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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 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.

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 Moral, the Political, and the Partisan

This was the D'var Torah I gave for Parashat Behar on May 21, 2022.

Whenever people suggest that Judaism could be separate from politics, I think about this week’s parasha. The Shabbaton and the Yovel (the sabbatical and the jubilee) – these mitzvot are not just personal and spiritual teachings, about what you eat and what you share. They are about the whole system of property and ownership and power, and about our relationship to the land and the ecosystem that provides our food.

Every seven years, it doesn’t matter who owns a field and who has stored up food from the year before. Everyone has access to all of it, and everyone comes side by side to get food from the land and from private storehouses, and maybe they even eat together. Every fifty years, it doesn’t matter who has bought or sold a piece of land and who lives where. All families go back to the land holdings originally given to them in the time of Yehoshua when the people first came into the promised land. Wealthy families give back what they have bought legitimately; poor families are restored to what they needed to sell.

None of this happens individually or one at a time. Both the Shabbaton and the Yovel happen to everyone at the same time, in every region of the land. It is a social experience around property and wealth and power that is shared all at once, by society as a whole.

It occurred to me this week that Shabbaton and Yovel are far more radical than even the Exodus itself, the overturning of Pharaoh, which I have taught often and recently was unlike anything ancient people had ever thought previously about the value of human beings and about power. The Exodus was unprecedented – but it was in response to a situation of actual group suffering, imposed by a specific oppressor. Shabbaton and Yovel are not in response to any specific instance like that. They are pre-programmed responses to the regular things that happen in a society where people work the land and trade food and labor and exchange property. They are for a society that also has good ideas of tzedakah (giving) and chesed (caring acts), which individuals are responsible to carry out.

Without the need for painful suffering on a massive scale, or mobilizing against a tyrant, the Torah in Leviticus 25 mandates the overturning of our relations in the economy and society, making it all change visibly in the open every seven years and every fifty years.

Maybe the end of the book of Vayikra (Leviticus) is the real bookend to the beginning of the Exodus. Exodus begins with our ancestors as slaves building cities for Pharaoh’s regime, and it ends with them building the opposite -- the Mishkan, a spiritual central for the regime of Hashem. “Let them make me a Sanctuary and I will dwell among them,” says Exodus. But now, nearly at the end of Leviticus, people imagine building a system for recalibrating their society on the go, making sure no one can permanently accumulate Pharaoh-like wealth and power over the others. “For to Me the Children of Israel are servants,” says the end of Leviticus – and the Talmudic rabbis explain: For to Me they are servants and not servants to other servants, not slaves to each other. Shabbaton and Yovel are the social and political inoculation against more Pharaohs, even a Pharoah among the Israelites themselves.

Political this is – and yet, it’s not. I’m using the word politics a bit fast and loose, because Parashat Behar does not show us politics in action. We know the sabbatical year was implemented in ancient times and still is today, and in Roman times and modern times there has been politics around it. We have no idea whether the jubilee really ever happened exactly the way the Torah stipulates. Our parasha describes an ideal society, and we can think about the moral and spiritual principles the parasha teaches. But the actual outcome could only be ensured through political activity.

Saying the Torah has social visions doesn’t itself prove that there is a Torah of politics and political action. I love to bask in Shabbaton and Yovel, any excuse to do that is dayenu – but I want to say more about the Torah of political action, which in a way only begins with things our parasha.

I want to use a distinction proposed by Yehuda Kurtzer, president of the Shalom Hartman Institute of North America, though I will take it in a slightly different direction. You may be starting to recognize the Hartman name and Yehuda’s name in particular from many of my d’rashot. For the past few years Yehuda has been teaching around the idea that American Jews ought to distinguish in our civic activity between the moral, the political, and the partisan. Briefly, Yehuda defines the moral as our core social principles; the political as our collaborative strategy and work in society; and the partisan as the activity we do typically within either of the two teams, the Democrats and the Republicans. Yehuda argues that it is bad for America and particularly bad for Jews when we don’t distinguish between the moral, the political, and the partisan.

The moral refers to the principles and values we hold, which generate our ideas about the good society, and the actions we actually perform toward other people and in groups of people we know. The moral is also about working on ourselves as people in society. It’s about being honest about our own individual gifts and our own individual limits. It’s about asking ourselves why we care about this more than that, looking at our own inconsistencies and hypocrisies. The moral is where we make judgments, often about others though it should also be toward ourselves. The moral is about how we do teshuvah around our action and inaction in society -- how we hold ourselves accountable and recalibrate ourselves, as well as the smaller groups within which we talk about politics or we organize. The moral dimension is very spiritual and obviously very Jewish.

