I'm Jon Spira-Savett, rabbi at Temple Beth Abraham in Nashua, New Hampshire. This website and blog is a resource for Jewish learning and Jewish action. It is a way to share my thoughts beyond my classes and weekly Divrei Torah. You'll find blog posts, standing resource pages with links and things to read, and podcasts as well.
I am pretty sure that from very soon after President Biden was inaugurated, I wrote and/or said that he had one essential mission, one which he was uniquely situated to do. To bring to bear his basic decency and his long experience with so many different types of people and groups in our society, and to bring people back to an American center. Not a set of policy compromises, or an unattainable moderate politics. Just to get to people who had become disillusioned about whether national generosity and decency and education matter, who were doubting the American exceptionalism that makes a country work with tremendous diversity of origins and religions and views about the role of government. To show all those people that they could talk to him and he could listen to them, and that they could talk and listen to each other.
I argued that he should do this not for policy goals, though that might be nice. But to detox the political rhetoric and to enlarge somewhat a political ”center” where people remain divided ideologically but recognize each other as committed Americans who win and lose elections and policy decisions.
We needed President Biden to travel the country in this way from day one in office, because no one else was or has been able to do it. To find partners in communities where most people did not vote for him. Not people who think he and his party are evil threats to their way of life, or who believe that nonwhite immigrants are the paradigm of every threat imaginable to life and prosperity. I mean the people who leaned away from him and the Democrats recently, or who have always been more conservative but still wanted to believe in most of their fellow citizens and a community among the different.
I don’t know how much President Biden could have succeeded. It wouldn’t have yielded him any short-term political benefit. It might well have given us a different Republican president in 2025, one without the hateful and brutal rhetoric and intentions – a President Haley or Rubio.
Yet how could President Biden have thought that this was such a distant second to his policy goals or his use of his initial legislative majorities?. How could he have thought that he was the last candidate standing, in the 2020 primaries and the general election, for any reason other than his unique persona and this mission? He certainly wasn’t nominated or elected because of his total record or his unique policy menu in 2020. He was elected to be not-Trump not in policy terms but civic terms.
Why didn’t he do it? Oh, why?
Maybe he wasn’t physically up to it. Maybe he thought that just being not-Trump, not dominating everything in the media, would leave room for other kinds of air to come in on its own. Maybe he believed what Democrats always believe and is never true in the short-term, that policy achievements even on a massive scale would change people’s feelings.
I don’t know and I don’t especially care. I suppose the signs were even in his inaugural address, where he just asserted the decency of Americans, labeled a fringe and called them a small fringe, and left it at that. He should have instead announced a plan to put himself personally on the line to make his American vision real and visible and palpable.
So this is why I will feel that President Biden has some historic fail on his record, a fail that matters.
I say this with extra regret because I do think that Joe Biden is also the most menschy president of my lifetime. I expect that less and less of presidents, and also need that less and less. I have for a while made myself stop falling in love with presidents. I think there’s a minimum threshold of decency we need in a president, it doesn’t have to be the kind we would want in a friend, and the extra can be traded for effectiveness in other areas. I don’t equate personal goodness with political virtue. But in my lifetime (I was born during the Johnson administration), I don’t think there is anyone who has held the office who was a better human being than Joe Biden has been overall through his time in public life. Obviously there are some terrible blots on this, particularly Anita Hill. Yet to use a cliché, his love not just for America but for Americans are powerful. If you want to get a glimpse into how Joe Biden the man has never waned, take a listen to him on Anderson Cooper’s podcast about grief.
This is the draft of my D'var Torah for tomorrow, focusing on Genesis 18 within Parashat Vayera.
One afternoon when Avraham did not feel at all great, two things happened. First, he saw three strangers going along their way and he ran out to them to bring them home. Second, and right after, he had a major debate with the God about whether five cities should be destroyed.
I was saying a few weeks ago, when we started from the beginning of the Torah, that we often deal with the Torah one story at a time. So Sodom and Gomorrah is one thing. Welcoming the three travelers is another thing. Each one has a lesson perhaps. But the Torah also has a structure and a flow, and among others the Talmudic rabbis were always wondering about what they called hekesh or juxtaposition – why is this story right next to that one.
So why are these two stories right next to each other?
One is a story of extraordinary chesed, love or lovingkindness, in which Avraham and Sarah go to great lengths in every way to bring people into their home and take care of them. The other is a story about tzedek, about the nature of justice and its application, and it’s also extraordinary because in all other places where God and people debate about tzedek it’s between doing it and not, but here God and Avraham are debating about how it applies.
The people who divided up the Torah into chapters in the Middle Ages, both the Jews and the Christians, made these two stories a single chapter. Which happens to be Genesis chapter 18, and maybe it’s a coincidence but 18 in Hebrew is represented in letters by chai, which means life. Both stories are actually life and death stories, which I’ll talk about. Somehow this chai chapter is about the relationship between chesed and tzedek, compassion and justice, which is both an evergreen topic and also something particularly of the day.
