Wednesday, December 8, 2010
Guest Blogging at the URJ
Hello, readers. I did a guest blog entry, "Black Friday," for the Union for Reform Judaism on issues related to the "December dilemma." I hope you enjoy it.
Friday, November 19, 2010
Little Nana
In Jewish tradition, we mark the anniversary of a loved one’s death, a yarzheit (from the word for “to remember”) by lighting a candle. Let these words be as a light, spreading some of the warmth with which Nana blessed me.
Some people knew her as “Emma,” some as “Ma,” some as “Nana.” Many people here called her “little Nana on the hill”: a tiny woman living on a steep hill in a house surrounded by carefully tended flowers and brimming with objects, food, cats and dogs, grandchildren and great-grandchildren – even great-great-grandchildren.
But to call Nana “little” tells only of her physical stature. With her four-feet and some-odd inches, Nana moved through the world with love, determination, and strength. Growing up in an era when women made few choices, she very much forged ahead, making at times tough calls. She created a wonderful life for herself of which we were each privileged to be a part.
At the age of twenty, already working in a factory and caring for her four younger siblings since her mother died, Nana was eager to start a new life. She told the story with humor, saying she called a relative in Boston to inform her that she would go to Massachusetts and get married. “At that time, I didn’t know who,” Nana laughed, “but I was going!” “Who” turned out to be Leo DeBlosi, my grandfather. They met, chaperoned of course, at a train station in Boston on a Friday. The following Sunday, they were married. Nana described her first husband as “very easygoing and very respectful,” and she recalled with a broad smile how he helped around the house and with their five children. The early days of their marriage were marred by a house fire that left them living in what Nana vividly described as a “bare” apartment that they filled slowly. She joked that, by the time she left Somerville, she had “fifteen truckloads” of things to fill her home—and she wouldn’t venture to estimate how many truckloads she amassed in Townsend with Eddie, her second husband, and their two children.
Many of us have told colorful stories about Nana’s house: the souvenir spoons displayed on wooden racks, the magnets covering the surface of the refrigerator, the collection of wooden shoes in ascending sizes, the ever-multiplying lawn ornaments, the untouched sets of crystal dishes and the table set with mismatched flea market finds. Of course, the objects Nana collected held meaning for her: they are the result of much hard work and determination on her part. And they collectively help to tell a story about the woman who collected them, her tastes and her values. But they cannot compare to the real things of value Nana contributed to the world and to our lives: the children she raised, both biological and foster; the people she nurtured at all stages of life; the strong (at times stubborn) will she modeled to each of us, undoubtedly making us each stronger in turn; even the religious conviction she was willing to follow despite the fact that her family followed another path. “Little” Nana has made an immeasurable impression on each of our lives.
Each of us knew Nana in a different way, by a different name. But each of us is thankful for having known a woman of great humor, generosity, love, compassion, and conviction. Nana lived a long and complex life. She knew hard work, deep loss, tough times, and great love. She made two homes and two families that have remained intertwined, and she taught each of us lessons large and small—from how to make bone soup to how to express our honest opinions.
I have been keenly aware, for the past couple of months, that our loved ones cannot live forever. But I do believe in the importance of sharing our stories about those who have died, passing on their memories. I intend to share what I know of Nana with my own family in the future: her affection for her grandchildren and for her animals; her honesty, witty tongue, and humor; her strength and determination in leaving her home more than once to start a new phase in her life; her generosity and warmth, extending not only from the full spread laid out on the table and the wood-burning stove but from Nana’s heart, certainly huge in proportion to her small body. In Jewish tradition, we pray that the memories of those righteous people we have loved and lost will be a blessing to future generations. For Nana, zichrona livracha, may her memory be a blessing.
When we were little, the DeBlosi and Wojcuilewicz grandchildren considered it a milestone to become finally “taller than Nana.” We would each be blessed to be even half as strong, as loving, as amazing, as big a presence as “little Nana.”
For Nana, Emma Rose Sacoccia DeBlosi Wojcuilewicz, 6 June 1913 – 24 November 2007
By granddaughter Nicole Lyn DeBlosi
November 29, 2007
Some people knew her as “Emma,” some as “Ma,” some as “Nana.” Many people here called her “little Nana on the hill”: a tiny woman living on a steep hill in a house surrounded by carefully tended flowers and brimming with objects, food, cats and dogs, grandchildren and great-grandchildren – even great-great-grandchildren.
But to call Nana “little” tells only of her physical stature. With her four-feet and some-odd inches, Nana moved through the world with love, determination, and strength. Growing up in an era when women made few choices, she very much forged ahead, making at times tough calls. She created a wonderful life for herself of which we were each privileged to be a part.
At the age of twenty, already working in a factory and caring for her four younger siblings since her mother died, Nana was eager to start a new life. She told the story with humor, saying she called a relative in Boston to inform her that she would go to Massachusetts and get married. “At that time, I didn’t know who,” Nana laughed, “but I was going!” “Who” turned out to be Leo DeBlosi, my grandfather. They met, chaperoned of course, at a train station in Boston on a Friday. The following Sunday, they were married. Nana described her first husband as “very easygoing and very respectful,” and she recalled with a broad smile how he helped around the house and with their five children. The early days of their marriage were marred by a house fire that left them living in what Nana vividly described as a “bare” apartment that they filled slowly. She joked that, by the time she left Somerville, she had “fifteen truckloads” of things to fill her home—and she wouldn’t venture to estimate how many truckloads she amassed in Townsend with Eddie, her second husband, and their two children.
Many of us have told colorful stories about Nana’s house: the souvenir spoons displayed on wooden racks, the magnets covering the surface of the refrigerator, the collection of wooden shoes in ascending sizes, the ever-multiplying lawn ornaments, the untouched sets of crystal dishes and the table set with mismatched flea market finds. Of course, the objects Nana collected held meaning for her: they are the result of much hard work and determination on her part. And they collectively help to tell a story about the woman who collected them, her tastes and her values. But they cannot compare to the real things of value Nana contributed to the world and to our lives: the children she raised, both biological and foster; the people she nurtured at all stages of life; the strong (at times stubborn) will she modeled to each of us, undoubtedly making us each stronger in turn; even the religious conviction she was willing to follow despite the fact that her family followed another path. “Little” Nana has made an immeasurable impression on each of our lives.
Each of us knew Nana in a different way, by a different name. But each of us is thankful for having known a woman of great humor, generosity, love, compassion, and conviction. Nana lived a long and complex life. She knew hard work, deep loss, tough times, and great love. She made two homes and two families that have remained intertwined, and she taught each of us lessons large and small—from how to make bone soup to how to express our honest opinions.
I have been keenly aware, for the past couple of months, that our loved ones cannot live forever. But I do believe in the importance of sharing our stories about those who have died, passing on their memories. I intend to share what I know of Nana with my own family in the future: her affection for her grandchildren and for her animals; her honesty, witty tongue, and humor; her strength and determination in leaving her home more than once to start a new phase in her life; her generosity and warmth, extending not only from the full spread laid out on the table and the wood-burning stove but from Nana’s heart, certainly huge in proportion to her small body. In Jewish tradition, we pray that the memories of those righteous people we have loved and lost will be a blessing to future generations. For Nana, zichrona livracha, may her memory be a blessing.
When we were little, the DeBlosi and Wojcuilewicz grandchildren considered it a milestone to become finally “taller than Nana.” We would each be blessed to be even half as strong, as loving, as amazing, as big a presence as “little Nana.”
For Nana, Emma Rose Sacoccia DeBlosi Wojcuilewicz, 6 June 1913 – 24 November 2007
By granddaughter Nicole Lyn DeBlosi
November 29, 2007
Thursday, November 18, 2010
BaMakom HaZeh
[The following was a sermon given at Temple Beth Am in Monessen, PA and adapted from a sermon given at Shir Tikva in Winchester, MA. The views expressed here are my own and do not necessarily reflect those of the congregation I am privileged to serve.]
I used to go out to the promenade across the valley from the walls of the Old City of Jerusalem just before sunset, my favorite time in Jerusalem, Yerushalaim shel zahav time—Jerusalem-of-gold time. The time when the slanted rays of the sun hit the sand-colored stones and the entire city shines gold.
Anyone who’s been to Jerusalem knows that it’s just not like anywhere else.
In the Jewish Quarter of the Old City, the narrow alleyways criss-cross sudden courtyards, winding up and down stairs, built upon layers and layers of stones attesting to the special place this hilltop city has held in Jewish history for centuries upon centuries. Suddenly, the city opens up and you’re standing at the Western Wall plaza. Thousands of people stuff notes into the crevices between the stones, carved and set in place during the time of King Herod. But around the corner, at the Southern Wall—that’s the spot I loved best.
The Southern Wall plaza contains a set of stairs leading to arches long since filled in with massive stone blocks. Pilgrims to the ancient Temple climbed these stairs and entered those arches to make sacrifices to God. Before them stood what must have been the largest human-built structure they had ever seen: the Temple of Solomon, and within it, the Holy of Holies. Unlike other sanctuaries of the Ancient Near East, the Temple in Jerusalem contained no statue. Instead, it held the Ark of the Covenant and the tablets on which the finger of God wrote the commandments.
It also held something else: a stone.
Jewish tradition says that the Holy of Holies stood upon the precise peak of Mount Moriah, the very spot where Abraham willingly offered his son Isaac as proof of his loyalty to God. But Abraham wasn’t the only Jewish patriarch to come into contact with that stone. The peak of Mount Moriah served not only as an altar but as a pillow. According to the rabbis, when Jacob camps out in the wilderness, the stone on which he rests his head is indeed the very same stone Abraham used for an altar.
From the Torah: Jacob leaves home to escape his brother Esau’s anger about the stolen birthright. Along his route, Jacob stops to rest, taking a stone for a pillow. In his sleep, “He had a dream; a stairway was set on the ground and its top reached the sky, and angels of God were ascending and descending on it” (28:12).
But Jacob’s experience on that night involved not only a vision of angels and a stairway and a realm beyond human experience.
As Jacob lay on the hard ground, his head upon the stone, he experienced a physical presence. “[Hinei ADONAI] And here is the Eternal [nitzav alaiv] standing beside him.” The God of his father Isaac and of his grandfather Abraham stood, a physical act, with Jacob, promising to give land, prosperity, and blessing to his descendants.
Jacob’s nearness to God motivates and changes him. When he wakes, he wonders aloud at his blindness to the significance of this place:
[Vayikatz Yaakov mishnato vayomer:] And Jacob awoke from his sleep and said: [“Achein! Yeish ADONAI bamakom hazeh v’anochi lo yadati”] “Aha! The Eternal was in this place and I did not know it!” [vayirah vayomar:] and he was shaken/awed/afraid, and he said: [“Mah-nora hamakom hazeh! ] “How awesome is this place! [ein zeh ki im beit elohim v’zeh sha’ar hashamayim”] This is none other than a house of God, and that is the gateway of heaven.” (28:16-18)
Jacob immediately erects a pillar and makes a vow to honor Adonai as his God.
While we tend to think of the presence of God as spiritual, we are strongly encouraged in this Torah portion to imagine the presence of God as physical—as upon us, aleinu. Jacob experienced the presence of God as an overwhelming, physical, bodily sensation. There was the Eternal in this place, here, at that very moment.
We might lament that we have no such opportunity. God simply doesn’t do that anymore. Or we might think, perhaps God appears in Jerusalem, at the peak of Mount Moriah, but not in the Monongahela Valley!
Jacob’s reply can guide us: [“Achein! Yeish ADONAI bamakom hazeh] “Aha! There was the Eternal in this place [v’anochi lo yadati] and I did not know it!” (28:16). In Hebrew, personal pronouns are not necessary; verbs tell us all we need to know about both actor and action. Here, however, we read “v’anochi”—and I—“lo yadati”—I did not know. “There was the Eternal in this place and I, I did not know.”
In other words, how could I not have known? How could I not have seen? How could I not have felt? What was it about me that prevented me from recognizing the presence of God bamakom hazeh, in this place?
Torah commentators pore over the exact, earthly location of Jacob’s dream site. Rashi infers from this passage a remarkable reshaping of the physical world that brings Jacob close to important sites in the history of the covenant between God and Israel: “God folded the entire Land of Israel beneath [Jacob]” (Genesis Rabbah). Jacob’s pillow represents layer upon layer of sacred spots: Hamakom hazeh, “this place,” is at once the site of Abraham’s prayer and worship; Mt. Moriah, the place of the near-sacrifice of Isaac; and the field where Isaac prayed after his ordeal. Rashi argues that “this place” is extraordinary, linked to the Jewish past and deeply significant to the covenant between God and Israel.
We can wait for a dream of our own—one in which we are seamlessly folded into the Jewish past—but this is not the only way our Torah portion imagines the potential for humans to encounter the Divine.
Perhaps the key is that God was indeed bamakom hazeh, in this place—not at the top of the stairway, not behind the gate of heaven, but standing over Jacob, who slept on the hard ground with a rock for a pillow. What if that rock was “just” a rock?
Standing on the stairs by the Southern Wall in Jerusalem, it’s all too easy to think, “Achein! ” The rise is steep; you are truly climbing, the closed arches before you, behind you, the rocky hills of Jerusalem and beyond, the expanse of the desert and the looming mountains of Morav. Awesome.
In arguing that God provided a very special pillow for Jacob, the rabbis imply that certain places offer unique access to the divine.
When we pray in this sanctuary, do we have a special access to God? Do you feel differently in this room than you do in your living room? I do. But I am not sure that what is different about this place is the presence of the sefer Torah or the smooth stone surrounding the ark or the lovingly-tended and beautiful mantles covering the scrools. I am not sure it is the physical structure, this building with its ritual objects and works of art, its Talmud volumes and schooldesks. Rather, what makes this place sacred, what makes this place a Beit Elohim is you, is us, is the community we form each month when we gather to hear the words of our tradition, the community that continues to nurture one another in very real ways throughout the year, throughout the lives of each of its members. What makes this space sacred are the memories of b’nei mitzvah celebrated on this bima, offers of food and sympathy carried to a mourner’s house, the names of this community’s ancestors displayed on the memorial plaques, holiday dinners shared down in the social hall, lively arguments at Torah study. This Beth Am, a house of the people, is indeed a Beit Elohim, a House of God. Like Jacob’s dream-place, like hamakom hazeh, this place offers us a vision of a stairway to the divine.
Jerusalem is special. And being in this sanctuary helps many of us to differently focus our attention toward Jewish ideals, our own Jewish memories, and the Divine. But we learn in this week’s Torah portion that we can connect to our Jewish tradition in any and every place. God manifested in an ordinary place, a physical spot in the real, tangible world. The fact that Jacob, upon waking, builds not a temple or a palace but a pillar, a marker for the next passerby, suggests not that bamakom hazeh is the lone, particular, special dwelling-place of the God of our ancestors, but that we, if we are open to it, can experience the presence of God in the places where we find ourselves.
So, despite the rabbis’ confidence that Jacob’s makom hazeh marks an actual location in Israel, we need not conclude that we can find God in only a finite number of places. Rather, our tradition tells us that God loves the Jewish people enough to transform any place—even a bed on the ground and a stone pillow—into a space in which we experience God’s nearness. If we are open to the surprise (Achein! ), we too might find God bamakom hazeh, in this place. As Lawrence Kushner writes, “There is another world, right here within this one, whenever we pay attention” (Jewish Lights Publishing, 2006: 25). We can open our hearts and minds to the surprise that, unbeknownst to us, God has been bamakom hazeh, in this place, all along.
I used to go out to the promenade across the valley from the walls of the Old City of Jerusalem just before sunset, my favorite time in Jerusalem, Yerushalaim shel zahav time—Jerusalem-of-gold time. The time when the slanted rays of the sun hit the sand-colored stones and the entire city shines gold.
Anyone who’s been to Jerusalem knows that it’s just not like anywhere else.
In the Jewish Quarter of the Old City, the narrow alleyways criss-cross sudden courtyards, winding up and down stairs, built upon layers and layers of stones attesting to the special place this hilltop city has held in Jewish history for centuries upon centuries. Suddenly, the city opens up and you’re standing at the Western Wall plaza. Thousands of people stuff notes into the crevices between the stones, carved and set in place during the time of King Herod. But around the corner, at the Southern Wall—that’s the spot I loved best.
The Southern Wall plaza contains a set of stairs leading to arches long since filled in with massive stone blocks. Pilgrims to the ancient Temple climbed these stairs and entered those arches to make sacrifices to God. Before them stood what must have been the largest human-built structure they had ever seen: the Temple of Solomon, and within it, the Holy of Holies. Unlike other sanctuaries of the Ancient Near East, the Temple in Jerusalem contained no statue. Instead, it held the Ark of the Covenant and the tablets on which the finger of God wrote the commandments.
It also held something else: a stone.
Jewish tradition says that the Holy of Holies stood upon the precise peak of Mount Moriah, the very spot where Abraham willingly offered his son Isaac as proof of his loyalty to God. But Abraham wasn’t the only Jewish patriarch to come into contact with that stone. The peak of Mount Moriah served not only as an altar but as a pillow. According to the rabbis, when Jacob camps out in the wilderness, the stone on which he rests his head is indeed the very same stone Abraham used for an altar.
From the Torah: Jacob leaves home to escape his brother Esau’s anger about the stolen birthright. Along his route, Jacob stops to rest, taking a stone for a pillow. In his sleep, “He had a dream; a stairway was set on the ground and its top reached the sky, and angels of God were ascending and descending on it” (28:12).
But Jacob’s experience on that night involved not only a vision of angels and a stairway and a realm beyond human experience.
As Jacob lay on the hard ground, his head upon the stone, he experienced a physical presence. “[Hinei ADONAI] And here is the Eternal [nitzav alaiv] standing beside him.” The God of his father Isaac and of his grandfather Abraham stood, a physical act, with Jacob, promising to give land, prosperity, and blessing to his descendants.
Jacob’s nearness to God motivates and changes him. When he wakes, he wonders aloud at his blindness to the significance of this place:
[Vayikatz Yaakov mishnato vayomer:] And Jacob awoke from his sleep and said: [“Achein! Yeish ADONAI bamakom hazeh v’anochi lo yadati”] “Aha! The Eternal was in this place and I did not know it!” [vayirah vayomar:] and he was shaken/awed/afraid, and he said: [“Mah-nora hamakom hazeh! ] “How awesome is this place! [ein zeh ki im beit elohim v’zeh sha’ar hashamayim”] This is none other than a house of God, and that is the gateway of heaven.” (28:16-18)
Jacob immediately erects a pillar and makes a vow to honor Adonai as his God.
While we tend to think of the presence of God as spiritual, we are strongly encouraged in this Torah portion to imagine the presence of God as physical—as upon us, aleinu. Jacob experienced the presence of God as an overwhelming, physical, bodily sensation. There was the Eternal in this place, here, at that very moment.
We might lament that we have no such opportunity. God simply doesn’t do that anymore. Or we might think, perhaps God appears in Jerusalem, at the peak of Mount Moriah, but not in the Monongahela Valley!
Jacob’s reply can guide us: [“Achein! Yeish ADONAI bamakom hazeh] “Aha! There was the Eternal in this place [v’anochi lo yadati] and I did not know it!” (28:16). In Hebrew, personal pronouns are not necessary; verbs tell us all we need to know about both actor and action. Here, however, we read “v’anochi”—and I—“lo yadati”—I did not know. “There was the Eternal in this place and I, I did not know.”
In other words, how could I not have known? How could I not have seen? How could I not have felt? What was it about me that prevented me from recognizing the presence of God bamakom hazeh, in this place?
Torah commentators pore over the exact, earthly location of Jacob’s dream site. Rashi infers from this passage a remarkable reshaping of the physical world that brings Jacob close to important sites in the history of the covenant between God and Israel: “God folded the entire Land of Israel beneath [Jacob]” (Genesis Rabbah). Jacob’s pillow represents layer upon layer of sacred spots: Hamakom hazeh, “this place,” is at once the site of Abraham’s prayer and worship; Mt. Moriah, the place of the near-sacrifice of Isaac; and the field where Isaac prayed after his ordeal. Rashi argues that “this place” is extraordinary, linked to the Jewish past and deeply significant to the covenant between God and Israel.
We can wait for a dream of our own—one in which we are seamlessly folded into the Jewish past—but this is not the only way our Torah portion imagines the potential for humans to encounter the Divine.
Perhaps the key is that God was indeed bamakom hazeh, in this place—not at the top of the stairway, not behind the gate of heaven, but standing over Jacob, who slept on the hard ground with a rock for a pillow. What if that rock was “just” a rock?
Standing on the stairs by the Southern Wall in Jerusalem, it’s all too easy to think, “Achein! ” The rise is steep; you are truly climbing, the closed arches before you, behind you, the rocky hills of Jerusalem and beyond, the expanse of the desert and the looming mountains of Morav. Awesome.
In arguing that God provided a very special pillow for Jacob, the rabbis imply that certain places offer unique access to the divine.
When we pray in this sanctuary, do we have a special access to God? Do you feel differently in this room than you do in your living room? I do. But I am not sure that what is different about this place is the presence of the sefer Torah or the smooth stone surrounding the ark or the lovingly-tended and beautiful mantles covering the scrools. I am not sure it is the physical structure, this building with its ritual objects and works of art, its Talmud volumes and schooldesks. Rather, what makes this place sacred, what makes this place a Beit Elohim is you, is us, is the community we form each month when we gather to hear the words of our tradition, the community that continues to nurture one another in very real ways throughout the year, throughout the lives of each of its members. What makes this space sacred are the memories of b’nei mitzvah celebrated on this bima, offers of food and sympathy carried to a mourner’s house, the names of this community’s ancestors displayed on the memorial plaques, holiday dinners shared down in the social hall, lively arguments at Torah study. This Beth Am, a house of the people, is indeed a Beit Elohim, a House of God. Like Jacob’s dream-place, like hamakom hazeh, this place offers us a vision of a stairway to the divine.