The political – I want to use the word in its Aristotelian sense. Not “yeech, politics”, but the elevating work of defining and creating the polis, the best society that is both aligned with our moral values and also cultivates those values at the same time. We are only real in society, and political activity enlarges us and elevates us and completes us. The political brings people together in purposeful work, helps us each discover our gifts and how they fit together, and shows us new things to admire about each other.

The political magnifies our power to achieve visions, on a scale not possible just by small group projects or even by giving tzedakah. The political is how we find the power to bring a society into alignment with the ideals of Shabbaton and Yovel.

The political is also the level where groups ought to try to understand themselves, and look at their own strengths and weaknesses and hypocrisies. Groups need to do teshuvah as well. This is spiritual work and Jewish work, and indeed the Torah presents the Jewish people as a group trying to learn the detailed social covenant from Mt. Sinai, to internalize it and build a society based on it in the promised land.

Finally, the partisan is working for the party and candidates we believe right now can bring our moral and political visions into being. It’s mobilizing behind the specific leaders and groups we believe can do that. When we use the word “politics”, Yehuda points out, what we usually mean is the partisan – picking sides, zero sum, experiencing outrage and supporting one group and being angry at the other.

The moral, the political, the partisan.

Yehuda argues that we have too often collapsed the distinction between the moral, the political, and the partisan. If all we let ourselves look at is the partisan, that becomes our good and evil and our daily religion. We will lose important parts of our moral compass to the extent that most of what we can think about or desire is that our group or favored leader wins. We need the moral as something separate, Yehuda says – and I would add (in my name if not his) that we need the political as distinct from the partisan as well.

People who object to having politics in Judaism say: Stick to the moral. But the moral alone is too general. Saying Tzelem Elohim (the image of God) does not tell us why we should care about Ukraine in this way and Afghanistan in the same way or perhaps a different way. Talking about Shabbaton and Yovel does not tell us what the tax rates should be on income or wealth. Moral principles frame the questions and suggest directions but don’t give us answers. From the moral we need those directions, and we need to circle back to the moral principles when we are doing political thinking and political work.

We need also all the processes of teshuvah – assessing ourselves and what we are bringing to political action, checking our hypocrisy and self-righteousness, making sure we are rooted more in love for those we responsible for or allies for, and less rooted just in hate of those we are against.

Too much of religious politics is the partisan alone, and that is bad for religion generally and terrible for Jews. The partisan is where work is done and things are accomplished. But it is a realm of constant fighting; it cultivates hate and anger and fear. It discourages nuance and punishes ambiguity, and it asks us to hold up as absolutely true things that are only partially true. When we equate all politics with the partisan, the losses that come inevitably in the partisan make all political work angry and fearful and dispiriting and draining, even when we have won something for the time being.

Yehuda says we rent out our moral sense too often to the partisan; and since the partisan is win-lose, our moral judgments become binary as well. Our fellow citizens are good or evil. Our fellow Jews. Yehuda quotes a Pew study that says as much bias as there is, explicit and implicit, against people of other backgrounds, whether religious or ethnic or racial or educational or economic, the most widespread hate in America is toward people of different partisan affiliation.

The moral is crucial; the partisan is where the rubber hits the road. But neither the moral that supplies our core principles, nor the partisan where we accomplish our goals or we lose -- neither of these should be the center. At the center should be the political. At the center should be the political for each of us spiritually, and for us as a Jewish community learning and acting and reflecting.

The political is where we ask how our principles translate, where we ask it again and again, even while we are strategizing and even as we are executing our strategies. We ask whether we are being true to our principles or just think we are.

The political is where we take time from the practical battles to appreciate and admire others: the leaders who motivate us, the teachers and writers who educate us, the people who bring the signs and the food and crunch the numbers. It’s where we see ourselves in a good light as part of such an organism.

The political is where we try to understand those we are fighting against -- for the principles they might have, for the people they are loving and standing up for. These are aspects of our opponents we might learn from or at least learn to answer, if only to make our own moral arguments stronger.

The political isn’t something you do by yourself. It’s not sermons and it’s not Facebook posts, unless they invite conversation. The political is together, and sometimes it even can be done together by partisans opposing each other. It’s what I hope tomorrow’s panel on reproductive rights will model. It’s what groups a lot of you have been involved in doing in your own political work in the local community.

