Rabbi Jon's Website and Blog

Affordable Housing: A Sukkot Reflection and Charge

This is my D'var Torah for the first day of Sukkot 5784 and Shabbat, September 30, 2023.

 

Sukkot is actually the third part of the High Holy Days. It’s not just Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. Sukkot is the zany but nuanced third festival of our kickoff month of Tishrei.

And Sukkot is specifically a continuation of Yom Kippur. On Yom Kippur we go hyperspiritual, in the sense that we put away most of our material existence – eating, physical pleasures and adornments, even our homes as we spend more time in the synagogue than any other day. Then on Sukkot it seems like the opposite – we get hypermaterial, very earthy. Outdoors, building the hut, waving the Four Species, and in contrast to Yom Kippur the essential mitzvah in the Sukkah is to eat.

What we are actually doing is bringing our spiritually-realigned selves from Yom Kippur into a stylized version of our material life. A simple house, a week of meals, getting hands-on with four types of plants that represent four basic ways we interact with the physical world of things that grow and the water cycle. It’s like moving into a prototype of the materialist world, getting the basics straight before we step out into a more complex actual world of commerce and tangible things. On Sukkot we try to align our material selves on the basis of our reoriented spiritual selves.

So in the Talmud the Sukkah is connected to the Holy of Holies, which the High Priest used to enter on Yom Kippur. That’s where the ark was with the tablets, which means the Sukkah itself is a covenantal place. It’s a design statement meant to guide our relationship to material things and to people with whom we share meals, and to people in our neighborhood. And all through Sukkot we’re reminded that our relationships with people and food are connected directly to nature. We’re always eating in the shade of the s’chach on top of the Sukkah, the shadows that remind us of the divine protection that covers us even when we’re not paying attention, a spiritual mist made up of very earthy material.

So I want to talk about one way we can prototype our material world in the coming year, so it becomes more aligned spiritually and covenantally. I am part of a group of about ten clergy in the area who call ourselves the Greater Nashua Interfaith Housing Justice Group. We have been together for about six years but we’ve been working very publicly on issues of housing for more than four years. I want to tell you some of the what and more of the why, and invite you to engage in that work with us as members of the Jewish community and the faith community more broadly. Many of us are speaking in our congregations this week on this topic. Some of you were here four years ago when we did the same.

A Sukkah is defined in the Talmud as dirat ara’i, temporary dwelling. On a Torah level this is about bringing us back to the desert, where the Jewish people lived in a series of temporary places while we got our Torah and our training. In Egypt, even as slaves we lived in houses, as we know from the night of the Exodus with the blood on our doorposts. In the promised land we would again have homes, to live in and buy and sell. Sukkot is about the experience in between. In the desert every one of us knew a vulnerability about food and shelter survival, and it was the same whether you were Moshe or Miryam or a tribal elder, or anyone else. 

In our community, dirat ara’i for some people means not having any place to call home from day to day. All of our local shelters are full all the time. Thanks to the vision of many local leaders and the generosity of many including members of our shul, a new shelter on Spring Street in Nashua was opened recently by the Nashua Soup Kitchen and Shelter. Having a stable place to come back to each day, to rest and eat a meal and do homework, is a basic prerequisite for physical health, and mental health, and doing your job well or staying consistent in school. Too many kids have to couch-surf, which means moving also from school to school, and you can imagine the impact on educational progress and social development.

Because so many of our local nonprofits work so well on homelessness, our clergy group has picked up the next level from that, which has never had enough public advocates. So we work on affordable housing, which in practice turns out be primarily for renters – another kind of dirat ara’i, temporary dwelling.

In the city of Nashua, an increasing number of people rent as opposed to owning the place where they live. As a result, rents in the city are skyrocketing, outpacing inflation by about double in the past decade. In our part of the state, even beyond the city, about half of renters pay more than they can afford on housing, meaning more than 30% of income. If you work in health care, education, or retail, it’s almost impossible to find a place to rent in Nashua that’s affordable on your salary, and certainly that’s the case for people in lower paying jobs.

As a result, just the City of Nashua needs to add around 4,500 more units of housing by 2030 to stabilize our overall housing market, and of that at least another 1,800 units that would have to be affordable to people making far less than the area median income. Even this wouldn’t quite meet the needs of all the families emerging from transitional housing programs or everyone working as a nurse, a police officer, or a public school teacher who wants to live in the community where they work. It would still be a dramatic bite in the shortage.

Our municipal leaders and our state leaders have been paying more attention to this over the past five years. In Nashua, there have been some welcome achievements and our interfaith housing justice group has been part of a couple of them, as has the Granite State Organizing Project in these and others. Nashua created an affordable housing trust fund with $10 million from the American Rescue Plan, one of the Covid-19 relief programs passed by Congress. This money will increase the incentives for private builders to create affordable housing. Rentals are financed on the expectation of an income stream down the road, and when the apartment is going to be rented for less than the market rate, there’s a shortfall there that makes the project unprofitable – or in the non-theological lingo we’ve learned, “it doesn’t pencil.” To make it sensible for a developer to rent at a rate that someone could afford who is a teacher or a nurse or getting back on their feet with a new job, each unit requires an extra $25-80,000 of upfront financing. That’s what this fund will provide. This $10 million can help us bite off some 10-20% of the need we have. We’ll need more in the fund to hit our goal by 2030. As an example, a real-estate transaction surcharge on the order of a penny on every $1,000 of a sale could fund our need in Nashua in perpetuity. 

We have a new inclusionary zoning ordinance that passed our Board of Aldermen with not a single dissent, which requires new buildings of certain sizes to have a certain number of units of affordable housing within them, or else the developer has to pay per unit built into the housing trust fund.

Many of you have seen the redevelopment and expansion of public housing downtown on Central Street off the south end of the new parkway, formerly the Bronstein Apartments and now Monahan Manor.

All of these are an acceleration of the pace of creating new affordable housing, but we are still behind where we need to be for 2030. So we need to advocate for more funding from the state and other sources, as the Covid-related stimulus funding comes to an end.

If it were just about numbers, I don’t know that we would be involved specifically as people of faith. How we create housing matters. 

The Sukkah is about covenantal design. It’s about how housing links us together or divides us. When the Talmud discusses the construction requirements for the Sukkah, it connects the Sukkah to a chuppah, the marriage canopy, and to a mavoy, a neighborhood allyway where people often decide to collaborate in carry things around or share food on Shabbat. I’ve been thinking about the most bizarre design teaching about Sukkah, which is the booth has to be big enough for your entire head, a table, and most of your body but not all of it. Obviously this wouldn’t be a comfortable Sukkah, nor is it ideal to have a Sukkah where you can’t eat with other people. I think what it means is that you have to experience a full Sukkah mind yourself, but your eating has to keep you connected to what’s outside.

How we create housing is as important as the raw number of apartments. American public housing programs created clusters of high-rise buildings that concentrated poverty and had the effect of segregating many cities by race. The newest thinking even about publicly financed construction is that it makes a difference when attention is paid to how a building helps people connect with their neighbors, with local business and public space. Open space and common space matter, incentives to connect with other people in the building as opposed to fearing them. It makes a difference when people of different socioeconomic backgrounds and cultures live in the same building – so much informal networking happens, so much social trust can be built across difference, the outcomes are proven better for children. 

It makes a difference when the people who live in a building or a neighborhood that will be rebuilt to increase its capacity for housing have a voice, in the design and in what happens to them while they are displaced.

Our interfaith housing groups call this covenantal thinking. It’s what we hope for and are already lobbying to happen around the next big projects in Nashua: redeveloping the Elm Street Middle School when the new school opens, recreating the public housing on Major Drive, what will happen next now where the asphalt plant was proposed down the hill from here, and how to repurpose Daniel Webster College as proposed in the new city master plan.