Jerusalem is special. And being in this sanctuary helps many of us to differently focus our attention toward Jewish ideals, our own Jewish memories, and the Divine. But we learn in this week’s Torah portion that we can connect to our Jewish tradition in any and every place. God manifested in an ordinary place, a physical spot in the real, tangible world. The fact that Jacob, upon waking, builds not a temple or a palace but a pillar, a marker for the next passerby, suggests not that bamakom hazeh is the lone, particular, special dwelling-place of the God of our ancestors, but that we, if we are open to it, can experience the presence of God in the places where we find ourselves.
So, despite the rabbis’ confidence that Jacob’s makom hazeh marks an actual location in Israel, we need not conclude that we can find God in only a finite number of places. Rather, our tradition tells us that God loves the Jewish people enough to transform any place—even a bed on the ground and a stone pillow—into a space in which we experience God’s nearness. If we are open to the surprise (Achein! ), we too might find God bamakom hazeh, in this place. As Lawrence Kushner writes, “There is another world, right here within this one, whenever we pay attention” (Jewish Lights Publishing, 2006: 25). We can open our hearts and minds to the surprise that, unbeknownst to us, God has been bamakom hazeh, in this place, all along.
Tuesday, November 16, 2010
Generation Ger
Somewhere in the back of my mind I always remember writing these papers for Mrs. Steinberg’s English class: a book review of Elie Wiesel’s Night, a reaction paper about the documentary Shoah, and a term paper on the Holocaust. I can recall the emotion more than the content: the shock, the disbelief, the sick emptiness in the pit of my stomach, the indignant anger, the tears welling up from a deep, deep place.
Until eighth grade world history class, I had remained utterly ignorant of the Shoah (the Hebrew term for the Nazi genocide of Jews during World War II). And then at age fourteen, I read obsessively—angry and weeping—about the cattle cars and the starvation, the selections and the gas chambers. The sheer information overwhelmed me. How could that have happened, then? But it was in Mrs. Steinberg’s class that I first saw the haunting images and started thinking about the Shoah in broader terms. Why? I asked, and the deeper question, How? How could human beings come to despise other human beings so, to ignore their humanity? There is no doubt that Mrs. Steinberg’s classes on the Holocaust left their mark on me, confirmed some things I knew about myself and my values and changed me, too, changed me down to my soul.
I’ve been thinking about those classes and those papers lately, reading an essay by Rabbi Harold M. Schulweiss called “The Stranger in our Mirror” and some other materials I read in preparation for a rabbinical school retreat on conversion and “outreach” (a term usually applied to Jewish efforts to include interfaith families in community and religious life). I read the materials alongside that week’s Torah portion, Toledot, a section that highlights the conflict between twin brothers Jacob and Esau. Rabbi Schulweiss notes that the Holocaust no longer unites the Jewish people as it had in the past; indeed, we spoke about this in our rabbinical school history class last year—the increasing personal distance from the Shoah, the aging and death of survivors, and the dilemma that seems to present for Hebrew School curricula. What happens to Jewish identity and Jewish memory when there is no longer a biological, generational connection to the formative events of the Jewish past?
So it was strange to have these ideas floating around in my head when I climbed up to my parents’ attic to clear out some of my childhood mementoes. Among the stuffed animals and the She-Ra action figures I found a box stuffed with writings—fraught, overworked, terrible poetry and essays on Steinbeck… and my paper on Night. So strange, to see my own concerns about the dehumanization of the Shoah laid out in prose upon paper, when I know the panic and the disgust I felt in even considering that slow and insidious process of transforming human beings into vermin. More surprising still were Mrs. Steinberg’s comments at the end of the paper, in red pen: “I’m reading [this essay] in the cafeteria of St. Elizabeth’s Hospital, where my father was given new life by the opposite of the monsters who could supply only death. […] How joyful I feel to read an essay like this from someone who will be on the side of good, not evil, to accomplish rather than destroy. L’Chaim!”
I’m sure I had no idea what “L’chaim” meant—my Yentl and Fiddler on the Roof phase began later, sparked in part by this class, no doubt. L’chaim—to life! Reading it now, that “L’Chaim!” takes on a different significance. In a way, it becomes part of my ancestry.
In Toledot, finding one’s place in the ancestry of the Jewish people is a complicated struggle. Jacob and Esau bitterly battle over the birthright; Esau even vows to murder his usurping young brother; the two are not reunited until later in the tale, after Jacob has been reassured by God that the fate of the Jewish people lay with him and his sons. Before the twins are born, Rebekah learns, “Two peoples are in your belly, two nations shall branch off from each other, from your womb. One people shall prevail over the other; the elder shall serve the younger” (25: 23). These verses became proof texts in the generations of conflict, suspicion, and hatred between Jews and Christians. And in this week’s parasha we also read of Esau’s marriage to two Hittite women—women who “were marat ruach—a bitterness of spirit to Isaac and Rebekah” (26:35). Esau’s pain reaches us through both his actions and his words. In an effort to win his parents’ approval, he takes another wife, one of the daughters of Ishmael, son of Abraham (28:6-9). And when he learns that Isaac has already bestowed his blessing on Jacob, he pleads, barcheni gam ani, avi—“Bless me—me, too, father!” (27:34).
Esau, a Jew born to a patriarch and a matriarch of our faith, feels left out of the story of our generations. I can identify with that, as I am sure many of us can. It is difficult to hear that even the Sages are suspicious of any taint of non-Jewish family creeping into the line of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. They argue, in Genesis Rabah, that Rebekah, daughter of idolatrous priests, might not have been bothered so much by Esau’s Canaanite wives because she herself had non-Jewish family.
I’m not sure I want Rebekah, or Isaac for that matter, to have been so very upset about their son’s marriages, but what also bothers me is the Sages’ assumption that anyone with non-Jewish family ties (like Rebekah) is inherently less invested in the future of Judaism. It’s the same argument about the constant “threat” of intermarriage and a dwindling Jewish population. I know there are piles of statistics about “the children of interfaith marriages” and the lack of Jewish observance in interfaith households, but those statistics have been changing, and in part any lack of observance might stem from the marginalization of interfaith families in our synagogues and communities. And, indeed, those statistics blur the fact that we’re talking about people—and I mean really, concretely, people we know. Me. So many of my classmates, colleagues, and friends who are ourselves converts or the children of converts or proud Jewish descendants of one Jewish and one non-Jewish parent. Moreover, I saw in the readings for the retreated I attended that so many researchers lump together the children of converts and the children of interfaith families, and both are a source for “alarm” because we lack a biological connection to the generations of the Jewish people. Schulweiss, for example, writes, “[H]e who chooses for Judaism one day may opt to choose out of Judaism another day or else his child may. In halakhic [that is, Jewish legal] terms the infant of a Jewish womb, whatever he/she may later choose, is irrevocably Jewish.”
What does it mean to be “irrevocably” Jewish? How does it feel to be the child of an interfaith family or a convert to Judaism and hear those words? Or to ask a related question, is biology destiny? Can we connect to the generations of the Jewish people—of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, of Sarah, Rebekach, Rachel and Leah—no matter our blood or our heritage or our family name? What of the emotional connection I, and others like me, felt when learning about the Shoa?
I would not deny that biology is important. My parents, my Italian-American heritage, my sincere and at least for a time nourishing Catholic background—these affect me, shape me, and neither can I simply will them away, nor would I want to. And biology matters in the history and the future of the Jewish people—a Jew by birth who denies his Judaism can still fall victim to bigotry, as we know all too well. But, in terms of the future of the Judaism I love, the Judaism we teach, I think biology is emotion, at its root. The biology we care about, at least. That biology, those generations, are the stories and memories that we tell and inherit and claim. That biology is about relationships and values far more than it is about blood and pedigree.
Being a part of the generations of the Jewish people is about the smell of Bubbe’s challah baking in the oven, the tzedakah [literally “righteousness” but related also to the modern notion of charity] projects children and parents create together, the response to schoolyard bullying that stems from the knowledge that all people are created b’tzelem Elohim [in the image of God], the conversations we have as a community about Kosher laws and other ritual commandments. Judaism emerges in community, through lived values.
A Brandeis study we read on outreach and inclusion urges Jewish professionals to consider conversion “the first, rather than the last step in creating a Jewish identity.” I would argue that birth, too, is simply a first step. There is nothing inevitable about how a Jew-by-birth will live the values of Judaism in her life—just as there is nothing inevitable about how a new Jew, newly named and emerged from the mikveh, will live the values of Judaism in hers. Both need the support and the prodding of a community of Jews who struggle to figure out what these ancient texts and longstanding practices mean.
Our teacher Rabbi Lawrence Hoffman puts out a call to the leaders of the Jewish communities of the very near future, leaders whose approach to living Judaism will affect converts and prospective converts, interfaith families, and born Jews. In his book Re-Thinking Synagogues, he adamantly urges that Judaism must be a religion for us, and not “ethnic nostalgia.” By “religion” Dr. Hoffman means a combination of spirituality and ethics that speaks to the realities of our contemporary lives. He writes, “The only question that counts for us is ‘Why be Jewish?’”
The answer to that question cannot be only, “I am Jewish because I am the son of Jacob and of Isaac and of Abraham.” It cannot be solely, “I am Jewish because my blood is Jewish.” When the Central Conference of American Rabbis, the professional organization for Reform Rabbis in North America, asks converts to commit to establishing a Jewish home, it points to “the presence of items such as Jewish books, Jewish music, Jewish art, a tzedakah box, and mezuzah, as well as adopting Jewish practices” like saying certain prayers. But the presence of ritual objects and the recitation of prayers say little about the deep, emotional, and resonant concerns of people’s lives. Objects and prayers are empty without the values and the ethics that underlie them. I want to have a conversation about those values; I want that conversation to be what carries me and my classmates through our relationship together as colleages, as rabbis, as cantors, as educators, as Jews, and as descendants and heirs of the generations of the Jewish people, bound in a covenant that leads us to act in the world in loving-kindness and in justice.
V’eileh toldot Yitzhak ben Avraham, “And these are the generations of Isaac, son of Abraham” (Genesis 25:19). What are our generations? A list of names tracing blood and biology, egg and sperm? Or something more? Stories that take time to unfold and reveal. The light in our students’ eyes when they make a connection between the Torah and their daily lives. These are our generations. V’eileh toledotai, and these are my generations: Nicole Lyn, daughter of Janice and Bob, granddaughter of Emma Rose, Dvora Nechama bat Avraham v’Sarah, and a child, too, of Mrs. Steinberg.
Until eighth grade world history class, I had remained utterly ignorant of the Shoah (the Hebrew term for the Nazi genocide of Jews during World War II). And then at age fourteen, I read obsessively—angry and weeping—about the cattle cars and the starvation, the selections and the gas chambers. The sheer information overwhelmed me. How could that have happened, then? But it was in Mrs. Steinberg’s class that I first saw the haunting images and started thinking about the Shoah in broader terms. Why? I asked, and the deeper question, How? How could human beings come to despise other human beings so, to ignore their humanity? There is no doubt that Mrs. Steinberg’s classes on the Holocaust left their mark on me, confirmed some things I knew about myself and my values and changed me, too, changed me down to my soul.
I’ve been thinking about those classes and those papers lately, reading an essay by Rabbi Harold M. Schulweiss called “The Stranger in our Mirror” and some other materials I read in preparation for a rabbinical school retreat on conversion and “outreach” (a term usually applied to Jewish efforts to include interfaith families in community and religious life). I read the materials alongside that week’s Torah portion, Toledot, a section that highlights the conflict between twin brothers Jacob and Esau. Rabbi Schulweiss notes that the Holocaust no longer unites the Jewish people as it had in the past; indeed, we spoke about this in our rabbinical school history class last year—the increasing personal distance from the Shoah, the aging and death of survivors, and the dilemma that seems to present for Hebrew School curricula. What happens to Jewish identity and Jewish memory when there is no longer a biological, generational connection to the formative events of the Jewish past?
So it was strange to have these ideas floating around in my head when I climbed up to my parents’ attic to clear out some of my childhood mementoes. Among the stuffed animals and the She-Ra action figures I found a box stuffed with writings—fraught, overworked, terrible poetry and essays on Steinbeck… and my paper on Night. So strange, to see my own concerns about the dehumanization of the Shoah laid out in prose upon paper, when I know the panic and the disgust I felt in even considering that slow and insidious process of transforming human beings into vermin. More surprising still were Mrs. Steinberg’s comments at the end of the paper, in red pen: “I’m reading [this essay] in the cafeteria of St. Elizabeth’s Hospital, where my father was given new life by the opposite of the monsters who could supply only death. […] How joyful I feel to read an essay like this from someone who will be on the side of good, not evil, to accomplish rather than destroy. L’Chaim!”
I’m sure I had no idea what “L’chaim” meant—my Yentl and Fiddler on the Roof phase began later, sparked in part by this class, no doubt. L’chaim—to life! Reading it now, that “L’Chaim!” takes on a different significance. In a way, it becomes part of my ancestry.
In Toledot, finding one’s place in the ancestry of the Jewish people is a complicated struggle. Jacob and Esau bitterly battle over the birthright; Esau even vows to murder his usurping young brother; the two are not reunited until later in the tale, after Jacob has been reassured by God that the fate of the Jewish people lay with him and his sons. Before the twins are born, Rebekah learns, “Two peoples are in your belly, two nations shall branch off from each other, from your womb. One people shall prevail over the other; the elder shall serve the younger” (25: 23). These verses became proof texts in the generations of conflict, suspicion, and hatred between Jews and Christians. And in this week’s parasha we also read of Esau’s marriage to two Hittite women—women who “were marat ruach—a bitterness of spirit to Isaac and Rebekah” (26:35). Esau’s pain reaches us through both his actions and his words. In an effort to win his parents’ approval, he takes another wife, one of the daughters of Ishmael, son of Abraham (28:6-9). And when he learns that Isaac has already bestowed his blessing on Jacob, he pleads, barcheni gam ani, avi—“Bless me—me, too, father!” (27:34).
Esau, a Jew born to a patriarch and a matriarch of our faith, feels left out of the story of our generations. I can identify with that, as I am sure many of us can. It is difficult to hear that even the Sages are suspicious of any taint of non-Jewish family creeping into the line of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. They argue, in Genesis Rabah, that Rebekah, daughter of idolatrous priests, might not have been bothered so much by Esau’s Canaanite wives because she herself had non-Jewish family.
I’m not sure I want Rebekah, or Isaac for that matter, to have been so very upset about their son’s marriages, but what also bothers me is the Sages’ assumption that anyone with non-Jewish family ties (like Rebekah) is inherently less invested in the future of Judaism. It’s the same argument about the constant “threat” of intermarriage and a dwindling Jewish population. I know there are piles of statistics about “the children of interfaith marriages” and the lack of Jewish observance in interfaith households, but those statistics have been changing, and in part any lack of observance might stem from the marginalization of interfaith families in our synagogues and communities. And, indeed, those statistics blur the fact that we’re talking about people—and I mean really, concretely, people we know. Me. So many of my classmates, colleagues, and friends who are ourselves converts or the children of converts or proud Jewish descendants of one Jewish and one non-Jewish parent. Moreover, I saw in the readings for the retreated I attended that so many researchers lump together the children of converts and the children of interfaith families, and both are a source for “alarm” because we lack a biological connection to the generations of the Jewish people. Schulweiss, for example, writes, “[H]e who chooses for Judaism one day may opt to choose out of Judaism another day or else his child may. In halakhic [that is, Jewish legal] terms the infant of a Jewish womb, whatever he/she may later choose, is irrevocably Jewish.”
What does it mean to be “irrevocably” Jewish? How does it feel to be the child of an interfaith family or a convert to Judaism and hear those words? Or to ask a related question, is biology destiny? Can we connect to the generations of the Jewish people—of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, of Sarah, Rebekach, Rachel and Leah—no matter our blood or our heritage or our family name? What of the emotional connection I, and others like me, felt when learning about the Shoa?
I would not deny that biology is important. My parents, my Italian-American heritage, my sincere and at least for a time nourishing Catholic background—these affect me, shape me, and neither can I simply will them away, nor would I want to. And biology matters in the history and the future of the Jewish people—a Jew by birth who denies his Judaism can still fall victim to bigotry, as we know all too well. But, in terms of the future of the Judaism I love, the Judaism we teach, I think biology is emotion, at its root. The biology we care about, at least. That biology, those generations, are the stories and memories that we tell and inherit and claim. That biology is about relationships and values far more than it is about blood and pedigree.
Being a part of the generations of the Jewish people is about the smell of Bubbe’s challah baking in the oven, the tzedakah [literally “righteousness” but related also to the modern notion of charity] projects children and parents create together, the response to schoolyard bullying that stems from the knowledge that all people are created b’tzelem Elohim [in the image of God], the conversations we have as a community about Kosher laws and other ritual commandments. Judaism emerges in community, through lived values.
A Brandeis study we read on outreach and inclusion urges Jewish professionals to consider conversion “the first, rather than the last step in creating a Jewish identity.” I would argue that birth, too, is simply a first step. There is nothing inevitable about how a Jew-by-birth will live the values of Judaism in her life—just as there is nothing inevitable about how a new Jew, newly named and emerged from the mikveh, will live the values of Judaism in hers. Both need the support and the prodding of a community of Jews who struggle to figure out what these ancient texts and longstanding practices mean.
Our teacher Rabbi Lawrence Hoffman puts out a call to the leaders of the Jewish communities of the very near future, leaders whose approach to living Judaism will affect converts and prospective converts, interfaith families, and born Jews. In his book Re-Thinking Synagogues, he adamantly urges that Judaism must be a religion for us, and not “ethnic nostalgia.” By “religion” Dr. Hoffman means a combination of spirituality and ethics that speaks to the realities of our contemporary lives. He writes, “The only question that counts for us is ‘Why be Jewish?’”
The answer to that question cannot be only, “I am Jewish because I am the son of Jacob and of Isaac and of Abraham.” It cannot be solely, “I am Jewish because my blood is Jewish.” When the Central Conference of American Rabbis, the professional organization for Reform Rabbis in North America, asks converts to commit to establishing a Jewish home, it points to “the presence of items such as Jewish books, Jewish music, Jewish art, a tzedakah box, and mezuzah, as well as adopting Jewish practices” like saying certain prayers. But the presence of ritual objects and the recitation of prayers say little about the deep, emotional, and resonant concerns of people’s lives. Objects and prayers are empty without the values and the ethics that underlie them. I want to have a conversation about those values; I want that conversation to be what carries me and my classmates through our relationship together as colleages, as rabbis, as cantors, as educators, as Jews, and as descendants and heirs of the generations of the Jewish people, bound in a covenant that leads us to act in the world in loving-kindness and in justice.
V’eileh toldot Yitzhak ben Avraham, “And these are the generations of Isaac, son of Abraham” (Genesis 25:19). What are our generations? A list of names tracing blood and biology, egg and sperm? Or something more? Stories that take time to unfold and reveal. The light in our students’ eyes when they make a connection between the Torah and their daily lives. These are our generations. V’eileh toledotai, and these are my generations: Nicole Lyn, daughter of Janice and Bob, granddaughter of Emma Rose, Dvora Nechama bat Avraham v’Sarah, and a child, too, of Mrs. Steinberg.
Saturday, October 9, 2010
Changing Expectations
[The following was a sermon for Temple Beth Am, Monessen, PA, on Shabbat Noach. The views expressed here are my own and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the community I am honored to serve this year.]
The story of Noah and the flood is a tale of violence, destruction, and renewal. Just last Shabbat Jews across the globe read of the creation of a world God unequivocally proclaimed “good”; indeed, after the sixth day of creation, the day on which adam, the human being, was made, God pronounces v’hinei tov m’od—“and behold! It was very good” (Genesis 1:31). As generations live and die upon the earth, however, something goes terribly wrong: “The earth became corrupt before God; the earth was filled with violence” (6:11). God decides to drown all of creation in the chaotic waters of the Flood; the only person God warns of this plan and the impending doom is Noah, whom the Torah describes as ish tzadik, a righteous person (6:9). God instructions Noah to build an ark, to save his family, and to preserve pairs of animals to repopulate the world after the Flood waters recede.
For forty days the rains pour down, and the water rises so high that even the tallest mountains are submerged in its depths. For one hundred and fifty days Noah and the other inhabitants of the ark float upon the surface, their futures uncertain.
During the Days of Awe, our futures, too, were uncertain, and in that uncertainty we called out, “yizkor”—May God remember. May God remember our loved ones who have died, we pleaded; may God remember the good deeds of all our ancestors, judging us less harshly on their account; may God remember the covenant with Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and all Israel.
In the story of Noah, God remembers:vayizkor elohim et Noach v’et kol ha’chaya v’et kol ha’behema asher ito bateiva, vaya’aver Elohim ruach al ha’aretz vayashku hamayim—“God then remembered Noah and all the animals and all the beasts that were with him in the ark, and God caused a wind to sweep over the earth, and the waters subsided” (8:1).