It's not enough for the synagogue to do the moral, and of course we should not be doing the partisan. It’s not good for religion to stay in a corner, or to make itself indistinguishable from a political party. But the political yes, sometimes all together as us and sometimes when we lift up one issue or sometimes when we’re in a learning posture about ourselves as people engaged in the political. That is very much what a religious group should do, and what Jews should do together.

And in that sense, maybe Shabbaton and Yovel are political. Apart from the practical sharing and resetting around food and property, they were ways to get people talking about the world of years 1-6 and years 1-49, and maybe even working on that politically. Or so I fantasize. Our next half year in this country is going to be intensely partisan, and that will be hard. Let’s do our part to elevate the time, by making it more political as well.

A Year in the Desert -- Reflections One Year Later

This was my D'var Torah on Saturday, March 13, 2021. Shabbat Ha-Chodesh is the name for the Shabbat that precedes the start of the month when Pesach occurs. These are some of my reflections on the past year of the Covid-19 pandemic; one piece can hardly say it all.

Shabbat Ha-Chodesh, this day in the Jewish calendar, is a set of bookends for both a year in the Torah narrative, and a year in our lives. The parasha (Torah reading) concludes with the final touches on the setup of the temporary, portable Sanctuary -- exactly one year to the day from when Moshe and Aharon were given the instructions for the night they would all leave Egypt. And it was this same Shabbat Hachodesh one year ago that was our first Zoom Shabbat service, with almost all the congregation at home and a minyan of us here celebrating Madeline Lee’s Bat Mitzvah. We have been once through the Torah since our last regular Shabbat service. 

What a year was that first year in the Torah – begun in slavery; between the plagues, of darkness and death; then the hurried preparations for the first days of a new life; crossing that Sea; a whole lot of new teachings to take in. Failing at first, badly, with the Golden Calf. Then building the mishkan, the spiritual center, out of everything valuable the people had -- everything valuable they might not even have realized they had -- putting something holy in the center of their camp amidst all the fear and emptiness of the midbar, the desert. 

What a year has been this past year of Covid-19. 

This morning I want to look back a bit, and next Shabbat to look ahead a bit. I’ll talk from the point of view of us as a whole, but this year hasn’t been the same for each of us and one person can’t presume to tell the story of everyone. People in our community have died of Covid-19, have been sick, have lost family members – at least a tenth of the households in our membership have had someone in their family who has died or been sick, and many more of us have lost friends to the disease. I haven’t asked everyone if they want their loved ones’ names said out loud, but I can say that the first person in our congregation who died from Covid-19 was Joshua Stern, Diana and David’s son, Jessica’s brother, who died during Pesach last year. For many months, the only times that members of the shul would actually see each other officially was at funerals. 

Another tenth at least of our congregation has at one point of another lost jobs or hours or income this year because of the pandemic, or had retirement or transition plans disrupted. And I don’t know how to describe the strain and pain this year has contained for so many people who live on their own, as one or two people; who have been confined in elder living communities or long-term care; who are children, and parents of children at home, and parents and grandparents and others separated from their families; who had already been dealing with other physical and emotional challenges and illnesses and family challenges, that are difficult in regular times and even more disrupted this past year. 

We have built this past year a mishkan, many mishkenot, a set of holy places and practices, out of our own materials. We have discovered together what it is that we had on hand to build with, what we brought with us hastily into this year.  

Most of all we have had mitzvahs. I make a point of noting, most Shabbatot at the start of services, the line we sing as we start, v’ahavta l’rayacha kamocha – all the ways we have adapted to gathering and staying apart in repeated fulfillment of the mitzvah of “loving our neighbor as ourselves”. I say it out loud to remind us that in these hours on Saturday morning we are holding each other’s lives in our hands; we are holding the lives of the people who live around us, who we don’t know, as our own responsibility. And not just in services but throughout the days of our weeks. 

Time has been so amorphous, and a lot of us have been trying recall exactly what the first days of these twelve months were like. For me, it revolved around Purim. On Monday morning, March 9 of last year, I went to Shirley’s apartment at Langdon Place and we recorded our second annual Esther rap. That night we gathered here, in smaller numbers than usual for the Megillah reading. I think we had food even -- we were trying at that time to have one person serve so we wouldn’t all be handling the same serving utensils -- and I remember wondering even then if the Megillah gathering was the right thing to do.  

For most of the next few days, our team recreated the upcoming Purim carnival at least once a day. Let’s cancel the Kitah Zayin (7th Grade) pie- throwing booth, and let's also wipe down each ball and fishing stick between participants. No let’s use only disposable balls and sticks, and we’ll just hand out prizes for tickets and not let kids rummage through them. No, let’s not have any of the booths but we’ll just gather in a circle for some songs and have a costume parade. 