Covenant thinking might lead any one project to have fewer units, which on its own seems like a missed opportunity. But as the lens widens, new people might see themselves as partners for affordable housing, and new projects can emerge that the existing stakeholders might never have thought of.

The Spring Street Shelter has some of this covenantal thinking in it. There are community rooms, rooms for education, and former director Michael Reinke’s vision was for community groups beyond NSKS to share a life in the building. Not just to see residents are people who need things from “the rest of us” like clothing, or even skills training. But a place where community groups could offer interesting cultural and educational programming for anyone, resident or not, in a location central in our city right downtown.

The last time a group of us preached on housing we were leading into a public event, which generated momentum and new relationships with city officials and led to some of the progress to date. We’ve been able to collaborate and to critique. So too this coming Monday the community is invited to a forum with candidates for mayor and the Board of Aldermen in Nashua. We will hear stories about the housing crisis from community members, and then ask the candidates for their policy priorities around equitable, affordable housing. The forum is at the Unitarian Universalist Church near here at 7:30, and you’ll have plenty of time to make it after our Sukkah dinner and event here that night. 

Whether or not you live in Nashua, you can advance the goals of more affordable housing created in a covenantal fashion in many ways. Attend the event on Monday. Sign up for our e-mail list, so we can keep you posted on public meetings of local planning boards and other bodies debating policies and budgets. We need people who are not the usual faces to come and be YIMBYs, Yes in My Backyard advocates, because almost every project is opposed by an organized group. Ask any candidate for office if they will accept a pledge toward 2,000 new units of affordable housing this decade if you live in Nashua. But things are happening all the time in the other towns too, and next year, the gubernatorial and legislative elections will have a big impact, because Gov. Sununu and the legislature the past few years have added tens of millions of new dollars statewide into affordable housing finance. The new governor and legislators should continue in that path and add even more.

And if you or someone you know has expertise in any area related to real estate or finance or construction, or philanthropy, help us connect. One of the things about our congregations is that we have so many different talents and resources among us, and it’s not just the same players as are around other tables who discuss and decide these matters.

Sukkot is a good time to reflect on the physical structures we live in and how they are connected as neighborhoods and as towns. On Sukkot we move out of our settled homes into dirat ara’i, temporary structures, which help us get our bearings as we relaunch into a year of commerce and consumption, neighborliness, political debate about how we marshall and share our collective resources. On this Sukkot, let’s complete the High Holy Day season by restoring our material lives to their spiritual roots, their covenantal roots, for the new year.

Shabbat Shalom and Chag Sameach!

My American Tale -- What's Yours? (Yaz on Masada)

This is the D'var Torah I gave for Parshiyyot Chukkat-Balak 5783, July 1, 2023.

This is a picture of me at the age of 17 on top of Masada in Israel, wearing a baseball cap that says “YAZ”. I remember asking someone to take this picture, and to get me and the Yaz cap and as much of Masada behind me in the phot as possible – hence the odd composition. I was on my end-of-11th-grade trip with the Alexander Muss High School in Israel program, and getting this picture was significant to me at the time for reasons I cannot remember.

But now, this photo stands for a whole story of who I am, which I focus on especially on the Shabbat leading into Independence Day and the first Shabbat that my daughter is in Israel for her very first time.

The Yaz hat I had for about nine months, and I wore it a lot even before Israel. I got the cap I think on the bridge between Kenmore Square and Fenway Park in probably August of 1983, when our family went to a Red Sox game during Carl Yastrzemski’s final season.  Yaz merch was everywhere. It’s a white kind-of-painter’s cap and by the first couple weeks of Israel it had become a bit discolored under the rim with sweat from our hikes. The cap came to an untimely end a week or two after Masada when our group was on a long bus ride and I was in front telling jokes on the microphone (we used to trade that off during our tiyyulum, our excursions from our base) and my friend Judy became carsick and needed to stop the bus and run off. I got out of her way, but didn’t get the last bit of the very top of my head out of the way quite in time. End of Yaz cap!

Masada is half of what’s important about the Yaz cap. Being at Fenway during Yaz’s last season is the other important part. When I was 1 to 3 years old, before I can even remember, my family lived in Rockport, Massachusetts. My father had recently completed his medical training and wanted to practice in a small town, and my mother did not want to live in a small town -- so they made a deal that they would try it for two years. Dad found a practice looking to add two young doctors in Gloucester. We lived there, but after the two years, Mom called it off.

What I do remember, for as long as I can remember anything, is that every year after the experiment ended we would make a summer trip out East -- a week in Utica with Dad’s family (Utica, a/k/a the Garden of Eden and the founding spot of all civilization, in Savett family lore), and a week on Cape Ann on the ocean down the street from where we had lived. And one of those days was always spent in Boston, often split between visiting our cousins and doing something in the city. Over the years growing up, we went to the Bunker Hill monument, the Freedom Trail, Lexington and Concord, the USS Constitution, Faneuil Hall, the North End. I grew up when Schoolhouse Rock was new on Saturday morning TV, so none of this Hamilton-The-Revolution’s-Happening-In-New-York garbage -- it was the Mayflower and Plymouth Rock and the Boston Tea Party.  I was fascinated for a time with how it wasn’t Paul Revere or William Dawes but Col. Prescott who actually rode out to announce the “British are coming!” I did not like reading Thoreau and Emerson in high school – but I did love that I had actually been to Walden Pond. The Boston history and landscape seeped into me, along with the ocean in Rockport, as a second home and as a central part of my own story and history.

So I wore the Yaz hat to connect me to my Boston, American-history roots, and I wore it on Masada as we sat as a group and debated as though we were the Zealots making our last stand against the Romans -- should we resist or flee or take our own lives. I wore it as we hollered into the canyon as Israeli soldiers do, shenit m’tzadah lo tipol, Masada will never fall again. I added a few weeks after my HSI trip ended to stay in Israel, and the moment I landed back in the U.S. I started to plan for getting back to Israel in college.

I wrote about that day on Masada for my college essays-- it was in a way both Yaz and Masada who got me back to Boston, to Harvard. I loved living there, walking the streets of our colonial founders each day with the signs of how many hundreds of years ago a particular path or road was first laid down. In the middle of that time I did fulfill my intention of going back to Israel (without the Yaz cap). Yet on the heels of a year when I was convinced I would make aliyah, I returned to Boston and found myself surprised to discover that I was deep down an American and I couldn’t give that up, and I didn’t want to.

And so, about a century after my great-grandparents came to the U.S. and Canada in flight from the czar, and had become Americans as my family had become Russian or Lithuanian or Ukrainian or Latvian some generations earlier for the very same kind of reason after living somewhere else -- I made a choice to be American.

When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation. The Declaration begins in this passage, and in the famous passage that follows, by announcing the choice of the people of this country to become Americans and not British. And at the same time words like necessary and impel and duty suffuse the opening lines as if to say -- we choose to become who we had no choice to become. That is how it felt to me and how it feels to me, as I think about choosing to be American and feeling compelled to make that choice.

And it’s important to declare the causes of that publicly, for me and for others of us who are American Jews. And I find myself this time of year when I have a kid in Israel and so many people I know are spending time there -- I find myself feeling like a “decent respect to the opinions of Jews and Zionists” requires me to declare why here and not there. Respect to Jews and Zionists here, in this room and this community as well as in Israel. For me, living in the land of Yaz is something I can’t separate from the part of me tied to the land of Masada, and my American-ness and my Zionism are so tightly connected.

Last fall when I was in Jerusalem, I brought with me the journal I kept from my year in college there. I read to myself the statements of the me who was declaring why he couldn’t live here and had to live there, and the values I thought were at stake in becoming an Israeli Conservative Jew in the religious peace movement. I took a walk with myself and talked to myself in Hebrew about whether I could have become anything like me, with whatever strength of moral character and whatever leadership it has taken decades to develop, if I had made aliyah. Who can know.

