Are You With Me?

The Torah portions for this week - tazria-metzorah - often have a bad image.  Oh - those are the ones that speak about sickness and sores and mildew.  And how the kohen, the priest, would diagnose a person's condition and help the person to reenter the community.    If you have to give a talk about these portions, people may sometimes offer you their compassion. 

But the portions are actually essential.  In fact, without them, the Torah doesn’t really work, its underlying message is largely untested. These portions test whether or not the Torah works.  

I’ll come back to that.  

Vera Eden and Dr. Eva Ebin, cousins and Shoah survivors

Last week we commemorated Yom Hashoah, Holocaust Memorial Day.  Vera Eden, longtime member of the congregation, Jewish educator for decades, spoke with passion and strength about her experiences as a teenager in Auschwitz.  She described how she was taken there, separated from most of her family, what she heard and saw on typical days and atypical days, how she felt at each moment, how the Nazis tried to deceive the Jews at each point.  She conveyed the horror, the terror, and the very rare moments of hope.

I Matter and You Matter: A Passover Message

We’ve reached the end of Passover and I want to speak about some difficult challenges that are facing the Jewish people in terms of how others relate to us and we relate to the rest of the world.  

Mireille Knoll, Holocaust survivor and humanitarian, z"l

What I’ve noticed is - by and large, people older than I am emphasize the importance of protecting the Jewish people and people younger than I am take a more universal view.  

This is a generalization to be sure.  You may surely say, I’m older than you and I am very universal in my thinking.  And you may be younger and say I totally see the need for protecting the Jewish people.  And you may say, I see both sides, I get the subtlety - and I’m sure that many of us do.  I know that I’m generalizing by generation.  But still…

I want to give 2 mini-sermons.

First off - here’s the sermon that I think many younger people could benefit from hearing.  It’s based on a famous passage in the Haggadah that begins with b’khol dor vador.  In every generation.

בכל דור ודור עומדים עלינו לכלותנו 

B’khol dor vador.  Om’dim aleinu l’khaloteinu.  

In every generation, enemies rise up against us to destroy us.

Maybe you didn’t experience much discrimination for being Jewish in school, in college, and professionally.  Maybe you weren’t called names, or spat at, or worse.

Please consider - that discrimination and persecution against Jews has always been a reality, and that it is still a reality - even if it hasn’t affected your life very much or at all.  

We Must Learn How To Leap

Years ago I had an interesting conversation with a colleague of mine in West Hempstead.  He said that usually he encourages people in his community to take gradual steps when it comes to making changes in their lives.  Not to do anything all at once.

With Senator Kirsten Gillibrand

But there’s one time a year that he encourages people to leap forward.  Not to take small, cautious steps but to leap.

And that time of year is Passover.  There’s actually a basis for this - I’m not making it up!  On Passover we read Song of Songs - a series of love poems - and - as my colleague pointed out - Song of Songs speaks of a lover leaping over the mountains - מדלג על ההרים m’daleg al he’harim. 

This is the time for us to learn how to leap.