I Am a Hebrew: The Courage of Jonah

SERMON    YOM KIPPUR 5785     October 11, 2024

Rabbi David Edleson     Temple Sinai   South Burlington, Vermont

I Am a Hebrew:  The Courage of Jonah

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. 

Let me start with my father of blessed memory. My father loved being an American more than anything.  As kids, my brother and sister and I would get new red, white and blue outfits every 4th of July, and my father would put up the flag and we would march out in our outfits and recite the pledge of allegiance. 

Sometimes on car rides my father would spontaneously recite the preamble to the Constitution or the Gettysburg Address which he knew by heart. He didn’t always understand the workings of American democracy, but he loved those texts. They were in some profound ways his religion.  

He loved the idea of small town southern life.  He wanted to be seen as just one of the guys.  He worked very hard at it.

The problem was that he was a Jew.  And it showed.  I look a lot like him, but his skin was much darker, his hair was full-on Jewfro, and his nose was even more majestic than this schnozz.

He just couldn’t pass, try as he might.  No matter how many little league teams he coached, no matter how much he put his heart into my brief time in the cub scouts, no matter how many Kiwanis and Elk club committees he sat on.  

My father had a solid Jewish upbringing, was an AEPi, but still he carried his Jewishness like it was a handicap he had to overcome, and that if he tried hard enough, he would. 

He kept trying even when we had an axe through our door with a note saying “The Jews are killing America.” 

He kept trying when he had a sad little cross burned in our yard. 

He believed deeply in the American idea of a melting pot, and he didn’t like that for some reason  he just couldn’t seem to melt.

My father didn’t much like the particularism of being Jewish.  The yarmulkes, the tallis, the mezuzah, and definitely keeping kosher were for “those Jews,” not for him as a Reform Jew.   Reform Jews had Christmas trees and ate ham.

Like so many Reform Jews I know, he went out of his way to make it clear to people who hadn’t asked that he loved cheeseburgers, lobsters, and pork chops.  You better not tell him he couldn’t have sour cream on his latkes with his brisket.  You might have met someone like him, Jews for whom not being kosher is their Jewish identity. 

He didn’t like that being Jewish made him different.  He didn’t think it should. 

My father didn’t like those Jews who insisted on standing out.  They made it harder for Jews in America to be accepted, he thought.

How many of us carry this at some level?  Maybe as a secret pride that our Jewishness doesn’t stick out, it doesn’t make us different.   Or maybe it is more of a secret sense of judgement at those Jews who do stick out.  

My father was raised as a Reform Jew, and the Reform Judaism of his generation had always focused on the universal aspects of our tradition – our monotheism, our sense of law and ethics, and discarded much of our particularism.

 Here is just one example from the 1885 Pittsburgh Platform, the first statement of American Reform Jewish belief:

4.  We hold that all such Mosaic and rabbinical laws as regulate diet, priestly purity, and dress originated in ages and under the influence of ideas entirely foreign to our present mental and spiritual state. They fail to impress the modern Jew with a spirit of priestly holiness; their observance in our days is apt rather to obstruct than to further modern spiritual elevation.

Reform Judaism famously eschewed tribalism for the American promise of acceptance, of universalism, and so this past year has been particularly tough on Reform Jews. 

Seeing the levels of hate, the bullying on college campuses, the dehumanizing language of “Zios” and “Zionist Entity”, the championing of Hammas’ and Hezbollah’s genocidal agenda against Jews, we can’t help but see that we might not be as accepted as we thought we were, and it doesn’t matter how assimilated we are. 

This summer, I studied for two weeks at the Hartman Institute in Jerusalem, and one of the faculty there is Dr. Tal Becker.   Dr. Becker is an international lawyer and diplomat and was one of the chief negotiators of the Oslo Accords, the Abraham Accords, and was the one who defended Israel at the International Criminal Court this year.

Dr. Becker focused on a text from the Book of Numbers, from Parashat Balak when the pagan prophet Balaam is paid a fortune by the King of Moab to curse the Israelites that have gathered near his border in the desert. 

Balaam, after a humbling adventure with a talking donkey and flaming swords, arrives, looks out from a mountain plateau at the Jews gathered below, and instead of a curse, the words that come out of his mouth are a blessing. 

How can I curse whom God has not cursed,
How doom when יהוה has not doomed?

