Hello Temple Sinai, this time from Jerusalem where I have come to study with over 100 other rabbis for 10 days at the Shalom Hartman Institute (more on that later). I am so grateful that I am able to come to learn and dive deep into texts, especially after the year we’ve had.

A few days before the Temple Sinai Halt Hate bus ads were to roll out, I got a call from a leader in the Jewish community asking me to postpone or change the signs. This person had heard from people who felt that it was wrong to address antisemitism without also addressing racism and transphobia on the signs. They also felt that drawing attention to antisemitism might make it worse, and it was better not to speak out about it.

I explained that as a gay activist, I had heard both these arguments many times. Some gay activists felt that issues of poverty and war should always take priority over LGBT issues.

As humans, we live in complex realities where all the parts don’t fit neatly into one another. Reality is rarely as coherent as a jigsaw puzzle. As Jews, we wrestle with how our many identities – a feminist, person of color, queer, conservative, American, immigrant, and so many more – work (or don’t) with our Jewishness. Our Jewish identity is complex in itself; we are in a tradition rooted in an ancient covenant, but as modern Reform Jews, we are skeptical about covenant, about Torah, about God. Jews excel at handling complexity.

The great essayist Elizabeth Hardwick in her essay The Apotheosis of Martin Luther King observes that perhaps one of the reasons Martin Luther King is such an exalted person in the American imagination is that we have imbued him with all the symbology of a saint, or a prophet, a semi-Christlike figure that died for our sins. She also asks if it was also perhaps a form of nostalgia, nostalgia of the dream, and possibility that King represents, a dream that in Hardwick’s view, was already crumbling and then shattered the day he was shot.

The great essayist Elizabeth Hardwick in her essay The Apotheosis of Martin Luther King observes that perhaps one of the reasons Martin Luther King is such an exalted person in the American imagination is that we have imbued him with all the symbology of a saint, or a prophet, a semi-Christlike figure that died for our sins. She also asks if it was also perhaps a form of nostalgia, nostalgia of the dream, and possibility that King represents, a dream that in Hardwick’s view, was already crumbling and then shattered the day he was shot.

L’shana tova! L’shana tova?

            For the second year in a row, we as a community in Burlington are facing antisemitic attacks just before the High Holy Days. Last year it was the angry, frothing at the mouth, push to boycott Israel at City Council. This year, it is the reaction to the Department of Education’s investigation into systemic antisemitism at UVM. In response to multiple student complaints, the Brandeis Center for Human Rights under Law followed up on those complaints and determined that UVM’s inaction warranted their filing suit with the Feds, and that prompted this investigation.

Tisha b’Av is a holiday that is rarely honored in Reform synagogues. This Jewish day of fasting commemorates the destruction of both the First and Second Jerusalem Temples; both occurred on the same day in the Jewish calendar, the ninth of Av, Tisha b’Av in Hebrew.

Shavu’ot is the question mark of major Jewish holidays. Most of us know it’s a holiday, but exactly what we are supposed to do seems vague. There’s no Seder, no Sukkah, no Shofar. You’d have to ask a lot of Jews “what’s your favorite holiday” before getting “Shavu’ot” as an answer.

Shavu’ot is the question mark of major Jewish holidays. Most of us know it’s a holiday, but exactly what we are supposed to do seems vague. There’s no Seder, no Sukkah, no Shofar. You’d have to ask a lot of Jews “what’s your favorite holiday” before getting “Shavu’ot” as an answer.

When my father’s family fled Russia in 1905, they lived for a time in Manhattan’s Lower East Side in a tenement on Hester Street. This is a narrative many of our families share the story of thousands upon thousands of Russian and Ukrainian Jews who fled pogroms and made it to New York to start new lives. A few years earlier, the Lower East Side they landed in had been home to a large German immigrant community, a neighborhood with over a hundred little breweries and beer gardens. The Germans had mostly moved uptown or to other boroughs when the flood of Jewish immigrants arrived.

As I’m writing this, I’m sitting here on my 61st birthday, recovering from COVID with Tim now getting sick. I was terribly disappointed to postpone our Purim celebration, but on Saturday after Torah study, I got several pieces of information about people in our community testing positive, and with what I already knew, I had a strong intuitive alarm bell go off about community health. We are blessed with outstanding people in leadership positions, so consulting with Susan Leff, Stacie Gabert, Saragail Benjamin, Aimee Loiter, Mark Leopold, David Wright, David Punia, and several others, we all felt that the community’s health and wellbeing outweighed, in this case, the need for the events. Many of us had worked many hours to create a truly special celebratory Purim: we made parade puppets, wrote and rehearsed the spiel, created specialty “Booster Shots” for the adult party, shopped for the hors d’oeuvre, and all was ready. For me, canceling Purim immediately symbolized all the small losses we have experienced over these past few years, none of which is tragic on its own, but together represent what our lives are built from. These lost parties, proms, school trips, vacations, dinners with friends, Shabbat dinners, birthday parties, dinner parties, Seders, breakfasts, weddings, Shabbat services, dates, and movies seen with kids and friends in a theater--with lots of other human beings--these matter.