After the Flood, God takes care that this remembering will always serve for renewal, not destruction: “And when I cause clouds to form over the earth, and the bow appears in the cloud,” God proclaims to Noah, “I will remember My covenant between Me and you and all living beings, all flesh, and never again shall the waters become a flood, to destroy all flesh. When the bow is in the cloud, and I see it, I will remember the everlasting covenant between God and all living beings, all that live upon the earth” (9:14-16).
God makes a covenant with Noah, charging Noah and his descendants, like Adam and Eve, to be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth, and prohibiting violence and murder. God reminds Noah and his descendants that human life is precious, ki b’tzelem Elohim asah et ha’adam, for human beings were made in the image of God” (9:6).
How are these survivors of the devastating Flood, human beings, made in the image of God, different from the souls drowned in the waters that rose higher than the mountains? What changed after the Flood?
“The earth became corrupt before God; the earth was filled with violence” (6:11) God brings the Flood to wipe away the corruption and violence, leaving the earth to the descendants of Noah, a righteous man. But it is not the nature of human beings that changes after the Flood; as biblical scholar Tamar Cohn Ezkenazi argues, it is God’s expectations of human beings that changes.
Before the Flood, at the end of last week’s parasha, God decides to destroy the first creation: “And the Eternal saw how great was the wickedness of human brings on the earth,” v’chol yeitzer machs’vot libo rak ra kol ha’yom—“and the entire inclination of the thoughts of their hearts was only wicked all the time, the Eternal regretted that He had made human beings upon the earth, and was heartsick. And God said, ‘I will wipe the human beings that I have created from off the face of the earth […] for I regret that I made them’” (6:6-7). Saddened and disappointed, God destroys the works of God’s own creation, human beings corrupt in their yeitzer, their inclination and instinct.
After the Flood, Noah builds an altar and offers sacrifices to God. In verses I chanted this evening, we learn, “The Eternal, inhaling the soothing fragrance, thought: ‘Never again will I bring doom upon the world on account of what people do,” ki yeitzer leiv ha’adam ra mi’n’urav—“though the inclination of the heart of the human is evil from his youth; never again will I destroy all living beings as I have done’” (8:21). Eskenazi finds this verse “striking,” for it represents “God’s change of heart” (WTC). What changes in the Flood?
The story of Noah shares some similarities with the creation story: the waters of the flood parallel the waters described in the time of tohu va’vohu, the unformed chaos that immediately precedes God’s first act of creation (Gen 1:2); the ruah Elohim—the breath or spirit or wind of God that “hovers” over the water just before God speaks, “Let there be light” (1:2-3)—can be likened to the ruach God sends to blow away the waters of the Flood (8:1). But Noah’s story is not the tale of a completely new creation, resulting in some new human being free of the potential for corruption and violence displayed by the preceding generations drowned in the Flood waters of God’s disappointment and anger. The human beings formed in Genesis, those drowned in the Flood, and the survivors, the descendants of Noah who are blessed to enter into a covenant with God—each of these human beings possesses a yeitzer, an inclination or instinct, toward evil, corruption, and violence. Human beings do not emerge from the ark changed; rather, as Eskenasi writes, “The transgressions that led to the Flood transform God’s expectations. They result in new rules to guide humankind and a promise of a perpetual covenant” (WTC 44, emphasis added). According to Eskenazi’s interpretation, the covenant God makes with Noah, a covenant that brings both responsibilities and rewards, is one that “aim[s] at channeling impulses and containing them” (Ibid.) God will never again Flood the earth, but not because human beings will never again distress God’s heart so with our wickedness, corruption, and violence. Instead, God acknowledges the limitations of these beings created b’tzelem Elohim, in the image of God, but created, too, with free will, with a yeitzer, an inclination or drive, that can sometimes lead us astray.
The Sages argued that we were created with two yeitzers, a yeitzer ha-tov as well as a yeitzer ha-ra. In the Torah, when God forms the animals, the text reads, and God “formed,” vayitzer, spelled with one yud (2:19). But when God forms the first human being, the text reads, and God “formed,” vayitzer—with two yuds (2:7). Why? Why is the same word spelled in two different ways in the Torah? In the Talmud, Rabbi Nachman explains that the two yuds “show that God created two inclinations, one good and the other evil” (Bavli Berakhot 61a). Both the yeitzer ha-tov, the impulse toward good, and the yeitzer ha-ra, the impulse toward evil, were created in us by God, the same God who created us b’tzelem Elohim, in God’s own image. Indeed, the Sages, in the midrash collection Genesis Rabbah, find the yeitzer ha-ra in the story of the first creation, on that sixth day when God creates the first human being and declares, v’hinei tov m’od—“Behold! It was very good” (Gen 1:31). Believing that no word in the Torah is superfluous, the Sages wonder why, on this day, the Torah declares not just hinei tov (“it is good”) but hinei tov m’od (“it is very good”). Rabbi Nachman responds that tov m’od—“very good”—indicates both the yeitzer ha-tov and the yeitzer ha-ra (Genesis Rabbah 9:7). “Can the yeitzer ha-ra be good?” the Sages chorus. Indeed, it can: “But for the yeitzer ha-ra […] no man would build a house, take a wife and beget children” (Ibid.). Our impulses and drives lead us to all kinds of endeavors and actions, some of them good, some of them wicked. Our impulses motivate us to take action in our lives.
From a midrash on the Noah story, Genesis chapter eight verse twenty-one:
If you argue: “Is it not the Holy One Himself who created the impulse to evil, of which it is written, yeitzer leiv ha’adam ra mi’n’urav—‘The impulse of man’s heart was evil from the time he was expelled from his mother’s womb’? Who then can possibly make it good?” the Holy One replies, “You are the one who makes the impulse to evil stay evil. How? When you were a child, you did not sin. Only when you grew up, you began to sin.” If you argue: “But no man can guard himself against it!” the Holy One replies, “How many things in the world are even less bearable and more bitter than the impulse to evil, yet you manage to sweeten them. […] if you sweeten for your need bitter things that I alone created, all the greater is your responsibility for the impulse to evil, which was placed under your control.” (Sefer ha-Aggadot quoting Genesis Rabbah).
In this imagined argument, God reminds us that we have the power to shape our own actions, that our yeitzer is an impulse, not a mandate. It is up to us to discern when our impulses are good and when they are wicked. It is up to us to take responsibility for the choices we make in reaction to the realities we face. Our drives and impulses, like our skin color or our nationality, are accidents of our birth. We cannot control how we are made, how we emotionally respond to the world. But we can control what we do with our emotions and our impulses and our drives.
God takes mercy on human beings after the Flood, not because we emerged from the ark all tzadikim, all righteous like Noah, but because God decided to deal with our humanness differently. Human beings are capable of good and of wickedness; our drives and impulses sometimes lead us astray. Shall God utterly destroy us all each time we slip up? No. Instead, God makes a covenant with us and calls us to ethical behavior; it is our responsibility to respond to our impulses and drives, directing them toward the good. As Tamar Eskenazi writes, “God recognizes that the inclination to do evil is part of human beings. God’s observation does not claim that humans are inherently sinful but rather recognizes human limitations” (WTC 43). Sometimes we will slip up. But sometimes our desires will motivate us to live and work and create.
God entered into a covenant, with such imperfect beings. God let go of the anger and disappointment God felt in seeing the wickedness in the yeitzer of human beings—an anger and disappointment that led to the Flood and the destruction of a work of creation God had previously deemed “very good.” God replaced that anger and disappointment with new, more realistic expectations. God cut us some slack.
I find it particularly inspiring to read the passage where God smells the fragrance of Noah’s offering and decides, in full awareness of human limitations, to enter into a covenant with us—I find it particularly inspiring to read this so soon after Yom Kippur, the day on which the ways we followed our yeitzer ha-ra to terrible consequences are laid bare before us, before the community, and before God. I find it inspiring that our Torah does not only ask us to lament our sins, but asks us, too, to be gentle with ourselves, to be realistic. Our actions have consequences; we reap what we sow. And yet, God takes enough mercy on us to acknowledge our humanness. And if God can treat us with such mercy and kindness, all the more so should we be merciful and kind toward one another.
When God sees the rainbow in the cloudy sky, God will remember. God will remember that human beings are created b’tzelem Elohim and that this “very good” world we inhabit contains both the yeitzer ha-tov and the yeitzer ha-ra. Let us be patient with ourselves and one another, human beings worthy of being remembered, human beings created b’tzelem Elohim.
The story of Noah and the flood is a tale of violence, destruction, and renewal. Just last Shabbat Jews across the globe read of the creation of a world God unequivocally proclaimed “good”; indeed, after the sixth day of creation, the day on which adam, the human being, was made, God pronounces v’hinei tov m’od—“and behold! It was very good” (Genesis 1:31). As generations live and die upon the earth, however, something goes terribly wrong: “The earth became corrupt before God; the earth was filled with violence” (6:11). God decides to drown all of creation in the chaotic waters of the Flood; the only person God warns of this plan and the impending doom is Noah, whom the Torah describes as ish tzadik, a righteous person (6:9). God instructions Noah to build an ark, to save his family, and to preserve pairs of animals to repopulate the world after the Flood waters recede.
For forty days the rains pour down, and the water rises so high that even the tallest mountains are submerged in its depths. For one hundred and fifty days Noah and the other inhabitants of the ark float upon the surface, their futures uncertain.
During the Days of Awe, our futures, too, were uncertain, and in that uncertainty we called out, “yizkor”—May God remember. May God remember our loved ones who have died, we pleaded; may God remember the good deeds of all our ancestors, judging us less harshly on their account; may God remember the covenant with Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and all Israel.
In the story of Noah, God remembers:vayizkor elohim et Noach v’et kol ha’chaya v’et kol ha’behema asher ito bateiva, vaya’aver Elohim ruach al ha’aretz vayashku hamayim—“God then remembered Noah and all the animals and all the beasts that were with him in the ark, and God caused a wind to sweep over the earth, and the waters subsided” (8:1).
After the Flood, God takes care that this remembering will always serve for renewal, not destruction: “And when I cause clouds to form over the earth, and the bow appears in the cloud,” God proclaims to Noah, “I will remember My covenant between Me and you and all living beings, all flesh, and never again shall the waters become a flood, to destroy all flesh. When the bow is in the cloud, and I see it, I will remember the everlasting covenant between God and all living beings, all that live upon the earth” (9:14-16).
God makes a covenant with Noah, charging Noah and his descendants, like Adam and Eve, to be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth, and prohibiting violence and murder. God reminds Noah and his descendants that human life is precious, ki b’tzelem Elohim asah et ha’adam, for human beings were made in the image of God” (9:6).
How are these survivors of the devastating Flood, human beings, made in the image of God, different from the souls drowned in the waters that rose higher than the mountains? What changed after the Flood?
“The earth became corrupt before God; the earth was filled with violence” (6:11) God brings the Flood to wipe away the corruption and violence, leaving the earth to the descendants of Noah, a righteous man. But it is not the nature of human beings that changes after the Flood; as biblical scholar Tamar Cohn Ezkenazi argues, it is God’s expectations of human beings that changes.
Before the Flood, at the end of last week’s parasha, God decides to destroy the first creation: “And the Eternal saw how great was the wickedness of human brings on the earth,” v’chol yeitzer machs’vot libo rak ra kol ha’yom—“and the entire inclination of the thoughts of their hearts was only wicked all the time, the Eternal regretted that He had made human beings upon the earth, and was heartsick. And God said, ‘I will wipe the human beings that I have created from off the face of the earth […] for I regret that I made them’” (6:6-7). Saddened and disappointed, God destroys the works of God’s own creation, human beings corrupt in their yeitzer, their inclination and instinct.
After the Flood, Noah builds an altar and offers sacrifices to God. In verses I chanted this evening, we learn, “The Eternal, inhaling the soothing fragrance, thought: ‘Never again will I bring doom upon the world on account of what people do,” ki yeitzer leiv ha’adam ra mi’n’urav—“though the inclination of the heart of the human is evil from his youth; never again will I destroy all living beings as I have done’” (8:21). Eskenazi finds this verse “striking,” for it represents “God’s change of heart” (WTC). What changes in the Flood?
The story of Noah shares some similarities with the creation story: the waters of the flood parallel the waters described in the time of tohu va’vohu, the unformed chaos that immediately precedes God’s first act of creation (Gen 1:2); the ruah Elohim—the breath or spirit or wind of God that “hovers” over the water just before God speaks, “Let there be light” (1:2-3)—can be likened to the ruach God sends to blow away the waters of the Flood (8:1). But Noah’s story is not the tale of a completely new creation, resulting in some new human being free of the potential for corruption and violence displayed by the preceding generations drowned in the Flood waters of God’s disappointment and anger. The human beings formed in Genesis, those drowned in the Flood, and the survivors, the descendants of Noah who are blessed to enter into a covenant with God—each of these human beings possesses a yeitzer, an inclination or instinct, toward evil, corruption, and violence. Human beings do not emerge from the ark changed; rather, as Eskenasi writes, “The transgressions that led to the Flood transform God’s expectations. They result in new rules to guide humankind and a promise of a perpetual covenant” (WTC 44, emphasis added). According to Eskenazi’s interpretation, the covenant God makes with Noah, a covenant that brings both responsibilities and rewards, is one that “aim[s] at channeling impulses and containing them” (Ibid.) God will never again Flood the earth, but not because human beings will never again distress God’s heart so with our wickedness, corruption, and violence. Instead, God acknowledges the limitations of these beings created b’tzelem Elohim, in the image of God, but created, too, with free will, with a yeitzer, an inclination or drive, that can sometimes lead us astray.
The Sages argued that we were created with two yeitzers, a yeitzer ha-tov as well as a yeitzer ha-ra. In the Torah, when God forms the animals, the text reads, and God “formed,” vayitzer, spelled with one yud (2:19). But when God forms the first human being, the text reads, and God “formed,” vayitzer—with two yuds (2:7). Why? Why is the same word spelled in two different ways in the Torah? In the Talmud, Rabbi Nachman explains that the two yuds “show that God created two inclinations, one good and the other evil” (Bavli Berakhot 61a). Both the yeitzer ha-tov, the impulse toward good, and the yeitzer ha-ra, the impulse toward evil, were created in us by God, the same God who created us b’tzelem Elohim, in God’s own image. Indeed, the Sages, in the midrash collection Genesis Rabbah, find the yeitzer ha-ra in the story of the first creation, on that sixth day when God creates the first human being and declares, v’hinei tov m’od—“Behold! It was very good” (Gen 1:31). Believing that no word in the Torah is superfluous, the Sages wonder why, on this day, the Torah declares not just hinei tov (“it is good”) but hinei tov m’od (“it is very good”). Rabbi Nachman responds that tov m’od—“very good”—indicates both the yeitzer ha-tov and the yeitzer ha-ra (Genesis Rabbah 9:7). “Can the yeitzer ha-ra be good?” the Sages chorus. Indeed, it can: “But for the yeitzer ha-ra […] no man would build a house, take a wife and beget children” (Ibid.). Our impulses and drives lead us to all kinds of endeavors and actions, some of them good, some of them wicked. Our impulses motivate us to take action in our lives.
From a midrash on the Noah story, Genesis chapter eight verse twenty-one:
If you argue: “Is it not the Holy One Himself who created the impulse to evil, of which it is written, yeitzer leiv ha’adam ra mi’n’urav—‘The impulse of man’s heart was evil from the time he was expelled from his mother’s womb’? Who then can possibly make it good?” the Holy One replies, “You are the one who makes the impulse to evil stay evil. How? When you were a child, you did not sin. Only when you grew up, you began to sin.” If you argue: “But no man can guard himself against it!” the Holy One replies, “How many things in the world are even less bearable and more bitter than the impulse to evil, yet you manage to sweeten them. […] if you sweeten for your need bitter things that I alone created, all the greater is your responsibility for the impulse to evil, which was placed under your control.” (Sefer ha-Aggadot quoting Genesis Rabbah).
In this imagined argument, God reminds us that we have the power to shape our own actions, that our yeitzer is an impulse, not a mandate. It is up to us to discern when our impulses are good and when they are wicked. It is up to us to take responsibility for the choices we make in reaction to the realities we face. Our drives and impulses, like our skin color or our nationality, are accidents of our birth. We cannot control how we are made, how we emotionally respond to the world. But we can control what we do with our emotions and our impulses and our drives.
God takes mercy on human beings after the Flood, not because we emerged from the ark all tzadikim, all righteous like Noah, but because God decided to deal with our humanness differently. Human beings are capable of good and of wickedness; our drives and impulses sometimes lead us astray. Shall God utterly destroy us all each time we slip up? No. Instead, God makes a covenant with us and calls us to ethical behavior; it is our responsibility to respond to our impulses and drives, directing them toward the good. As Tamar Eskenazi writes, “God recognizes that the inclination to do evil is part of human beings. God’s observation does not claim that humans are inherently sinful but rather recognizes human limitations” (WTC 43). Sometimes we will slip up. But sometimes our desires will motivate us to live and work and create.
God entered into a covenant, with such imperfect beings. God let go of the anger and disappointment God felt in seeing the wickedness in the yeitzer of human beings—an anger and disappointment that led to the Flood and the destruction of a work of creation God had previously deemed “very good.” God replaced that anger and disappointment with new, more realistic expectations. God cut us some slack.
I find it particularly inspiring to read the passage where God smells the fragrance of Noah’s offering and decides, in full awareness of human limitations, to enter into a covenant with us—I find it particularly inspiring to read this so soon after Yom Kippur, the day on which the ways we followed our yeitzer ha-ra to terrible consequences are laid bare before us, before the community, and before God. I find it inspiring that our Torah does not only ask us to lament our sins, but asks us, too, to be gentle with ourselves, to be realistic. Our actions have consequences; we reap what we sow. And yet, God takes enough mercy on us to acknowledge our humanness. And if God can treat us with such mercy and kindness, all the more so should we be merciful and kind toward one another.
When God sees the rainbow in the cloudy sky, God will remember. God will remember that human beings are created b’tzelem Elohim and that this “very good” world we inhabit contains both the yeitzer ha-tov and the yeitzer ha-ra. Let us be patient with ourselves and one another, human beings worthy of being remembered, human beings created b’tzelem Elohim.
Monday, September 20, 2010
Loving Neighbors, Strangers, and Selves
[The following is my sermon for Yom Kippur Morning at Temple Beth Am, Monessen, PA. The views expressed here are my own and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the community I am honored to serve this year.]
On Rosh HaShana, two days before the anniversary of the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, my neighbor waited for the subway train to arrive on the platform. Suddenly, five New York City police officers assembled near her in a semi-circle, “staring quietly” straight ahead. What did they surround? A Muslim man who had rolled out a prayer rug to kneel and recite his evening prayers.
The Shabbat between Rosh HaShana and Yom Kippur is called Shabbat Shuva, the Shabbat of turning—turning toward God in repentance, as the new year moves from the Day of Remembrance into the Day of Atonement. This year, Shabbat Shuva coincided with September 11th, a day of remembrance for those souls killed in the terrorist attacks of 2001. A day of remembrance. A day when all was turned upside town, a day on which we turn to one another for support. A call to us on this Day of Atonement.
Usually a somber day of solidarity and mourning, this September 11 brought different sentiments and slogans to ground zero, including one picture of an innocent victim of the World Trade Center attacks with words beneath: “‘We love you!! Islam mosque right next to ground zero??? We should stop this!!’” (Anne Barnard and Manny Fernandez, “On Aniversary of Sept. 11, Rifts Amid Mourning,” NY Times, 12 September 2010).
By now all of you have heard about the controversies surrounding the building of an Islamic cultural center in downtown Manhattan—inaccurately referred to as the “Ground Zero Mosque”—and a Florida Christian minister’s plans—eventually cancelled after pressure from the Obama administration—to burn copies of the Quran on September 11. At one conservative protest held near the proposed site of the Islamic cultural center, a few blocks from ground zero, a crowd gathered to support the organization “Freedom Defense Initiative and Stop Islamization of America”; some shouted, about Muslims, “‘Kill them all!’” (Ibid. )… We love you… Kill them all.
Indiscriminate, bigoted, and violent, this call to kill all Muslims came not only on a day of national and, for far too many, personal mourning—September 11. It came not only on a day of remembrance and renewal for Jews—Rosh HaShana. It came on a day of celebration for Muslims—Eid, the festival marking the end of the fast of Ramadan, a time of year when Muslims, like Jews during the Days of Awe, look for the forgiveness of their sins and make amends. With recently reported incidents of violent assaults against Muslim cab drivers, shots fired into a mosque in upstate New York on September 4th, and calls for the burning of Islam’s holy book, many American Muslims, according to several newspapers, planned to have a low-key celebration this year, fearing that marking Eid would be misinterpreted as an act of hatred or disrespect.
A day for remembrance. A day for turning. A day for atonement.
September 11, 2010, was for many a day of alienation, a day of suspicion, a day of being labeled an outsider, a stranger.
This afternoon, on our Day of Atonement, we will read from the Holiness Code in Leviticus, a series of laws following the declaration, “You shall be holy, for I, the Eternal your God, am holy” (19:2). We learn what acts will help us to be holy, and we read: k’ezrach mikem y’hyeh lachem ha’ger ha’gar itchem, v’ahavta lo kamochah, ki geirim hayitem b’eretz mitzrayim, “The stranger who lives among you shall be to you as one of your citizens; you shall love him as yourself, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt” (19:34).
