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Seders Are Done, But Passover Isn't!

My column for the April 2019 bulletin for Temple Beth Abraham:

One way to experience Pesach (Passover) is: Two nights of Seder, followed by a week of matzah. Two nights of a unique happening – around a table, with people very familiar and/or new to you, part recitation and part roleplaying, with symbolic foods and special foods, detours for discussion, hopefully much singing. Then – a week of just figuring out how to eat.

In fact, Pesach is meant to be so much more expansive. A long, immersive experience of first-time freedom. The Seders are supposed to launch us into a week-long new year festival. We’re intended to continue to read and reflect on the meaning today of our people’s Exodus from Egypt. We’re meant to experience freedom as though these were our first free days and our first free steps.

The Seder scripts the very first steps, just as the Torah says our ancestors were guided step-by-step through the days leading up to and through the first Pesach. But part of freedom for them meant that they didn’t have a simple script for the next days, the first days as a free nation.

And it’s the same for us. It’s on us as Jews to define what those first days of freedom are going to be like. We have special food for the journey – matzah and other Kosher for-Passover things. What will we make out of our freedom?

In the Talmud, the sages Rav and Shmuel argue over what freedom essentially means. Shmuel says the story of the Exodus begins: “We were slaves in Egypt.” Rav says: “Long ago, our ancestors worshipped false gods.”

For Shmuel, the story culminates in the final escape from Pharaoh. For Rav, the story peaks when the Jews arrive at Mt. Sinai, to make a covenant and speak directly with God. Shmuel argues that the Exodus is primarily about physical and political oppression. So Pesach is a celebration of being freed from tyrants and tyrannies.

Rav argues that it’s about spiritual oppression, about being freed as well from the falsehoods of Egypt. So Pesach is about how we get ourselves to Mt. Sinai, how we decide to use our freedom.

This year, we need both a Shmuel perspective and a Rav perspective on our situation as Jews. We should use the whole of Pesach, not just the Seders, to reflect and learn about what it means to be free Jews today, and commit ourselves to some actions as a result.

In a Shmuel perspective, we need to reflect and learn about anti-Semitism, from the murders in Pittsburgh to the slanders of Rep. Omar. Here’s a book to read during Pesach, if not before: Anti-Semitism: Here and Now by Emory University Professor Deborah Lipstadt. Prof. Lipstadt is one of the most sought-out teachers and commentators on the matter. She is a Holocaust scholar, the central figure in a major trial in the U.K. about Holocaust denial, and someone up close to campus anti-Semitism from the left. Read her book or find her writings online.

And if you have been feeling paralyzed by reappearance of anti-Semitism in any or all of its forms – resolve to take some action. If you are within a group that needs to be called out, do that from the inside. If you can be an ambassador for Jews and Judaism, among people who might know very little, do that. Invite someone to services with you, or invite them to coffee with you and if you like with me.

In a Rav perspective, we should remember that true freedom has to be for something, toward something. Pick something new to learn about Judaism. Come to a class, engage with the weekly Torah reading online or with a study partner or with me. Get your own copy (or borrow a child’s copy!) of Rabbi Telushkin’s Book of Jewish Values. While you are eating your matzah, resolve on a way you can strengthen our own Jewish community. In a joyful way, through Shabbat meals or at services or celebrations. Or when we need each other the next time you see an announcement about a house of mourning.

And as you take your first steps from Pesach toward Mt. Sinai, think about the next mitzvah that your soul is begging to focus on. It could be some aspect of tzedakah (giving) or lashon ha-ra (gossip). Maybe you even want to partner up with someone to do it together – create the next Beth Abraham tzedakah collective, or buddy up on a gossip management project and check in each week!

Whatever you do – don’t let Pesach just be about something that happened more than 3000 years ago. Don’t let the days after the Seder slip away without savoring the first moments of freedom and responsibility, without noticing that the way you’ll notice every crumb of matzah in the seat cushions!

Wishing all of you a Zissen (Sweet) and Kosher Pesach,
Rabbi Jon

Bring Philip Roth to Shul Day

This was my Dvar Torah on May 26, for Parashat Naso.