No, we can’t do it at all. Probably fifteen hours of work just to decide to do nothing.  

Let’s bring everyone mishloach manot (Purim baskets), very carefully -- and here, driver, are plastic gloves for you to wear and please put each box in a bag, contact-free, and say hello in person to everyone who answers their door and make sure to stand far enough away, and promise that we’ll see each other soon.  

Everything was like that at the start – every decision not to do something took hours, before we even got to figuring out how to do the all-new things or the necessary regular things like shopping for food in a new way. 

The day after we delivered mishloach manot in person and said L’hit’raot (“until we see each other”), we sent out a note to whole congregation that we would for the time being gather only online, starting that night, Monday, March 16. I took a bunch of screenshots of that minyan. 24 screens and regular phones all together, most of us named but some identified still by number or e-mail; we were still figuring out Zoom.  I must have asked everyone to smile, because in one photo Stan is smiling and Larry is smiling, and Richard and Carol are smiling on different screens in the same home,, and Carlos and Joy and Jessica and Jerry and Laura and Gordon and Nancy and Elliot and Daniel are smiling. And Ira I think is smiling but you can’t really see in the dark of his room. Very quickly we added minyanim for Saturday and Sunday nights, and there hasn’t been a single day we haven’t had a minyan of ten. That Thursday was our first online Religious School class; our triumph was getting Rina Scharf online. 

At our best we have been full of mitzvot. We’ve been building a capacity to check in with people by phone; we’ve connected people to resources and support, in personal conversations and what we can put up online. On the fly, we’ve had to figure out how to safely do bikkur cholim, to visit people who have been sick, and dying; how to gather safely for burial; how to comfort people during shiva. Without hugs and with masks; with iPhones streaming and Zooms instead of living rooms. All the extra burdens on those in mourning to stare into that screen at everyone all at once, rather than having people come up to you one by one. I worry about the pent-up and incomplete grief of our mourners. 

I am so proud to be connected to the caregivers -- nurses and doctors and elder care and home care workers -- who from the start went into dangers known and unknown, and many of whom volunteer now on their off hours to give vaccines. I am so proud to see in the news and at local meetings members of this congregation who work in public health, in professional roles and on governing boards. I am so grateful to the teachers, and everyone who has had to or who has chosen to go to work in places with known or unknown risks.  

In the daily life of Beth Abraham for a year, we have had online gatherings every day and often more than once a day. I believe we have saved at least one life through these gatherings, and we have made other lives more bearable.  

So many of our members early on became mask makers. Some sewing by hand, some working for hours after their regular jobs, some converting their slowed-down businesses into mask manufacture, some joining up with calls to action from individual leaders or town organizations. Making masks for frontline workers, who were so short of them at the start. Masks for anyone they worried about, particularly older people but even for my family, so people could go shopping safely. Many of you did that work, to help bridge the weeks it took for an entire industry to get up and running. 

At our best as a society scientists and technicians and engineers, and the companies and universities and labs that organize them, have been working nonstop on lifesaving discovery and creation and manufacture and distribution on a huge scale. At our best as a society, we reengineered a system for holding democratic elections, and cried out against continuing racial injustice even as we cried out about everything. At our best, our elected representatives to the Congress in a poisonous political environment worked several times to come to the aid of all of us in massive ways. 

Here in the wilderness of New Hampshire, our shul built its new mishkan out of everything we had. We have our Betzalels and their teams-- our tech designers and operators, our Zoom supervisors, our people who know their way around a soundboard and a camera and networking equipment. We have our Aharons and other equivalents to the Kohanim and Levi’im, who organize and lead our services so we could do far more than go through the motions. These things we do, to interact and hear each other and see each other, to create a live service from so many locations -- it’s amazing and I’m proud that we’re toward the forefront. We have our Miryams, who provide inspiration and joy, every week through singing and over coffee and yarn, and cooking and Torah and Hebrew language for adults and for children. 

We have been building a mishkan out of things we have. Our fabrics and threads and animals skins include our wires and plexiglass and donated monitors. And of course the money contributed toward this mishkan, the Temple itself. At a time of economic contraction, the synagogue has been stable and we just raised the most money from the Purim baskets we ever have. Incredibly, new people have joined the congregation since a year ago today. 

