idea with a colleague of mine, he said, emphatically “Don’t do it!”  I asked, “Why not?”  He said, “People don’t think about God in that way.  They’re not sure what they believe about God.  They feel abandoned by God.  And it sounds too…Christian."

When I texted my son about the topic, he texted back, “What about 9/11 and the Holocaust?”  Followed by suggestions for how I should give the sermon that concluded, masterfully I must say, with a request for some additional funds.   If God loves us, and I love him, then…

If enough people tell you your tie is on crooked, you look down to check your tie.  So first, I want to acknowledge why this topic is difficult.  But then I want to talk about why it’s so important.

As many people as are sitting here, that’s how many various opinions and shades of opinion there are about God, and how God operates in the world.

Some Boundaries Should Be Crossed - Great Neck Shabbat Project 5775

When I was a little boy, my parents often took my sisters and me on trips and we would all sit together in the car.  Sometimes we got along and sometimes there were, shall I say, interpersonal challenges.

Especially when one of us crossed over the date-line.  The date-line was the term we used for an imaginary boundary that separated one person’s space from another.

Years later, we joked about “crossing the date-line” but at the time, it was no laughing matter.

Boundaries are important.  One of the first things we human beings discover is where we end and others begin. This is my toy.  That’s your toy.  Understanding when “not to cross the line” is crucial. 

One day, I will devote a conversation to the importance of maintaining certain boundaries.  God knows, there are ample instances of individuals – including political and religious leaders – crossing boundaries they should not cross, violating people’s privacy, exerting inappropriate power over those who are vulnerable.  

This morning, I want to talk about the positive benefit that can come from crossing boundaries in a healthy way, from sneaking out of our comfort zones, getting to know people we don’t ordinarily get to know, looking at the world through a different lens than we already do.

Learning How to Hope: A Message for the New Year 5775

Deanna and I were in Jerusalem for most of July, during a large portion of the conflict with Gaza.  Several times we experienced what Israelis experience with far greater frequency.  We heard a siren indicating that a rocket was about to land and knew that we had a little over a minute to try to find a secure place to stay.  One time we were in the street and ran into a friend’s apartment.  Another time we were in the street and ran into a supermarket and huddled near the dairy section, where we distracted ourselves by noting how many different types of cheese there are in a typical Israeli market. 

For me personally, the moments of running to a relatively safe place and waiting to see what happened next were a jumble of thoughts and feelings.

Wondering what’s going on.  Feeling helpless.  Thinking of our children thousands of miles away.  And the quiet, but pressing thought, I hope we’ll be ok.

A few years ago on the high holidays I spoke about fear.  Crossing the Golden Gate Bridge, or not quite.

For many reasons, I thought it was important this year to speak about hope, in some sense the counterpart to fear.

Hope is an interesting thing.  I’m not quite sure how to characterize it.  It’s not quite an action and it’s not quite an emotion.  When we are anxious about something, we hope it will turn out ok.  Sometimes in general we say, “I hope everything will be ok,” even though we know that’s kind of unrealistic. 

We hope all the time. But what does hope actually mean?  To what extent is it helpful, to what extend is it a painful exercise in self-delusion?

Hope is crucial, but perhaps we need to reconsider the way we hope.  At the start of the New Year 5775, I propose that we reconsider what it means to hope when it comes to the international and the national, the political and the personal. 

Great Neck Shabbat Project 5775: October 23-25, 2014

On October 23-25, the entire Great Neck Jewish Community will join together to celebrate Shabbat as part of the world-wide Shabbat Project.  Highlights will include a communal Challah baking, Friday night services and dinners for all ages, and an exciting community-wide Havdalah and concert.  The above video was produced by the fun-loving folk at Temple Israel of Great Neck. Any resemblance to something you've seen before is purely coincidental...

We Still Need to Hope

Some summers are entirely pleasant affairs, filled with long strolls and ample time for reading and contemplation.  This was not that kind of summer.  The conflict between Israel and Gaza was intense and bloody and the after-effects remain.  The threat of ISIL seems to grow larger with each passing day.  The unrest in Ferguson, Missouri, was unsettling on many levels. 