I know one person, and maybe only one, who would have loved the beginning of this Torah reading – Philip Roth, the great American Jewish author who died this week at the age of 85. He was not really a Torah person, but the scenario about a jealous husband suspicious of his wife would have been right up his alley. And the best part for Roth might have been where the Kohen writes down a curse with the name of God and dissolves it into bitter water. The one time that we are actually commanded to erase God’s name, which is one of the blasphemies of the Torah! Philip Roth, may his memory be for a blessing, was insistently anti-religious and was called blasphemous plenty of times, from plenty of pulpits. His characters were often Jewish but he fought against being called a Jewish writer. He might have just loved that opening passage -- and I’m just as sure he would hate the idea that rabbis would make him the subject of a sermon in the synagogue.

In recent years a lot of Jews like us reclaimed Philip Roth, or felt he had come back to us, after his novel The Plot Against America in 2004, in which he imagined the anti-Semite Charles Lindberg becoming president at the time of World War II. But I’d like to go back to the beginning of his career, to story from 1958. When Roth was 25 years old, he published a wicked funny and wickedly funny short story in the Paris Review called “The Conversion of the Jews.” The following year it was published with a few others at the end of his first novel, Goodbye Columbus.

It’s set in a fifth- or sixth-grade yeshivah class, where one of the boys, Ozzie Freedman, loves to pester Rabbi Marvin Binder with questions. All the other boys, like his good friend Itzie Lieberman, just want to keep quiet and laugh and make faces and obscene gestures behind the rabbi’s back. But Ozzie asks questions. Like why the rabbi can call the Jews “The Chosen People” if the Declaration of Independence says that all men are created equal. And why, when a plane crashed at LaGuardia and 58 people died, the fact that eight of them were Jewish made it a tragedy. Mrs. Freedman had already been called in to speak to Rabbi Binder because of those two questions. The rabbi had answers, but Ozzie kept saying, “I’m asking something different.”

Now for a third time Mrs. Freedman has to come in, and this is why. For some reason Rabbi Binder was talking about Jesus in class – the rabbi brought it up, Ozzie says -- and how Jesus was a historical person and not God. And Ozzie tells Itzie how he asked, after a very dramatic introduction about God’s powers of creation: “Anyway, I asked Binder if He could make all that in six days, and He could pick the six days He wanted right out of nowhere” --  why God couldn’t make a woman have a baby without a human father.

Itzie, his friend, is more interested in the sex part of the question. Maybe Rabbi Binder is upset about both. Anyway, Rabbi Binder reiterated that Jesus is not God, and Ozzie explains to his friend, “I understood that. What I wanted to know was different.”

It happens on a Friday, and Ozzie is going to tell his mother about what happened and why she was going to be summoned again. It’s just the two of them, his father is no longer living, and first Mrs. Freedman lights the Shabbat candles. I just love Roth’s description of how she appeared to Ozzie: “When his mother lit candles she would move her arms slowly towards her, dragging them through the air, as though persuading people whose minds were half made up. And her eyes would get glassy with tears… Even when she was dressed up she didn’t look like a chosen person. But when she lit candles she looked like something better; like a woman who knew momentarily that God could do anything.”

But when Ozzie finally fesses up, his mother smacks him in the face, the first time she’s ever done that.

The following Wednesday arrives, the day of the meeting with the rabbi and Ozzie’s mother. There is some time at the end of the class day, so Rabbi Binder says there will be open discussion on any question. No one has any questions, and Ozzie doesn’t want to say another word. But Rabbi Binder makes him stand up and ask a question. Ozzie finally screams out another version of his question about God. The rabbi flips out, so does Ozzie, and eventually Ozzie runs out of the classroom and onto the roof and he locks the door behind him.

All the kids run outside the building, the firemen are called, and Ozzie’s mother too. Ozzie threatens to jump, and makes the firemen with their net chase as he trots from one side of the roof to another. One of my favorite characters in the story is the custodian or caretaker, Yokov Blotnik, who is capable of only two ways of evaluating any situation – good-for-the-Jews and no-good-for-the-Jews. That’s with hyphens – good-for-the-Jews, no-good-for-the-Jews. Ozzie’s mother pleads with him to come down from the roof: “Don’t be a martyr.” But his friend Itzie yells up to the roof, “Gawhead, be a Martin!” And all the boys begin to chant, “Be a Martin! Be a Martin!”

Eventually, Ozzie says that he will come down safely if Rabbi Binder says in front of everyone that God can make anything. And then he has to say that God could have made Jesus, and then he makes everyone bow on the ground and say it. He makes his mother promise that she will never hit anybody about God – probably the truest thing anyone in the whole story says -- and everyone repeats that too. And he jumps down – safely, we think, “right into the center of the yellow net that glowed…like an overgrown halo.”