The ger, the stranger, is not an enemy, nor a brother nor a kinsman. He is not a Jew, yet he lives, “either temporarily or long-term,” notes the Women’s Torah Commentary, in the Land, alongside the biblical Israelites (see Kaminowski, WTC 710). The ger is a “stranger,” not a citizen but treated like a citizen, a political and kin-group outsider. Often bundled together with the orphan, the widow, and the Levite (the tribe dedicated to Temple service and thus unable to participate in the normal political and economic life of the ancient Israelites), the ger is one who must be supported, treated kindly, incorporated into the system of justice. Throughout the Torah, we are repeatedly enjoined not to oppress the stranger, not to make the stranger into an enemy: “There shall be one law for you and the stranger who resides among you […] You and the stranger shall be alike before the Eternal” (Numbers 15:15), “Love the stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt” (Deuteronomy 10:19), “You shall not oppress the stranger, for you know the soul of the stranger, having yourselves been strangers in the land of Egypt” (Exocus 23:9).
The rabbis later adapted the word ger and applied it to a different kind of outsider: the convert. So, in Hebrew, the ger is twofold: the stranger who never “belongs” to the kinship group but whom one is obligated to treat with justice, and the convert who mystically, theologically, and legally “becomes” kin. One blogger called the Talmudic ger “someone who feels strange, but wishes to belong” (VirtualJewishLibrary).
Who are these strangers among us, those clamoring to belong, those who feel strange?
In the United States, not all Muslims are gerim, if ger is distinct from “citizen.” Many Muslims, of all shades and sects, are patriotic American citizens who, at least in name, according to the letter of the law, “belong” here. And yet so many Muslims are speaking out about feeling strange, alien. I think the analogy is worth exploring, this year, on the heels of a September 11th that turned from a day of remembrance to a day of bigotry and ignorance, confusion and exclusion.
On Yom Kippur, we are enjoined, “You shall love [the stranger] as yourself, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt” (Leviticus 19:34). How do we love the stranger, and precisely what does it mean to love the stranger “as yourself”?
The Hebrew verb ahav, love, appears as a command only three times in the Torah (WTC). It appears in the V’ahavta, in Deuteronomy: V’ahavta et Adonai elohecha, “And you shall love the Eternal your God” (6:5). And it appears twice in parashat Kedoshim, the section from Leviticus that we read on Yom Kippur afternoon: v’ahavta re’echa kamocha, “and you shall love your neighbor as yourself” (Leviticus 19:18) and k’ezrach mikem y’hyeh lachem ha’ger ha’gar itchem, v’ahavta lo kamochah, ki geirim hayitem b’eretz mitzrayim, “The stranger who lives among you shall be to you as one of your citizens; you shall love [the stranger] as yourself, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt” (19:34). Scholar Tamara Cohn Eskenazi sees these three commandments about love as “three dimensions of a single, deep connection: to love God is to love others, those like us and those who are not” (“Another View on K’doshim,” WTC 716). Though we tend to link kedoshim, holiness, with separation, Eskenazi points out that the Holiness Code in Leviticus emphasizes connection, not separation. We learn that “holiness comes from cultivating relationships […]:the connection to parents whom one must honor, to the poor and disadvantaged whom one must protect, to the neighbor and stranger whom one must love, and of course to God” (Ibid. ). Holiness is about relationships; we are holy—or not—in how we treat one another.
On Yom Kippur, we remind ourselves that the Gates of Heaven are open to hear our pleas, that we will be forgiven, by the end of the day, for sins committed bein adam lamakom, between human beings and God. But sins committed bein adam lachaveiro, between one human being and another, are forgiven only when we approach those we have wronged to make amends. It is this same spirit that infuses the laws in the Holiness Code: laws that remind us that the Jewish covenant calls us to act with love not only toward God but toward one another—to our neighbors and to the strangers among us (cf. WTC 703).
How does one “love the stranger as yourself”? Suan Retik and Patti Quigley turned from their immeasurable grief to love, and love of the stranger, in the wake of the deaths of their husbands in the 9/11 attacks. As reported in the New York Times, these two women turned to strangers whose emotions they could perhaps understand: Afghani widows. As the US government responded to the terrorist attacks with a war, these widows founded an organization, Beyond the 11th, that provides education and economic assistance, designed to battle the conditions that made so many Afghanis easy targets for fundamentalist Taliban recruiters (Nicholas D. Kristof, “The Healers of 9/11,” New York Times, 8 September 2010). This is how we might love the stranger as ourselves, by reaching out, across ignorance and fear, to build a better world.
Reaching across ignorance and fear is precisely what Feisal Abdul Rauf, chairman of the Cordoba Initiative and imam of a Lower Manhattan mosque, intended in proposing the Park51 Islamic cultural center. Modeled after the YMCA and the Jewish Community Center, the space was designed as a shared community space for performances, social events, education, and recreation, with a swimming pool, classrooms, and multifaith prayer spaces (as well as individual prayer spaces for Muslims, Christians, and Jews) (Feisal Abdul Rauf, “Building on Faith,” New York Times, 7 September 2010). Indeed, he calls two commandments the institution’s cornerstones: “to love the Lord our creator with all of our hearts, minds, souls and strength; and to love our neighbors as we love ourselves” (Ibid. ). Rauf intended not to avoid the tough issues of the day, not to ignore the radicalism and fundamentalism that have become most associated with Islam in the popular media, but rather to confront the difficult issues head on, to provide a space for real dialogue between Muslims and non-Muslims and to provide for a broader understanding of the variations in Islam (Ibid. ).
The word ger already carries ambiguity in Hebrew: the stranger, the convert; the one who does not quite belong but whom we love, the one who once stood outside and now is embraced as one of am Yisrael, the Jewish people. Things get even more muddled in our contemporary example; when those who flew the planes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon lay claim to Islam, it is difficult to distinguish between the enemy and the stranger we are called to love. But making that distinction is crucial if we are to live the values and the ethics God calls us to live today, the Day of Atonement.
We need not pretend naively that enemies do not exist, that dangers do not threaten our freedoms, or that terrorists did not claim the lives of thousands of innocents on September 11th. But we can ill afford—neither as Jews nor as Americans—to lump all strangers into the category of enemies. President Obama crucially noted in his September 11 commemoration remarks at the Pentagon, “‘It was not a religion that attacked us that September day; it was Al Qaeda, a sorry band of men which perverts religion. And just as we condemn intolerance and extremism abroad, so we will stay true to our traditions here at home as a diverse and tolerant nation’” (Quoted in Barnard and Fernandez).
The polarized rhetoric that erupted this year on 9/11, Shabbat Shuva, a day of turning from the joy of the renewal of the new year to the process of making amends, reminds me so much of religious conflicts in Israel, where “Judaism” and “Jewish” are words that have been unfairly monopolized by a version of Orthodoxy that excludes and silences women, marginalizes and punishes gays and lesbians, and discounts Reform converts and rabbis. In fact, the Israel Movement for Progressive Judaism, a Reform organization based in Jerusalem, launched an ad campaign to combat this monopoly, with the slogan, Yeish yoteir mi derech achat lihiyot yehudi, “There’s more than one way to be Jewish.”
Indeed, our Torah portion this afternoon, Kedoshim, is a reminder that there is more than one way to live our lives according to our own Jewish tradition. In Reform synagogues, we read an abbreviated version of the list of commandments that will, the Torah says, help to make us holy. We leave out the troubling section about a man who “lies with another man,” the verse that uses the word “abomination” and has led to so much violence (including self-inflicted violence) against gays and lesbians. I had to remind myself of that stark fact as I read website after website of vitriolic anti-Muslim sentiment that equated Islam with sexism and homophobia.
Don’t get me wrong: I know that certain individuals and governments who claim to follow Islam—do promote sexism and homophobia. I have read the reports of stoning for adultery, stoning for homosexuality, honor killings against women believed to be “unchaste.” But there’s more than one way to be Muslim, too, although people on both sides of the frantic debate about burning the Quran and building the Islamic cultural center often forget variation and subtlety. They forget the ambiguity inherent in the word ger; they forget the challenge to distinguish between enemy and stranger; they forget the commandment to “love the stranger as yourself.” We can remember, not forget, by openly discussing and debating, right on that dangerous line between enemy and stranger. We can confront the fundamentalist and extremist versions of any religion—Islam or Judaism, Christianity or any other faith. We can call moderate and liberal Muslims and Jews to speak out against the extremists who lay claim to their respective religious traditions. And we can love the stranger as ourselves—love the imperfect, love knowing there are faults and failings, love with compassion and with principle. K’ezrach mikem y’hyeh lachem ha’ger ha’gar itchem, v’ahavta lo kamochah, ki geirim hayitem b’eretz mitzrayim, “The stranger who lives among you shall be to you as one of your citizens; you shall love him as yourself, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt” (Leviticus 19:34).
We are called to love the stranger in the same way in which we love ourselves.
Well, sometimes loving ourselves is a complicated endeavor, particularly on this Day of Atonement, when we stand in awareness of all our faults and failings, our shortcomings and our sins. We wonder whether our deeds of chesed outweigh the times we have missed the mark. We cling to the memory of Rosh HaShana, the Day of Remembrance, the day when God remembers not every misdeed we have committed but remembers the covenant between God and the Jewish people, remembers the acts of g’milut chasadim of all our ancestors. We remind ourselves that God loves us, because God loves the Jewish people, and we try to love ourselves. This love is a struggle.
In our struggle to love ourselves, to love God with all our hearts and souls and beings, to love our neighbor, and to love the stranger as ourselves, we can think about Jacob, the man who was renamed Israel, the one who struggled with the Divine.
Our forefather Jacob famously wrestled with a stranger, in the middle of the night. Though the Torah does not call this mysterious figure a ger, a stranger, the story tells us nothing of substance about him. He is ish, a man, an individual. He might be an angel, a Messenger of God. We read only that “a man struggled with [Jacob] until the break of dawn” (Genesis 32:25). Though Jacob pleads with the man to reveal his name, he refuses; Jacob injures his thigh, physically altered by this ambiguous encounter (is it hostile or friendly?). The man gives Jacob the blessing he requests, and because Jacob has “prevailed” in his struggle with both “divine beings and men,” the nameless man gives Jacob a new name: Israel. Left alone, injured, Jacob immediately changes the name of the place where the encounter happened, marking it as special. He calls it “Peniel,” a composite of the Hebrew words for “face” and “God,” as in “I have seen a divine being face to face” (Genesis 32:25-33).
Jacob struggled with the strange, the unfamiliar, and in that struggle was forever changed… was blessed.
We have turned our attention to change and blessing; we have turned from our past misdeeds; we have turned toward an effort to live the new year in peace and in blessing, with acts of kindness and with good deeds.
When violence and terror plague us, let us turn to one another in comfort and in healing. When extremists claim their religion as justification for murder and oppression, let us voice our opposition, let us lay claim to our own definition of religious living. When our neighbor rolls out his prayer rug, let us surround him in open and honest dialogue, and not in suspicion. When our neighbors build their house of worship, let us enter its doors in hope.
This Yom Kippur, may we turn our own struggles to love the stranger into a source not of strife but of blessing.
[This post was inspired by the prayer “For Unexpected Intimacy” in Siddur Sha’ar Zahav.]
On Rosh HaShana, two days before the anniversary of the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, my neighbor waited for the subway train to arrive on the platform. Suddenly, five New York City police officers assembled near her in a semi-circle, “staring quietly” straight ahead. What did they surround? A Muslim man who had rolled out a prayer rug to kneel and recite his evening prayers.
The Shabbat between Rosh HaShana and Yom Kippur is called Shabbat Shuva, the Shabbat of turning—turning toward God in repentance, as the new year moves from the Day of Remembrance into the Day of Atonement. This year, Shabbat Shuva coincided with September 11th, a day of remembrance for those souls killed in the terrorist attacks of 2001. A day of remembrance. A day when all was turned upside town, a day on which we turn to one another for support. A call to us on this Day of Atonement.
Usually a somber day of solidarity and mourning, this September 11 brought different sentiments and slogans to ground zero, including one picture of an innocent victim of the World Trade Center attacks with words beneath: “‘We love you!! Islam mosque right next to ground zero??? We should stop this!!’” (Anne Barnard and Manny Fernandez, “On Aniversary of Sept. 11, Rifts Amid Mourning,” NY Times, 12 September 2010).
By now all of you have heard about the controversies surrounding the building of an Islamic cultural center in downtown Manhattan—inaccurately referred to as the “Ground Zero Mosque”—and a Florida Christian minister’s plans—eventually cancelled after pressure from the Obama administration—to burn copies of the Quran on September 11. At one conservative protest held near the proposed site of the Islamic cultural center, a few blocks from ground zero, a crowd gathered to support the organization “Freedom Defense Initiative and Stop Islamization of America”; some shouted, about Muslims, “‘Kill them all!’” (Ibid. )… We love you… Kill them all.
Indiscriminate, bigoted, and violent, this call to kill all Muslims came not only on a day of national and, for far too many, personal mourning—September 11. It came not only on a day of remembrance and renewal for Jews—Rosh HaShana. It came on a day of celebration for Muslims—Eid, the festival marking the end of the fast of Ramadan, a time of year when Muslims, like Jews during the Days of Awe, look for the forgiveness of their sins and make amends. With recently reported incidents of violent assaults against Muslim cab drivers, shots fired into a mosque in upstate New York on September 4th, and calls for the burning of Islam’s holy book, many American Muslims, according to several newspapers, planned to have a low-key celebration this year, fearing that marking Eid would be misinterpreted as an act of hatred or disrespect.
A day for remembrance. A day for turning. A day for atonement.
September 11, 2010, was for many a day of alienation, a day of suspicion, a day of being labeled an outsider, a stranger.
This afternoon, on our Day of Atonement, we will read from the Holiness Code in Leviticus, a series of laws following the declaration, “You shall be holy, for I, the Eternal your God, am holy” (19:2). We learn what acts will help us to be holy, and we read: k’ezrach mikem y’hyeh lachem ha’ger ha’gar itchem, v’ahavta lo kamochah, ki geirim hayitem b’eretz mitzrayim, “The stranger who lives among you shall be to you as one of your citizens; you shall love him as yourself, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt” (19:34).
The ger, the stranger, is not an enemy, nor a brother nor a kinsman. He is not a Jew, yet he lives, “either temporarily or long-term,” notes the Women’s Torah Commentary, in the Land, alongside the biblical Israelites (see Kaminowski, WTC 710). The ger is a “stranger,” not a citizen but treated like a citizen, a political and kin-group outsider. Often bundled together with the orphan, the widow, and the Levite (the tribe dedicated to Temple service and thus unable to participate in the normal political and economic life of the ancient Israelites), the ger is one who must be supported, treated kindly, incorporated into the system of justice. Throughout the Torah, we are repeatedly enjoined not to oppress the stranger, not to make the stranger into an enemy: “There shall be one law for you and the stranger who resides among you […] You and the stranger shall be alike before the Eternal” (Numbers 15:15), “Love the stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt” (Deuteronomy 10:19), “You shall not oppress the stranger, for you know the soul of the stranger, having yourselves been strangers in the land of Egypt” (Exocus 23:9).
The rabbis later adapted the word ger and applied it to a different kind of outsider: the convert. So, in Hebrew, the ger is twofold: the stranger who never “belongs” to the kinship group but whom one is obligated to treat with justice, and the convert who mystically, theologically, and legally “becomes” kin. One blogger called the Talmudic ger “someone who feels strange, but wishes to belong” (VirtualJewishLibrary).
Who are these strangers among us, those clamoring to belong, those who feel strange?
In the United States, not all Muslims are gerim, if ger is distinct from “citizen.” Many Muslims, of all shades and sects, are patriotic American citizens who, at least in name, according to the letter of the law, “belong” here. And yet so many Muslims are speaking out about feeling strange, alien. I think the analogy is worth exploring, this year, on the heels of a September 11th that turned from a day of remembrance to a day of bigotry and ignorance, confusion and exclusion.
On Yom Kippur, we are enjoined, “You shall love [the stranger] as yourself, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt” (Leviticus 19:34). How do we love the stranger, and precisely what does it mean to love the stranger “as yourself”?
The Hebrew verb ahav, love, appears as a command only three times in the Torah (WTC). It appears in the V’ahavta, in Deuteronomy: V’ahavta et Adonai elohecha, “And you shall love the Eternal your God” (6:5). And it appears twice in parashat Kedoshim, the section from Leviticus that we read on Yom Kippur afternoon: v’ahavta re’echa kamocha, “and you shall love your neighbor as yourself” (Leviticus 19:18) and k’ezrach mikem y’hyeh lachem ha’ger ha’gar itchem, v’ahavta lo kamochah, ki geirim hayitem b’eretz mitzrayim, “The stranger who lives among you shall be to you as one of your citizens; you shall love [the stranger] as yourself, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt” (19:34). Scholar Tamara Cohn Eskenazi sees these three commandments about love as “three dimensions of a single, deep connection: to love God is to love others, those like us and those who are not” (“Another View on K’doshim,” WTC 716). Though we tend to link kedoshim, holiness, with separation, Eskenazi points out that the Holiness Code in Leviticus emphasizes connection, not separation. We learn that “holiness comes from cultivating relationships […]:the connection to parents whom one must honor, to the poor and disadvantaged whom one must protect, to the neighbor and stranger whom one must love, and of course to God” (Ibid. ). Holiness is about relationships; we are holy—or not—in how we treat one another.
On Yom Kippur, we remind ourselves that the Gates of Heaven are open to hear our pleas, that we will be forgiven, by the end of the day, for sins committed bein adam lamakom, between human beings and God. But sins committed bein adam lachaveiro, between one human being and another, are forgiven only when we approach those we have wronged to make amends. It is this same spirit that infuses the laws in the Holiness Code: laws that remind us that the Jewish covenant calls us to act with love not only toward God but toward one another—to our neighbors and to the strangers among us (cf. WTC 703).
How does one “love the stranger as yourself”? Suan Retik and Patti Quigley turned from their immeasurable grief to love, and love of the stranger, in the wake of the deaths of their husbands in the 9/11 attacks. As reported in the New York Times, these two women turned to strangers whose emotions they could perhaps understand: Afghani widows. As the US government responded to the terrorist attacks with a war, these widows founded an organization, Beyond the 11th, that provides education and economic assistance, designed to battle the conditions that made so many Afghanis easy targets for fundamentalist Taliban recruiters (Nicholas D. Kristof, “The Healers of 9/11,” New York Times, 8 September 2010). This is how we might love the stranger as ourselves, by reaching out, across ignorance and fear, to build a better world.
Reaching across ignorance and fear is precisely what Feisal Abdul Rauf, chairman of the Cordoba Initiative and imam of a Lower Manhattan mosque, intended in proposing the Park51 Islamic cultural center. Modeled after the YMCA and the Jewish Community Center, the space was designed as a shared community space for performances, social events, education, and recreation, with a swimming pool, classrooms, and multifaith prayer spaces (as well as individual prayer spaces for Muslims, Christians, and Jews) (Feisal Abdul Rauf, “Building on Faith,” New York Times, 7 September 2010). Indeed, he calls two commandments the institution’s cornerstones: “to love the Lord our creator with all of our hearts, minds, souls and strength; and to love our neighbors as we love ourselves” (Ibid. ). Rauf intended not to avoid the tough issues of the day, not to ignore the radicalism and fundamentalism that have become most associated with Islam in the popular media, but rather to confront the difficult issues head on, to provide a space for real dialogue between Muslims and non-Muslims and to provide for a broader understanding of the variations in Islam (Ibid. ).
The word ger already carries ambiguity in Hebrew: the stranger, the convert; the one who does not quite belong but whom we love, the one who once stood outside and now is embraced as one of am Yisrael, the Jewish people. Things get even more muddled in our contemporary example; when those who flew the planes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon lay claim to Islam, it is difficult to distinguish between the enemy and the stranger we are called to love. But making that distinction is crucial if we are to live the values and the ethics God calls us to live today, the Day of Atonement.
We need not pretend naively that enemies do not exist, that dangers do not threaten our freedoms, or that terrorists did not claim the lives of thousands of innocents on September 11th. But we can ill afford—neither as Jews nor as Americans—to lump all strangers into the category of enemies. President Obama crucially noted in his September 11 commemoration remarks at the Pentagon, “‘It was not a religion that attacked us that September day; it was Al Qaeda, a sorry band of men which perverts religion. And just as we condemn intolerance and extremism abroad, so we will stay true to our traditions here at home as a diverse and tolerant nation’” (Quoted in Barnard and Fernandez).
The polarized rhetoric that erupted this year on 9/11, Shabbat Shuva, a day of turning from the joy of the renewal of the new year to the process of making amends, reminds me so much of religious conflicts in Israel, where “Judaism” and “Jewish” are words that have been unfairly monopolized by a version of Orthodoxy that excludes and silences women, marginalizes and punishes gays and lesbians, and discounts Reform converts and rabbis. In fact, the Israel Movement for Progressive Judaism, a Reform organization based in Jerusalem, launched an ad campaign to combat this monopoly, with the slogan, Yeish yoteir mi derech achat lihiyot yehudi, “There’s more than one way to be Jewish.”
Indeed, our Torah portion this afternoon, Kedoshim, is a reminder that there is more than one way to live our lives according to our own Jewish tradition. In Reform synagogues, we read an abbreviated version of the list of commandments that will, the Torah says, help to make us holy. We leave out the troubling section about a man who “lies with another man,” the verse that uses the word “abomination” and has led to so much violence (including self-inflicted violence) against gays and lesbians. I had to remind myself of that stark fact as I read website after website of vitriolic anti-Muslim sentiment that equated Islam with sexism and homophobia.
