Parshat Naso

…”But perhaps the most important life lesson in Pirkei Avot is almost hidden.  It doesn’t read like an ethical or moral teaching at all.   Here it is:

משֶׁה קִבֵּל תּוֹרָה מִסִּינַי, וּמְסָרָהּ לִיהוֹשֻׁעַ, וִיהוֹשֻׁעַ לִזְקֵנִים, וּזְקֵנִים לִנְבִיאִים, וּנְבִיאִים מְסָרוּהָ לְאַנְשֵׁי כְנֶסֶת הַגְּדוֹלָה.

Moses received the Torah from Sinai and transmitted it to Joshua, and Joshua to the Elders, and the Elders to the Prophets, and the Prophets transmitted it to the Scholars of the Great Assembly.

Not the most exciting opening, perhaps, but hidden in plain sight is a profound lesson:  the need to pass on our traditions to the next generation.  This unbroken chain of tradition through the generations, in Hebrew, the Dorot,  is one of the great strengths of the Jewish people, and given our difficult history, it is, I think, a miracle that our tradition has not only been passed down through the generations but it has continued to deepen, to evolve, to adapt and to grow.  Each generation must make it their own and find a way to pass it on to the next one.  As anyone who has taught Hebrew School knows, this is not so easy to do.“

Shavuot Sermon

THE PROFOUND IF BORING WISDOM OF JEWISH TRADITION:   RULE OF LAW

Rule.   Of.   Law. 

These three words rarely conjure up a deep sense of holiness, or spirituality, but these three words sum up what is perhaps the most profound wisdom of our tradition.  

Shavuot celebrates the giving of the Torah, and while there is much drama in the description of lightning and thunder and blasts of the shofar, matan Torah, the giving of the Torah boils down to God’s demanding that we live under the rule of law. 

Parshat Bamidbar

This week, we leave the book of Leviticus (whew) and we begin the book of Numbers. 

In Hebrew,  it is called “BaMidbar”  or “in the wilderness.”   In the Jewish conception, “the wilderness” is not some pristine forest;  it is a dry desert mountainous area where it is very difficult to know where you are or where you are going.   What you do know is that you are definitely not where you have been.   It seems appropriate for the times we are living in.   

In Hebrew numerology, Bamidbar equals 248, which is also what the name “Abraham” equals.  Abraham also left what he had known and travels through a wilderness before finally reaching his new home.  These days, we are all Abraham.

Parshat Behar

I first read about the murder of Yaron Lischinsky, 30, and Sarah Lynn Milgrim, 26 late Wednesday night when it came across my Instagram feed.   I’m not proud of my first reaction.  I read a sentence or two and then kept scrolling.   I didn’t want to deal.  Instead of sadness, I felt something like irritation that here we are again.  After a minute or so, I scrolled back up and read some more, but even then, I am ashamed to say I felt mostly numb.   I didn’t think to send out something until late yesterday afternoon a reporter asked me if we were having a vigil.   

I fear many of us are developing a bit of numbness.  After Pittsburgh, and October 7, and October 8, and City Hall, and Poway, and the situation on some college campuses, not to mention the devastation in Gaza and the divisions inside Israel,  Jews and those in our community are tired and a bit numb.  It’s natural to develop a bit of a callous.  It feels like a survival mechanism. 

Pirkei Avot -   The Ethics of our Ancestors

Between Pesach and Shavuot, it is a Jewish tradition to read a chapter of a special section of the Mishnah called Pirkei Avot.  It means “Verses of the Ancestors”  but is most often translated “Ethics of our Fathers.”   

It is a collection of pithy aphorisms from the early rabbis about how what is a ‘good life’ in Jewish terms.  The most Jewish thing about is that the rabbis don’t agree about what makes a good life.  Some say study, others say kindness, others say purity and others say helping the vulnerable.  There is not one set of ethics, but competing and conflicting sets of ethics that leave it to the reader to work our way through.

In Every Generation

It turns out that Jews seem to have a problem having faith.  We are “the people of the book” but we endlessly question what the words in the book mean and if they are true.  

Think about it.   The Jews had just gotten out of Egypt where they had been enslaved for hundreds of years, and they got out not through political organizing, or coalition building, but through plagues that were incredibly dramatic.   Over and over, Moses tells Pharaoh that if he doesn’t let our people go, God will send a terrible plague, and then Pharaoh doesn’t and God does and everyone witness it.   When the people got to the sea, the had no faith that they would get across.  Even Moses seems skeptical.   Only one, Nachshon ben Amminadav, had faith and plunged in until the seas parted. 

Difficult Freedoms

Dara Horn just came out with a new graphic novel called ONE LITTLE GOAT, or Had Gadya.   It is a trippy book with a portal into other dimensions and a talking goat leading a kid bored at an endless seder to a series of seders throughout Jewish history. 

One of the key images is that when we have our seders this year, the room our seder is in stands on the top of a tower of rooms where other seders have happened going back to the first seder in Egypt.  It is a like a tower of light boxes, and we can go and turn on the lights in one and imagine what that seder was like, how it was the same, how it was made different by the times people were living in. 

Reaping the Whirlwind

There is so much going on around us that it is hard to know where to look, what to pay the most attention to, where to focus efforts at resistance or efforts in support.   Do we put our efforts toward defending the basic rights of transpeople who are under attack?   Or do we focus on rule of law and due process?  Or do we focus on the world order?   Or do we fight for Veterans’ care?  Or do we put our energy into defending Jews against antisemitism which is skyrocketing?  Or could it be that all this newfound pugilistic support we are receiving from the government now could ultimately backfire or turn against us? 