I think everyone who teaches Hebrew School should have to read this story every year.

Anyway, what kind of a story is “The Conversion of the Jews”? Maybe it’s just plain satire; maybe it’s just a great example of in a Jewish tradition making fun of cheders and befuddled rabbis. Maybe Ozzie Freedman is just an annoying pisher, a nudnik who happens to be clever. Maybe Philip Roth wasn’t yet one of the greatest authors in America, but a 25-year-old kid with an audience, horsing around.

But one of Philip Roth’s themes was about writing itself, and how authors were constantly facing audiences who came up with their own sometimes-crazy theories of what the author had in mind. That was one of his favorite subjects.

So Philip Roth said he wasn’t a Jewish writer, not interested in Jewish questions… well, bigshot author, may your memory be for a blessing, I’m bringing you to shul, and this is why.

Because this one short story has all the characters we are still grappling with six decades on:

The one who can only think in terms of good-for-the-Jews or no-good-for-the-Jews.

The one, the poor rabbi, who is trying to wrap his head around America and the Christian majority, and who is smart and wants to be relevant, but just can’t keep up with these kids who are more American than he is.

The kids in the story represent two incredibly important types of American Jews. The one who has all the right questions about being Jewish in America, and thinks there must be a good answer, a good Jewish answer, but can’t find anyone who knows how give it to him.

The group, who are probably the most classic Philip Roth-y, who are just living in the moment and in the physical, in the body.

That’s four sons, Seder style, and Roth does it for laughs. (I’m not sure what to do with the mother – a feminist writer, he was not.)

There is no chacham in the story, no upstanding and coherent wise man in sight. Roth’s critique of religion was summed up by my friend and critic Stephen Hazzan Arnoff: “Roth desires to shove traditional answers about ethereal questions aside because of their perceived attachments to religious absurdity, oppression, or boredom.”

That’s what the kids in the story hate – absurdity, oppression, and boredom. Ozzie thinks his rabbi is absurd and oppressive. Itzie and the others think he is oppressive and boring. And we know that for a whole generation or two of Jews in America, when Philip Roth was becoming a great writer, that was the problem with our synagogues and with our neighbors’ churches. And by the time we religious leaders got wise to it, by the time we were trying to respond, a lot of people were…. asking something different.

Roth is important in the synagogue because he represents both the wicked child of the Seder, and a new one, the one who has no interest anymore in asking. So religious Jews and rabbis hated him, or ignored him back, for a long time.

But I think we should honor Philip Roth in shul during his shiva, and give him his due for holding up a mirror to us shul people. For laughing at us and making us laugh at ourselves, if we’re smart enough to do that. In one hand, we need to be carrying Heschel, who was writing at the exact same time and scolding us for the exact same reasons and lecturing us to change before it’s too late. In the other, Philip Roth, laughing at us.

We should honor Philip Roth for reminding us that hearing his questions is not the same as giving a satisfying answer.

And as we remember Philip Roth, we have to give him his due as a Jewish artist of American individuality. He didn’t claim to be anyone’s leader, to give an answer to anything. He was a writer, accountable only to his individual voice. We ought to remember -- we who want people to come to synagogues -- that each Jew out there is an individual, observing and writing and creative about their lives. And we won’t know anything until we read all their stories the way they write them, in their own distinctive and beautiful way. Even when they make fun of us. Even when they point out what seems absurd, oppressive, or boring. If we’re going to offer an answer, we’re going to have to do it at Philip Roth’s level -- just as beautiful, just as interesting, and just as funny.

Why Exodus Is the Most Important Book of All Time

My D'var Torah at Beth Abraham on Shabbat morning, Saturday, January 6, 2018.

Today we begin reading the most important book in human history -- Sefer Shmot, the book of Exodus. 

This is the book that transformed what was possible in the world and what was imaginable in the world. You can divide human history and culture into before the book of Exodus and after the book of Exodus. You can divide world literature into before Exodus and after Exodus, and you can divide religion into before Exodus and after Exodus. No one had ever told a story like this, about the gods or the powers of the world, its peoples or its leaders.

The book of Exodus made it possible to change the world, and to tell other stories about change and hope and transformation. And we, the Jews, are the Exodus people -- people who not only experienced the Exodus from Egypt, but whose whole civilization is built out of this book we are reading here over the next ten weeks.