Don’t get me wrong: I know that certain individuals and governments who claim to follow Islam—do promote sexism and homophobia. I have read the reports of stoning for adultery, stoning for homosexuality, honor killings against women believed to be “unchaste.” But there’s more than one way to be Muslim, too, although people on both sides of the frantic debate about burning the Quran and building the Islamic cultural center often forget variation and subtlety. They forget the ambiguity inherent in the word ger; they forget the challenge to distinguish between enemy and stranger; they forget the commandment to “love the stranger as yourself.” We can remember, not forget, by openly discussing and debating, right on that dangerous line between enemy and stranger. We can confront the fundamentalist and extremist versions of any religion—Islam or Judaism, Christianity or any other faith. We can call moderate and liberal Muslims and Jews to speak out against the extremists who lay claim to their respective religious traditions. And we can love the stranger as ourselves—love the imperfect, love knowing there are faults and failings, love with compassion and with principle. K’ezrach mikem y’hyeh lachem ha’ger ha’gar itchem, v’ahavta lo kamochah, ki geirim hayitem b’eretz mitzrayim, “The stranger who lives among you shall be to you as one of your citizens; you shall love him as yourself, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt” (Leviticus 19:34).
We are called to love the stranger in the same way in which we love ourselves.
Well, sometimes loving ourselves is a complicated endeavor, particularly on this Day of Atonement, when we stand in awareness of all our faults and failings, our shortcomings and our sins. We wonder whether our deeds of chesed outweigh the times we have missed the mark. We cling to the memory of Rosh HaShana, the Day of Remembrance, the day when God remembers not every misdeed we have committed but remembers the covenant between God and the Jewish people, remembers the acts of g’milut chasadim of all our ancestors. We remind ourselves that God loves us, because God loves the Jewish people, and we try to love ourselves. This love is a struggle.
In our struggle to love ourselves, to love God with all our hearts and souls and beings, to love our neighbor, and to love the stranger as ourselves, we can think about Jacob, the man who was renamed Israel, the one who struggled with the Divine.
Our forefather Jacob famously wrestled with a stranger, in the middle of the night. Though the Torah does not call this mysterious figure a ger, a stranger, the story tells us nothing of substance about him. He is ish, a man, an individual. He might be an angel, a Messenger of God. We read only that “a man struggled with [Jacob] until the break of dawn” (Genesis 32:25). Though Jacob pleads with the man to reveal his name, he refuses; Jacob injures his thigh, physically altered by this ambiguous encounter (is it hostile or friendly?). The man gives Jacob the blessing he requests, and because Jacob has “prevailed” in his struggle with both “divine beings and men,” the nameless man gives Jacob a new name: Israel. Left alone, injured, Jacob immediately changes the name of the place where the encounter happened, marking it as special. He calls it “Peniel,” a composite of the Hebrew words for “face” and “God,” as in “I have seen a divine being face to face” (Genesis 32:25-33).
Jacob struggled with the strange, the unfamiliar, and in that struggle was forever changed… was blessed.
We have turned our attention to change and blessing; we have turned from our past misdeeds; we have turned toward an effort to live the new year in peace and in blessing, with acts of kindness and with good deeds.
When violence and terror plague us, let us turn to one another in comfort and in healing. When extremists claim their religion as justification for murder and oppression, let us voice our opposition, let us lay claim to our own definition of religious living. When our neighbor rolls out his prayer rug, let us surround him in open and honest dialogue, and not in suspicion. When our neighbors build their house of worship, let us enter its doors in hope.
This Yom Kippur, may we turn our own struggles to love the stranger into a source not of strife but of blessing.
[This post was inspired by the prayer “For Unexpected Intimacy” in Siddur Sha’ar Zahav.]
Fast, with All Your Heart, All Your Soul, All Your Being
[The following is my sermon for Kol Nidre, the evening that begins Yom Kippur, at Temple Beth Am, Monessen, PA. The views expressed here are my own and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the community I am honored to serve this year.]
Catholics traditionally fast on Ash Wednesday, the first day of the season of Lent, a time to prepare spiritually for Easter. Raised Catholic, I fasted each year—not at the insistence of my parents or my teachers, but from my own desire to do my religion “right.”
I fainted each year, too.
As an adult convert to Judaism, I struggle with Yom Kippur and the fast. Why do I fast? How do I fast? Do I continue the same fast of my childhood, the one that inevitably leads to fainting? What does that fast teach me? Does it help me turn back to God? Fasting to the point of fainting treads dangerously into the territory of donating money just to get the recognition, into the territory of “I-am-more-observant-than-you.” I am not sure what I learned from these fasts, what I learned about God and my spiritual and ethical duties.
In some ways the opposite of the Lenten fast, which precedes what Christians call the renewal of Easter, the Yom Kippur fast comes after the renewal of our year. We have eaten the apples and the honey, and now we stand, shrouded in white as we will in our own graves, standing before an Ark empty and stark as a coffin (for this analogy, I am indebted to my teacher, Rabbi Dr. Lawrence A. Hoffman). Our tradition calls us to know, in our minds and our hearts and our bodies, that we are mortal and fragile. That this life is temporary. We become more aware of our bodies.
Yet many people assert just the opposite: fasting takes us out of the physical, and into the spiritual. Relying on a stark divide between body and soul, religious leaders (not only in Judaism but in other spiritual traditions as well) claim that we can pay better attention to the “spiritual” when we “overcome” the physical. In an online forum, Orthodox rabbi Mendy Hecht calls Yom Kippur “G-d’s designated annual day of total spirituality,” a day on which we do things “that make us like the angels the most” instead of things “that make us like animals the most.” Yom Kippur makes us less human, some people say, and that’s a good thing; humans are bogged down in the physical, in necessity and desire. We should strive to be more spiritual, more like the angels.
It’s a big fad: spiritual fasting. A few weeks ago, I browsed the bookstore at the Pittsburgh Airport and found dozens of Christian evangelical books and journals on fasting for spiritual insight. You can buy fasting kits online, complete with promises that days of consuming just vegetable broth will give you a “natural high,” that it will rid your body of otherwise unspecified toxins, that it will bring you closer to God. Fasting websites abound with language of “discipline,” “submission,” and “control”: fasts are supposed to make you a “servant” or a “soldier” for God; no longer dependent on food, you can focus instead on serving the spiritual.
Yet today, we stand, shrouded in the color of burial and death, very likely aware of our bodies—as we will likely be even more so tomorrow, as Ne’ilah approaches. We come here tonight in the spirit of teshuva, turning, repenting. We reflect on our actions over the past year, all the things we have sown, and we come face to face with what we will reap. We come with the sound of the shofar still ringing in our ears, a clarion call for us to live Jewishly, a plea for God to remember the covenant.
In Leviticus, we read “In the seventh month, on the tenth of the month, you shall afflict yourselves and do no work […]. For this day will atone for you, to purify you from all your sins; before God you will be purified. It is a Sabbath of Sabbaths for you, and you shall afflict yourselves” (16:29-31). Is all our fasting about affliction?
In the Book of Samuel, King David fasts in an attempt to effect change. The prophet Nathan has just confronted David with the grievous sin he committed with Bathsheba, who was another man’s wife. David not only violated the marriage, but arranged for the husband to be killed in battle. God vows to punish David’s household. The guilty David suffers, watching his innocent son, born to Bathsheba, fall critically ill. “David entreated God for the boy; David fasted, and he went in and spent the night lying on the ground” (2 Samuel 12: 16). David’s servants try to get him to eat, but he refuses. After seven days, the child dies, and David’s servants fear what he will do when he learns of this tragedy. But David does not continue his fasting; instead, he bathes, puts on fresh clothes, and bows down in the Temple. He returns home and breaks his fast. His servants are confused: “[N]ow that the child is dead, you rise and take food!” they wonder aloud. David answers, “While the child was still alive, I fasted and wept because I thought: ‘Who knows? The Eternal may have pity on me, and they child may live.’ But now that he is dead, why should I fast? Can I bring him back again?’” (2 Samuel 12:22-23).
Perhaps David’s fast is like ours: we plead, we afflict ourselves, we wonder whether God is paying attention to our suffering, and we hope that God will forgive us before the Gates close at Ne’ilah. Rabbi Michael Strassfeld writes of our Yom Kippur fast, “We are meant to feel that the natural course of our existence is suspended on this day while our lives, or at least the quality of our lives, hang in the balance. We are to face what a permanent suspension of existence—death—would be like, and thus to learn how to better embrace life” (Strassfeld, The Jewish Holidays, 111). This fast is not a self-absorbed attempt to have spiritual visions or a pointless test of our self-control. At the end of our fast, like David, we return to the rhythm of our lives, hopefully more aware of not only our capacity to miss the mark, but our capacity to make things right.
Why do we fast? Not to prove to ourselves that we can. Not to prove to others how observant we are. While the discipline of a fast can remind us viscerally of the discipline required for teshuva, turning or repentance, our fast cannot end there. We spend a day in self-assessment and public confession, as individuals and as a community. We make amends for past wrongs and we make resolutions for the future. Strassfeld writes, “Yom Kippur is supposed to lead from thought to deed—from looking at ourselves to transforming the way we act” (Strassfeld 119). This, indeed, is the message of the haftarah passage we will read tomorrow, from the prophet Isaiah: “Is this the fast I desire, a day for men to starve their bodies? Is it bowing the head like a bulrush and lying in sackcloth and ashes? Do you call that a fast, a day when the Eternal is favorable? No, this is the fast I desire: to unlock fetters of wickedness, and untie the cords of the yoke, to let the oppressed go free, to break off every yoke. It is to share your bread with the hungry, and to take the wretched poor into your home; when you see the naked, to clothe him, and not to ignore your own kin” (Isaiah 58:5-7). In turning our attention to one another, to the most vulnerable among us—in being present for one another, God in turn will be present for us. As Isaiah says, “When you call the Eternal will answer; when you cry, he will say, Hineini, Here I am!” (Isaiah 58:9).
Spiritual fasting websites claim that fasting will not only rid your body of harmful toxins but will give you a direct experience of that hineini, that presence of God—the feeling that something Divine is listening to you, looking out for you. Writer David Rakoff, who is basically an atheist, embarked on one of these fasts, paying three hundred dollars in exchange for email consultations and a strict regimen for a twenty-day fast: three days of restricted intake on either end, and fourteen days of a very limited liquid diet of broth and herbal tea. He wondered whether he would shed not only toxins and weight but the rationalism that kept him away from all things spiritual. He wanted enlightenment and clarity and focus—all virtues the website promised he could gain through denying his physical body. He thought the experience would show him something new, like “a new color,” something impossible, something he had never seen before (This American Life, Episode 259, “Promised Land”).
But Rakoff did not experience peace or tranquility or insight. He didn’t have visions. He felt sleepy, he reported at first, and he had a hard time concentrating. As the fast continued, he felt better, focused—but no new insights. On day six, he worried that something had gone terribly wrong; he felt faint. He got reassurance from his doctor, who was skeptical and would have preferred that Rakoff end this quest. But he continued with the fast, which he calls “self-obsessed”: twenty days of “narcissistic rumination” that served to increase what the writer calls his “usual feelings of venality and guilt.” Fasting doesn’t solve anything for him, doesn’t reassure him that life and the universe have a purpose. Toward the end of the ordeal, Rakoff recalls a slight feeling of detachment; he was “aware” of the problems in his life, but they didn’t matter as much to him. Worried that he had gone about the fast incorrectly, he called a woman who has fasted like this five times. She reported a radical cleansing of her body; she saw and felt the toxins released. “You feel like you’re new,” she said, “like you’re a new person […] your highest self” (This American Life). Is this the fast we desire?
About halfway through his fast, Rakoff rode the subway in New York City. I will try to retell the story as he told it on the radio: “One night on the subway, I see a woman at the end of the car. She leans over to the people sitting next to her and asks in a quiet, friendly, almost business-like tone, ‘Do you have any extra food I can buy off of you?’ I can only hear her because the train is silent. She isn’t standing in the middle of the car addressing us. She’s just asking those within earshot. I walk over and give the woman a dollar before I get off at Union Square. ‘But do you have any extra food?’ she asks me. I apologize and say that I do not have any extra food. But I know in that moment that there is neither clarity nor serenity enough in the world that would give me the chutzpah to tell her why not” (This American Life).
Is this the fast God desires? Is this the fast we, as a Jewish community, seek on Yom Kippur? Choosing not to eat so that we can gain something for ourselves, some kind of insight or spiritual experience—choosing not to eat while others go hungry? Rakoff saw the sadness in fasting for “spiritual enlightenment,” out of choice and whim and as an intellectual experiment, in the midst of a city where too many people go home hungry, or can go to no home at all. The woman on the subway asked quietly not just for food, but for extra food. She did not want others to go hungry to feed her, but she wanted something to eat. Such a fast gets it backwards: we pay so much attention to our own bodies, to ourselves, that we cannot see the person in need right before our eyes.
What matters tonight and tomorrow is not what passes our lips, not the form our fast takes. We each make our own decisions about our health as we decide how to restrict the intake of food and water and the pleasures of the body denied to us on Yom Kippur. What matters is not that we torture ourselves or punish ourselves. What matters is not that we go on a spiritual quest for visions and enlightenment.
What matters is that our fast awakens us in ways the shofar call did not—awakens us to the fragility of our lives, to our role as partners with God in bringing about a just society. What matters is that we face the empty Ark, dressed as the dead are dressed, with a new awareness of our duty to clothe the naked, to feed the hungry, and to welcome the stranger. What matters is not that we think today alone about our bodies, but that we carefully consider each day what we eat, where it comes from, who prepares it, how they are paid and treated.
God, through the prophet Joel, declares that our fast is desirable. God instructs us, “Turn back to Me with all your hearts, and with fasting, weeping, and lamenting” (Joel 2:13). But this fast cannot be a show. “Rend your hearts rather than your garments,” God urges (Joel 2:13).
May our fast move us, in our very being, to turn our lives toward the care of the neglected, the vulnerable, and the lonely. May we be partners with God in caring for one another.
Catholics traditionally fast on Ash Wednesday, the first day of the season of Lent, a time to prepare spiritually for Easter. Raised Catholic, I fasted each year—not at the insistence of my parents or my teachers, but from my own desire to do my religion “right.”
I fainted each year, too.
As an adult convert to Judaism, I struggle with Yom Kippur and the fast. Why do I fast? How do I fast? Do I continue the same fast of my childhood, the one that inevitably leads to fainting? What does that fast teach me? Does it help me turn back to God? Fasting to the point of fainting treads dangerously into the territory of donating money just to get the recognition, into the territory of “I-am-more-observant-than-you.” I am not sure what I learned from these fasts, what I learned about God and my spiritual and ethical duties.
In some ways the opposite of the Lenten fast, which precedes what Christians call the renewal of Easter, the Yom Kippur fast comes after the renewal of our year. We have eaten the apples and the honey, and now we stand, shrouded in white as we will in our own graves, standing before an Ark empty and stark as a coffin (for this analogy, I am indebted to my teacher, Rabbi Dr. Lawrence A. Hoffman). Our tradition calls us to know, in our minds and our hearts and our bodies, that we are mortal and fragile. That this life is temporary. We become more aware of our bodies.
Yet many people assert just the opposite: fasting takes us out of the physical, and into the spiritual. Relying on a stark divide between body and soul, religious leaders (not only in Judaism but in other spiritual traditions as well) claim that we can pay better attention to the “spiritual” when we “overcome” the physical. In an online forum, Orthodox rabbi Mendy Hecht calls Yom Kippur “G-d’s designated annual day of total spirituality,” a day on which we do things “that make us like the angels the most” instead of things “that make us like animals the most.” Yom Kippur makes us less human, some people say, and that’s a good thing; humans are bogged down in the physical, in necessity and desire. We should strive to be more spiritual, more like the angels.
It’s a big fad: spiritual fasting. A few weeks ago, I browsed the bookstore at the Pittsburgh Airport and found dozens of Christian evangelical books and journals on fasting for spiritual insight. You can buy fasting kits online, complete with promises that days of consuming just vegetable broth will give you a “natural high,” that it will rid your body of otherwise unspecified toxins, that it will bring you closer to God. Fasting websites abound with language of “discipline,” “submission,” and “control”: fasts are supposed to make you a “servant” or a “soldier” for God; no longer dependent on food, you can focus instead on serving the spiritual.
Yet today, we stand, shrouded in the color of burial and death, very likely aware of our bodies—as we will likely be even more so tomorrow, as Ne’ilah approaches. We come here tonight in the spirit of teshuva, turning, repenting. We reflect on our actions over the past year, all the things we have sown, and we come face to face with what we will reap. We come with the sound of the shofar still ringing in our ears, a clarion call for us to live Jewishly, a plea for God to remember the covenant.
In Leviticus, we read “In the seventh month, on the tenth of the month, you shall afflict yourselves and do no work […]. For this day will atone for you, to purify you from all your sins; before God you will be purified. It is a Sabbath of Sabbaths for you, and you shall afflict yourselves” (16:29-31). Is all our fasting about affliction?
In the Book of Samuel, King David fasts in an attempt to effect change. The prophet Nathan has just confronted David with the grievous sin he committed with Bathsheba, who was another man’s wife. David not only violated the marriage, but arranged for the husband to be killed in battle. God vows to punish David’s household. The guilty David suffers, watching his innocent son, born to Bathsheba, fall critically ill. “David entreated God for the boy; David fasted, and he went in and spent the night lying on the ground” (2 Samuel 12: 16). David’s servants try to get him to eat, but he refuses. After seven days, the child dies, and David’s servants fear what he will do when he learns of this tragedy. But David does not continue his fasting; instead, he bathes, puts on fresh clothes, and bows down in the Temple. He returns home and breaks his fast. His servants are confused: “[N]ow that the child is dead, you rise and take food!” they wonder aloud. David answers, “While the child was still alive, I fasted and wept because I thought: ‘Who knows? The Eternal may have pity on me, and they child may live.’ But now that he is dead, why should I fast? Can I bring him back again?’” (2 Samuel 12:22-23).
Perhaps David’s fast is like ours: we plead, we afflict ourselves, we wonder whether God is paying attention to our suffering, and we hope that God will forgive us before the Gates close at Ne’ilah. Rabbi Michael Strassfeld writes of our Yom Kippur fast, “We are meant to feel that the natural course of our existence is suspended on this day while our lives, or at least the quality of our lives, hang in the balance. We are to face what a permanent suspension of existence—death—would be like, and thus to learn how to better embrace life” (Strassfeld, The Jewish Holidays, 111). This fast is not a self-absorbed attempt to have spiritual visions or a pointless test of our self-control. At the end of our fast, like David, we return to the rhythm of our lives, hopefully more aware of not only our capacity to miss the mark, but our capacity to make things right.
Why do we fast? Not to prove to ourselves that we can. Not to prove to others how observant we are. While the discipline of a fast can remind us viscerally of the discipline required for teshuva, turning or repentance, our fast cannot end there. We spend a day in self-assessment and public confession, as individuals and as a community. We make amends for past wrongs and we make resolutions for the future. Strassfeld writes, “Yom Kippur is supposed to lead from thought to deed—from looking at ourselves to transforming the way we act” (Strassfeld 119). This, indeed, is the message of the haftarah passage we will read tomorrow, from the prophet Isaiah: “Is this the fast I desire, a day for men to starve their bodies? Is it bowing the head like a bulrush and lying in sackcloth and ashes? Do you call that a fast, a day when the Eternal is favorable? No, this is the fast I desire: to unlock fetters of wickedness, and untie the cords of the yoke, to let the oppressed go free, to break off every yoke. It is to share your bread with the hungry, and to take the wretched poor into your home; when you see the naked, to clothe him, and not to ignore your own kin” (Isaiah 58:5-7). In turning our attention to one another, to the most vulnerable among us—in being present for one another, God in turn will be present for us. As Isaiah says, “When you call the Eternal will answer; when you cry, he will say, Hineini, Here I am!” (Isaiah 58:9).
Spiritual fasting websites claim that fasting will not only rid your body of harmful toxins but will give you a direct experience of that hineini, that presence of God—the feeling that something Divine is listening to you, looking out for you. Writer David Rakoff, who is basically an atheist, embarked on one of these fasts, paying three hundred dollars in exchange for email consultations and a strict regimen for a twenty-day fast: three days of restricted intake on either end, and fourteen days of a very limited liquid diet of broth and herbal tea. He wondered whether he would shed not only toxins and weight but the rationalism that kept him away from all things spiritual. He wanted enlightenment and clarity and focus—all virtues the website promised he could gain through denying his physical body. He thought the experience would show him something new, like “a new color,” something impossible, something he had never seen before (This American Life, Episode 259, “Promised Land”).
But Rakoff did not experience peace or tranquility or insight. He didn’t have visions. He felt sleepy, he reported at first, and he had a hard time concentrating. As the fast continued, he felt better, focused—but no new insights. On day six, he worried that something had gone terribly wrong; he felt faint. He got reassurance from his doctor, who was skeptical and would have preferred that Rakoff end this quest. But he continued with the fast, which he calls “self-obsessed”: twenty days of “narcissistic rumination” that served to increase what the writer calls his “usual feelings of venality and guilt.” Fasting doesn’t solve anything for him, doesn’t reassure him that life and the universe have a purpose. Toward the end of the ordeal, Rakoff recalls a slight feeling of detachment; he was “aware” of the problems in his life, but they didn’t matter as much to him. Worried that he had gone about the fast incorrectly, he called a woman who has fasted like this five times. She reported a radical cleansing of her body; she saw and felt the toxins released. “You feel like you’re new,” she said, “like you’re a new person […] your highest self” (This American Life). Is this the fast we desire?