But I think not. I have spoken to you on many Shabbatot before Independence Day about this and written about it -- you can check out the USA page on rabbijon.net so I’ll just summarize it here. I discovered, back in the fall of 1988, that I was American to the core, that American ideas and the paradigm questions and American politics were all I wanted to think about and talk about and study. And it was not only my Boston marination, but my Judaism and my Torah that were making me American.

To quote and paraphrase myself from last year and a few years before:

Jewish experience and Torah were my path to America. In my mind, this is how I think about freedom and individuality: Thomas Jefferson with his self-evident truths speaks to Moshe demanding that Pharaoh let our people go. Henry David Thoreau, who would not compromise one bit with conventional society and went off to live in the woods all on his own, who went to jail rather than pay taxes that would help fund what he thought was an unjust war – Thoreau is talking to Rabbi Eliezer ben Hyrcanus, who in the Talmud is banished by his colleagues after he couldn’t persuade the rest of the rabbis to set the law his way, even when God sent miracles and a voice down from Heaven to back him up.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, who wrote the classic essay on individualism, speaks with Rav Yosef Soloveitchik, who wrote about sh’lichut, one’s unique individual mission in the world.

I think about how freedom is the basic, precious truth we learn from the Exodus, and how much more precious that freedom is than what John Locke or Thomas Jefferson ever wrote about. How Torah freedom compels us to stop at Mt. Sinai and enter into covenant, and what that required stop teaches about the kinds of covenants free people in America are able to make or ought to make.

I think about how freedom is also the fundamental challenge to our humanity, even the most basic idol. It was free people after all who chose the make a golden calf and worship a thing made of gold. It was free people who imagined themselves trading the challenge of rising spiritually for the fleshpots back in Egypt and the thought of a life free of difficult decisions and moral agency. The Torah of freedom talks to the challenges today, of freedom that opens up to mere materialism, to unrestrained competition in the economy and social competitiveness. A freedom that can make everything a commodity, including ourselves — allowing our interests, our time, even our unique talents to be valued in our own eyes by what they are worth in the short term to others. All of which can disconnect us from the larger and longer stories we are part of, which we author and co-author.

I think about how the long Jewish practice of tzedakah as more like taxation than charity wants us to understand the blessing we say first thing in the morning, praising the Divine she’asanu b’nai chorin, who has made us free people. I think about how Jews have been stewards of both freedom and self-government for more than three thousand years, carrying the Exodus story and wearing it around our bodies in tallit and tefillin, running even our medieval communities in a principled self-government. How does the person who wakes up into freedom also wake up into responsibility? I want to know how freedom and responsibility are linked — in talmudic detail and American detail, in philosophical detail and political detail.

It’s because of America that Torah has had to speak to issues beyond our group and its wellbeing, and become a wisdom for this nation and the world. American has brought Torah to answer questions about totalitarianism, the nuclear age, technology, racism, human rights, compelling Jewish thinkers to explore the ethics of power and the limits of human potential. And because of America, Jews export that wisdom back to Israel, whether it’s to the Conservative and Reform communities, the religious Zionist movement, or many creative secular and non-governmental initiatives and communities and think tanks. There could be no democratic, modern Israel without the Jews and Judaisms of America.

Some look at the phrase “Jewish American,” or “American Jew,” and see a space between the words, a yawning gap between two aspects of consciousness. Or they see a dash like a minus sign, where one word or maybe both take something away from the other. I see rather a chemical bond. Not ionic – charged, each trying to take something from the other. But covalent. A sign of the energy that flows uniquely when two entities are bound together, and something new emerges that is different from either atom on its own.

The hyphen in “Jewish-American” is one of the most exciting things I know. The identity, and the specific moral dilemmas that come with the hyphen -- I wouldn’t trade that hyphen for anything.

That’s why I chose to be American, and why I had to make that choice, once thirty-five years ago and over and over again since.

So that’s my story, my journal of ideas and my photo albums. The picture I showed you might not look like it has anything to do with this American tale. But the photo on top of Masada of me wearing a cap of the great Carl Yastrzemski is one photo of an overall equilibrium of how Jewish history and American history flow toward me and within. We don’t share these stories and declarations enough of why we are here and why we are us, the way we share stories of Zionism and persecution. Last Rosh Hashanah I charged us to look ahead to this year and the coming two years after, and to make a Jewish leap of faith in American democracy. Whether right now the America you experience is more like the crises of leadership and national direction in our first parasha today, Chukkat. Or whether like in the second, Balak, you’re reassuring yourself that from ten thousand feet and from the outside, we are a beacon still or at least okay.

So on this July 4th, tell your story, at least to yourself. If you have chosen to be here, be proud you made that choice -- that you have chosen this place with the moral questions that come with this place and time. Baruch she-asanu b’nai chorin -- thank you, to the One who has made us all free in this place and this time.

My Love Letter to Hebrew

I gave this as a sermon on Shabbat, April 22, 2023, preceding Israel's 75th anniversary of independence.

What I remember first about Mrs. Nussbaum’s Sunday School class is that everyone learned how to read a whole Hebrew word before I did.

I can remember coming and looking at the book and I saw nothing. I recognized individual letters; we had been learning those for a couple years. But while other kids were sounding out words I could not, I saw just overwhelming Scrabble racks on the page.

Well, the reason I was behind was that I had missed a class or two, being sick at the start of the year. And I can remember exactly how I was sitting in the JCC when suddenly it all snapped into focus. Dani b'veit haknesset, Nira b'veit haknesset... I can picture the table where I was, closer to the door than to the window looking out on St. Paul Avenue. With Dani and Nira, Mrs. Nussbaum, my friends David Glaser and Holly Brod and a few others, it was off to the races. And look at me now -- tistaklu alai achshav!

This is my love letter to the Hebrew language, and my thank you to the people who gave me Hebrew, as we get ready to celebrate Israel’s 75th anniversary this week and launch a season of celebration and learning too I hope from now through our May 21 New Hampshire-wide gathering. 

Mrs. Nussbaum was our teacher at Shaare Shalom, a small group of maybe 50 families at its biggest. (She was the one who in first or second grade let me play the part of God in the paper bag puppet show about the binding of Isaac, so long as I and my bearded God would be hidden under the table.) She set us up to start in third grade at the Talmud Torah of St. Paul, which for a golden few decades from the ‘70s through the ‘90s especially was a city-wide supplementary school that all the Conservative and Reform students attended. 

Again I can remember so much specific about third grade with G'veret Vlodaver. We got right to it with basic grammar so we could read things and write things -- kotev, kotevet, kotvim, kotvot. I remember the first songs we learned with Sh’ulah and her accordion -- yadaim l’ma’alah... mi ohev et hashabbat... The songs were simple and taught us some basic vocabulary and grammar.

And for me Hebrew was always simple for some reason. I don’t have a natural ear for language generally. I think for me it was partly because I’m a nerd and the structure was appealing to me. Three letter shorashim, roots, easy to plug into a chart. I may still have the blue mimeograph sheet from 3rd or 4th grade with the past tense -- katavti, katavta, katavt, I wrote you wrote... Even the irregular verbs in Hebrew have patterns, all the verbs that start with nun or yod. We had a Ben Yehuda small Hebrew English dictionary at home and a snapshot of me in fifth grade or so would be me studying the charts of the seven verb conjugations. I learned the terminology of subject and object, direct and indirect, active and passive, long before we learned grammar terms in public school. Somehow grammar was what I really wanted to get.