Living in Jerusalem for a month this summer, I experienced and observed certain aspects of the Israel-Gaza conflict.  Mind you, it was quite tame in Jerusalem compared to southern Israel and Gaza itself.  But I did get a feel for the mood of many Israelis, including residents of the south, reservists in the army and parents of soldiers, as well as a few Palestinian residents of East Jerusalem.

The mood overall was characterized by anguish and frustration.  As I wrote from Jerusalem several weeks ago, the word I heard repeatedly with regard to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was “intractable.”  Both an Israeli reservist and scholar and a Palestinian urban planner, speaking to my rabbinic cohort at the Hartman Institute in separate contexts, bemoaned the complicated dynamics that, to their thinking, make a full resolution of the conflict extremely unlikely in the near future.

And yet, even during the depth of the violence, I saw seeds of hope.  Muslims and Jews gathered together to break the Fast of Ramadan and the Fast of Tammuz.  The uncle of one of the slain Israeli teens received condolences from Muslim co-workers.  A group of Jews, including rabbis, offered condolences to the family of a slain Muslim boy. 

We Hold the Highlighter

Thirty years ago, I was sitting in an English literature class and I raised my hand at one point, as other people were doing, to offer an idea about a poem that the professor was discussing.  And he said to me, “just like a broken clock.”  And I said, “sorry?”  And he said, “Even a broken clock is right twice a day.  If you keep on offering that idea, eventually it will apply.”

I didn’t say very much else in that class.  But I continued to listen.  He was a good professor, if slightly acerbic.  One day he gave us his "highlighter theory." There was one novel in particular that we were reading which he said could be subject to multiple interpretations.  He said, you can take a highlighter and highlight certain parts, and then the novel reads like a very optimistic embrace of life.  You can highlight other parts and it comes across very cynical.

So, with due deference to my professor, I want to say something similar about the Torah.

A lot depends on what you do with your highlighter. 

Highlight certain parts and you have a tradition about taking care of the vulnerable, about showing mercy and giving the benefit of the doubt.

Highlight other parts and the thrust is about war and violence, about clearing a path for your people even at the expense of others.

Passing the Torch of Peace, Unity and Brotherhood in Violent and Chaotic Times

De and I traveled a bit in Europe after we left Israel, specifically in Italy and Greece.  In Greece, one of the places we toured was Olympia, the site of the ancient Olympics.

The ancient Olympics occurred over a period of 400 years.  In modern times, the International Olympic Committee reinstated the Olympics in 1896.

We are familiar with the Olympics tradition of carrying the torch from Greece to wherever the current site of the Olympics is.

The Olympic flame beginning its journey toward London in 2012

The first time that was done was for the summer Olympics 1936.  The place: Berlin, Germany. 

Now the three cornerstones of the ancient Olympics were Peace, unity and brotherhood.

The tourguide showed us the place in Olympia, a kind of fire-pit, where the torch was lit before it was brought to Berlin.  And she said, "Imagine the torch representing brotherhood, peace and unity arriving at the stadium in Berlin as Adoph Hitler presided in the stands."

Thoughts and Context After a Month in Israel

So much has been written in blogs, tweets, articles about the situation in Israel.

It is a heartbreaking, complicated mess.  And while the world’s attention is somewhat diverted to Iraq and Ferguson, Missouri, I want to focus on Israel because of its significance to us and because De and I were there for several weeks during the rocket firing and the operation in Gaza.  As you may know, I spent a month in Israel as part of a program run by the Hartman Institute, bringing rabbis from across the denominational spectrum for learning, analysis, professional development, etc.

I want to share some incidents, through my own personal lens, of the time I spent in Israel and then to offer some reflections on the larger context.  Of course, such a situation is vast and affects millions of people, but, as with any larger circumstance, we experience it as individuals, through our own lenses, one event at a time.

