Challenging Our Assumptions

Delivered on Kol Nidre Night 5773 at Temple Israel of Great Neck


I’ll start with a joke that many have heard, which I hope to use for a new purpose.  Robby tells the rabbi that he has a problem.  The World Series game is the same night as Kol Nidre.  The rabbi tells Robby he can TIVO it.  Robby says “Rabbi, you’re the best!  I didn’t know you can TIVO Kol Nidre.”

Tonight I want to talk about assumptions and how we need to challenge them.

First, a fact about an unfortunate recent event.  Christopher Hitchens died on December 15, 2011.  This was within the past Jewish year, 5772, a fact which may or may not have been of interest to him, given that he spent much of his recent career arguing against the existence of God and denouncing religion for all of its negative contributions to the world.

Hitchens was an intelligent man with strong convictions.  He gave people of all religious backgrounds and perspectives a lot to think about.

Two years after he published God is Not Great:  How Religion Poisons Everything, Karen Armstrong wrote The Case for God. 

In The Case for God, Armstrong argued that the religion that Hitchens was attacking is fundamentalist religion.  Hitchens’ critique that religion claims a monopoly on truth is a critique of fundamentalist religion, as is his critique that religion is a source of bloodshed.

According to Karen Armstrong, Hitchens' attacks on religion assumed a fundamentalist approach to religion, and I tend to agree.  He set religion up as a straw man. 

Tonight, I’m going to ask us to do something that is entirely in keeping with the spirit of Yom Kippur as I understand it.  Yom Kippur is the day of reflection and purification. 

If ever there is a time for us to try to be honest with ourselves, to try to clean out the attic, intellectually and emotionally speaking, Yom Kippur is it. 

Tonight, I’m going to ask us to question our assumptions.  About God.  About one another.  And about ourselves. 

Speak Out, Act Out - Exerting Influence

A message for the New Year, delivered during the High Holy Days at Temple Israel of Great Neck

There’s a story told about a famous rabbi who became head of a yeshiva and author of several books.  His full name was Naftali Tzvi Yehuda Berlin and he lived in Poland during the 19^th century.  He was known as the Netziv. 

But, of course, he wasn’t always famous.

In fact, when he was younger, he wasn’t a particularly good student.  The story told is that one evening, a year after his bar mitzvah, he overheard his parents talking in the kitchen and saying that because he wasn’t such a good student, maybe he should stop studying Torah so intensively and become a tailor.  The young man was confused. 

He went to sleep that night and had a dream.  In the dream, he saw himself at the end of his life, and then he passed on into the next world and he got to the front desk and he was asked a simple question.

Where are your books?

Excuse me?  He said.

You had the ability to write books about Jewish tradition and philosophy that would influence generations.

Where are they?

God's Love is for Everyone

Sometimes, I set out to say one thing and end up realizing I’d rather say something else.  That happened to me when I was preparing to speak for this morning.

I was set to talk about the evolution of our relationship with God and our religious tradition – the trajectory from the innocence of childhood to the rejection of teen hood to the accommodations and willed innocence of adulthood.
 

I was going to do my best not to oversimplify, to indicate that each phase has its nuances, and ultimately to come to what it means to be ach sameach – utterly joyful, during the festival of Sukkot – given the arc of our psychological and emotional development over time.

And then I opened up the New York Times and saw the cover article about a young man who is severely cognitively impaired, who is leaving the hospital where he spent his entire life and about to enter a group home.

Jews and the Sacred Balancing Act

(I shared these words with the Temple Israel community the morning after I returned from a synagogue trip to Israel.  Click here to see photos and reflections from the families who participated in the trip.)

I returned yesterday morning on the red-eye from Israel, having spent 10 days with a group of Temple Israel families. 

It was an amazing trip. I’m suffering a little bit from jetlag and my brain is currently somewhere over Greenland, but I’m going to do my best to share a few interesting stories about our adventures and, hopefully, to make a worthwhile point.

Monday morning, 2:30 am.  Three adults, including me, and three teens, all of whom celebrated becoming bar mitzvah on our bimah, left the lobby of our hotel in Jerusalem to drive to Masada so we could climb it and then watch the sun rise.

While we were planning it the night before, it seemed like a great idea (and in the end it was, as you can see!)

Ten Days in Israel with Family

On the concrete level, Temple Israel’s trip to Israel concluded for each participant with the thwack of the US Customs stamp on our passports at JFK.  But the impact of the trip is hardly over for any of us, certainly not for me.

I’ve been to Israel many times and each trip resonated in its own way, a function of itinerary, company and life circumstance.  But this trip was unique for me in at least one respect.  Never before have I led a group of families – young children, teens and adults – as a rabbi.

For starters, I enjoyed watching people of all ages as they took in the kaleidoscopic reality of Eretz Yisra’el, some for the first time.  What’s it like to watch the mostly Jewish throngs (some in thongs) on the Tel Aviv promenade?  What’s it like to shmooze with Israeli teens (some who idolize America) at a natural watering hole in Beit Shean?  What’s it like on Shabbat to walk to and from shul on the streets of Jerusalem? 

What’s it like to dance with wide-eyed kindergartners in Ashkelon and then see the shelter that they have 20 seconds to run to when rockets strike? What’s it like to celebrate with a Bat Mitzvah a few hundred feet from where the ancient Levites used to ascend the steps to the Holy Temple?

From Russia, With Love

Last week, I joined with over a dozen rabbis from the New York area on a UJA-Federation sponsored mission to St. Petersburg, Russia.  The previous week, our president, Alan Klinger, and his wife, Susan, joined a group of lay leaders on a similar trip that also included Moscow.

I’d like to share several highlights of the trip and then try to put it into a larger context.

Naturally, Russia is very different now than it was just 25 years ago in many respects.  A colleague of mine on the trip pointed out that when he was there in the late 80’s, food was scarce for virtually everyone.

Today, food is more widely available.  We ate well at two kosher restaurants, which points to a second major change.

Today, religion can be practiced far more openly than in pre-perestroika times.  We prayed daily in our hotel wearing tallit and tefilin.  We wore kippot in the streets of St. Petersburg.

And we observed a Jewish summer camp, sponsored by the local Jewish community with enormous support from Jewish communities abroad, chief among them the New York community, through the efforts of UJA-Federation of New York.

Time to Grow Up

If you’re looking for interesting summer reading, why not pick up an old classic?  Though it's not quite a page-turner, I recommend Sigmund Freud’s Civilization and its Discontents. 

It reads in part as a sophisticated critique of religion, but it’s also an attempt to understand how the human mind works. 

Freud draws an analogy between the human mind and a city.  A city is established when its first buildings are built; while these buildings are sometimes destroyed as the city grows, often they are preserved as new layers emerge.  In Paris, the ile de la cite remains central; in New York, it’s Lindy’s near Time Square. . .

But far more than these foundational buildings shape a city, Freud argues, foundational experiences shape our cognitive and emotional development.

The yearnings and fears we experience in infancy carry on profoundly as part of the human psyche.  Our hungers, for example, or our fear of abandonment, remain core elements of who we are.

What do we do with these intense and foundational parts of our identity?

Some people don’t ever quite get beyond their own selves. 

Hopefully, most of us build on our core hungers and fears.  We come to recognize that, just as we have needs and fears, others do, as well.  We come to appreciate that for us to have opportunity and liberty, others must, as well – or else the whole house begins to collapse.

I highly recommend a series on HBO about John Adams, based on the biography by David McCullough.

On and around July 4, it’s especially pertinent.