My parents were of course a big factor, and I have to ask them how much intention they had in setting up our home. My dad would be the doctor for a week at Herzl Camp, and we would be with the whole camp in what they called the chadar, the dining hall -- camp has its own Hebrew with its sometimes questionable relationship to actual Hebrew -- and that’s where we heard all the Israel songs, the Zionist songs, Bashanah Ha’ba’ah, which today are standards but back then were brand new. Dad would always steal some copies of the shiron, the song book, and we’d try to replicate those camp Shabbat meals on Friday nights just the four of us. A lot from transliteration, mangling the words I am sure. Later, Mom and Dad would play Hebrew records after Shabbat dinner -- from Debbie Friedman, or the Israeli Chasidic Song festival that had rolled into St. Paul when I was about ten.

I remember in those years especially, later in grade school and junior high, this sense that the songs’ meanings were on the tip of my tongue. I knew something like half the words, and for some reason didn’t apply myself to learning the other ones, I wonder why. But that tip of my tongue kept me going.

In my early Hebrew education, there was no sense of division between modern Hebrew, the Torah, and the Siddur (prayerbook). But apart from one or two rules about verbs, we could just as easily read and translate a verse of the Torah as a poem about a nad'nedah, a see-saw at a playground, with a basic lexicon of verbs and some basic grammar and a dictionary. I mean really, in the Torah what do people do other than talk, omer or daber, or eat, ochel, or give and go, ten and lech?

The revival of Hebrew as a living and creative language, of modern society and culture, came about in the past two hundred years and it was possible because of the unique story of the Hebrew language over the past three thousand years.

We know that Hebrew was the language of the Land of Israel during biblical times, and there were other languages in the land and in surrounding lands that were related Hebrew the way that Spanish and Italian are related. We know that there were dialects and accents even in ancient Israel. The English word “shibboleth” comes from a story in the book of Judges, where a group of Jews from the Gil’ad region were fighting a group from the tribal area of Ephraim, and the Ephramites were trying to pass through after losing the battle. The Gil'adim asked each one to say the word shibolet, which means the head of a stalk of grain, but the Ephramites could only say si-bolet, and let’s just say it didn’t end well for them.

As Jews were exiled to Mesopotamia, and then restored to Eretz Yisrael under imperial rule -- Persian, Hellenistic, Roman -- Hebrew itself was transformed, it took in so many words from the imperial languages, and Hebrew became less and less the spoken language of Judea, even though it continued to be a language of writing and accounts and sacred literature. The typical Jew in Roman Judea or Palestine would not have been monolingual in Hebrew, and probably spoke more Greek or Aramaic. 

When the Temple was destroyed, Hebrew was concentrated by the early rabbis, who produced their work in a simple Hebrew style with a straightforward grammar of subject, verb, object. They took advantage of the basic patterns of Hebrew to pass along their teachings in very simplified and rhythmic Hebrew, one that could be spoken and repeated easily by students who weren’t speaking Hebrew in daily life. During the Middle Ages, some poets and composers took a kind of Rococo, almost Shakespearean path leading to some of the most complicated works in our prayerbook. But for even the typical literate person it was the simplified Hebrew of the Mishnah that they knew, with its labels for things of religious significance and mundane life. It was a slimmed down language for centuries, a kind of hibernation or preservation strategy in retrospect.

The idea of Hebrew as a primary language emerged during the Jewish Enlightenment, especially in the 1800s. First there was literature, a conscious effort to breathe life into Jews by escaping Talmudic Aramaic and shtetl Yiddish. Then came Zionism and the idea of speaking Hebrew as a primary language, as a way to be a new Jew. My favorite story about this relates to Eliezer Ben Yehudah, who was raised a traditional Jew in Belarus and made aliyah in the first modern wave in 1881 at the age of about 23. He lived in Jerusalem and dedicated himself to creating a fully functioning modern Hebrew. One day a religious Jew heard him giving instructions to his dog in Hebrew. This struck him as a sacrilige, how could you use the Lashon Hakodesh this way, the holy language of the Torah? And they killed Eliezer’s dog. But the dogs and their owners got the last word.

The Hebrew of today makes it easy to read the Hebrew of Maimonides from the Middle Ages, or the Torah itself, even as Hebrew has stretched to incorporate modern words from other languages, sometimes even into the classic three-consonant root form. I remember staring at a milk carton in Israel trying to figure about what m’hum’gan meant -- it’s "homogenized", in its exactly appropriate one of the seven verb conjugations.

For me, when I went to Camp Ramah in Wisconsin just before 9th grade, the placement test put me in the same group as kids from the Solomon Schechter Day School in suburban Chicago. I could understand everything they could learning Hebrew every day, about Maimonides’ teachings about tzedakah in the original or in our modern Hebrew class. But for the first time in my life, the sessions were ivrit b’ivrit, Hebrew learned by speaking Hebrew, and I hardly spoke a word all summer unlike the day school kids. That would be my mission eventually, to be able to speak.

Through junior high and high school the head of the Talmud Torah was Rabbi Yosi Gordon. Yosi was from Green Bay, Wisconsin, a Jewish cheese-head, and he was the one American we knew who both loved Hebrew and really knew it. He told us this story, about being a student at the Hebrew University on his year-abroad and really wanting to develop an Israeli accent. So he went to a tutor, worked on his r’esh’es and vowels, and the test was for him to go to this particular Jerusalem barber. You’d get your hair cut and talk, and the barber would try to figure out where you were from. The first time Yosi went the barber was challenged, and said he had narrowed it down to Romania or somewhere. Yosi said nothing, went back for more lessons, and eventually passed the barber test as Israeli.

Yosi was the one person in shul who davvened out loud. Even in high school, most of the right side of the Siddur was just overwhelming gibberish; I couldn’t just scan it. But I got the idea that you try maybe to recite something out loud, something you know, maybe something you don’t. At some point in high school I had that instant that had happened in Mrs. Nussbaum's classroom, where suddenly the page was phrases and sentences.

I came back from my trip to Israel the summer after eleventh grade and all I could think of was going back. I had this one cassette of songs by Naomi Shemer -- it went with me in the car everywhere, I am surprised I didn’t destroy it. Al kol eileh, etleynu bechatzer.... I had that tip of my tongue feeling that I sort of understood them, and I was in the car so couldn’t pull out my dictionary. But again it kept me motivated that one day, I’d be able to sing the songs and understand them one hundred percent.

Meanwhile for those of us who stuck it out in Hebrew High, twelve grade meant no more textbooks. We read poems by Yehuda Amichai and stories by Shai Agnon, with just our knowledge and dictionaries. I placed into third year Hebrew when I got to college, without spending a day in a day school or an ulpan. Granted, the X factor was me; not everyone in my cohort has the same story. But this is why I believe we can teach our kids read Hebrew right here where we are.

Finally I spent a whole year in Israel as a junior in college, and I made myself talk past my shyness and my uncertainty -- to get a kartisiya on the bus, a discount punch ticket; to haggle in a monit, a taxi. I developed occasionally this other persona, Israeli Jonatan, who might say things with a sharpness that Jon doesn’t usually have. I am ever grateful to the Israelis here -- to Ruti, to Sara, to Eitan, to Moshe and Etti -- who speak Hebrew slowly not just to me, and who seem to savor every word they form.

To my surprise I have come to love Hebrew not just for its system and not just for its concepts, but for its art. I love the rhythm, the same rhythm that locked down the language for safekeeping in the second century, the ah and oh-ness. Ahavah, love -- ahavah rabbah, boundless love. Glidah is so much more beautiful than ice cream. Sometimes Hebrew translations are even better than the original -- barad yarad bidrom Sfarad ba’erev -- the rain in Spain stays mainly in the plain!

I have come to think of each Hebrew shoresh, each root, as a kind of atomic field, with a nucleus of meaning but like any small particle in physics you can’t quite pin it down. Chesed means lovingkindness, but it also means loyalty, doing your duty, and love in the most unbounded sense.  Tzedek, tzedakah, is more than legal justice and charity, it’s giving with understanding and with a bigger picture, it’s relational and not just formal. One of my favorite ways to keep learning Hebrew is a podcast called Streetwise Hebrew, which takes what’s often a root or a word that’s familiar to you if you know some Hebrew, and shows how it’s stretched idiomatically in Israel today.