About halfway through his fast, Rakoff rode the subway in New York City. I will try to retell the story as he told it on the radio: “One night on the subway, I see a woman at the end of the car. She leans over to the people sitting next to her and asks in a quiet, friendly, almost business-like tone, ‘Do you have any extra food I can buy off of you?’ I can only hear her because the train is silent. She isn’t standing in the middle of the car addressing us. She’s just asking those within earshot. I walk over and give the woman a dollar before I get off at Union Square. ‘But do you have any extra food?’ she asks me. I apologize and say that I do not have any extra food. But I know in that moment that there is neither clarity nor serenity enough in the world that would give me the chutzpah to tell her why not” (This American Life).
Is this the fast God desires? Is this the fast we, as a Jewish community, seek on Yom Kippur? Choosing not to eat so that we can gain something for ourselves, some kind of insight or spiritual experience—choosing not to eat while others go hungry? Rakoff saw the sadness in fasting for “spiritual enlightenment,” out of choice and whim and as an intellectual experiment, in the midst of a city where too many people go home hungry, or can go to no home at all. The woman on the subway asked quietly not just for food, but for extra food. She did not want others to go hungry to feed her, but she wanted something to eat. Such a fast gets it backwards: we pay so much attention to our own bodies, to ourselves, that we cannot see the person in need right before our eyes.
What matters tonight and tomorrow is not what passes our lips, not the form our fast takes. We each make our own decisions about our health as we decide how to restrict the intake of food and water and the pleasures of the body denied to us on Yom Kippur. What matters is not that we torture ourselves or punish ourselves. What matters is not that we go on a spiritual quest for visions and enlightenment.
What matters is that our fast awakens us in ways the shofar call did not—awakens us to the fragility of our lives, to our role as partners with God in bringing about a just society. What matters is that we face the empty Ark, dressed as the dead are dressed, with a new awareness of our duty to clothe the naked, to feed the hungry, and to welcome the stranger. What matters is not that we think today alone about our bodies, but that we carefully consider each day what we eat, where it comes from, who prepares it, how they are paid and treated.
God, through the prophet Joel, declares that our fast is desirable. God instructs us, “Turn back to Me with all your hearts, and with fasting, weeping, and lamenting” (Joel 2:13). But this fast cannot be a show. “Rend your hearts rather than your garments,” God urges (Joel 2:13).
May our fast move us, in our very being, to turn our lives toward the care of the neglected, the vulnerable, and the lonely. May we be partners with God in caring for one another.
Sunday, September 12, 2010
Here I Am
The following is my sermon for Rosh HaShana Morning at Temple Beth Am, Monessen, PA. The views expressed here are my own and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the community I am honored to serve this year.
“Present!” I would answer when my grade-school teacher took attendance. For some reason, “Here” seemed too informal to my mind. I was ready to learn, even eager to diagram sentences in English class. I was present!
A friend of mine recently told me that she, too, would answer her teacher with a more formal response to the mundane role call. But this was in a different language, in a different kind of school. At her afternoon Hebrew school class, my friend responded not with “I’m here” (in Hebrew, Ani po). Instead, she called out, “Hineini!” Here I am! Other students snickered as her teacher tried to explain the rich and sometimes subtle difference between two Hebrew expressions that can both indeed be translated as “Here I am.”
In the Tanakh and in our liturgy, hineini represents much more than physically being here. Hineini indicates a presence and an intention and a humility that can clue us in to our duties as Jews and as morally-conscious human beings. Last night, at the beginning of our service, I recited the traditional words of the prayer leader, a humble statement of intention and responsibility. The prayer begins hineni, here I am. With all my own faults, grateful for the trust of this community on whose behalf I invoke Jewish tradition, here I am.
For the prophet Isaiah, hineini is his immediate, perhaps even instinctual, response to what is literally a call from God: “Then I heard the voice of my Lord saying, ‘Whom shall I send? Who will go for us?’ And I said, ‘Hineni, sh’lacheini, Here I am, send me’” (Isaiah 6:8). But the Bible does not reserve this special word for human encounters with the Divine. Hineini symbolizes a son’s willingness to take action for his father. When his father Isaac calls to him saying, “My son,” Esau responds, “Hineini, here I am” (Genesis 27:1). Esau responds openly, willingly, though he does not know what his father will ask of him. This call to a son answered so openly and willingly marks the beginning of a conversation. Isaac asks his son to hunt some game and prepare a stew for him; Esau follows through on his hineini, hunting as his father requested. Making the stew demonstrates just how present Esau can be for his dying father, who plans to bestow upon his son his “innermost blessing,” a blessing from the depths of his soul (Gen. 27:4). Hineini symbolizes a beloved child’s willingness to put himself at risk. When his father Jacob sends the young Joseph out to the fields to check up on his competitive brothers, he answers “Hineni, Here I am”—or, as one translation renders it, “I am ready” (Gen. 37:13). Jacob’s trust in his son is met by Joseph’s loyalty.
And as we see so clearly in the Akeida, the story of the binding of Isaac, hineini indicates far more than proximity or attendance. Hineini represents a bond between one person and another, between a person and God. A covenantal tie or a feeling of responsibility prompts one to reply, Hineini, Here I am.
Climbing Mount Moriah together, Abraham and his son, his only one, his beloved, Isaac, have not wandered far from one another. The Torah tells us, “vayeilchu sh’neihem yachdav”—“and the two walked off together” (Gen. 22:6). When Isaac cries out, “Father,” he does not need Abraham to tell him physically where he is; Isaac can see Abraham clearly. Perhaps he can reach out and touch him, steadying himself on the rocky ground during the long climb. Isaac calls out in his own fear and confusion, seeking the love and loyalty of a father, asking just with that one word, that one name—Father—for Abraham to remember the responsibility that binds him to Isaac. “Then Isaac said to Abraham his father, ‘Father!’ And he answered, ‘Hineini, vni’—‘Here I am, my son.’ And he said, ‘Hinei, Here are the fire and the wood, but where is the sheep for the burnt offering?’” (Gen. 22:7). Abraham reassures his son that God will provide for the offering, though this father had already pledged to offer up his beloved son; he has the knife in his hand even now. Abraham reassures his son not only with the words, “God will see to the sheep for the offering,” but by twice addressing Isaac as “my son”: “God will see to the sheep for the offering, my son” (Gen. 22:8); and “Hineini, vni”—“Here I am, my son” (Gen. 22:7). Abraham reassures his son with the very word he used earlier to respond to God, the Most High. “Hineini, vni”—“Here I am, my son.” Here I am, willing to take responsibility for you, remembering the love and loyalty I feel toward you, bound in two directions, bound by the covenant with a God who tests me with this ultimate sacrifice, bound by the ties of father to son.
When God first calls to Abraham in this story, the response is immediate, open, and willing. As many classical commentators note, Abraham commits himself to fulfilling God’s call before he knows what God is asking of him (Genesis Rabbah and Or Ha-Hayyim). “Abraham,” God cries. “Hineini” (Gen. 22:1). And then God asks the impossible: “Take, please, your son, your only one, the one you love, Isaac, and take yourself (lech-lecha) to the land of Moriah, and offer him there as a burnt offering on one of the mountains that I will show you” (Gen. 22:2).
I wonder how it felt to be present, there in that moment, atop the mountain, binding his beloved son to the wood for the burnt offering. Isaac has asked only one question; whether he was reassured or horrified we cannot know. The Sages say that the Angel of God blessed Isaac with a tear as he lay, bound to the wood atop the altar—a single tear to blind Isaac, sparing him from the terrible sight of his father: “Vayishlach Avraham et yado vayikach et hama’achelet lischot et b’no”—“And Abraham put out his hand and took the knife to slaughter his son” (Gen. 22:10). In that moment, could Abraham be truly present, or had he turned his brain to autopilot, carrying out the motions? In that moment, the Angel of God calls Abraham to be present again: “Then an angel of the Eternal called to him from heaven: ‘Abraham! Abraham!’ And he answered, ‘Hineini’” (Gen. 22:11). Called to be present in the moment, shaken from the terrible truth of the knife in his hand, Abraham can now fulfill the promise he made with each previous Hineini. He can be loyal to the God of the covenant, and he can be loving toward his son. He can be present to two crucial relationships in his life—relationships that bind Abraham to take on the sometimes messy project of discerning what it means to live a Jewish life.
Rabbi Dr. Norman Cohen sees in the Biblical examples of Hineini a challenge to us. We must not assume that this word, and the attention to relationship it carries with it, was meant only for the ancient Israelites (Hineini in Our Lives). We can bring hineini into our own relationships.
To be present, truly present, with another human being, and to feel responsible in relationship to another human being—not knowing what will be asked of you, not knowing the consequence—this is hineini. And hineini is something I learned this summer through an internship in hospital chaplaincy.
In the Bible, hineini indicates a conversation, an exchange, a reciprocal encounter between two beings tied to one another in relationship. Hineini does not open the conversation; it is a response; it continues an ongoing exchange. Hineini can link past, present, and future: because of our past covenant, I will commit to taking action for you in the present, accepting the consequences for our shared future.
For Isaiah, hineini happened in an unprecedented direct conversation with God. The covenant between God and Israel was not new to Isaiah, but his role as a prophet came upon him like a bolt from the blue, a voice from the heavens calling out to him alone. And he answered, Hineini, here I am.
It is this kind of call we answer when we dare to be present to other human beings. Bound by the ethics of Jewish religious tradition, I walked into hospital rooms this past summer feeling a generalized sense of responsibility, an abstract call to be present. But in the face of each new human being, each stranger lying vulnerable in a hospital bed, I was called individually and anew. “Will you be present for me?” Hineini. Here I am.
When I first visited Wanda, she immediately grabbed my hand. “You’re the chaplain,” she said, relieved. “Pray for me. Pray for God to change the minds of all these doctors and social workers. They won’t let me go home. Pray for God to change their minds.”
Wanda’s story was complex, her stay in the hospital lengthened by her own unwillingness to be transferred to a rehabilitation center where she could get proper care. Alone at home, Wanda had no support, and she needed at least two people to help her get out of bed. Resistant and angry and afraid, Wanda could not hear the reasoned, and at times impatient, words of the social worker, nor could she interpret the nurses’ care as attentive.
Over the course of my visits with Wanda, she often changed her mind about what she wanted. One day she refused to be transferred to rehab; the next day she complained that the doctors wouldn’t let her go.
During each visit, I tried to simply be present with Wanda—not to argue for or against the social workers’ recommendations or to determine whether Wanda was “right” or “wrong” about the nurses. Instead, I tried to discern what Wanda was asking of me, present with her in the moment of her pain and vulnerability. And loneliness.
“People treat me like I’m dog meat,” she said, seemingly referring not only to the hospital staff but to everyone she had ever encountered—all of humanity. “I’m a person.”
The last time I prayed with Wanda, I began with a song: Don’t hide your face from me; I’m asking for your help. I call to you, please hear my prayer, O God. If you would answer me as I have called to you… please hear me now; don’t hide your face from me.
In that prayer, I asked that Wanda come to know, in her interactions with the hospital staff, throughout her healing process, and indeed throughout her life, that each person is created betzelem Elohim, in the image of God. In our humanity, we share a bit of the Divine, and we are called to reach out to one another in responsibility and in humility and with care. Being present with Wanda meant saying hineini to her loneliness and her pain. Being present with Wanda meant urging her to reconnect to the other people around her even as I acknowledged that sometimes people fall short, sometimes they fail to see the human being in pain right in front of them.
Being able to say hineini means recognizing that, when we stand in the presence of another human being who is willing to reach out to us in relationship, we stand upon holy ground. Present in that moment, we each have the opportunity to remind the other that she is human in the best sense. We have the opportunity to remind the other that she is not only mortal or vulnerable or fragile, but that she is created in the Divine image, that she is capable of taking action in her own life, that she is capable of climbing the mountain or calling the world to justice.
Being able to say hineini means paying attention to who is calling us. Asleep in the Temple, the young Samuel hears a voice in the night: “Vayikra Adonai el Shmuel vayomer ‘Hineini’”—“and the Eternal called out to Samuel and he answered, ‘Here I am’” (1 Sam. 3:4). Throughout the night, Samuel misses the call, not realizing it is God reaching out to him. Samuel thinks it is Eli, the High Priest, calling him to some particular duty; he willingly answers, Hineini, but he answers the wrong person. The Jewish Publication Society indicates the difference between the kind of answer Abraham gives to the Angel of God and the answer Samuel gives to a voice he thinks is Eli. JPS translates Samuel’s nighttime hineini as “I’m coming”—a more casual response to a voice Samuel thinks he has heard dozens of times. Eventually, Eli unravels the mystery and instructs Samuel on a new answer: “Speak, Eternal, for your servant is listening” (1 Sam 3:9,10).
Sometimes we respond in our relationships with rote replies. “I’m coming,” we say, rolling our eyes. But our tradition teaches us that we must open our ears to the extraordinary call, the radical call to be vulnerable to another, responsible for another, willing to live in relationship with an other. Hineini, here I am, here I am with all my faults and in love and in loyalty. Here I am, for you, in this moment.
As we embark upon this new year, let us be attentive to our relationships. Let us answer one another’s call. And let us remember that God, too, reaches out to us in relationship. Through the prophet Isaiah, God assures us, “When you call, the Eternal will answer. When you cry, He will say, Hineini, Here I am” (Isaiah 58:9).
“Present!” I would answer when my grade-school teacher took attendance. For some reason, “Here” seemed too informal to my mind. I was ready to learn, even eager to diagram sentences in English class. I was present!
A friend of mine recently told me that she, too, would answer her teacher with a more formal response to the mundane role call. But this was in a different language, in a different kind of school. At her afternoon Hebrew school class, my friend responded not with “I’m here” (in Hebrew, Ani po). Instead, she called out, “Hineini!” Here I am! Other students snickered as her teacher tried to explain the rich and sometimes subtle difference between two Hebrew expressions that can both indeed be translated as “Here I am.”
In the Tanakh and in our liturgy, hineini represents much more than physically being here. Hineini indicates a presence and an intention and a humility that can clue us in to our duties as Jews and as morally-conscious human beings. Last night, at the beginning of our service, I recited the traditional words of the prayer leader, a humble statement of intention and responsibility. The prayer begins hineni, here I am. With all my own faults, grateful for the trust of this community on whose behalf I invoke Jewish tradition, here I am.
For the prophet Isaiah, hineini is his immediate, perhaps even instinctual, response to what is literally a call from God: “Then I heard the voice of my Lord saying, ‘Whom shall I send? Who will go for us?’ And I said, ‘Hineni, sh’lacheini, Here I am, send me’” (Isaiah 6:8). But the Bible does not reserve this special word for human encounters with the Divine. Hineini symbolizes a son’s willingness to take action for his father. When his father Isaac calls to him saying, “My son,” Esau responds, “Hineini, here I am” (Genesis 27:1). Esau responds openly, willingly, though he does not know what his father will ask of him. This call to a son answered so openly and willingly marks the beginning of a conversation. Isaac asks his son to hunt some game and prepare a stew for him; Esau follows through on his hineini, hunting as his father requested. Making the stew demonstrates just how present Esau can be for his dying father, who plans to bestow upon his son his “innermost blessing,” a blessing from the depths of his soul (Gen. 27:4). Hineini symbolizes a beloved child’s willingness to put himself at risk. When his father Jacob sends the young Joseph out to the fields to check up on his competitive brothers, he answers “Hineni, Here I am”—or, as one translation renders it, “I am ready” (Gen. 37:13). Jacob’s trust in his son is met by Joseph’s loyalty.
And as we see so clearly in the Akeida, the story of the binding of Isaac, hineini indicates far more than proximity or attendance. Hineini represents a bond between one person and another, between a person and God. A covenantal tie or a feeling of responsibility prompts one to reply, Hineini, Here I am.
Climbing Mount Moriah together, Abraham and his son, his only one, his beloved, Isaac, have not wandered far from one another. The Torah tells us, “vayeilchu sh’neihem yachdav”—“and the two walked off together” (Gen. 22:6). When Isaac cries out, “Father,” he does not need Abraham to tell him physically where he is; Isaac can see Abraham clearly. Perhaps he can reach out and touch him, steadying himself on the rocky ground during the long climb. Isaac calls out in his own fear and confusion, seeking the love and loyalty of a father, asking just with that one word, that one name—Father—for Abraham to remember the responsibility that binds him to Isaac. “Then Isaac said to Abraham his father, ‘Father!’ And he answered, ‘Hineini, vni’—‘Here I am, my son.’ And he said, ‘Hinei, Here are the fire and the wood, but where is the sheep for the burnt offering?’” (Gen. 22:7). Abraham reassures his son that God will provide for the offering, though this father had already pledged to offer up his beloved son; he has the knife in his hand even now. Abraham reassures his son not only with the words, “God will see to the sheep for the offering,” but by twice addressing Isaac as “my son”: “God will see to the sheep for the offering, my son” (Gen. 22:8); and “Hineini, vni”—“Here I am, my son” (Gen. 22:7). Abraham reassures his son with the very word he used earlier to respond to God, the Most High. “Hineini, vni”—“Here I am, my son.” Here I am, willing to take responsibility for you, remembering the love and loyalty I feel toward you, bound in two directions, bound by the covenant with a God who tests me with this ultimate sacrifice, bound by the ties of father to son.
When God first calls to Abraham in this story, the response is immediate, open, and willing. As many classical commentators note, Abraham commits himself to fulfilling God’s call before he knows what God is asking of him (Genesis Rabbah and Or Ha-Hayyim). “Abraham,” God cries. “Hineini” (Gen. 22:1). And then God asks the impossible: “Take, please, your son, your only one, the one you love, Isaac, and take yourself (lech-lecha) to the land of Moriah, and offer him there as a burnt offering on one of the mountains that I will show you” (Gen. 22:2).
I wonder how it felt to be present, there in that moment, atop the mountain, binding his beloved son to the wood for the burnt offering. Isaac has asked only one question; whether he was reassured or horrified we cannot know. The Sages say that the Angel of God blessed Isaac with a tear as he lay, bound to the wood atop the altar—a single tear to blind Isaac, sparing him from the terrible sight of his father: “Vayishlach Avraham et yado vayikach et hama’achelet lischot et b’no”—“And Abraham put out his hand and took the knife to slaughter his son” (Gen. 22:10). In that moment, could Abraham be truly present, or had he turned his brain to autopilot, carrying out the motions? In that moment, the Angel of God calls Abraham to be present again: “Then an angel of the Eternal called to him from heaven: ‘Abraham! Abraham!’ And he answered, ‘Hineini’” (Gen. 22:11). Called to be present in the moment, shaken from the terrible truth of the knife in his hand, Abraham can now fulfill the promise he made with each previous Hineini. He can be loyal to the God of the covenant, and he can be loving toward his son. He can be present to two crucial relationships in his life—relationships that bind Abraham to take on the sometimes messy project of discerning what it means to live a Jewish life.
Rabbi Dr. Norman Cohen sees in the Biblical examples of Hineini a challenge to us. We must not assume that this word, and the attention to relationship it carries with it, was meant only for the ancient Israelites (Hineini in Our Lives). We can bring hineini into our own relationships.
To be present, truly present, with another human being, and to feel responsible in relationship to another human being—not knowing what will be asked of you, not knowing the consequence—this is hineini. And hineini is something I learned this summer through an internship in hospital chaplaincy.
In the Bible, hineini indicates a conversation, an exchange, a reciprocal encounter between two beings tied to one another in relationship. Hineini does not open the conversation; it is a response; it continues an ongoing exchange. Hineini can link past, present, and future: because of our past covenant, I will commit to taking action for you in the present, accepting the consequences for our shared future.
For Isaiah, hineini happened in an unprecedented direct conversation with God. The covenant between God and Israel was not new to Isaiah, but his role as a prophet came upon him like a bolt from the blue, a voice from the heavens calling out to him alone. And he answered, Hineini, here I am.
It is this kind of call we answer when we dare to be present to other human beings. Bound by the ethics of Jewish religious tradition, I walked into hospital rooms this past summer feeling a generalized sense of responsibility, an abstract call to be present. But in the face of each new human being, each stranger lying vulnerable in a hospital bed, I was called individually and anew. “Will you be present for me?” Hineini. Here I am.
When I first visited Wanda, she immediately grabbed my hand. “You’re the chaplain,” she said, relieved. “Pray for me. Pray for God to change the minds of all these doctors and social workers. They won’t let me go home. Pray for God to change their minds.”
Wanda’s story was complex, her stay in the hospital lengthened by her own unwillingness to be transferred to a rehabilitation center where she could get proper care. Alone at home, Wanda had no support, and she needed at least two people to help her get out of bed. Resistant and angry and afraid, Wanda could not hear the reasoned, and at times impatient, words of the social worker, nor could she interpret the nurses’ care as attentive.
Over the course of my visits with Wanda, she often changed her mind about what she wanted. One day she refused to be transferred to rehab; the next day she complained that the doctors wouldn’t let her go.
During each visit, I tried to simply be present with Wanda—not to argue for or against the social workers’ recommendations or to determine whether Wanda was “right” or “wrong” about the nurses. Instead, I tried to discern what Wanda was asking of me, present with her in the moment of her pain and vulnerability. And loneliness.
“People treat me like I’m dog meat,” she said, seemingly referring not only to the hospital staff but to everyone she had ever encountered—all of humanity. “I’m a person.”
The last time I prayed with Wanda, I began with a song: Don’t hide your face from me; I’m asking for your help. I call to you, please hear my prayer, O God. If you would answer me as I have called to you… please hear me now; don’t hide your face from me.
