We are the Descendants of Such Beautiful Audacity

D’VAR TORAH       October 26, 2023       13 Cheshvan 5784   Rabbi David Edleson 

When I was a Dean at Middlebury College, the words “Resistance is the Secret of Joy” hung over my desk.  This line from Alice Walker’s novel The Secret of Joy, spoke to me.  As a Jew, as a gay man, as a thinking person, and as a person of faith who also sees skepticism as holy, I had to resist a lot of pressure to be like everybody around me.  There is a heaviness and a sadness to a life of resistance, but that line helped me see that there was also great joy and meaning in refusing to assimilate and blend in.   

 I took the words down when I learned that Alice Walker had turned into a rather unapologetic antisemite, but I still think of it often.  It still helps me no matter its source, like the belly laughs I enjoy every time I watch Woody Allen’s Sleeper.  

 This week’s Torah portion is Lech L’cha where God tells Abraham to leave everything he has known and go to a strange new land where he knows no one, and Abraham says, “Sure.” 

The Chasidic master, Sfat Emet, teaches that “Abraham’s greatness was that heard the call, because God calls out Lech L’cha , Go forth to every person all the time.  Abraham not only heard it but was willing to follow it. 

Since then, the Jewish people have chosen to move rather than give up their beliefs. Until some of us started to hear a different call, in many ways a more audacious call:  to go back to where Abraham went and refuse to leave or give in, to dare to fulfill the hope of 2000 years to again become a free people in the land of Zion and Jerusalem.

We here tonight are all audacious enough to have chosen to be Jewish.  Many of are also the descendants of audacious people who generation after generation would not give up their Jewishness, refused to be bullied into assimilation, and found joy in resisting the pressure to disappear.

Over the millennia, so many of our fellow Jews have left our people, either due to force, threat, or a desire to do better and to have more choices.  Huge numbers of Jews converted to Christianity, or Islam, or Communism or Germanness, or Americanness, or any of the other incredible pressures the world has put on Jews to give up.

Be we are those who would not.  We are still here.   We are choosing to be here.

In these horrible times, where the levels of antisemitism are soaring and the massacre of 1400 Jews seems to mean nothing to people we thought were allies, I’ve been thinking about where I find comfort. 

Of course, I find comfort in our tradition, in my partnership with Tim, in the Jewish community, but I personally get great comfort from thinking back to grandparents, great-grandparents going back and back who went through much much worse than this, and faced much more severe consequences, and yet they refused to give in.  They persevered.   They stubbornly and lovingly made sure the Jewish people continued.   What fierce people they were.

When I feel like giving up, or hiding, or just feel exhausted from the hate spewing at us and the only Jewish state, I think about the people we come from and I realize that just like generational trauma is part of our people, so is amazing strength and brilliance and joy, and we know how to survive and how to resist joyfully.  

After all, what is more counterculture, more a radical form of resistance than Shabbat, a refusal to work and a demand to be joyous at creation and the inalienable freedoms we have as human beings made in God’s image.

So, as we continue to carry Abraham’s journey forward, let’s remember we stand on the shoulders of giants, many of whom were under 5-feet tall, but giants nonetheless. 

We here are the descendants of such beautiful audacity.  It is an honor to be part of such a people.  Remembering that helps me these days.   I hope it will help you, too.

 Am Yisrael Chai

David