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? 

“What we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period of postwar history, but the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.   (“The End of History?”  The National Interest 16 (1989) Preface)  

That’s what famous American Political Scientist Francis Fukuyama wrote in 1989, without irony.  The idea that the post-war bubble of international order, cooperative science, cultural exchange and liberal democracy was not a bubble, but the new normal.  The world’s worst problems would be solved; progress was inevitable.  War as way to resolve conflict was a thing of the past.

It was a heady time.  The Soviet Union had collapsed under its own weight and Russia was inching toward liberal democracy.   China had liberalized and opened up to the world, and its desire for growth and prosperity would inevitably push it toward capitalism and some form of democracy and individual rights, so the thinking went.

Fukuyama himself admitted that there were two possible threats to this new order:  religion and nationalism, but he quickly asserted that these were minor and easily manageable in the face of the great march of progress. 

Rabbi Menachel Mendel of Kotzk said,

“There is nothing so whole as a broken heart.”

אין יותר שלם מלב שבור

“There is nothing so whole as a broken heart.”

My heart is broken, but I confess it does not feel very whole. 

Does yours?  

No, I feel emptied out and hollow by the year we’ve had since October Seventh.

We have all been holding so much.  

So much fear.

So much hurt.

So much loss.

So much anger.

So much disillusionment.

So much sadness.

We are bereft.

Each year, Jews around the world read the entire Torah section by section, and that means we finish the last book, Deuteronomy at the High Holy Days.   This week, we read the next to the last section, a double portion called Nitzavim-Vayelech.  

This week’s Torah portion has what is among the most important commandments in the entire Torah.   We know that the Torah is deeply concerned with communal stability, good relations, and health.  It deals with real world issues.   There are elaborate lengthy passages describing how to deal with public health outbreaks, and about how people should handle disputes, but this one might contribute more than any of them to the overall wellbeing of the Israelites as they wandered through the desert:

וְיָד֙ תִּהְיֶ֣ה לְךָ֔ מִח֖וּץ לַֽמַּחֲנֶ֑ה וְיָצָ֥אתָ שָּׁ֖מָּה חֽוּץ׃

וְיָתֵ֛ד תִּהְיֶ֥ה לְךָ֖ עַל־אֲזֵנֶ֑ךָ וְהָיָה֙ בְּשִׁבְתְּךָ֣ ח֔וּץ וְחָפַרְתָּ֣ה בָ֔הּ וְשַׁבְתָּ֖ וְכִסִּ֥יתָ אֶת־צֵאָתֶֽךָ׃

Further, there shall be an area for you outside the camp, where you may relieve yourself. With your gear you shall have a shovel, and when you have squatted you shall dig a hole with it and cover up your excrement.

Wise words.  Holy words.

Noah,  thank you so much for being willing to share your bar mitzvah evening with PRIDE Shabbat.  It is in one way very appropriate, because we are so proud of you and how much your learned and how much you engaged what it meant to become bar mitzvah.   So in some ways, this is your Jewish Pride Shabbat.

PRIDE is actually an interesting word.  It can be both very good or very bad.