In that prayer, I asked that Wanda come to know, in her interactions with the hospital staff, throughout her healing process, and indeed throughout her life, that each person is created betzelem Elohim, in the image of God. In our humanity, we share a bit of the Divine, and we are called to reach out to one another in responsibility and in humility and with care. Being present with Wanda meant saying hineini to her loneliness and her pain. Being present with Wanda meant urging her to reconnect to the other people around her even as I acknowledged that sometimes people fall short, sometimes they fail to see the human being in pain right in front of them.
Being able to say hineini means recognizing that, when we stand in the presence of another human being who is willing to reach out to us in relationship, we stand upon holy ground. Present in that moment, we each have the opportunity to remind the other that she is human in the best sense. We have the opportunity to remind the other that she is not only mortal or vulnerable or fragile, but that she is created in the Divine image, that she is capable of taking action in her own life, that she is capable of climbing the mountain or calling the world to justice.
Being able to say hineini means paying attention to who is calling us. Asleep in the Temple, the young Samuel hears a voice in the night: “Vayikra Adonai el Shmuel vayomer ‘Hineini’”—“and the Eternal called out to Samuel and he answered, ‘Here I am’” (1 Sam. 3:4). Throughout the night, Samuel misses the call, not realizing it is God reaching out to him. Samuel thinks it is Eli, the High Priest, calling him to some particular duty; he willingly answers, Hineini, but he answers the wrong person. The Jewish Publication Society indicates the difference between the kind of answer Abraham gives to the Angel of God and the answer Samuel gives to a voice he thinks is Eli. JPS translates Samuel’s nighttime hineini as “I’m coming”—a more casual response to a voice Samuel thinks he has heard dozens of times. Eventually, Eli unravels the mystery and instructs Samuel on a new answer: “Speak, Eternal, for your servant is listening” (1 Sam 3:9,10).
Sometimes we respond in our relationships with rote replies. “I’m coming,” we say, rolling our eyes. But our tradition teaches us that we must open our ears to the extraordinary call, the radical call to be vulnerable to another, responsible for another, willing to live in relationship with an other. Hineini, here I am, here I am with all my faults and in love and in loyalty. Here I am, for you, in this moment.
As we embark upon this new year, let us be attentive to our relationships. Let us answer one another’s call. And let us remember that God, too, reaches out to us in relationship. Through the prophet Isaiah, God assures us, “When you call, the Eternal will answer. When you cry, He will say, Hineini, Here I am” (Isaiah 58:9).
Sow in Tears, Reap in Joy
The following is my sermon for Erev Rosh HaShana at Temple Beth Am, Monessen, PA. The views expressed here are my own and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the community I am honored to serve this year.
Shana tova. Tonight we greet each other this way, eating apples and honey and thinking about a sweet new year. We proclaim, “Today is the birthday of the world.” It is a day of renewal and joy. Yet today is also a day of responsibility and even trembling: U’netane tokef kedushat hayom, ki hu norah v’ayom. Let us proclaim the holiness of this day, for it is terrible and full of dread.
During these ten Days of Awe, our liturgy is pleading and humble. Through the rest of the year the Reform prayerbook edits out certain references to a theology of reward and punishment; for example, our Shema omits a paragraph where God warns that, if we do not obey God’s commandments, God’s anger will “flare up” against us, interrupting the natural order of the world and causing calamity. But reward and punishment fill the pages of our High Holy Day liturgy. We address God as King and as Judge—all-powerful, towering above us, lowly and unworthy. We plead with God not to close the Gates on our prayers for forgiveness. In some synagogues, congregants weep and wail as they recite the u’netane tokef prayer: “On Rosh HaShanah it is written, on Yom Kippur it is sealed: How many shall pass on, how many shall come to be; who shall live and who shall die; […] who shall perish by fire and who by water; […] who shall be tranquil and who shall be troubled, who shall be poor and who shall be rich.” This litany of disastrous consequences, often distanced from our modern understanding with beautiful organ music and cantorial improvisation, seems harsh. For some of us, in some years, it can be nearly impossible to face, to recite those cold and indeed dreadful words.
It is dreadful to pray to a God who is deciding, right now, “who shall be poor and who shall be rich” when our nation struggles through a long economic depression. When our loved ones or we ourselves fear for our job security or face yet another month unemployed. It is dreadful to pray to a God who is deciding, right now, “who shall live and who shall die” when our minds and hearts are with someone lying in a hospital bed. When we live each day with the knowledge that a terminal disease threatens our very being or someone we hold dear. It is dreadful to pray to a God who is deciding, right now, “who shall be tranquil and who shall be troubled” when each day can be a battle against stress or depression or a learning disability. I confess, sometimes when we’ve reached u’netane tokef in our liturgy I have sat in the pew thinking, “Give me a break this year, God. I cannot say these words.”
It is hard to pray a liturgy that depicts God as so very invested in reward and punishment. It is hard to voice precisely how little control we have over crucial aspects of our lives: the economy that secures or threatens our sustenance and shelter, our own health and the health of loved ones, natural disasters like the devastating floods in Pakistan, accidents like the oil spill whose effects continue to alter the landscape of an entire region of our country. It is hard to pray when we have seen in our own lives that God doesn’t always seem to respond and make everything better. During these Days of Awe, faced with the knowledge that so much in this world is out of our control, how can we pray?
From praise to thanksgiving to supplication, our Bible and rabbinic literature depict Jews praying to God for various reasons and in different ways. The prophet Daniel models a confessional prayer seeking mercy and forgiveness, much like the confessions we will offer on Yom Kippur. Like our modern-day liturgy, Daniel’s prayer begins with intention and attitude: “I turned my face to the Lord God, devoting myself to prayer and supplication” (Daniel 9:3). Daniel turns his prayer to confession with words like those we pray at the end of Avinu Malkeinu when we say “be gracious and answer us, for we have nothing.” “We have sinned,” Daniel laments, “we have gone astray. […] With you, God, is the right, and the shame is on us to this very day” (Daniel 9:5,7). These are the kinds of prayers we offer during the Days of Awe, and perhaps less often during the rest of the Jewish calendar. They are prayers that profess collective belief in human powerlessness.
Jewish tradition offers us other ways to pray, too. We call upon God as one who remembers the covenant. God remembers Sarah and Rachel in their intense desire for children. As we read each Rosh Hashanah, God remembers Hannah. In these stories, human beings cry out to God, emotional and vulnerable, and God not only hears but grants their requests, blessing each with a son. How many of us have prayed that same prayer, pining for a miracle? In the story of Hannah in the Book of Samuel, we read that Hannah, so distressed by barrenness, wept, refused to eat, and began to pray: “[I]n the bitterness of her soul, [Hannah] prayed to the Eternal, weeping all the while” (1 Samuel 1:10). Praying silently, only her lips moving, Hannah appeared drunk to the priest Eli, who chastised her until Hannah promised that she had drunk no wine but had been pouring out her soul to God. We do not know the entirety of Hannah’s prayer, but we do know that she made a vow: if God granted her a son, Hannah would dedicate that son to service in the Temple. And of course, this is what happens—despite her barrenness, despite the ridicule she endured, despite Eli’s misunderstanding. “Elkanah knew his wife Hannah and the Eternal remembered her. Hannah conceived, and at the turn of the year bore a son. She named him Samuel, meaning, ‘I asked the Eternal for him.’” (1 Samuel 1:19-20).
I can certainly relate to heartfelt prayers going misunderstood. And I can relate to Hannah’s despair and the loneliness she must have experienced when even her own husband could not comprehend how deep was her desire for a child. It is harder for me to understand the end of the story, where God remembers Hannah. Will God remember each of us, in our distress, by granting our prayers?
Yet something else happens to Hannah. She prayed for a son, yes, but perhaps she prayed, too, for comfort. Perhaps she prayed for a lessening of her loneliness and isolation. Leaving the Temple, perhaps Hannah is so confident in her prayer that she has no doubt God will grant her a son. I’m not sure I can have that kind of confidence. But I take comfort in the peace Hannah gained from pouring out her soul to God: “And she went on her way, and she ate, and was no longer downcast” (1 Samuel 1:18). That is to say, Hannah gained comfort through her prayer, even before it was literally answered, simply by saying the words. Sometimes letting go of our loneliness, voicing the deepest desires of our souls, and pouring out our fears can be liberating. I find in Hannah’s tale a hint that prayer can be effective even when we see no recognizable “answer.” It can help us to let go of some of the things over which we have no control.
Yet prayer is not only about results, nor is it only about our comfort. In shaping our daily liturgy, the rabbis taught that prayer is a call to action. Each day, after reciting the blessing for Torah study, the rabbis instituted the practice of reading aloud an adaptation of a passage from the Mishnah: Eilu devarim she’ein la’hem shiur… “These are things that are limitless, of which a person enjoys the fruit of this world, while the principal remains in the world to come. They are: honoring one’s father and mother, engaging in deeds of compassion (gemilut chasadim), arriving early for study, morning and evening, welcoming guests, visiting the sick,
providing for the wedding couple, accompanying the dead for burial, intentionality in prayer, and making peace among people. But the study of Torah encompasses them all.” This text, recited each day, states unequivocally why we engage with Judaism, why we pray, why we study ancient texts in a language that has become for many of us distant and challenging. In Hebrew, “to pray” is a reflexive verb, something one does to oneself: lehitpalel. To examine oneself, to go inside oneself. The rabbis wanted to ensure that our prayers neither wandered into the territory of narcissism nor remained in the mode of prostration and wailing. Instead, they built into our liturgy a reminder of Judaism’s ultimate aim: to do mitzvot in the world. If Torah does not lead us from this sacred space into the world to fill bowls at the soup kitchen or listen to the stories of the residents of the nursing home or advocate for peace in Israel and all the world, then we have not prayed.
So what do we do with u’netane tokef? When we already bear so much responsibility and pain, how do we find words to carry us through the Days of Awe into the new year?
As I have been preparing for these Days of Awe, coming from a summer of working in hospital chaplaincy, surrounded by terminal illness and death and often hopelessness, I have been thinking about a different prayer, from Psalms. It is a text that many people lean on when they want to believe that prayer is magical and immediate, that God responds straightaway, in humanly recognizable terms, giving us all that we ask for. We are suffering now, people say, but God will provide for us in the future, suddenly and without precedent. “Those who sow in tears will reap in joy” (Psalm 126:5). Many times, I have heard this phrase as a surrender: there is nothing more I can do, so I will wait for God. I am here, suffering, but God will suddenly turn all of this upside down.
Indeed, Psalm 126 is a vision of some unknown future when God will reverse the plight of the Israelites in Exile:
When the Eternal restores the fortunes of Zion
---we see it as in a dream---
our mouths shall be filled with laughter,
our tongues, with songs of joy.
[…]
They who sow in tears
will reap with songs of joy.
Though he goes along weeping,
carrying the seed-bag,
he shall come back with songs of joy,
carrying his sheaves.
Certainly, such a vision promises that God will reverse expectations, allowing us to reap joy where we have planted only tears. But I want to think just about that one line: “Those who sow in tears will reap in joy.” At least for me, raised in the suburbs and now a confirmed Brooklynite, sowing and reaping are not daily activities. I often think about the backbreaking work of preparing the soil, bending to cast the seeds over the ground, but then I skip to the part where we’re all gathered around the table eating the bread. We have reaped, and we joyously benefit from what we worked so very hard to plant.
But reaping is hard work! Now, at the beginning of our Days of Awe, we prepare to reap what we have sown this past year. That is the essence of u’netane tokef. Today is terrible and full of dread because we face the consequences not of the whims of some faraway God, but because we, renewing our commitment to Jewish tradition each year, reflect upon our own actions. How have we enacted our prayers, transforming the pouring out of our emotions into mitzvot in the world?
To affirm that “those who sow in tears will reap in joy” ought to be neither a surrender nor an admonishment. If we do not find ourselves reaping in joy at the moment, we need not assume that it is all our fault, that we are being punished for the tears we have sown. And if we do find ourselves at this moment sowing in tears, suffering and worried, we cannot assume that God will turn it around, make everything better.
How can we approach prayer during these ten Days of Awe? We can approach it thinking, “Those who sow in tears will reap in joy.” We can approach it knowing that our tears matter—to this community, to one another, and to God. We can approach prayer knowing that we must not only sow but reap; we must attend to those crucial tasks the rabbis included in our daily prayer routine: caring for the sick, celebrating life’s joyous moments, studying Jewish tradition, and honoring our nurturing relationships. We can approach prayer hoping that our own efforts to reap what we have ourselves planted will be matched by an ability to see the joy around us, to see the small miracles amidst the challenges we each face. Our tears are necessary; they sink into the fertile ground and sprout up a newly-appreciated ability to recognize joy. We cannot control events like earthquakes and cancer diagnoses, ultrasound results and economic downturns. But we can do the hard work of shaping our reactions to those events.
I think this is how prayer worked for Isaac—the young son who, as we will hear tomorrow morning—lay atop a pile of dry timbers, his father holding the fire and the knife. Likely traumatized by his experience on the mountaintop, Isaac disappears from the narrative in Genesis, while Abraham buries Sarah and arranges for Isaac’s marriage. The next time we see Isaac, he is pensive. Isaac does not cry out or pray for God to return his mother to him; he does not petition for anything. We read, “Vayetze Yitzchak lasuach basadeh lifnot erev vayisa einaiv vayar v’hinei g’malim baim”¬—Translation here is complicated by the verb lasuach, used rarely in the Bible. “And Isaac went out to lasuach in the field at the coming of evening, and he lifted his eyes, and he saw, and—behold!—camels approach!” (Gen. 24:63). The rabbis of the Talmud interpret lasuach as “to meditate” or “to pray” (Brachot 26b). So at twilight, as one day ends and another begins, Isaac walks out into the field, his head and his spirits lowered, meditating and praying. His prayer does not revive his mother from the dead; instead, Isaac’s prayer changes the way he sees the world.
“And he lifted his eyes, and he saw, and—behold!—camels approach! And Rebecca lifted her eyes, and she saw Isaac, and she fell from her camel. […] And Isaac brought her to the tent of Sarah his mother, and he took Rebecca as his wife, and he loved her, and Isaac was comforted after the death of his mother” (Gen. 24:63-64,67).
Isaac went to pour forth his sadness in prayer; his evening meditation allowed him to lift up his eyes and look again at the world, despite the grief he still carried. And, in looking up, the world surprised him. He found Rebecca, found the ability to risk loving again in spite of loss, found comfort. The tears he sowed and the prayer he offered allowed Isaac to reap in joy.
These Days of Awe, may our prayers represent our willingness to pour forth our tears and to do the work of reaping what we have planted. May our prayers make us ready to lift up our eyes and see the world anew. May our prayers be, as Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel urges, “our humble answer to the inconceivable surprise of living” (Quoted in Lawrence A. Hoffman, The Way into Jewish Prayer, 15). Today is full of awe. Vayisu eineinu. And we lift up our eyes.
Shana tova. Tonight we greet each other this way, eating apples and honey and thinking about a sweet new year. We proclaim, “Today is the birthday of the world.” It is a day of renewal and joy. Yet today is also a day of responsibility and even trembling: U’netane tokef kedushat hayom, ki hu norah v’ayom. Let us proclaim the holiness of this day, for it is terrible and full of dread.
During these ten Days of Awe, our liturgy is pleading and humble. Through the rest of the year the Reform prayerbook edits out certain references to a theology of reward and punishment; for example, our Shema omits a paragraph where God warns that, if we do not obey God’s commandments, God’s anger will “flare up” against us, interrupting the natural order of the world and causing calamity. But reward and punishment fill the pages of our High Holy Day liturgy. We address God as King and as Judge—all-powerful, towering above us, lowly and unworthy. We plead with God not to close the Gates on our prayers for forgiveness. In some synagogues, congregants weep and wail as they recite the u’netane tokef prayer: “On Rosh HaShanah it is written, on Yom Kippur it is sealed: How many shall pass on, how many shall come to be; who shall live and who shall die; […] who shall perish by fire and who by water; […] who shall be tranquil and who shall be troubled, who shall be poor and who shall be rich.” This litany of disastrous consequences, often distanced from our modern understanding with beautiful organ music and cantorial improvisation, seems harsh. For some of us, in some years, it can be nearly impossible to face, to recite those cold and indeed dreadful words.
It is dreadful to pray to a God who is deciding, right now, “who shall be poor and who shall be rich” when our nation struggles through a long economic depression. When our loved ones or we ourselves fear for our job security or face yet another month unemployed. It is dreadful to pray to a God who is deciding, right now, “who shall live and who shall die” when our minds and hearts are with someone lying in a hospital bed. When we live each day with the knowledge that a terminal disease threatens our very being or someone we hold dear. It is dreadful to pray to a God who is deciding, right now, “who shall be tranquil and who shall be troubled” when each day can be a battle against stress or depression or a learning disability. I confess, sometimes when we’ve reached u’netane tokef in our liturgy I have sat in the pew thinking, “Give me a break this year, God. I cannot say these words.”
It is hard to pray a liturgy that depicts God as so very invested in reward and punishment. It is hard to voice precisely how little control we have over crucial aspects of our lives: the economy that secures or threatens our sustenance and shelter, our own health and the health of loved ones, natural disasters like the devastating floods in Pakistan, accidents like the oil spill whose effects continue to alter the landscape of an entire region of our country. It is hard to pray when we have seen in our own lives that God doesn’t always seem to respond and make everything better. During these Days of Awe, faced with the knowledge that so much in this world is out of our control, how can we pray?
From praise to thanksgiving to supplication, our Bible and rabbinic literature depict Jews praying to God for various reasons and in different ways. The prophet Daniel models a confessional prayer seeking mercy and forgiveness, much like the confessions we will offer on Yom Kippur. Like our modern-day liturgy, Daniel’s prayer begins with intention and attitude: “I turned my face to the Lord God, devoting myself to prayer and supplication” (Daniel 9:3). Daniel turns his prayer to confession with words like those we pray at the end of Avinu Malkeinu when we say “be gracious and answer us, for we have nothing.” “We have sinned,” Daniel laments, “we have gone astray. […] With you, God, is the right, and the shame is on us to this very day” (Daniel 9:5,7). These are the kinds of prayers we offer during the Days of Awe, and perhaps less often during the rest of the Jewish calendar. They are prayers that profess collective belief in human powerlessness.
Jewish tradition offers us other ways to pray, too. We call upon God as one who remembers the covenant. God remembers Sarah and Rachel in their intense desire for children. As we read each Rosh Hashanah, God remembers Hannah. In these stories, human beings cry out to God, emotional and vulnerable, and God not only hears but grants their requests, blessing each with a son. How many of us have prayed that same prayer, pining for a miracle? In the story of Hannah in the Book of Samuel, we read that Hannah, so distressed by barrenness, wept, refused to eat, and began to pray: “[I]n the bitterness of her soul, [Hannah] prayed to the Eternal, weeping all the while” (1 Samuel 1:10). Praying silently, only her lips moving, Hannah appeared drunk to the priest Eli, who chastised her until Hannah promised that she had drunk no wine but had been pouring out her soul to God. We do not know the entirety of Hannah’s prayer, but we do know that she made a vow: if God granted her a son, Hannah would dedicate that son to service in the Temple. And of course, this is what happens—despite her barrenness, despite the ridicule she endured, despite Eli’s misunderstanding. “Elkanah knew his wife Hannah and the Eternal remembered her. Hannah conceived, and at the turn of the year bore a son. She named him Samuel, meaning, ‘I asked the Eternal for him.’” (1 Samuel 1:19-20).
I can certainly relate to heartfelt prayers going misunderstood. And I can relate to Hannah’s despair and the loneliness she must have experienced when even her own husband could not comprehend how deep was her desire for a child. It is harder for me to understand the end of the story, where God remembers Hannah. Will God remember each of us, in our distress, by granting our prayers?
Yet something else happens to Hannah. She prayed for a son, yes, but perhaps she prayed, too, for comfort. Perhaps she prayed for a lessening of her loneliness and isolation. Leaving the Temple, perhaps Hannah is so confident in her prayer that she has no doubt God will grant her a son. I’m not sure I can have that kind of confidence. But I take comfort in the peace Hannah gained from pouring out her soul to God: “And she went on her way, and she ate, and was no longer downcast” (1 Samuel 1:18). That is to say, Hannah gained comfort through her prayer, even before it was literally answered, simply by saying the words. Sometimes letting go of our loneliness, voicing the deepest desires of our souls, and pouring out our fears can be liberating. I find in Hannah’s tale a hint that prayer can be effective even when we see no recognizable “answer.” It can help us to let go of some of the things over which we have no control.
Yet prayer is not only about results, nor is it only about our comfort. In shaping our daily liturgy, the rabbis taught that prayer is a call to action. Each day, after reciting the blessing for Torah study, the rabbis instituted the practice of reading aloud an adaptation of a passage from the Mishnah: Eilu devarim she’ein la’hem shiur… “These are things that are limitless, of which a person enjoys the fruit of this world, while the principal remains in the world to come. They are: honoring one’s father and mother, engaging in deeds of compassion (gemilut chasadim), arriving early for study, morning and evening, welcoming guests, visiting the sick,
providing for the wedding couple, accompanying the dead for burial, intentionality in prayer, and making peace among people. But the study of Torah encompasses them all.” This text, recited each day, states unequivocally why we engage with Judaism, why we pray, why we study ancient texts in a language that has become for many of us distant and challenging. In Hebrew, “to pray” is a reflexive verb, something one does to oneself: lehitpalel. To examine oneself, to go inside oneself. The rabbis wanted to ensure that our prayers neither wandered into the territory of narcissism nor remained in the mode of prostration and wailing. Instead, they built into our liturgy a reminder of Judaism’s ultimate aim: to do mitzvot in the world. If Torah does not lead us from this sacred space into the world to fill bowls at the soup kitchen or listen to the stories of the residents of the nursing home or advocate for peace in Israel and all the world, then we have not prayed.