I had dinner with a friend at the beginning of my time in Israel at the old train station in Jerusalem.  At a certain point, we noticed that the people around us were visibly upset.  We checked the news on our i-phones and read that the bodies of the three abducted teens were found.  At that moment, as a parent of children close in age to these boys, I had a profound nauseating feeling which didn’t let up.  I recall feeling surprised, though maybe I shouldn’t have been.  Perhaps others, like me, harbored the hope that they would be kept alive.

Thoughts on the Conflict: Do Jews Believe in "Intractable?"

The Israeli government ordered ground troops to enter Gaza Thursday evening, Israel time.  Though this raises the potential for immediate casualties for Israelis and Palestinians, most Israelis, it seems to me, support the incursion.

More and more, over the past week, I have heard Israeli lay people and leaders alike use the word “intractable” to refer to the conflict.  Perhaps the incursion will buy us a few years of quiet, I hear people say.

Unfortunately, the sense that this conflict has no clear end is hardly new.  In a Hartman session devoted to the poetry of war and peace, my colleagues and I read a poem called “The Winter of 1973,” written in 1994 by those who were born following the Yom Kippur War.  The narrators in the poem, written by Shmuel Haspri and set to music, are now themselves in the army and they speak out to their parents about broken promises and disappointment.  Here is most of the poem:

We are the children of winter 1973

You dreamt us first at dawn at the end of the battles

You were tired men who were grateful for their good fortune

You were worried young women and you wanted so much to love

When you conceived us with love in winter 1973

You wanted to fill up with your bodies what the war took away…

You promised a dove,

An olive tree branch

You promised peace

You promised spring at home and blossoms

You promised to keep your promises, you promised a dove

We are the children of the winter of 1973

We grew up and now we are in the army

With our weapons and a helmet on our heads

We know how to make love to laugh and to weep

We are men we are women

And we too dream about babies

This is why we will not pressures, demand or threaten you.

When we were young you said promises need to be kept

We will give you strength if that is what you need

We will not hold back

We just wanted to whisper

We are the children of that winter in the year 1973

And here is a video of a performance of the popular song, based on the poem:

Reflections from Jerusalem on a Difficult Few Weeks

Tuesday night, July 8.  My friend and I had just left his apartment building in Jerusalem when we heard the alarm siren.  We looked at each other and realized that we needed to go back into the building and search for the shelter.  When we asked a few residents of the building where the shelter was, they responded with a single Hebrew word, “אין ein.” There is no shelter in our building.  So we all stood together on the landing of one of the floors, two American rabbis, half a dozen young Israeli women and an ultra-Orthodox family with young children tugging on their mother’s dress and telling her they were scared.

Hostility and fear have risen steadily in Israel over the past weeks.  Three Israeli boys were kidnapped and murdered by Palestinian terrorists while returning from yeshiva.   A Palestinian boy was lit on fire by Israeli terrorists on his way home from morning prayers.  Rockets, fired by Hamas into the south of Israel for years, increased in frequency and distance as the IDF began its operation in Gaza.

What’s it like to be in Israel when all this is going on?  As journalist and Hartman faculty member Yossi Klein-Halevi put it, Israelis seldom have time to process events since they unfold so rapidly.  Along with our Israeli brothers and sisters, we offered condolences to the families of the Israeli boys and condemned the killings.  (My colleagues and I were among thousands who attended the funeral.)  Several days later, we offered condolences to the Palestinian family and condemned the killing.  (Hundreds of Israelis, including rabbis, went to the home of slain boy, Muhammed abu Khdeir, to offer condolences and to condemn the murder.)  And now we go about our business, making sure we are never too far from a place that is at least reasonably safe in case the rocket siren goes off again which it did, two days after the first one.

Am Yisra'el United in Grief

On Tuesday afternoon, a few colleagues and I drove from Jerusalem to Modiin to attend the funeral for the three murdered Israeli teens - Eyal Yifrach, Gilad Shaar and Naftali Frenkel.  Given the enormous crowd, we needed to park several miles from the cemetery and walk to the site of the funeral along with throngs of people.