And if I might say something about the Moshe’s, the rabbis. Not just me, but the rabbis of congregations all over North America and the clergy of Greater Nashua who have drawn so close to each other. A year ago, I thought that innovators in American Jewish life were leaving synagogue jobs or never even thinking of coming to work in shuls, all of them off starting their own ventures to do Jewish learning or spirituality. It turns out there are at least a few hundred of us, talking the same language and inventing the same things in parallel, sending around the concept papers and how-to guides, asking each other over and over what do our congregants need, how can we do more than just hold the line. I have personally met at least a dozen amazing colleagues through this grassroots work, people who you’ll never read about in the Times of Israel or the Forward, amazing partners and teachers. All of us know it’s not about the techniques, it’s not about preserving the shuls and our jobs -- it’s about taking care of you. 

The pandemic has challenged the practice of Judaism and the reality of Jewish community. I haven’t been in a hospital or an assisted living place or a nursing home, or even inside a shiva home, in this past year. I made that decision with other clergy in town all at once. That was the hardest thing to decide a year ago, and holding back from you at hard times has been the most awful part of my year personally as a rabbi. 

We decided, consciously, to change the character of our relationship to computers in the shul on Shabbat. It is absolutely the right decision but it doesn’t work for everyone. Our second or third Shabbat morning on Zoom something was wrong with the setup or people didn’t have the right link, and as I led services by myself I was also checking e-mails and texts from people right here on the bimah. Now we’ll decide what it means to integrate technology into Shabbat the way a previous generation integrated the automobile. Most of all in services, we just miss each others’ voices and spiritual energy. 

I have joked occasionally that there is a warehouse somewhere full of all the gefilte fish and pastries that have not been eaten in our shul and other shuls for a year. There was an article a couple months ago in The Atlantic about the loss of Kiddush, the time after services. Actually the word “Kiddush” never appears in the article by Amanda Mull  about the loss in our lives of the people we don’t have a good name for -- the relationships of standing around together after services or sitting at a table, deciding to talk for a minute or five or for an hour just on the spot. The conversations that aren’t prearranged but just happen, the intergenerational moments, the moments that breathe with volume and quiet, with interruptions and not just turn-taking, where people sit down and get up in the middle and come back later. A community is supposed to be a place where connections and conversations don’t only take place when they are scheduled or work-oriented or agenda-driven. The loss of Kiddush is profound, the loss of Shabbat dinners and Shabbat lunches and holy days together too. 

As a symbol of some of these losses and challenges, I have stubbornly kept our Shabbat service different the past year in a few ways. I have held us back from some of the rituals of reading the Torah and Haftarah -- not only because you are not here and not only because it would not be safe yet to walk around with the Torah if you were. I've insisted on using the not-perfect aspects of Zoom. I’ve done this because our prayer experience itself needs to have some of the not-smoothness and the chaos of our lives, or it won’t be real. I know no one likes the moments when we try to be a minyan together singing or reciting something on Zoom. It doesn’t sound great, but the cacophany has to be here, in the mishkan, a brokenness we bring when we are before the Divine. 

What a year since Shabbat Ha-Chodesh twelve months ago. We have brought everything we have to create the mishkan that is our lives; we have been building it for a year and we are still in the desert. I am so grateful for this Shabbat community that has stayed together. I miss you and worry about you. I want to sing with you and just linger with you, with no hurry to get out. I am grateful that you have wanted something for yourself on Shabbat morning, and wanted to be with others when this is not easy. That you have wanted to hear Torah from me, that you have wanted Shabbat to be still somehow a time of joy and a time of mutual support.  

Let’s not forget of course that each of us has our own story of this year, and let’s not forget the losses that can never be recovered and especially the people who you have lost and we have lost together.  

It is a whole year, an important year we are concluding. We are still in the midbar, still on our way, and may the mishkenot, the spiritual centers of every sort we have built help guide us on our desert journeys ahead -- just like the daytime cloud and the nighttime fire that began on the first day of the first month of the second year, and guided the people on their journeys and never went out. Baruch she-hecheyanu v’kiynmanu v’higiuyanu lazman hazeh – how blessed we are to be alive, to be kept alive, to have arrived at this time. Chazak chazak v’nitchazek -- may we each find strength and continue to give our strength to each other.  

Let's Hear It For Article 1!

As our focus is on the inauguration, I don’t want to lose sight of our representatives in Congress. Americans in our spirit of action are drawn to the president, as we are seem to value people who act more than those who deliberate. But I’ve found myself the past few years becoming more and more an Article 1 guy. For me the Capitol is sacred space more than the White House.