Genesis, which we just finished last week -- it’s not bad. A God who creates the universe with no more effort than speaking, who tracks people across the world from Mesopotamia to Egypt and talks to them, who identifies special individuals and sends them on missions and adventures -- Genesis is bringing some game. 

But Genesis isn’t radically new. There are new things in it, but it’s full of the kinds of stories you could imagine in other cultures. And Genesis is still a book about the familiar world. It ends not with transformation, but with exile.Exodus announces itself as something different right away. You see it in the opening scenes, when women get out in front of men and even in front of God, taking charge of the transformation of the world where Genesis left off. The world of suffering and oppression. Midwives who talk back to power, an inventive mother, a courageous sister, Pharaoh’s own rebellious daughter -- they are the last line holding against total evil and the first to rise up.

And what a transformation takes place, from the first to the last chapter of Exodus.

Who could imagine this powerless people, whose babies were being tossed into the Nile, standing at a mountain hearing God speak to each and every one of them?  In chapter 1, the Israelites are slaves who have to find their own straw to build cities of darkness to reinforce Pharaoh’s power. By the last chapter, they have given whatever they have in overflowing generosity, and they have built a Sanctuary so perfect that God’s presence immediately fills it and lights it up.

The book of Exodus changed forever how human beings conceive of God. Until Exodus, gods were parents and protectors and allies of kings and overlords, and specific lands. In Genesis, the God Who created heaven and earth seems to be mostly on high, at the top of a ladder of angels perhaps. 

But in Exodus, God leaves our land and God comes down. Down to the Nile, to the lowest spot in the low valley of Egypt.  Down from the sky into those waters of chaos and death that are carved, down, deep into the lowly Earth.  God comes down to the lowest people, who are beaten and dehumanized, whose hands are muddy and blistered and broken, who are detached from their souls to the point where they can hardly do anything but groan, who can’t think beyond the terrible things happening to them now.

God has to fight for them, against a tyrant who everybody thinks is really the god.  God has to fight for the Israelites’ awareness. God has to get next to them, down in the mud and in their slave camps, and next to the taskmasters too, just to get any of these people even to notice.  

God has to frustrate the expectations of all those who think that gods only go with grandeur like Pharaoh has, the beauty and richness of his palace and his temple and his architecture, and the hosts who do his bidding.

The book of Exodus says: This is much harder work than creating the universe. As you read Exodus, it’s clear that redemption, rescuing these people, takes much longer than six days. And it is a much, more, difficult labor than the Genesis project of making the world.

And by coming down, God shows us that more is involved in being God than pure power -- more than just the abililty to make things and do things.  The task of redemption requires commitment, and loyalty, and dedication.  Rabbi Heschel called it divine pathos: God’s essence is that God hurts when people hurt. And God is enraged when people stand by and go along or do nothing.  

So when people are enslaved, oppressed, suffering, the hurt is so large that God’s response to that is the largest thing that God ever does.What God does in Exodus by redeeming our people is the only thing big enough to justify the idea that God is great. God’s true nature, the gadol-ness, the greatness that we associate with the notion of God -- it isn’t manifest until God comes down, as far from Heaven as possible, into Egypt.

The book of Exodus changed forever what it means to be a leader on behalf of God. In previous stories, in other Middle Eastern societies, leaders were blessed by the gods from the beginning and show off divine powers at a human level. Or they were heroes with magical powers or immortality.

Moses is different. Moses isn’t the son of God. He actually the one who ran away for decades even when he felt responsible for what he saw.

Moses at the burning bush doesn’t remotely see himself as a hero, as a leader. He doesn’t have any of the basic credibilities of a leader or a hero -- he can hardly speak, he does not inspire. As soon as Moses experiences his revelation at the burning bush, he argues that he can’t do what God wants. This resistance against leading is easily the longest conversation between anyone in whole Torah.

At almost every key moment in Exodus, Moses is shown not to be a god, but simply to be a human vessel, an instrument for divine energy and purpose. Moses teaches that anyone can become this, regardless of origins or personality or specific qualities and talents.

The book of Exodus redefined forever what it means to have laws and religious practices. In other societies, religion helped cement the social order and taught people how to be servants for the needs of the gods.

The law code of Hamurrabi in Babylonia, for instance, starts off with the investigation and punishments around murder. The law code in Exodus, right after the Ten Commandments, puts the laws of murder and assault second. The first law is about how to set free the slaves in our own society.