It appeared that the attendees were nearly all religiously observant and mostly in their teens and early twenties, the ages of my sons.  I felt surrounded by the next generation of Israelis, expressing their grief and their solidarity with the families of their peers.  It was quite hot and several people in our area fainted, requiring medics to be called over. 

A small group started to sing a slow, soulful melody and the entire crowd soon joined in.  “May God be merciful to our fellow Jews who wander over sea and land or who suffer persecution and imprisonment.  May God soon bring them relief from distress and deliver them from darkness to light, from subjugation to redemption.”  This was followed by Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach’s stirring setting for the dramatic verse from Psalm 23:  “Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death I fear no harm, for You are with me.”  For half an hour, we sang songs of grief, hope and comfort.

The ceremony consisted of prayers recited by the Chief Ashkenazic and Sephardic Rabbis and speeches by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and President Shimon Peres.  I was especially moved by the eulogy given by the rabbi who leads the yeshiva that two of the teens attended.  He spoke about the boys' kindness and creativity, giving specific examples from their lives. Reflecting on the outpouring of support from the crowd, he said that while two Jews may have three opinions, they share one heart.

Following the ceremony, the families proceeded to a private burial and the crowd began to leave the cemetery. 

I will never forget that afternoon.  Though the size of the crowd exceeded people’s expectations, things never got unruly. There were no demonstrations, no violent incidents, no calls for revenge, just a sad, soulful, communal demonstration of unity and support.  Am Yisra’el showed up that afternoon to grieve the senseless deaths of three teens who will never attend university or have families of their own. 

Toward the end of his eulogy, the boys’ rabbi reflected on the importance of prayer when all other words fail us.  “The essence of prayer,” he said, “is the underlying belief that tomorrow can be better than today.” 

Surrounded by even larger crowds than I entered with, I left the cemetery praying that tomorrow would be better.

If Only

Jews throughout the world are have been feeling immense anxiety due to the capture of three Israeli teens, Naftali Frenkel, Gilad Shaar and Eyal Yifrach.

Our friends who live in Ranaana, a suburb of Tel Aviv, described how their son, currently serving in the Israeli Army, was called back to his base on Shabbat morning, possibly in order to join his fellow paratroopers doing house-to-house searchers for the kidnapped teens in Hebron.

People of good will, Jewish and non-Jewish, are praying for the safe release of these teens.  For the first few days, the only reactions I saw were prayers on behalf of the young men and supportive words for their families.

And then, as the week wore on, people started to express their opinions regarding this situation and its larger context.

And I began to think that the way people view the tragic abduction of these three men is kind of Rorschach test for people’s overall perspectives and politics.

In this corner – Samuel Heilman, Professor at Queens College, writing that he blames the yeshiva where these boys were studying for not providing adequate armored buses to transport students from one place to another. 

And in this corner – Avraham Burg writing an article for the left-leaning Ha’aretz newspaper titled, “The Palestinians:  A kidnapped society.”  In it he argues that Israeli society by and large has become desensitized to the pain caused to an entire people through the occupation.  He writes, “All of Palestinian society is a kidnapped society.  Like many of the Israelis who performed significant service in the army, many of the readers of this column, or their children, entered the home of a Palestinian family in the middle of the night by surprise, with violence, and simply took away the father, brother or uncle, with determination and insensitivity.  That is kidnapping, and it happens every day.”  (Ha’aretz, June 18, 2014)

And he goes on to blame the Israeli government for not making genuine gestures toward reconciliation.

Still We Rise: Encouraging Resilience

A few years ago, Rabbi Adelson and I led a series of discussions in the home of members of our congregation having to do with parenting.

We had over forty people there who had children ranging in age from infancy to adulthood. 

During the first discussion, we asked the question, what qualities do you want to encourage in your children?

And we made a list.

The qualities included:  Compassion.  Honesty.  And one that I want to focus on because it sounds great, but it’s complicated.

Everyone agreed that they want to raise children who are resilient.  This morning, on the holiday in which we celebrate the centrality of the Torah in our lives and moments before we recall our loved ones who are no longer with us, I want to talk about resilience.