In part this is because I’ve met my own U.S. Senators and Representatives, and I’ve been in their office suites and the Capitol itself. I’ve never been at the White House or met a president. And despite the presence of plenty of people in the state and national legislatures whom I don’t admire, and others I don’t agree with – I’m still very Mr.-Smith-y about Congress. Our many elected representatives from all over are what makes this a republic, at least as much as our single elected president.

Part of what the Capitol mob attacked was the dignity of our Senators and Representatives. I worry that the images of invaders in the chambers, sitting in the chair’s seat, make the members seem small and powerless. As I said, American prize action and the very incomplete idea of leadership as the person out in front, and we love or hate those people but we pay attention and assume their power. Appreciating those who deliberate in groups, who decide what others will execute, who oversee and keep watch on them – that’s an acquired democratic taste.

We should acquire that taste.

There’s a reason Article 1 comes before Article 2 in our Constitution. There should be an aura to being an elected official, even as they should be people of the people. Just as our attention is naturally drawn to the president, we should train ourselves to pay attention to our representatives as well.

I have been fortunate in my years in New Hampshire to be represented in both the Senate and the House by members in both parties who have been people of substance. Those I voted for and those I didn’t. I’ve been in offices of Democrats and Republicans, talking both domestic and foreign policy, sometimes with the member and sometimes with staff. At least one member sat in my office as a candidate, and others have been in the our synagogue as candidates and sitting Senators and U.S. Representatives. I have lobbied them, agreed with them, argued with them.

I admire them and their roles more because I don’t think I could ever be a legislator myself. Even though I love to discuss and deliberate. Maybe at the city of school board level, but I couldn’t imagine myself as a legislator beyond that in any capital. It could be that in my role as a rabbi I’ve come to love having authority mixed in with policy deliberation. In any case, those who know how to be good legislators have a special set of virtues and skills – for research and thinking, for listening and motivating and collaborating, for passing their work on to others. These are so important, and not a little countercultural.

So let’s hear it for Article 1, and thank you to those who are serving as our democratically elected representatives. We celebrate you, as the new president comes in front of your house and ours to take his oath tomorrow.

Sukkat Shalom -- What a Temporary Peace Is (And Is Not)

I am posting this just after seeing that the U.S. House has voted to impeach President Trump for his actions leading to the violence at the Capitol one week ago. This is from the D'var Torah I gave on the Shabbat of Shmini Atzeret, the end of the festival of Sukkot, Saturday, October 10, 2020. This was a few weeks before Election Day. It is a charge about peace during the difficult time that was coming and that continues in this country. I drew out how the symbols and rituals connected to "Sukkat Shalom" (a temporary shelter of peace) might guide us. We are still in a time that requires the kind of Shalom-making I describe here. That Shalom is more than avoidance, and it has a moral and spiritual cost even though it is an imperative. This is not all I have to say today and in the coming days.

What’s next for us after our holy season in 5781 is the election season of 2020…. My own week of Sukkot has been about contemplating Sukkat Shalom, Sukkot as a training about peace.

The Geonim taught that the blessing over Lulav and Etrog is said each morning of Sukkot right after the blessings of peace that conclude the Amidah – the Birkat Kohanim(the priestly blessing of peace), Sim Shalom, Oseh Shalom.

They taught that we need to accumulate blessings of peace on the way to Lulav and Etrog, because the ritual involves four species that are so different and distant and hard to put together into one. Our tradition takes the four species to represent vastly different kinds of people. Palm, citron, myrtle and willow have smell and taste, or one or the other, or neither one at all. The midrash compares this to how Jews come in different combinations – those with great Torah and great mitzvot (deeds), those with great Torah and few mitzvot, those with great mitzvot but little Torah, those with very little or none of either. Holding the four species together in one bundle is about the difficulty of holding together such a group. Four species that don’t by their nature automatically come together.

In that bundle, the Etrog looks like the heart. It has both a beautiful fragrance and a sharp taste – just as those with both Torah wisdom and goodness are the heart of a community. But the community is the whole bundle. The four species are so different and have different logics to how they live, and we are commanded to bring them together in one bundle of peace. Not a surface peace, but a challenging and dynamic one, a peace that has to be demonstrated each day of Sukkot. A peace that requires effort, working your way by concentrating on constant reminders of what Shalom could be.  You cannot fulfill the mitzvah of Lulav unless the bundle is one you yourself have acquired. There’s no shortcut – you cannot use a stolen Lulav in Jewish law. You cannot have peace without acquiring it legitimately. There is no shortcut. You cannot have peace without actually wrestling with difference and division in the logics of how people live.

In the coming month until Election Day, and a period of time to follow, a fundamental imperative will be Shalom – peace that is dynamic, acquired, recognizing difference and tension, built around Torah and righteous action. Difficult peace.