I want to celebrate Hebrew as we celebrate Israel’s 75th anniversary. It unites us across everything, and it’s the key that unlocks everything from Torah to prayer to Israel. So in the weeks that come we’ll share Beth Abraham’s 75 favorite Hebrew words -- if you have one to nominate I’ll tell you how to record yourself or I’ll come and do that. If you learn just a bit of grammar and maybe 150 words, you’ll be amazed what you can read. Even if you’re not a language person, you’ll be astonished what you can internalize. And please make me speak and teach more, me and Sarit as well.

And as for me, I can’t thank enough Alice and Dalia and Yosi and Ruti and Yechiel and Earl and Sari and Aya and Anne and Roger and Jon-Jay and and and, and Mom and Dad, for bringing me the gift of Hebrew. It can be your gift, whether you’re just starting today or whether you have a story like mine which I’d love to hear. Who knows what the coming decades are bringing, to Israel, to Jewish life everywhere. Whatever it is, it will be coming in Hebrew.

Israel's Declaration of Independence

 

 

I am posting this on the eve of Israel's 75th anniversary of independence. The translation is based on what I found on the Israeli Knesset website with my own revisions to bring the words closer to the Hebrew at the sacrifice occasionally of an equivalent English idiom. I have chosen to translate the term "Eretz Yisrael" throughout as "The Land of Israel", though there might be room to understand the term at the same time as "Palestine" in the sense it was understood in 1948, as that territory in question over which the British Mandate applied.

 

 

In Eretz Yisrael (The Land of Israel) the Jewish nation arose. Here their spiritual, religious, and political identity was shaped. Here they first lived as a polity, created cultural values of national and universal significance, and gave to the world the eternal Book of Books.

After being forcibly exiled from their land, the people remained faithful to it throughout their dispersion and never ceased to pray and hope for their return to it and for the restoration in it of their political freedom.

Out of this historic and traditional connection, Jews strove in every successive generation to re-establish themselves in their ancient homeland. In recent generations they returned in their masses. Pioneers, immigrants in defiance of restrictive legislation and defenders, they made deserts bloom, revived the Hebrew language, built villages and towns, and created a thriving community controlling its own economy and culture, loving peace but knowing how to defend itself, bringing the blessings of progress to all the country's inhabitants, and aspiring towards independent nationhood.

In the year 5657 (1897), at the summons of the spiritual father of the Jewish State, Theodore Herzl, the First Zionist Congress convened and proclaimed the right of the Jewish people to national rebirth in its own country.

This right was recognized in the Balfour Declaration of November 2, 1917, and re-affirmed in the Mandate of the League of Nations which gave specific international sanction to the historic connection between the Jewish people and the Land of Israel and to the right of the Jewish people to establish anew its national home.

The Holocaust which recently befell the Jewish people - the massacre of millions of Jews in Europe – proved anew the imperative of solving the problem of its homelessness and statelessness by re-establishing in the Land of Israel the Jewish State, which would open wide the gates of the homeland wide to every Jew and confer upon the Jewish people the status of a full and equal member of the community of nations.

Survivors of the Nazi slaughter in Europe, as well as Jews from other lands, did not stop migrating to the Land of Israel, undaunted by difficulties, restrictions and dangers, and never ceased to assert their right to a life of dignity, freedom and honest toil in their national homeland.

In the Second World War, the Jewish community of this country contributed its full share to the struggle of the freedom- and peace-loving nations against the forces of Nazi wickedness and, by the blood of its soldiers and its war effort, gained the right to be reckoned among the peoples who founded the United Nations.

On November 29, 1947, the United Nations General Assembly passed a resolution calling for the establishment of a Jewish State in the Land of Israel; the General Assembly required the inhabitants of the Land of Israel to take such steps as were necessary on their part for the implementation of that resolution. This recognition by the United Nations of the right of the Jewish people to establish their State is irrevocable.

This right is the natural right of the Jewish people to be masters of their own fate, like all other nations, in their own sovereign state.

Accordingly we have assembled, members of the People’s Council, representatives of the Jewish community of the Land of Israel and of the Zionist movement, on the day of the conclusion of the British Mandate over Palestine, and by virtue of our natural and historic right and on the basis of the decision of the General Assembly of the United Nations, we hereby declare the establishment of a Jewish state in the Land of Israel: the State of Israel.

We declare that beginning at the moment of the conclusion of the Mandate tonight, the eve of Shabbat, 6 Iyar 5708 (May 15, 1948), until the establishment of the elected, regular authorities of the State in accordance with the constitution which shall be adopted by the elected constituent assembly not later than the October 1, 1948, the People's Council shall act as a Provisional Council of State, and its executive organ, the People's Administration, shall be the Provisional Government of the Jewish state, to be called "Israel".

The State of Israel will be open for Jewish immigration and for the ingathering of the exiles; it will foster the development of the country for the benefit of all its inhabitants; it will be based on freedom, justice and peace as envisaged by the prophets of Israel; it will ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex; it will guarantee freedom of religion, conscience, language, education and culture; it will safeguard the holy places of all religions; and it will be faithful to the principles of the Charter of the United Nations.

The State of Israel is ready to cooperate with the agencies and representatives of the United Nations in implementing the resolution of the General Assembly of November 29, 1947, and will take steps to bring about the economic union of the whole of the Land of Israel.

We call on the United Nations to assist the Jewish people in the building of its state and to receive the State of Israel into the family of nations.

We call – even in the midst of the onslaught launched against us now for months - to the Arab inhabitants of the State of Israel to preserve peace and take part in the building of the state on the basis of full and equal citizenship and due representation in all its provisional and permanent institutions.

We extend a hand in peace and neighborliness to all neighboring states and their peoples, and appeal to them for cooperation and mutual help with the sovereign Jewish people in its land. The State of Israel is prepared to contribute its share in a common effort for the advancement of the entire Middle East.

We call to the Jewish people throughout the Diaspora to rally round the Jews of the Land of Israel through immigration and upbuilding and to stand by its side in the great struggle for the realization of the age-old dream of the redemption of Israel.

With trust in the Rock of Israel, we hereby affix our signatures in witness to this declaration, at this session of the Provisional Council of State on the soil of the homeland, in the city of Tel-Aviv, this day, the Eve of Shabbat, 5 Iyyar 5708, May 14, 1948.

David Ben-Gurion
Daniel Auster
Mordekhai Bentov
Yitzchak Ben Zvi
Eliyahu Berligne
Fritz Bernstein
Rabbi Wolf Gold
Meir Grabovsky
Yitzchak Gruenbaum
Dr. Abraham Granovsky
Eliyahu Dobkin
Meir Wilner-Kovner

Zerach Wahrhaftig
Herzl Vardi Rachel Cohen
Rabbi Kalman Kahana
Saadia Kobashi
Rabbi Yitzchak Meir Levin
Meir David Loewenstein
Zvi Luria
Golda Myerson
Nachum Nir
Zvi Segal
Rabbi Yehuda Leib Hacohen Fishman
David Zvi Pinkas

 

 

 

Aharon Zisling
Moshe Kolodny
Eliezer Kaplan
Abraham Katznelson
Felix Rosenblueth
David Remez
Berl Repetur
Mordekhai Shattner
Ben Zion Sternberg
Bekhor Shitreet
Moshe Shapira
Moshe Shertok

 

Hope, Chanukkah, and the Dreidel

This is one version of a D'var Torah I have given in a few variations at different times, around Chanukkah and even once on Rosh Hashanah!