As I see them from the mountain tops,
Gaze on them from the heights,
There is a people that dwells apart,
Not considered among the nations ,

 הֶן־עָם֙ לְבָדָ֣ד יִשְׁכֹּ֔ן וּבַגּוֹיִ֖ם לֹ֥א יִתְחַשָּֽׁב

THERE IS A PEOPLE THAT DWELLS ALONE, NOT CONSIDERED AMONG THE NATIONS.

The key word  l’vadad’  or ‘boded’ means isolated or alone.  I won’t go through all the examples we looked at, but let’s say it is almost never a good thing.  For example, lepers live apart. It usually means you aren’t safe or exiled.  So what does Balaam mean here? 

It was interesting that the Orthodox and Conservadox rabbis there had no problem with this. 

But for the Reform and other liberal rabbis, it was much more challenging.  Our identity, our values, and our world view are rooted in the idea of being and important part of mainstream society, of being Americans who also happen to be Jewish. We have come to know the blessing and the safety of not having to live apart and alone.  We count as one of our great blessings the degree to which we have integrated into the societies we are part of.

We have also made it central to our values the need to stand with other minority groups and marginal groups and support their fight for acceptance and respect.  Jews have disproportionately been leaders and activists in the civil rights movement, the women’s rights movement, the gay rights movement. 

Dr. Becker put it this way:  “we believed that by advocating for others, we will be accepted, but we don’t need to advocate for our own distinctiveness.”

October 7 and what has followed has shown us that in some very troubling ways, that no matter how accepted we are in one moment, it can turn in the next.  Of course, we have allies, however quiet, but  this past year has reminded us of the limits of universalism. 

Growing up, when people would say things that were blatantly antisemitic, like ‘how to you hide your tail in your jeans”  or “when did you have your horns removed?”  or  the much more common, “why did y’all kill Jesus?” my father didn’t know what to say.   He would just laugh, or shake his head, and try to be affable.  

When my mother would very clearly and angrily tell them exactly why they were wrong, or call them idiots (though that isn’t the word she would use)  my father would get angry at her for making a scene and making Jews look bad. 

So many of us have been trained consciously or unconsciously to ignore antisemitism, to laugh it off, not to take it seriously, not to “make a scene.”

It is hard to unlearn that.  It is hard to unlearn this unrelenting belief that if we are nice enough, people won’t hate us.  

What I learned over time was that my father really didn’t know what to say.   He was skilled at saying things that helped him fit in, but he really didn’t know what to say to stand up for his Jewishness. 

Many of us here today are very much like my father.  We don’t’ know what to say. 

This past year,  I’ve been so proud to see some of our parents and our teens learning how to speak up, to advocate for themselves, to call out the double standards and the antisemitism in the schools.  Our teens have confronted teachers and administrators, respectfully but clearly.

But I fear those are the exceptions to the rule.  I think that many of us are like my father and just want to let it go and avoid making other people feel uncomfortable, or have other people stop including them.  Sometimes, this includes their spouses, or their children. 

To this end, a few weeks ago I invited my friend Linda Lovitch who does media training for diplomats in Israel to come here to offer a training to our community on how to speak up effectively.  

She did a great job and people were troopers to spend four hours in that workshop on a gorgeous September day. 

But I have to say that what struck me that day was how many Jewish people who would show up for a training on advocacy were nonetheless profoundly uncomfortable just simply saying they think someone is wrong and telling them why. 

It seems that many of us have an almost pathological need to be peace—makers, to see both sides.   Maybe it was a room full of middle children, but I think there was something else going on. 

Over and over, the people in that workshop just wanted to say they we should be civil and that it was ok to disagree, or that we all want the same things.  They wanted to say things that would bring us together, not create divisions. 

In some ways, it showed a beautiful side of our community, but here’s a hard fact: that is not effective in the face of the pervasive onslaught of Jew-hatred we are living through.   It turns our that other people are very comfortable calling us the worst names possible, calling us the devil and evil, while our response is often some version of “why can’t we all just get along.“

I suspect that the Jews in Europe in the early 1930’s had a similar impulse.  I always wondered how the Jews in America would respond if a great wave of antisemitism arose here.  If you ever wondered how you would react should that happen, just look at your reactions this past year. 

That is the cheshbon nefesh, the soul searching our community needs to do this Yom Kippur.  To ask every more deeply why we remain quiet in the face of outrageous lies and the erasure of our history. 

One reason is that many people don’t feel that have enough information.  They feel insecure about how to defend Judaism, or what to say, or about Israeli history and the history of the conflict.   Jews don’t want to say something if they aren’t sure they will get an A.  