At the heart of this will be anyone willing to be like an Etrog. A heart connected to what seem like different species, to people who are strong in wisdom and knowledge, and who are weak in them; to people who are strong in actions of goodness, and who are weak in them.

How fascinating that the Torah did not ask us to take a sweeter fruit instead. The Etrog, the heart, has to announce the fragrance it has, and it has to challenge with the sharp taste it has. The Etrog is held next to the Lulav, the palm that draws its strength from deep sources, from deep water that is true no matter what storms are in the sky or not in the coming season, no matter what water is flowing on the surface or not.

I am wearing this kippah today, the one with the Jewish star and the American flag, and will continue to wear it daily through the election and beyond. My nation, my values, my community. The Shalom imperative of this next period is something I am taking on along with other clergy leaders in our area. Hareini m’kabel alai – we take it on for our congregations and for this Nashua area.

This month and the next few are not going to be the months when we reach the long-term and deep solutions we need in America. We are not going to solve the issues of justice and suffering while we are voting, and counting votes, and in the waiting period that might follow. We are not going to be able to get to work on long-term solutions in the period right after the election is settled while many people are hurt and confused and disoriented and angry, which will be the case for more people than ever, even more than today, no matter who wins.

So as we take down our ritual Sukkot, we need to build another kind of Sukkat Shalom, a temporary and fragile Sukkah held up by those who are committed to peace on many levels – to nonviolent responses, to reaching out even to those who are deficient in Torah or deficient in good deeds or deficient in both. To speak to and draw out more of any Torah they have, any good deeds they have. This is a Sukkat Shalom we will need to hold up for a period of time but not for longer than necessary, to enable us to walk truly into a new American year, a new phase in this country.

We will hold it up, myself and my clergy colleagues and any of you who choose to join in this work. We will hold it up as a shelter, as a house of Sarah and Avraham where any can talk who is willing to talk, even if you are not ready yet to talk toward agreement. We will hold it up as a Sanctuary, for anyone who needs a quiet and safe place to pray or reflect or for any who are disoriented. This place here where I am standing, and other churches in our community, will be those shelters of Shalom.

Our clergy will hold up a Sukkah of peace in the public square, on Main Street and in the papers, by calling publicly for nonviolence before and after the election. We will do what we did four years ago in our Men’s Club political breakfast, when I got a commitment from then-Senator Ayotte and now-Senator Hassan to meet a group of us two days after the election to make a public show of Shalom. We have begun to approach the authorities in Nashua to offer ourselves, because we need to prepare and we need our authorities to be prepared. One spark in the wrong place can cause things to get out of hand. We need people of Shalom to be driving the response to any conflict we have, not people of violence.

A time that elevates peace above other things for a time means assuming responsibility for those whose suffering will not be addressed in the period of Sukkat Shalom. The suffering because of COVID-19 and around racial injustice is not distributed evenly, and calling for peace first means taking responsibility for delaying what many people need. So I and my clergy colleagues need to back that up with a commitment to stand up for those bearing the brunt nonetheless, and to make sure that peace is not an excuse to push off everything else indefinitely. A Sukkah that can stand for too long is no longer a kosher Sukkah. Already, the conflicts in our society that have pushed off the moral imperatives of our day give us much to repent for.

And if in this time of seeking peace any group is targeted for intimidation or worse, the Sukkat Shalom must shelter and protect them, and not trade them for a false peace. That could be us, by the way, who are targeted – Jews generally; members of our community who are people of color or LGBTQ+ or immigrants. People will stand by us if that happens and we need to stand up for others.

Shalom means lifting up the example of those leaders who embody a true solidarity. We need those models, especially in our political leaders. It has fallen too hard on local leaders to be the only figures of such solidarity.

Shalom means holding to account those who advocate policies we want but who are themselves divisive. It means asking those we know on the other side politically to do the same when they point the finger only our way.

So I will wear this kippah to show this commitment to Shalom. In this spirit I have been reaching out and will continue to do so – to fellow religious leaders in the area who are my longtime partners and my emerging ones, to leaders of groups I do not have relationships so deep with, to leaders of groups whose vulnerability I worry about. To members of this congregation whose commitments I respect and admire, to members of this congregation who express themselves politically with whom I am solidarity even though we do not have the same outlook on social questions of the day.

We will need in the coming months some backing off and cooling off, and some compromise, and those will be the right thing at times as long as we don’t mistake them for the truest Shalom. They will not last on their own. They haven’t until now. We have tried too long in America to find Shalom only by cooling off and compromising and pushing off until later.

