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.