The popular magazine Psychology Today offers the following definition of resilience:

"Resilience is that ineffable quality that allows some people to be knocked down by life and come back stronger than ever. Rather than letting failure overcome them and drain their resolve, they find a way to rise from the ashes. Psychologists have identified some of the factors that make someone resilient, among them a positive attitude, optimism, the ability to regulate emotions, and the ability to see failure as a form of helpful feedback. Even after a misfortune, blessed with such an outlook, resilient people are able to change course and soldier on."

I want to speak about us as individuals, I want to regard us in the context of our tradition, which exemplifies resilience, and then I want to challenge us to encourage resilience in ourselves and in those we love.

I Would Not Complain: Must Embracing Religion Require Belief in God?

The NY Times recently interviewed a woman who grew up Muslim but basically left Islam.  She claimed to be an atheist.  She said that at a certain point, the tenets of Islam didn’t make sense to her.  She found herself at odds with her parents, who couldn’t believe that did not want to remain a Muslim.

Among the things she questioned was why she couldn’t have a boyfriend?  And why she needed to observe Ramadan?

Apparently, she found some comfort with self-described atheists from other religions.

The article got me thinking further about a cluster of questions that many of us have thought about and discussed, as it pertains to us and also as it pertains to our children and grandchildren.  And that is:  What’s the connection between belief in God and adherence to religious tradition?

Do you need to believe certain things about God in order to find direction and meaning in religion?

Or, to put it more starkly, when children say, “I don’t believe in God!” does that mean that parents and grandparents, aunts and uncles, need to freak out? 

I’m all for belief in God.  But I think we do everyone a disservice when we bundle everything together.  Just because a person has doubts about God, does that mean that he or she needs to abandon religious tradition and community?

Or, conversely, just because a person questions the values of their religious tradition and community, does that necessarily mean that they have issues with God?

I’m going to explore something this morning that some may find outrageous and others may find obvious.  I’m going to suggest that it’s not such a terrible idea to separate God and religion, at least in the short-term. 

The refrain of my comments will be, “I would not complain if…”

NBA, TIGN and the Purpose of Religion

By now we’ve all heard about the owner of the LA clippers, Donald Sterling. whose unacceptable comments to his girlfriend have engendered the maximum fine the NBA imposes as well as consideration of a lifetime ban from NBA involvement.

You may also know that he’s Jewish.  And whether we think it’s fair or not, his Jewishness has been mentioned in some accounts of what transpired. 

I don’t want to spend much time this morning talking about the unfortunate comments of an NBA team owner. 

What I do want to do is reflect for a bit on how ideally being Jewish needs to lead us to a better ethical place.  Otherwise we’re missing the point.

We can’t control what every Jew says or does, but I believe we can say that when a Jew is dismissive or pejorative toward a racial or ethnic group or socioeconomic group, when a Jew cuts corners in business, when a Jew behaves in ways that are base and undignified, it represents a measure of failure for all of us.

Not because it’s important for us to look good, but because it’s important for us to actually be good.  And while I hope that my colleagues of other religions are delivering similar messages to their communities, I can only start by worrying about my own.

Judaism Should Challenge Us

Jon Stewart did a great routine two years ago, comparing Passover to Easter.  Stewart himself is Jewish.  He went over to his special “camera 3” where he "addresses" the Jews in the audience. He said, "mishpocha, we’re losing the contest with Easter."  He held up a basket and said, "Check this out.  Chocolate bunnies, eggs filled with chocolate."

And then he held up the seder plate and said, “but we have matzah, bitter herbs and eggs filled with – EGG.”

It’s a funny routine, worth watching if you haven’t seen it yet. 

In the aftermath of Passover, it’s hard to deny that sometimes Judaism is challenging.  It’s challenging to prepare a house for Passover.  Parts of the Seder are difficult to understand. 

To be sure, there have always been attempts to make it more user-friendly.  Selling the chametz, for example, allows us to avoid serious waste and financial loss.  (Though the legal fiction, whereby all of the chametz in your house belongs to a non-Jew for the duration of Passover, has sparked its own share of jokes.  One Jew sees another smoking on Shabbat, which is against the rules.  He says, “My friend, what are you doing?  You’re not supposed to smoke on Shabbat.”  And the friend says, “It’s OK.  I sold my lungs to a gentile.” )

Notwithstanding efforts to make Passover more manageable, it’s still a challenge.