So you know what you can do about that?  You can educate yourself.  You can read, listen to podcasts, and make the time to learn enough to respond.  There is no excuse for putting our heads in the sand.  We can tell ourselves it is self-care, that getting involved upsets us too much, but it is not self-care to be passive when you are being attacked, delegitimized and dehumanized as Jews.  

We have got to find the courage and the spine to speak up and to call out the lies and disinformation.  If we don’t, who are we thinking is going to? 

As I’ve said before, there are many parallels with coming out as an LGBT person in the 1980’s.  You risked arrest, losing your job, losing your friends, losing your family, but it was still important enough to do it, because the lives of the gay community depended on it.  Public leaders speaking out wasn’t going to do it.  Regular people needed to come out in their churches and synagogues, in their schools and in their families to change people’s attitudes and minds.  We helped each other plan what we would say, make a strategy for who to call after, and in general, supported one another through it.  That support is what made it possible to do on such a large scale. And what a change that has made in the world.

Today, we need to help one another practice what to say, strategize, and we need to check in on another for support. 

I’ve given many classes on the current conflict, on antisemitism, and will again but they are often attended by the same small group of people.  God bless them, but we need many more people to take the time to learn.   

But more than information, we need to find the courage to actually speak up, to public figures, yes, but also to the other people in our lives, our friends and coworkers.  That in some ways take more courage because the personal stakes are higher.

This means confronting our deep seated need to be liked, to be likable.  We need to confront our fear of becoming one of “those Jews” who is loud and angry.  

Women, African Americans, LGBT people have all learned the painful lesson that sometimes we have to be ‘those people.’ 

It is ok to be one of “those Jews” in times like this.  More than ok, it is deeply important and necessary for our future as American Jews.  

On Yom Kippur, we confess our sins so here are some we might need to confess:

For the sin we have sinned against each other by being silent when we should speak up.

For the sin we have sinned against each other by staying home when we should show up.

For the sin we have sinned against each other by not taking the time to learn enough to respond.

For the sin we have sinned against one another by internalizing the antisemitism around us. 

For the sin we have sinned against one another by not checking in on each other, by not helping one another find our voice together. 

For these sins, in this new year, pardon us, forgive us, help us do better...

In the book of Jonah that we read traditionally read on Yom Kippur, and that I mentioned last night, there is one moment that has always moved me.  Jonah is a whiner, he doesn’t want to go, he wants to just sleep, and he gets made that he might look like a fool in public if he does what God commands.   We are all Jonah.

But when things are darkest, and the risk is greatest, Jonah does an amazing thing.  Angry sailors confront him and ask him what he is.   Jonah’s simple answer is so powerful:   Ivri Anochi.  I am a Hebrew. 

This year, we need to find the courage Jonah somehow found to face those who attack us and say I’m a Jew.    

A modern day Jonah that Stacie and I deeply admire is Eitan Chitayit.  He is an Israeli advertising executive, and in 2015 after the antisemitic riots in Paris, he coined the phrase, “I’m That Jew.”  It was a way of showing solidarity across the Jewish spectrum.   He made a video that went viral of all sorts of different Jewish identities that start with I’m that Jew.  

Some of you might remember that a few years ago, Stacie and Aimee Loiter and I did a rendition of “I’m that Vermont Jew.” 

Since October 7,  Eitan has been traveling and speaking to Jewish groups to share the message that we need get out of our passivity.  We all need to find the courage to speak up and do something when we are attacked.   The biggest problem he sees is that so many Jews just remain silent, or are too afraid to confront people who are attacking us. 

So I’m proposing an I’m That Jew project here at Temple Sinai.   If you find yourself in a situation where you could just be quiet but you chose to speak up and take action about antisemitism, send us an email with the subject line  I’m that Jew, and share your story with us.   We’ll give you a free “I’m that Jew” t-shirt.  If it takes off, from time to time, we’ll send out some of the stories to encourage others to do the same.  If you don’t want your story shared, or you want to take out identifying details, just let us know.  

I will also have some “Ivri Anochi” tshirts made, so you can choose. 

The point is for us to find the courage to stand up, to be ‘that Jew’, to be Jonah in that moment, and to support others to do the same.   We’ll call it “Project Jonah.” 

So please send your stories and if there was an outcome positive or negative, and we’ll send you the shirt.

I’m going to start right here.  A few days ago, Stacie decided to right Channel 5 to express how upset she was at their coverage of October 7.   A producer there called her and apologized, and said they agreed and needed to do better.   So on this Yom Kippur,  Stacie is “that Jew.”  

May we all find our voice in this new year.

Ken Y’hi Ratson