But real Shalom is not avoidant and it is not shallow. It is not the lowest common denominator.

Peace comes only through people who are like the Etrog -- who probe their deeds and probe their Torah, who have both an inviting fragrance and a sharp flavor, who know that even a fruit that is beautiful has to be cultivated again and again.

The America we need will not come from violence, nor will it come from avoiding conflict.  It will come in the period following a Sukkat Shalom, a dynamic and hard peace held up by those who will step forward and actively hold it.

I hope that my fears and preparations are overblown and not so needed – that the worst we have is unhappiness this month and next, not outright conflict – but the preparation is good no matter what. Though my words are solemn, I speak them in the same hope I taught on Rosh Hashanah: seeing myself and others step up in worthwhile action on behalf of people we care about, including you and others.

I shall keep wearing this kippah. As we turn to Yizkor (memorial prayers), I will reach to the example of ancestors who faced challenges as serious as the ones we do and pray that their merits will inspire and bless us, as we finally step out of Elul and Tishrei into the year it is our destiny to build for our country.

A New Page -- USA

I just finished the first version of a new page on my site, which I'm calling simply "USA". It has sources and mostly my own reflections about American politics, racial justice, anti-Semitism, and political leadership. I will be updating it with the best links I want people to know about, and anything good I generate as well.

It feels healing particularly today to look back on things I have written, said, and done out of my faith in this country and its politics. Rather than focus only on today's troubles, I am trying to be drawn toward MLK Day.

The Beginning of Exodus and the Events of the Week

The Torah contemplates something parallel to the national leadership dynamics situation we are judging right now, about the relationship between the president’s words and acts and the actions of the rioters. Thanks to Rabbi Aryeh Klapper for directing my attention to a source on this. I’m linking his shiur (lesson) on the text, but I haven’t listened to it yet (I will, but it’s an hour!). So the take on the text here is mine and we’ll see how it tracks Rav Klapper’s.

This week’s Torah reading in Jewish communities is the beginning of the book of Exodus. Chapters 1-2 are about the progression from Pharaoh’s oppression of the Israelites to slavery to the murder of baby boys, and then about resistance. Rabbi Moses Nachmanides (medieval Spanish commentator) lays out an interpretation of what the Torah text presents us.

Nachamides taught that Pharaoh had the whole project of enslavement and murder in mind at the start. But he did not begin that way specifically because his people would have recoiled at that, and Pharaoh was constrained by the willingness of his people at a given moment. So first he proposed a corvee, a small forced-labor tax, because his people would have regarded that as common and acceptable behavior toward foreigners.

Then according to Nachmanides, Pharaoh approached the midwives serving Israelite mothers behind closed doors about killing newborn boys, so that even mothers giving birth and arranging for a midwife wouldn’t know what might happen. When that didn’t work, Pharaoh next move was to say to his whole people that they should throw baby boys into the Nile. The Torah says Pharaoh commanded, and Nachmanides says Pharaoh spoke in a more common way, because he didn’t want to assign the task to any specific official. He did not want the act to be associated with his regime specifically, but with the people as a whole. By now they were willing to do things publicly they were not willing to do at first. Nachmanides posits that Pharaoh was also preserving his right to disavow any specific act. If an Israelite father would come to a local official about his own baby, Pharaoh would invite the father to offer proof and then punish the killer himself.

But Nachmanides says that eventually this set of winks became impossible and Egyptian mobs began to storm Israelite homes in search of babies. That was the situation in which Moses’ mother Yocheved knew to give birth in secret and hide the birth and the child, and that’s what led eventually to the acts of resistance involving midwives, Moses’ sister Miriam, and Pharaoh’s own daughter.

Nachmanides is pointing out that there is more to leadership responsibility than accountability for explicit orders. There is more than what is said out loud, clearly, or publicly. There is a complex feedback dynamic between the leader and the group. The group sometimes constrains the leader; the group can amplify the leader’s general direction in ways of its own that are sometimes predictable and sometimes not; the group has its own reality that is not the same as the regime; there are resisters both inside and outside. It’s worth sitting with the Torah’s story and this kind of interpretation on its own, and then thinking and talking about how it might speak to us right now.

What is the moral responsibility of the leader? Is the group responsible only for its own actions, or for anything about its leader as well? These moral responsibilities of leader and group aren’t identifical but overlap in some way. These are what we should be thinking about, from each of our positions as Americans, partial or substantial supporters or opponents of the president, citizen-judges of what happened this week and what ought to happen going forward.