If anything, we’ve seen increased effort over the years to make Judaism more user-friendly and to the extent that we are engaging more people in the experience of our tradition, that’s a good thing. 

But I want to urge us, this morning, to consider various ways in which Judaism challenges us and why that’s a good thing.

Please Don't Bury Our Souls: the Fear of Being Forgotten

I shared the following message with the Temple Israel community on the last day of Passover, right before Yizkor:

A poignant article appeared in the recent Sunday magazine section of the Times about two female African-American blues singers in the 1920’s and 30’s who are very highly regarded by the small group who knows them, but otherwise quite obscure.

There are very few remaining recordings of their songs and a major search was required in order to shed a bit of light on their lives and music.

One of the women, Geeshie Wiley, sang a song called "Last Kind Words," in which she implores, "If I get killed, please don’t bury my soul."  

The irony is that in a sense the actual singer’s soul was nearly buried, despite the persistent efforts of some ardent fans of her work to keep the work, the memory, her soul alive, the soul of a woman who, it appears, had a difficult life not unlike the lives evoked in her music.

Fear of death is one thing.  Fear of having one’s essence buried, fear of being forgotten – is, I believe, even more powerful.

On this final day of Passover, I want to ask us to consider our fear of being forgotten, as well as what we should do, communally and individually, to the extent that we acknowledge that fear.

With Our Young and Our Old We Go Forth

The forum known as Intelligence Squared recently held a debate about the Millennial generation.  Millennials are defined as those born between 1980 and 2000. 

The proposition of the debate was, "Millennials don’t stand a chance."  Arguing in favor was a lawyer and human rights advocate as well as a professor of psychology, both older than the millennial generation.  Arguing against, in other words, arguing that Millennials DO stand a chance, were, perhaps not surprisingly, two Millennials. 

You can imagine the arguments which say Millennials don’t stand a chance at achieving success – they are narcissistic, coddled, still living at home, unable to face the challenges that lie ahead.

And you can probably imagine the arguments that say that Millenials will be just fine – they have been handed a rough deal in terms of a lousy economy, but they are more idealistic and socially conscious than previous generations and they will prevail.

"Millenials Don't Stand a Chance":  Intelligence Squared debate participants David D. Burstein and Jessica Grose

Those who are present this morning who are two or three generations older than the Millennials may well be thinking, "We’ve heard this song before."

Older generations have often looked at younger generations and said, you are less capable, more self-serving, more clueless than we were when we were your age.  And younger generations have said to their elders, you don’t understand us.  We are more responsible and capable than you think.

In ancient times, the Torah anticipated that the generation following the Exodus wouldn’t understand its significance.  והיה כי יאמרו עליכם בניכם מה העבודה הזאת לכם Vahaya ki yomru aleikhem b’neikhem ma ha’avoda hazot lakhem.  It will come to pass that your children will say to you, "what does all of this mean to you?"

Finding the Right Diagnosis

Three Jewish moms are bragging about their sons.  The first says, “My son is an amazing doctor.  When the Surgeon General has a question, my son is the one he calls." The second says, “That’s nothing.  My son is an amazing lawyer.  He has such a busy practice that people are happy to wait months to get advice from him.”  The third says, “That’s nothing.  My son is a successful businessman.  Three times a week, he sees the most expensive psychiatrist in town.  And guess who he spends most of his time talking about?  Me!”

Like the businessman in the joke, we may find ourselves exerting enormous effort to try to get to the root of a problem. The origin of the word diagnosis is the Greek word for “to know.”

One could say that diagnosis is about knowing what the issue is and then knowing how to proceed.

Both are often not so easy – knowing what’s wrong, and knowing what to do about it.

One at a Time

Right after college, my oldest son and his friends left Burlington, VT in a small Kia SUV and drove out west, where they explored Utah, Arizona, California, Oregon, Washington and Montana.  They drove through the Midwest as fast as they could.