I have only a couple of Chanukkah sermons, and in fact you may have heard me give a version of this in years past and even on a Rosh Hashanah. I want to talk about hope, through the lens of Chanukkah. I think we can learn about hope from the dreidel – nun, gimel, hay, shin.

The definition of hope that comes closest to the matter for me is from Czech playwright and dissident and eventually president Vaclav Havel: “Hope is definitely not the same thing as optimism. It is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.” The Talmud says that when we arrive at the entrance to the World to Come, we will be asked a series of questions about how we lived, and then the last question will be: “Tzipita liyshua? Did you have hope that there would be redemption for yourself, for the world?” Before you knew how your story on earth ended, before you knew the state of the world when you left it, did you hope?

So, the dreidel. On the surface -- on its four surfaces -- the dreidel seems like the very essence of randomness, the opposite even of hope. You can hold it by something firm, it comes together here on one point, but those don’t last. As soon as you put it in play, it’s just all uncertainty. Nun, Gimel, Hay, or Shin? But I have come to see each letter and each possible landing as a different kind of hope.

When you play dreidel someone brings the M&Ms, stakes the pot in the middle, and gives some to everyone. When you spin, if you land on Gimel you get everything in the pot. Hay, you take half. Nun, nothing happens. Shin, you put something in.

Look deeper into each outcome, and there’s a type of hope corresponding to each outcome. Gimelhope, Hay hope, Nun hope, Shin hope.

Gimel stands for the word gadol, meaning large. Gimel is when you win all the M&Ms in the middle.Gimel hope is going for broke, hoping and praying for everything. The final definitive cure from an illness.  Life or the world exactly as it is supposed to be. And not just praying but getting what you pray for.

My all-time favorite Gimel story comes from Rabbi Sharon Brous, who read it from New York Times columnist Nick Kristof and his wife Sheryl WuDunn. The two were living in China in 1990 and met a young village girl named Dai. Dai Manju was a terrific student who had to walk four miles to school every day. Tuition at her elementary school was an unaffordable $13 per year, and her parents certainly would not be able to pay the additional $4 a year it would cost for junior high.

Kristof wrote about Dai Manju and people began to donate money, as you would expect – that’s not the Gimel -- and one donation came through for $10,000! Not just enough for her tuition, but for a lot of tuitions, and enough to build another school. And that’s not even the Gimel. When Kristof checked in again, he found out when the bank was converting the large donation from dollars to yuan, and they dropped a decimal point. The donation was only supposed to be $100.00! But rather than take back the money, the bank just stood by its own transfer and made the difference their own donation.

Ten years later, Dai Manju had finished high school and trained to become an accountant.  She was contemplating starting her own enterprise. Every home in her village had electricity. The readers, the dropped decimal point, and all the other kids made ripples on one family, the village, and beyond. So much Gimel!

In dreidel, the odds of a Gimel are just one in four. In the real world, even less. But each Gimel keeps us going. Gimel is when the world as it is suddenly crosses with the world that we know is supposed to be, and that ideal world is real. If there weren’t Gimel in the world, we could hardly live at all.

When the dreidel lands on Hay, you take half the pot. Hay hope is for something partial. It's remission from cancer; it’s a good day during the months after a concussion. It’s a big issue win on the local level.

I feel fortunate to live in communities with a lot of Hay. I see people rallying to each other within our congregation all the time, every single week, at times of illness or loss, at times of loneliness, and it’s not everything but it’s more than something. I feel fortunate to live in an area where we have energetic leaders, in office and as volunteers, who are trying to make our city a welcoming community through culture and the library and business and government. I see young people with idealism, finding something to do in politics or service and impatiently asking what can they do next, how can they make a bigger difference because they don’t feel they’re doing enough, that it’s Hay but not yet Gimel.

I see how people hunger for Hay stories, stories of healing and resilience for a time – and I see how much people who live in other places love to know about the partial, hopeful stories of this shul or this state. When Gimel seems too much to hope for, unattainable or just not possible to believe, what people really need is Hay.

Nun is when you get nothing. This is actually the Hebrew letter in the game that stands for nes or miracle. How can nothing be a miracle, much less hope?

When I talked about this a few years ago I mentioned the Israeli leader Shimon Peres z”l, who was in one view the biggest nothing in Israeli politics and history. He was the loser of more elections than anyone else ever, and he was the champion of the Oslo peace process with the Palestinians that did not achieve peace. There was a lot of Nun, nothing, at the end of the defining initiatives of his career.

Yet Shimon Peres, even in his 90s, refused to give up his conviction that one day his visions would come true.  Half a century before, Peres had been the builder of Israel's first energy revolution, in nuclear power. As an elder statesman, he rolled up his sleeves with young innovators and entrepreneurs to help launch the newest phase of Israel's green energy revolution. Shimon Peres lived by these words of Rabbi Donniel Hartman: “It is not in our hands alone to actualize our dreams. It is in our hands to ensure that these dreams remain alive.” Nun today might mean Hay or even Gimel sometime later.

The hardest of the four sides of the dreidel to call hope is Shin -- you lose, you put something back. Shin in Hebrew stands for sham, which means "there", over somewhere else. It seems like the opposite of hope – but it's not. Shin hope is a kind of hope, that comes as we leap the distance between what we pray for and what is, when they are in fact so far from each other.

I told the story a few years ago about a call I got from a congregant named Sandi one spring day a few years ago, telling me she’d like to chant a Haftarah at the end of July, the one from her Bat Mitzvah.  Sandi used to chant frequently for us, but at the time she was dying from cancer. The previous phone call I’d had with her had been about some bad test results she had received. I wondered if she was really saying “If I’m still alive I’m going to chant the Haftarah.” Neither of us said that out loud.

And indeed Sandi didn’t quite make it. She went into hospice a week before her Haftarah, and she died two days before that Shabbat. Friends were in her room all that week, making plans for how they could chant to Sandi or even have her chant a little bit from her bed. That Shabbat right after Sandi died, when her synagogue friends could have been just too tired or grief-stricken, they came here to services and one of them chanted Sandi’s special Haftarah.

Everything about those weeks was hope with a Shin. In the hospice I asked Sandi where she found the strength to keep going and to hope. She taught me President Havel’s answer in her own words – she said she loved her shuls, here and Temple Israel, and being close to the Torah, and the people who were in her life because of the shuls, and her small family. She looked at me like: no big deal. Planning to chant the Haftarah was what she was putting into the pot -- that was her Shin, how she expressed hope and lived it. Hard as it was, all her friends and all of us have what Sandi put in.

The story of Chanukkah comes entirely from Shin. The cruse of oil that lasted miraculously first had to be given away as a Shin. At a time when others were despairing, someone made a beautiful container with a special seal of the kohanim, and hid it where the enemy wouldn’t see it. Whoever did so believed one day that someone would be in a position to find the oil – maybe not in the same lifetime, but eventually. Instead of despairing, that kohen played a Shin. They put something in, for later; they put in hope for someone else.

Nun, Gimel, Hay, Shin. Hope for the biggest things; hope for partial healing and partial justice. Hoping for others or the future; and just hoping when you can't even give any good reason for doing so.

We come here on Shabbat because this is where the M&Ms are stored. We come with however much we have in a given week, and the Torah gives us some more. Maybe you or I walk out with more or maybe we give some; for sure there is someone who leaves our Shabbat gathering with more. Shul is where we come with an absolute guarantee of Gimel in that that tens of people just in this one community will use their lips to say words of peace, love, generosity, and justice. After a week that maybe was a week of Shin, of spending or losing hope, we come here to tell the Gimel and Hay.

Hope in itself doesn't guarantee healing or Tikkun Olam. But when we hope together, when we bring together our Nuns, Gimels, Hays, and Shins, we help each other live more hopefully, on the inside and toward others.