Reaping the Whirlwind

There is so much going on around us that it is hard to know where to look, what to pay the most attention to, where to focus efforts at resistance or efforts in support.   Do we put our efforts toward defending the basic rights of transpeople who are under attack?   Or do we focus on rule of law and due process?  Or do we focus on the world order?   Or do we fight for Veterans’ care?  Or do we put our energy into defending Jews against antisemitism which is skyrocketing?  Or could it be that all this newfound pugilistic support we are receiving from the government now could ultimately backfire or turn against us? 

Reaping the Whirlwind

There is so much going on around us that it is hard to know where to look, what to pay the most attention to, where to focus efforts at resistance or efforts in support.   Do we put our efforts toward defending the basic rights of transpeople who are under attack?   Or do we focus on rule of law and due process?  Or do we focus on the world order?   Or do we fight for Veterans’ care?  Or do we put our energy into defending Jews against antisemitism which is skyrocketing?  Or could it be that all this newfound pugilistic support we are receiving from the government now could ultimately backfire or turn against us? 

“To save a life is to save an entire world. “

I remember a poster with this hung in one of the Hebrew schools I attended, and it was up in the graduate school I attended in Jerusalem.  This famous quote from the Talmud reminds us that every person is a world unto themselves, and every family is a world.   After all,  according to our sacred texts, and for that matter, science,  all human beings descended from a single couple so to destroy them would have been to destroy all of us.  

In the fall of 1976,  I was a sophomore with Tim at Chattooga High School in Summerville, Georgia.  As many of you know,  I was a band geek, and already Drum Major, but I also was the only good piccolo player in the band.  So every Friday night at the big football game, the flag and rifle corps would huddle up in the front, and I would disappear into them.  The band would start Stars and Stripes Forever, the flags would begin to lift, and then on cue, the flags would sweep down to the ground to reveal me, standing on the crossed rifles of the rifle corp, being lifted up like Venus in the clam, to play that screeching piccolo solo – (imitates solo).  

It was a heady time!   It was the bicentennial, and a governor of Georgia was running for President.  My family was all in for Jimmy Carter that year.  He went to Georgia Tech, where my father had gone, and he brought a very new style to presidential politics after Nixon. 

Christmas is a pretty complicated time for many American Jews.  We might have written most of the most popular Christmas songs, but how to navigate Christmas as individuals, as couples, as families brings up lots of issues and feelings about identity, assimilation, and our desire to be citizens of the world.   

This week’s portion is a powerful one, and one that is central in understanding how we see ourselves as a people.  Jacob, having worked many years for his conniving father in-law, Laban, is now returning home to the Negev desert, the place he fled because he had done something so underhanded and mean that his brother was planning to kill him.  He had tricked his father and taken advantage of his brother to steal the birthright and the blessing, all under the guidance of his mother, Rebecca.  He left alone and in a hurry, hunted, and now is returning with a huge family and considerable wealth. 

One thing many people are giving thanks for this week is the ceasefire agreement between Israel and Lebanon.   

People have been calling for some sort of cease-fire since this war began, and unlike Hamas, which doesn’t seem to care how much disruption or death of civilians takes place, Lebanon’s government was very keen on finding a way to a ceasefire.   

Many in Israel, particularly military leaders and those who live in the north are not happy about this ceasefire.  In fact, they are furious about it.  Israelis are very skeptical about it.   

Well,  we’ve just been through an election….   I know just by my saying that, a bunch of people in this room got nervous about what I might say.  Don’t worry.  I know that we have people who voted both ways here tonight, and in our community, but we also share deep bonds and share fate with one another as a people.   I will say that the recent election shows that we are a very divided nation politically, as we have been now for decades.   Being deeply divided is often part of being a democracy.  I know in Israel, which is also a deeply divided democracy, polls show there is wide consensus on many key issues, a great center, but the political culture makes it seem like there is no common ground because that is how elections are won.

Well,  we’ve just been through an election….   I know just by my saying that, a bunch of people in this room got nervous about what I might say.  Don’t worry.  I know that we have people who voted both ways here tonight, and in our community, but we also share deep bonds and share fate with one another as a people.   I will say that the recent election shows that we are a very divided nation politically, as we have been now for decades.   Being deeply divided is often part of being a democracy.  I know in Israel, which is also a deeply divided democracy, polls show there is wide consensus on many key issues, a great center, but the political culture makes it seem like there is no common ground because that is how elections are won.

I had another sermon written about particularism and the dangers of universalism, but the more I sat with it, the more if felt to theoretical, to abstract for what we are living through.   So in the coming weeks, I’ll turn that into a blog and send it out. 

Instead, I want to talk about why it seems so hard for so many of us to stand up for ourselves as Jews. 

A Poem We May Dwell Within

To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven:

A time to be born, and a time to die; A time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted;

A time to kill, and a time to heal; A time to break down, and a time to build up;

A time to weep, and a time to laugh; A time to mourn, and a time to dance;

A time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together; A time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing;

A time to seek, and a time to lose; A time to keep, and a time to cast away;

A time to rend, and a time to sew; A time to keep silence, and a time to speak;

A time to love, and a time to hate; A time for war, and a time for peace.

Tonight, we gather as Jews have done for millennia as a community to confess our wrongdoings and ask God’s forgiveness. 

But this year, I am finding it hard to ask God’s forgiveness, when part of me feels it is God that should be asking ours.  The covenant that God would protect us, that the sun would not harm us by day nor the moon by night, has been broken so many times, and October 7 is just the latest in a long line of God being Missing in Action.

How many times have Jews come together in the darkness of Kol Nidrei evening  with a sense of worry, of forboding, of wondering just how bad it will get?  Will we be here next year?