This teaches us that every law and every practice is not simply to serve God but to imitate God. We are God-like, the book of Exodus says, whenever we follow the law, live the law. When we bring about more freedom in our world, or pay our workers a fair wage on time, or watch out for the stranger because we know what it’s like to be the stranger -- Exodus reminds us that we are being like the God who liberated us from the house of slavery. 

And the way we pray and the rituals that structure our day and week are Exodus rituals. We sing the Song of the Exodus morning and night, every day. When we rest on Shabbat, we affirm that we are not slave laborers anymore.  When we give tzedakah, we are told that this is the opposite of hardening our hearts to people who live in our community and our world.

And our sacred spaces are celebrations of the Exodus. The whole last section of the book of Exodus is about how slave builders became builders of a Sanctuary to the God who frees slaves. It’s about making physically permanent the transformation from slavery to freedom, from darkness to light, from hopelessness to possibility. As permanent as any pyramid or mummy.

And of course, Pesach. God says:  The moment of liberation is going to be there, always. We bring it back at least once a year in an elaborate way. So that every time you are oppressed by another Pharaoh, by armies of enemies, by illusion or illness or depression, you will know that I come down, I come there, as low as you are or as low as things go.  No matter how much mud or blood or tears as there may be.  I can’t stop those things from happening, God says, but I can and will be there and fight for you to notice Me, to see me fighting there with you.If a religion is made up of ideas about God and rituals and sacred places -- then the book of Exodus changed religion forever. Not just Judaism, but every religion that ever learned about the book of Exodus.

And the book of Exodus changed history, and the possibilities of history. After Exodus, human beings could know that oppressive power might be strong, but it’s never an equilibrium. Each time the Jews have found ourselves against an unshakeable enemy or an unmovable evil -- we have read Exodus and told the stories and prayed Exodus and observed Exodus -- and eventually overcame.

And other peoples have read the book of Exodus and the stories and histories inspired by it, and the same things have happened. The book of Exodus created and continues to create hope, to prove that hope is not absurd in our world.

We are Exodus people. Charged to keep reading and teaching this book, and to define our lives as responding to this book. We take it in, and we broadcast it out. That is what it means to be a Jew -- to live in the light of the most important book ever written.

Shabbat Shalom.

 

Judaism for Dummies

You may not believe it, but Judaism for Dummies is a very good book -- for those interested in becoming Jewish, or just as a general reference to Jewish ideas, texts, and history.  I think I have to thank my colleague in New Hampshire, Rabbi Beth Davidson, for pointing it out to me.  I recommend it a lot.

I mention this why?  Because at the moment, bookcloseouts.com is having a sale on "Dummies" books.  You can get Judaism for Dummies for $5.00.

Pride and Prejudice and Fiddler on the Roof

This just hit me the other day.

We've been listening to "Fiddler on the Roof" music over and over lately because the kids love it.  It just wandered into my mind that there are some similarities or at least parallels between "Fiddler" and Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice.  Both have relatively poor families with five daughters, and marriage worries are the structure of the story.  Both stories involve a daughter choosing the wrong guy, or at least an unexpected man.  Both have black sheep, daughters who marry beyond the pale (no pun intended).

Could the people who wrote the book for the musical have had this in mind?  I don't know anything much about Sholom Aleichem's original stories.  Has anyone written about this?

Well, one person has -- just a few weeks ago in another blog. 

Think about it....

Synaplex and Crop Walk

Two items for the local readers:

First, this Shabbat is the kickoff of the new version of Temple Beth Abraham's Synaplex.  Read all the details here.  Our goal is to make sure that there is some way for everybody to experience the joy of Shabbat, for yourself and in community.  I've described that vision in my most recent bulletin article.  Whether it's the traditional service and the whole morning, an hour of yoga, a learners' service and discussion, or just my sermon and singing at the end before lunch.  Something for you individually, and a way to experience the power of community.

Second, on Sunday, October 25 is the CROP Walk (Communities Responding to Overcome Poverty), the Nashua area interfaith walk to raise money and awareness to eradicate hunger overseas and in our community.  It's important for the money it raises, it's important to join our voices and power with those of many other local faith communities.  It's who we are as a congregation named for Avraham and Sarah.  It will motivate us and inspire us to do more to fight hunger and poverty throughout the year.  You can walk or help with arrangements at the synagogue.  I'm aiming for 100 pairs of feet, which would about double our participation from last year.  If you have any questions write me and I can put you in touch with Carol Gorelick or Becky Green, our organizers.