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.