So what do we do with u’netane tokef? When we already bear so much responsibility and pain, how do we find words to carry us through the Days of Awe into the new year?
As I have been preparing for these Days of Awe, coming from a summer of working in hospital chaplaincy, surrounded by terminal illness and death and often hopelessness, I have been thinking about a different prayer, from Psalms. It is a text that many people lean on when they want to believe that prayer is magical and immediate, that God responds straightaway, in humanly recognizable terms, giving us all that we ask for. We are suffering now, people say, but God will provide for us in the future, suddenly and without precedent. “Those who sow in tears will reap in joy” (Psalm 126:5). Many times, I have heard this phrase as a surrender: there is nothing more I can do, so I will wait for God. I am here, suffering, but God will suddenly turn all of this upside down.
Indeed, Psalm 126 is a vision of some unknown future when God will reverse the plight of the Israelites in Exile:
When the Eternal restores the fortunes of Zion
---we see it as in a dream---
our mouths shall be filled with laughter,
our tongues, with songs of joy.
[…]
They who sow in tears
will reap with songs of joy.
Though he goes along weeping,
carrying the seed-bag,
he shall come back with songs of joy,
carrying his sheaves.
Certainly, such a vision promises that God will reverse expectations, allowing us to reap joy where we have planted only tears. But I want to think just about that one line: “Those who sow in tears will reap in joy.” At least for me, raised in the suburbs and now a confirmed Brooklynite, sowing and reaping are not daily activities. I often think about the backbreaking work of preparing the soil, bending to cast the seeds over the ground, but then I skip to the part where we’re all gathered around the table eating the bread. We have reaped, and we joyously benefit from what we worked so very hard to plant.
But reaping is hard work! Now, at the beginning of our Days of Awe, we prepare to reap what we have sown this past year. That is the essence of u’netane tokef. Today is terrible and full of dread because we face the consequences not of the whims of some faraway God, but because we, renewing our commitment to Jewish tradition each year, reflect upon our own actions. How have we enacted our prayers, transforming the pouring out of our emotions into mitzvot in the world?
To affirm that “those who sow in tears will reap in joy” ought to be neither a surrender nor an admonishment. If we do not find ourselves reaping in joy at the moment, we need not assume that it is all our fault, that we are being punished for the tears we have sown. And if we do find ourselves at this moment sowing in tears, suffering and worried, we cannot assume that God will turn it around, make everything better.
How can we approach prayer during these ten Days of Awe? We can approach it thinking, “Those who sow in tears will reap in joy.” We can approach it knowing that our tears matter—to this community, to one another, and to God. We can approach prayer knowing that we must not only sow but reap; we must attend to those crucial tasks the rabbis included in our daily prayer routine: caring for the sick, celebrating life’s joyous moments, studying Jewish tradition, and honoring our nurturing relationships. We can approach prayer hoping that our own efforts to reap what we have ourselves planted will be matched by an ability to see the joy around us, to see the small miracles amidst the challenges we each face. Our tears are necessary; they sink into the fertile ground and sprout up a newly-appreciated ability to recognize joy. We cannot control events like earthquakes and cancer diagnoses, ultrasound results and economic downturns. But we can do the hard work of shaping our reactions to those events.
I think this is how prayer worked for Isaac—the young son who, as we will hear tomorrow morning—lay atop a pile of dry timbers, his father holding the fire and the knife. Likely traumatized by his experience on the mountaintop, Isaac disappears from the narrative in Genesis, while Abraham buries Sarah and arranges for Isaac’s marriage. The next time we see Isaac, he is pensive. Isaac does not cry out or pray for God to return his mother to him; he does not petition for anything. We read, “Vayetze Yitzchak lasuach basadeh lifnot erev vayisa einaiv vayar v’hinei g’malim baim”¬—Translation here is complicated by the verb lasuach, used rarely in the Bible. “And Isaac went out to lasuach in the field at the coming of evening, and he lifted his eyes, and he saw, and—behold!—camels approach!” (Gen. 24:63). The rabbis of the Talmud interpret lasuach as “to meditate” or “to pray” (Brachot 26b). So at twilight, as one day ends and another begins, Isaac walks out into the field, his head and his spirits lowered, meditating and praying. His prayer does not revive his mother from the dead; instead, Isaac’s prayer changes the way he sees the world.
“And he lifted his eyes, and he saw, and—behold!—camels approach! And Rebecca lifted her eyes, and she saw Isaac, and she fell from her camel. […] And Isaac brought her to the tent of Sarah his mother, and he took Rebecca as his wife, and he loved her, and Isaac was comforted after the death of his mother” (Gen. 24:63-64,67).
Isaac went to pour forth his sadness in prayer; his evening meditation allowed him to lift up his eyes and look again at the world, despite the grief he still carried. And, in looking up, the world surprised him. He found Rebecca, found the ability to risk loving again in spite of loss, found comfort. The tears he sowed and the prayer he offered allowed Isaac to reap in joy.
These Days of Awe, may our prayers represent our willingness to pour forth our tears and to do the work of reaping what we have planted. May our prayers make us ready to lift up our eyes and see the world anew. May our prayers be, as Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel urges, “our humble answer to the inconceivable surprise of living” (Quoted in Lawrence A. Hoffman, The Way into Jewish Prayer, 15). Today is full of awe. Vayisu eineinu. And we lift up our eyes.
Tuesday, August 31, 2010
Crying Out
The rabbis of the Talmud dictated that, when we read publicly from the Torah, we end on a nechemta, a comforting passage. In that spirit, tonight I read aloud verses that enjoin Israel to establish a just society—a society that holds dear the rights of the vulnerable: “You shall not subvert the rights of the stranger or the orphan; you shall not take a widow’s garment in pawn” (24:17). We learn in this week’s parasha that we must not withhold a laborer’s wages or refuse to protect a runaway slave or deceive others with dishonest weights and measures. Repeatedly, Moses links these guidelines for an ideal Israelite society with our collective experience of slavery and degradation: “Remember that you were a slave in the land of Egypt.” I certainly find comfort in this transformation of a dehumanizing experience of oppression into a cry for the pursuit of justice for all human beings.
In Tractate Megillah of the Talmud, the rabbis debate whether certain Torah verses that might be misunderstood by the average Jew ought even to be read aloud or translated in the synagogue. Passages that reflect negatively on King David, for example, are read but not translated, so that only those who understand the difficult, ancient Hebrew will understand the story. These passages are not comforting to the rabbis, and, while they accept them as part of the Torah to be read aloud, they worry about how the congregation will hear and interpret them.
This week, I worried, though my worries could not have been anticipated by the rabbis of the Talmud. I worried about some of the laws described in this week’s parasha, and I did not want to fill this sanctuary with the sound of my voice chanting those words in Hebrew, our sacred language. Instead, I read aloud verses that carry with them the charge to treat the vulnerable with chesed and with mishpat, with kindness and with justice. The stranger, the orphan, and the widow are to be taken under the protection of the community.
And yet many of the laws in this week’s parasha deal with another vulnerable class—vulnerable both in Israelite society and, too often, in our own: women. I try to read these laws with the knowledge that ancient Israelite society differed radically from our own. I try to read them with the knowledge that much of Jewish law acted, in its ancient context, to protect women from destitution and exploitation within a limited social order. Yet I still struggled, especially with one particular law.
This week’s parasha speaks of a woman who cries out, and another who does not: “In the case of a virgin who is engaged to a man – if a man comes upon her in the city and lies with her, you shall take the two of them out to the gate of that city and stone them to death: the girl because she did not cry for help in the city, and the man because he violated another man’s wife. Thus you will sweep away evil from your midst.” (22:23-24)
Reading this story with a modern sensibility and my own background in women’s rights organizing, I cringe at the Hebrew word inah, here translated as “violated” but elsewhere translated as “raped.” To hear the Torah condemn a rape victim to death for failing to cry out for help sounds like blaming the victim. The Hebrew, however, does not mirror our modern connotations. Rather, the Biblical Hebrew inah, violated, denotes humiliation or debasement in social standing that results from a sexual encounter—consensual or not. What mattered in ancient Israelite law was that another man’s property had been rendered less valuable; his betrothed sullied by a sexual encounter with another man. To “violate” a woman in ancient Israelite society meant rendering her unmarriageable, condemning her to an impossible life as a woman untethered to any man, with no claim to economic security. The Torah does not say much about how this engaged woman might have suffered emotionally or psychologically; indeed, the Torah rarely speaks of women with attention to their emotional or psychological perspectives.
Yet our Torah portion does pay attention to a woman’s consent:
“But if the man comes upon the engaged girl in the open country, and the man lies with her by force, only the man who lay with her shall die, but you shall do nothing to the girl. The girl did not incur the death penalty, for this case is like that of one party attacking and murdering another. He came upon her in the open; though the engaged girl cried for help, there was no one to save her” (22:25-27).
At first, reading this parasha, my entire focus remained with the girl in the city: the Torah assumed she must not have cried out, and the Torah blamed and punished her for the resulting rape. But then I considered the girl in the country: the Torah conversely assumes she must have cried out, but there was no one there to hear her cries.
My modern sensibilities balked at the way the Torah holds the engaged woman in the city responsible for sex that may or may not have been consensual. Yet the Torah identifies more responsible parties than the man and the engaged woman: the community is also responsible.
In a parasha filled with laws about protecting the vulnerable, welcoming the stranger into the community, and refusing to ignore the plight of our neighbors, the Torah tells of an ideal community—a city in which, when a woman cries out for help, someone will certainly respond.
Reading Torah can sometimes be a risky business. Reading Torah means navigating ancient Hebrew language and customs, understanding the “original” meaning, as far as that can be understood. But reading Torah also means interpreting for our time. Too often, those who purport to be the gatekeepers of Torah become frozen by the ancient laws, mapping Israelite customs onto modern Jews. Too often, Jewish women become frozen in a hierarchical system that distances them from Torah.
Nowhere have I felt that distance more keenly than in the place where God’s Presence is said to most nearly approach us. I stood near the Western Wall, a tallit embroidered with the names of the four matriarchs wrapped around my neck, praying amidst dozens of women, many of them rabbis.
“Lo lashir!” they shouted. “Do not sing!” “Hitbayeshu lachen! You should be ashamed of yourselves!” A white-bearded man wrapped in a blue and white tallit hurled these words at us as pebbles pelted our heads from the men’s side of the divided Western Wall. Wads of spit showered us as we huddled together, wearing our tallitot as scarves for fear of being arrested. The fine for a woman donning a prayer shawl there is ten thousand shekels or seven years in prison.
Since 1988, a dedicated group of Israeli women have gathered to welcome each new month with psalms and prayer at the holiest site in Judaism. Like the men who gather to stand before the only physical remainder of the Temple, these women pray aloud with the words of the traditional siddur. Some of them wear a tallit. They lovingly carry among them a Torah scroll. And, after praying the morning service, they walk, as mandated by Israeli law, to a site far from the eyes of the offended Orthodox groups who deny women access to the Torah. Here, at Robinson’s arch, still beneath the shadow of the massive wall but far from the cracks where pilgrims leave their letters to God, Women of the Wall conduct a monthly Torah service, chanting aloud from the words of a tradition that is too often twisted to exclude them.
Each month, gathered before the holy site, these Jewish women suffer verbal and physical abuse. They are insulted and spat upon. Men throw chairs at them from over the separating wall. So-called observant Jews throw feces at them. Their attempts to reach out to God through prayer are viewed only as provocations to disorder, violence, and sin. Among the many laws and customs the ultra-Orthodox groups who oppose Women of the Wall cite is an injunction from this week’s Torah portion: “A woman must not put on man’s apparel, nor shall a man wear women’s clothing; for whoever does these things is abhorrent to your God the Eternal” (22:5). These men consider the tallit a man’s garment, following only one interpretation of Jewish law and ignoring rabbis who argue that, while women are not obligated to wear the tallit, neither are they expressly forbidden. Orthodox opponents to Women of the Wall also consider the sound of a woman’s voice to be a sexual temptation that distracts from prayer.
When women lift their voices to the God the traditional Jewish siddur calls haBocheir ba’shirei zimra, “the one who chooses songs of praise,” some Orthodox Jews hear not individuals communicating to God but a provocation to their own “baser” instincts. Praying at the Western Wall, I felt the sting of the disgust and disapproval of the Orthodox men and women who discounted our prayers and turned our beautiful songs of praise into ugly blasphemy. I felt like an object—not a person. Just a month ago, Women of the Wall’s Chairperson Anat Hoffman was arrested not for wearing a tallit or for reading publicly from the Torah—both of which are expressly forbidden in Israeli law. She was arrested simply for carrying a Torah scroll in her arms.
The rabbis of the Talmud at times found Torah challenging and difficult for the community. I continue to wrestle with our tradition’s sacred text, as I hope we will do as a community throughout the coming year. I struggle with laws written for a very different social structure, laws that treat women as the property of men even as they seek to protect women within that lopsided structure. I struggle with the unfair application of these ancient Israelite laws to the modern world in which we live and pray. But I find hope and comfort in the Torah’s depiction of an ideal society—a society in which we are each bound not to ignore the plight of others, each bound to safeguard the rights of the most vulnerable among us—whether they are Jews or not—each bound to heed the cry of those in need. In the city of Jerusalem, women are crying out for the chance to lift their voices at the Western Wall. Their humanity violated, their social standing among the Jewish people questioned, these women are not crying out in the empty countryside. In a modern world, with our complex and rich Reform relationship to interpreting Torah, these cries are among those we do not ignore.
[The above was given as a sermon for my student pulpit. The views expressed here are my own and do not necessarily represent the views of the community I am honored to serve.]
In Tractate Megillah of the Talmud, the rabbis debate whether certain Torah verses that might be misunderstood by the average Jew ought even to be read aloud or translated in the synagogue. Passages that reflect negatively on King David, for example, are read but not translated, so that only those who understand the difficult, ancient Hebrew will understand the story. These passages are not comforting to the rabbis, and, while they accept them as part of the Torah to be read aloud, they worry about how the congregation will hear and interpret them.
This week, I worried, though my worries could not have been anticipated by the rabbis of the Talmud. I worried about some of the laws described in this week’s parasha, and I did not want to fill this sanctuary with the sound of my voice chanting those words in Hebrew, our sacred language. Instead, I read aloud verses that carry with them the charge to treat the vulnerable with chesed and with mishpat, with kindness and with justice. The stranger, the orphan, and the widow are to be taken under the protection of the community.
And yet many of the laws in this week’s parasha deal with another vulnerable class—vulnerable both in Israelite society and, too often, in our own: women. I try to read these laws with the knowledge that ancient Israelite society differed radically from our own. I try to read them with the knowledge that much of Jewish law acted, in its ancient context, to protect women from destitution and exploitation within a limited social order. Yet I still struggled, especially with one particular law.
This week’s parasha speaks of a woman who cries out, and another who does not: “In the case of a virgin who is engaged to a man – if a man comes upon her in the city and lies with her, you shall take the two of them out to the gate of that city and stone them to death: the girl because she did not cry for help in the city, and the man because he violated another man’s wife. Thus you will sweep away evil from your midst.” (22:23-24)
Reading this story with a modern sensibility and my own background in women’s rights organizing, I cringe at the Hebrew word inah, here translated as “violated” but elsewhere translated as “raped.” To hear the Torah condemn a rape victim to death for failing to cry out for help sounds like blaming the victim. The Hebrew, however, does not mirror our modern connotations. Rather, the Biblical Hebrew inah, violated, denotes humiliation or debasement in social standing that results from a sexual encounter—consensual or not. What mattered in ancient Israelite law was that another man’s property had been rendered less valuable; his betrothed sullied by a sexual encounter with another man. To “violate” a woman in ancient Israelite society meant rendering her unmarriageable, condemning her to an impossible life as a woman untethered to any man, with no claim to economic security. The Torah does not say much about how this engaged woman might have suffered emotionally or psychologically; indeed, the Torah rarely speaks of women with attention to their emotional or psychological perspectives.
Yet our Torah portion does pay attention to a woman’s consent:
“But if the man comes upon the engaged girl in the open country, and the man lies with her by force, only the man who lay with her shall die, but you shall do nothing to the girl. The girl did not incur the death penalty, for this case is like that of one party attacking and murdering another. He came upon her in the open; though the engaged girl cried for help, there was no one to save her” (22:25-27).
At first, reading this parasha, my entire focus remained with the girl in the city: the Torah assumed she must not have cried out, and the Torah blamed and punished her for the resulting rape. But then I considered the girl in the country: the Torah conversely assumes she must have cried out, but there was no one there to hear her cries.
My modern sensibilities balked at the way the Torah holds the engaged woman in the city responsible for sex that may or may not have been consensual. Yet the Torah identifies more responsible parties than the man and the engaged woman: the community is also responsible.
In a parasha filled with laws about protecting the vulnerable, welcoming the stranger into the community, and refusing to ignore the plight of our neighbors, the Torah tells of an ideal community—a city in which, when a woman cries out for help, someone will certainly respond.
Reading Torah can sometimes be a risky business. Reading Torah means navigating ancient Hebrew language and customs, understanding the “original” meaning, as far as that can be understood. But reading Torah also means interpreting for our time. Too often, those who purport to be the gatekeepers of Torah become frozen by the ancient laws, mapping Israelite customs onto modern Jews. Too often, Jewish women become frozen in a hierarchical system that distances them from Torah.
Nowhere have I felt that distance more keenly than in the place where God’s Presence is said to most nearly approach us. I stood near the Western Wall, a tallit embroidered with the names of the four matriarchs wrapped around my neck, praying amidst dozens of women, many of them rabbis.
“Lo lashir!” they shouted. “Do not sing!” “Hitbayeshu lachen! You should be ashamed of yourselves!” A white-bearded man wrapped in a blue and white tallit hurled these words at us as pebbles pelted our heads from the men’s side of the divided Western Wall. Wads of spit showered us as we huddled together, wearing our tallitot as scarves for fear of being arrested. The fine for a woman donning a prayer shawl there is ten thousand shekels or seven years in prison.
Since 1988, a dedicated group of Israeli women have gathered to welcome each new month with psalms and prayer at the holiest site in Judaism. Like the men who gather to stand before the only physical remainder of the Temple, these women pray aloud with the words of the traditional siddur. Some of them wear a tallit. They lovingly carry among them a Torah scroll. And, after praying the morning service, they walk, as mandated by Israeli law, to a site far from the eyes of the offended Orthodox groups who deny women access to the Torah. Here, at Robinson’s arch, still beneath the shadow of the massive wall but far from the cracks where pilgrims leave their letters to God, Women of the Wall conduct a monthly Torah service, chanting aloud from the words of a tradition that is too often twisted to exclude them.
Each month, gathered before the holy site, these Jewish women suffer verbal and physical abuse. They are insulted and spat upon. Men throw chairs at them from over the separating wall. So-called observant Jews throw feces at them. Their attempts to reach out to God through prayer are viewed only as provocations to disorder, violence, and sin. Among the many laws and customs the ultra-Orthodox groups who oppose Women of the Wall cite is an injunction from this week’s Torah portion: “A woman must not put on man’s apparel, nor shall a man wear women’s clothing; for whoever does these things is abhorrent to your God the Eternal” (22:5). These men consider the tallit a man’s garment, following only one interpretation of Jewish law and ignoring rabbis who argue that, while women are not obligated to wear the tallit, neither are they expressly forbidden. Orthodox opponents to Women of the Wall also consider the sound of a woman’s voice to be a sexual temptation that distracts from prayer.
When women lift their voices to the God the traditional Jewish siddur calls haBocheir ba’shirei zimra, “the one who chooses songs of praise,” some Orthodox Jews hear not individuals communicating to God but a provocation to their own “baser” instincts. Praying at the Western Wall, I felt the sting of the disgust and disapproval of the Orthodox men and women who discounted our prayers and turned our beautiful songs of praise into ugly blasphemy. I felt like an object—not a person. Just a month ago, Women of the Wall’s Chairperson Anat Hoffman was arrested not for wearing a tallit or for reading publicly from the Torah—both of which are expressly forbidden in Israeli law. She was arrested simply for carrying a Torah scroll in her arms.
The rabbis of the Talmud at times found Torah challenging and difficult for the community. I continue to wrestle with our tradition’s sacred text, as I hope we will do as a community throughout the coming year. I struggle with laws written for a very different social structure, laws that treat women as the property of men even as they seek to protect women within that lopsided structure. I struggle with the unfair application of these ancient Israelite laws to the modern world in which we live and pray. But I find hope and comfort in the Torah’s depiction of an ideal society—a society in which we are each bound not to ignore the plight of others, each bound to safeguard the rights of the most vulnerable among us—whether they are Jews or not—each bound to heed the cry of those in need. In the city of Jerusalem, women are crying out for the chance to lift their voices at the Western Wall. Their humanity violated, their social standing among the Jewish people questioned, these women are not crying out in the empty countryside. In a modern world, with our complex and rich Reform relationship to interpreting Torah, these cries are among those we do not ignore.
[The above was given as a sermon for my student pulpit. The views expressed here are my own and do not necessarily represent the views of the community I am honored to serve.]
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