Pardon the analogy, but some people think of the Torah portion we read this morning the way that my son and his friends, rightly or wrongly, thought about Ohio.  You just have to get through it on your way to something more interesting…

Today's Torah portion, Tazria, features discharges, skin rashes, ritual purity and several varieties of mildew.  It would be easy to glide past it, waiting for the scriptural equivalent of the Rocky Mountains to appear.

When I was in rabbinical school, Rabbi Harold Kushner spoke to our class about this portion.

Between "Fire and Brimstone" and "Everything's Cool": How to Talk about Being Jewish

In his book, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, James Joyce wrote a creative first-person narrative about an author coming of age in Catholic Ireland.  The book traces the linguistic, spiritual and emotional development of this young man.

The religious education that the narrator received was rather austere, not exactly lovey-dovey.

Corporal punishment was frequently used in his school and in one extended passage, one of the priests delivered a real fire and brimstone speech, designed to terrify the students listening into obeying the rules.  Here is a video of Sir John Gielgud portraying the priest as he delivered the sermon.

I watched the first two minutes of it and was terrified.

Now we might be tempted to think that the the Torah doesn’t aim to frighten us like that.  But of course, that’s not true. 

Taking Out the Garbage

Ufashat et begadav.  ופשט את בגדיו  He removed the clothing he was wearing. 

V’lavash b’gadim aherim.  ולבש בגדים אחרים  And he put on different clothing.

V’hotzi et hadeshen el mihutz lamahaneh.  והוציא את הדשן אל מחוץ למחנה  And he took the ashes outside of the camp.

The Torah is a profound book.  It talks about the creation of the world.  It talks about creating a just society.  It talks about journeys from slavery to freedom, from wilderness to promised land.

Why on earth does this same Torah tell us, in effect, that the Kohen, the priest, changed his outfit in order to take out the garbage?

Rashi says that the Torah is teaching basic derekh eretz, good manners.  The Kohen didn’t want to mess up the clothing that he used for the ritual sacrifices, so he wore a less dignified outfit.

For me personally, this little action on the part of the Kohen is a metaphor for what we need to do more often than we do, and that is, to step away from business as usual, to dress down if we need to, and to begin to remove the garbage that’s all around us and that sometimes seeps within.

By garbage, I mean unacceptable circumstances that we nevertheless accept, due to factors like inertia, obligation and fear. 

When you see an individual or a nation “put on new clothing” and begin to remove the garbage, it’s inspirational.

I want to share some of the inspiration, and then I want to challenge each of us to look within ourselves.

A few days ago, the acting president of Ukraine, Oleksandr Turchynov, wrote an op-ed to the Times in which he presented a message to the Russian leadership, especially Vladimir Putin. 

Downton Abbey and the Jewish Approach to Change

The fourth season of Downton Abbey just finished.  For those who may not know, Downton Abbey is a TV series about an upper class British family and their servants at the beginning of the 21^st century.

Spoiler alert:  I’m going to frame my comments with two scenes from the final episode of the season. 

There are two "grand dames" in the show – one British, played by Maggie Smith; one American, played by Shirley MacLaine.  They have a relationship that is icy at best.  Maggie Smith is all British restraint, subtle sarcasm, old money.  Shirley MacLaine’s character is brash American, overt hostility, nouveau riche.  In the final episode, they have kind of a showdown where Shirley MacLaine's character accuses Maggie Smith's of being a snob and says, in effect, you are clinging to the past and I am facing the future.

I want to talk about change.  The inevitability of change, our resistance to change, and the wisdom Judaism offers us regarding how to face change.

Of course, change is universal and changing circumstances impact all people, all countries, all cultures. 

Downton Abbey explores it in Great Britain.  Jumpa Lahiri’s novel, Lowlands, traces the arc of change and its impact on multiple generations in India. Khaled Hossein’s And the Mountain Echoed explores is in Afghanistan.

We need to learn how to handle change because it happens – to us personally and to our surroundings.