Not everyone can hope in a Gimel way right now, or in the weeks to come. Yet I hope you can find at least one of the other paths of hope – a Hay, a Shin, a Nun. And most of all, I hope we all recognize the ways we are the cruse of oil, the M&Ms, storehouses of hope for each other in the community and for the world outside.

Shabbat Shalom and Chag Urim Sameach!

My Rosh Hashanah Sermons From Last Week

Here are my sermons from Rosh Hashanah 5783:

First day:
Help Me Talk About What I've Been Through and Who I Am

Second day:
Right-ology: How to Be Right Better in the New Year

Wishing everyone a Shana Tova Umetukah, a good and sweet new year!

Best of My Past High Holy Day Sermons

These are to me the best of my Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur sermons from years past. I'm collecting them here because you find them useful to read and think about in Elul. They aren't in chronological or any particular order.

Hope In An Uncertain World (5777/2016)
What the Chanukkah dreidel can teach us about four kinds of hope.

Who Knows? (5780/2019)
How the story of Esther even more than the Torah can guide us to live in a world of mortal dangers.

How Good Do I Have to Be? (5777/2016)
With assists from the Green Monster, Pesky's Pole, Naomi Shemer and Reb Simcha Bunem.

Still Small Voices (5778/2017)
We are a community where many people have prayers they don't reveal out loud about the difficult things happening in our lives and families. How to be there even when we don't reveal or don't know what those prayers are.

Finding Purpose and Direction (5773/2012)
Figuring out your purpose, especially in up in the air times, or transitions in life or work.

Lost and Found (5779/2018)
When the pieces of life's puzzle aren't gone, but someone else has yours to give you back, or vice versa.

V.O.R. -- Vision-Opinion Ratio (5779/2018)
Fewer superficial reactions to public things, more visions -- how to find and speak about the things you are truly committed to, and quieting down about the rest.

Holy Impatience (5775/2014)
Some impatience is selfish, unfair expectations. Holy impatience is rooted in love, a concern for someone else who doesn't have the life or peace they deserve.

Helping Someone Else Change (5771/2010)
No one can change someone else -- but sometimes we can support other people in their changes. Starring a mitzvah in Leviticus and some social psychology research.

Busy (5776/2015)
Why "Busy" has become the answer to "How are you?" and what we can do about it.

Moral Adventure (5776/2015)
Adventure isn't just for heroes and myths. Our own lives are different when we recognize them as moral adventures, and the people we go through life with as our fellow students and sidekicks.

Long Tables, Shabbat Meals (5772/2011)
Why long tables are better than round, long meals are magical, and Shabbat creates relationships different from friendship but no less powerful.

Back to Better Than Normal (5782/2021)
As we transition from the Covid-19 pandemic, the old normal is certainly not what what we want to go back to.

Being Present in a Digital Age (5774/2013)
How to make people and not devices more central to our daily lives.

Look Up (5780/2019)
In a cynical age, we need to focus more on looking up to people -- the everyday people in our lives, the people who need us, the best leaders we know.

Body Talk (5779/2018)
How to show others we really believe they are the image of God.

More Daughters of Tzelophechad, Less Pinchas: How to Stand Up Today

This is my D'var Torah from last Shabbat, Saturday, July 23, 2022.

“It’s not a movement if everyone’s just sitting.”

That’s a line from a conversation between then-Professor Ruth Bader Ginsburg and her 15-year-old daughter Jane in the film On the Basis of Sex, which is partly the story of how RBG, zichrona livracha, came to win her first major court case for gender equality. Professor Ginsburg has just come back from teaching her newest law students, after walking through an anti-war demonstration to get into the building. Her own students in class are passionate and impatient, and it throws her for a loop. At home that night, RGB brings up a note with her name that Jane forged so she could skip school and attend a Gloria Steinem rally. They argue about which strategy is necessary for women’s equality -- the legal process or the rallies -- and Jane gets in her zinger: “It’s not a movement if everyone’s just sitting. That’s a support group.”

I think about this argument when I read the story of the five daughters of Tzelophechad in the Torah portion Pinchas. Machlah, Choglah, Milkah, Noah and Tirtzah are sisters who are absolutely the spiritual ancestors of Justice Ginsburg. She a modern icon of equality and the exemplar of a certain approach to change, and the five Torah sisters also icons especially in our age -- but there is a lot of arguing these days against the approach they have in common. So I want to explore how the Torah and the midrash understand the daughters, the B’not Tzelophechad, and to argue why we need more of their approach even though there is truth within Jane Ginsburg’s critique.

The story of B’not Tzelophechad (Numbers 27) is that their father had died in the desert, before the assignment of future land holdings in the Land of Israel to every family. They have no brothers, and according to the law communicated so far, their immediate family will not have any holding of land when the arrive shortly. So the sisters approach Moshe, El’azar the high priest and all the tribal leaders, in front of the whole community.

Vatikrav’na Bnot Tzelophechad -- they “came close.” Which I think we can understand this way: their strategy was to shrink the distance between themselves, and the judges and the men of the community. The best way to read the story in the Torah might be to have in mind the first cases that RGB pressed as a lawyer. Such as the one at the climax of the film, Moritz vs. Commissioner, argued in federal appeals court. There she challenged the constitutionality of a law that denied an unmarried man a tax deduction for the expenses related to care of his mother, even though a woman would have qualified.

So too when the sisters speak, they center not themselves as women but their father. They say avinu, “our father”, three times. Only at the end of their speech do they say give us, t’nu lanu achuza, give us something to hold among our father’s brothers. They mention that their father was not like the other men who had in fact been enemies of Moshe and El’azar’s father Aharon, part of the insurrection against them led by Korach. Those men deserved to be punished by not getting a holding in the land -- but not avinu, our father.

That’s exactly how Attorney Ginsburg started building a set of precedents striking down laws on the basis of sex discrimination: with a series of cases centering men. B’not Tzelophechad, like RBG, did not call into question the whole patriarchical system of property and inheritance. They found a place where the authorities might agree on their own terms to a ruling that benefits women.

And indeed, the five sisters win their case when Moshe takes it to his court of appeals, to God -- and the law is taught that in a case where there is no son then daughters shall inherit. We might say dayenu just at the fact that God seems to respond to this argument from women. That’s suprising all by itself, no? And not only that, but the first words of God’s response put B’not Tzelophechad in the center, and repeat their request as a court order -- naton titen lahem, “give, yes give to them” -- and “their father” isn’t mentioned until last part of that sentence.

But the midrash goes even further in explaining the process of legal response that happens here.

When God hears the sisters’ case, God’s first words to Moshe are: Ken B’not Tzelophechad dovrot. “The daughters are speaking right.” Also ken means “thus”, as in: the daughters of Tzelophechad are speaking the exact words I God have been instruction you Moshe to say already.

In this interpretation, God is saying: Moshe, you have been teaching the people the law of inheritance but you have left a gap. I have told you about it, but you have had a blind spot. Not me, not I the Divine -- but you are not seeing it. Even I haven’t been able to teach you yet how a law about families without sons is necessary. So now here are five real people -- do you see them? Do you get now the situation I’ve been telling you about?

So according to the midrash, God’s law isn’t being changed at all. It’s just being unblocked. Moshe finally is able to teach this part of the law to the people. And this is what makes him realize that it’s time to get to planning better for his retirement and succession. The rest of the chapter is Moshe saying to God: Let’s find a new leader who can lead around these matters better than I have been doing.

It is a compelling case of influencing leadership from the grassroots for social change. Ken B’not Tzelophechad dovrot.They speak ken -- they speak honesty, with integrity, with respect. They say ken to the men in charge -- ken means “yes.” Yes to the basic framework of Torah. The sisters have a better understanding of what God wants than even Moshe does.

That’s famously how RBG did it, particularly at the start of her career. She won more than one case on behalf of men, and got male judges to say that legal equality between the sexes was not new but had been in the Constitution all along.  Justice Ginsburg spoke again and again about what we might call the vatik’rav’na principle, shrinking the distance, and the ken principle, not losing your integrity in the process. And as for what her daughter Jane said in the film, the Torah describes B’not Tzelophechad as va’taamod’na, they stood up. They absolutely did, and this is how they did it.

I hope so far I’ve made a good case for B’not Tzelophechad. But Jane Ginsberg age 15 and plenty of adult critics still have what to say back. Of course a group of male rabbis in the Talmud 1500-plus years ago are going to approve of this soft-spoken, gradual approach from women. And what did B’not Tzelophechad really achieve -- one fix for one specific case. If they had been five sisters with one brother, they would have gotten nothing. If only Miryam had been alive still, maybe she would have spoken more fundamentally about the bias in the whole system. We need an approach based on wider questioning and more pressure and more discomfort.

Well our own Torah reading presents a version of that approach a couple chapters earlier. It’s Pinchas the son of El’azar the high priest, who was faced in real time with a terrible social injustice -- an insurrection against God in the form of a pagan orgy in concert with the people of Moav. People were about to start dying in the conflict, or some say people were already dying. (I would make the case, though this is a whole other talk, that this particular pagan orgy is offensive to the Torah partly because of how degrading idolatry and its rituals were to women.)

Pinchas sees what is happening, the threat to lives and I will say to women. He sees a particular man and woman together and he skewers them through with a sword, killing them -- and the whole thing stops and the dying stops. And the Torah says that God rewards Pinchas and his descendents that they will be the major lineage for the kohanim (priests) from now on.

This is passion. The Torah has God say: Pinchas is passionate for the things I am passionate for. It’s something like what Professor RBG is afraid of according to the film. If a door is opened to violence as a response to social ills, who knows what happens after and who will be its victims down the road, as bystanders or targets. RGB was afraid that people who meet the violence of the current reality with mass protests that are too broad and too agressive, they might stop a plague but also unleash one.

And that’s why the tradition is skeptical about Pinchas, even though the Torah says he is devoted to the right things and he is rewarded. The midrash trends toward a real concern about him. So one interpretation is that Pinchas was allowed only one of these violent acts in his life. And that’s why the Torah labels his reward brit shalom, a covenant of peace. From now on, Pinchas has to include peacemaking in all of his future work and all of his future activism. Otherwise he will be too dangerous an actor, even for God, even against this kind of pagan insurrection that is a clear affront to the Ten Commandments.

(It’s clear to me that the story of B’not Tzelophechad is told the way it is intentionally as a contrast with Pinchas, through wordplay. Pinchas has passion, kin’ah, but B’not Tzelophechad have integrity and honesty, ken. The sisters draw close, vatikravna, in a twist on the root word karav that labels the offerings so associated with priests like Pinchas, the korbanot. Pinchas is unusually for the Torah introduced as not just son, but also grandson. B’not Tzelophechad are given three more generations of lineage than that. Pinchas jumps up -- vayakom -- but B’not Tzelophechad stand and stand together, vata’amod’na.)

In the past, I might have said that the Torah is giving us two models of activism in B’not Tzelophechad and Pinchas, and we need them at different times or they suit different people. A time for passionate and force and absolutism, and a time for up close engagement and gradualism. A time for Gloria Steinem and a time for RBG.

But today I say: Enough with adding more Pinchas. There is too much of it among the bad folks and even the good folks. Our spiritual and political air is choked with aggressive speech, metaphors of force and fight and violence in our speech and writing, zingers far worse than Jane Ginsburg’s to her mother. Not to mention actual violence.

It can feel so good to tell off, to mock and insult. Enough people do that, in direct speech and on social media. They’re on the wrong side but they’re on your side too. It’s more than covered, the aggressive, the Pinchas. It’s not just masculine either. It’s probaby not possible to change all the Pinchas-style behavior once it’s begun.

But we need more people to learn the ways of Bnot Tzelophechad. I don’t mean to be content with only one change. Or to decenter the people who should be at the center. Jane Ginsburg and the other critics are so right about that. But I don’t think the most important thing about Bnot Tzelophechad, or RBG, was the gradualism, the strategy. It’s believing that there is power that comes with ken dovrot, with speaking correctly and out of integrity, with figuring how to communicate what is eternally true and you know it when that’s still new to someone else. There is power in vatikrav’na, to coming toward someone else’s perspective -- it challenges them but not in a threatening way. It challenges in a charged but still inviting way. There is power in believing that the changes that are needed are ken -- they are already here in the Divine image of the world, they are already more eternal and more permanent than anything else, they just haven’t been seen or spoken aloud enough.

These are powerful moves -- they just might not look as forceful from the outside and they sure are not violent. But powerful are B’not Tzelophechad whenever they appear in our world. Enduring change doesn’t come only from force or only from keen strategy. It comes from affecting how people see alternate leaders, the effect of their integrity. Respect for them transforms enough opponents and enough bystanders. It need not transform them all.

People acting like the five sisters might be a support group, and that isn’t a bad thing. But they are not sitting -- they are standing up together. Without them, without us acting like them, there can never be any movement at all.

Inheriting America, Choosing America

This is another take on something I've written and spoken about before, how and why I chose to stay in America because of my engagement with quintessential American themes of freedom and individuality. I spoke about this last Shabbat, in anticipation of Independence Day 2022. It's published here at the Times of Israel.

The Latest Religion and Schools Supreme Court Decision (and No More Government Benedictions for Me)

Posted June 27, 2022 on Facebook, so not quite as tight as what I usually write.

 

This is what the top of my head looks like today and through next Monday at least, July 4. No matter what’s happened recently, I am celebrating our independence, freedom, and democracy, and wearing that above me as a kippah, the flag of my country and the star of my faith. I am proud to be American, and to be an American leader in my American community.

 

1. What bothers me about today’s Supreme Court decision about the high school teacher/coach leading a Christian prayer in the middle of the field after a game is not the individual teacher or the place. Viewed in itself, of course he doesn’t speak for “the state” which has repeatedly tried to disavow this one particular thing.

 

What bothers me is the majority’s consistent disregard of the overall context. It’s not the individual situation; it’s the pattern of one particular religious expression seeking to shape our laws overall (and our culture but I think that's not the constitutional issue). It’s their right to do so. But the majority says that the First Amendment only extends to guaranteeing the tolerance that would have been understood as “non-establishment of religion” by the Framers. Many (not all) of the Framers surely did feel that as long as there is some space for religious minorities and dissenters and atheists, and that the government is not paying the expenses of a church directly, then the First Amendment is satisfied.

 

That’s what the Supreme Court majority says is the standard today. I know that non-originalist approaches are problematic, but the originalist approach is too. We’ve come a long way and I believe our Constitution has helped that. Not so much if this is what can happen place by place.

 

2. I have thought about this for a long time, and now I am deciding for sure and declaring: I will no longer accept invitations to give prayers at government meetings. Not if it’s my friend in office, not if it’s the president of the United States. I just can’t, not consistent with what I’ve written here.

 

I will participate as a citizen and share my motivations when they are religious. I will identify as a leader, freely exercising my right to speak and teach and testify at hearing about what my faith says relating to public matters. I’ll participate in public and governmental things that are about religious diversity or cultural diversity. But no more benedictions and opening prayers, no more invoking the divine in an official capacity before a government body meets. My fellow citizens who are not religious or not religious in a style parallel to mine deserve their forums to respect them.

 

Yes, I realize no one ever thinks that my prayer means the state is endorsing Judaism. But when I say a prayer, I’m as much a ”clergy person” or a “religious representative” as a Jew specifically, and it’s all about a role for religion in government overall that I cannot endorse. So I have to follow my principle and set an example. If that means ceding the “pulpit” only to those who don’t have that principle – well overall they already have taken it.

 

The words of a proud American patriot.