So what’s extraordinary about the first story is hinted at in the second verse. Avraham lifted up his eyes and whoa, three men were standing over him, and he saw and he ran toward them from the opening of his tent and he bowed to the ground (18:2). If they were standing over him, what does it mean that he ran toward them, and that he bowed?
Avraham didn’t just want to do something for them. He felt that he should make the effort to go up to them, even though they were already next to him. He felt that he should not stand over them, as some kind of lord, or as a wealthy shepherd like himself might do over a scraggly wanderer – he wanted to look up to them, even though he was already sitting and they were standing.
The Torah describes what Sarah and Avraham did next in the language of maher, which means hurrying. They didn’t stop to find out anything about these people until they could offer them some refreshment of water and food and restoring their feet. Only when they were sitting would Avraham and Sarah and their people stand.
We find out quickly that these aren’t random travelers, and they have a chai message especially for Sarah and Avraham, a message that they will be welcoming a new life in the next year. But for the first verses Avraham and Sarah have no idea. They don’t have a people where they live, except the camp of followers they have put together. Their land does not lack in enemies. They live on the edge of the desert, which is a dangerous place, and who knows if these are maurauders. As we will soon see, Avraham and Sarah don’t live too far from S’dom and ‘Amorah, where the people are known to be generally vile – maybe these three people come from there.
So I don’t think it’s too much to think that Sarah and Avraham are taking some risk in running toward these travelers and bringing them into their home. At the very least, Sarah and Avraham are do good and ask questions later. As far as they are concerned, it’s the three men who are in danger, from thirst and hunger and bandits. It’s life and death for the three possibly, and at the very least they need something now. That’s the only thing that Avraham and Sarah process.
So there is no hesitation. This is extraordinary chesed.
Avraham escorts them from his home, because it’s dangerous to go out from settlement and there is desert in two directions. They and Avraham stop on the mountain ridge overlooking S’dom and ‘Amorah, and God engages him in conversation. The Torah says that God has an inner monologue: “Should I cover up from Avraham what I am doing? Avraham is surely going to become a large and powerful nation, through whom all the earth’s nations will be blessed” (18:17-18). And God continues to think that all of this is because God wants Avraham to charge and command his descendants in the ways of justice so that they can become great in these ways. So God then speaks to Avraham and says essentially: What is going on down in the valley in S’dom and ‘Amorah is so evil and I’m going to check it out to see if it’s as bad as it sounds. I’m sending my team to investigate. That’s all God says at first, and the messengers leave and now it’s just God and Avraham.
And without hesitation Avraham says: “So you will even sweep away the innocent with the guilty, or the righteous with the evil, tzaddik im rasha?” (18:23) Not, “Tell me more about what you meant by that” – Avraham cuts right to it, and then posits this situation of fifty tzaddikim, and winds it up by saying, “It would be profane for You to put to death tzaddik and rasha, and the tzaddik would be just like the rasha. Profane for you – the Judge of all the world will not do justice.”
And as you know from there, Avraham and God have this negotiation which ends with an agreement to save the cities if there are ten tzaddikim, which again might mean righteous people or just innocent people.
So what’s interesting to me is how this part of the chapter, the tzedek part, has Avraham doing different things than the chesed part. He talks here very differently about people, and his relationship to the people down in the valley is very different, even though what he is trying to do is the same which is to save their lives.
The chesed story is up close human contact. In the tzedek story, Avraham is far away from the people he’s talking about, whom he describes in terms of numbers and concepts, abstractions even.
In the first story Avraham is bowing down to people he doesn’t know and who may be a threat to him. He calls them “my lords.” He makes a presumption of good. In the second, Avraham is on a mountain ridge looking down on them. He calls them tzaddik and rasha, righteous and evil. He has no problem with the language of good and evil, toward people or toward God.
The midrashim say that the people of S’dom believed what’s yours is yours and what’s mine is mine to a punctilious extreme, punishing someone who took a short cut across their property just as severely as they would punish a thief.
They had no language for cooperation, only isolation that would surge into small-scale violence and occasionally a mob. Avraham does not volunteer to go up close and get to know them better, and he’s fine looking down on them from the hills.
At our Ritual Committee meeting this week, Larry Rubin brought us an interpretation of Avraham’s pointed words to God. It’s not necessarily an accusation that God isn’t intending to treat the people in the cities justly, but a statement that it’s not enough to apply principles of legal justice. “The Judge of the entire earth wouldn’t only do justice.” Sometimes you have to figure out how to mix the law with mercy, and just calling people guilty even when that’s true is not enough to tell you what to do. Mishpat is the law, but tzedek or mishpat tzedek is the integration of the law and a higher justice.
How could Avraham be such an extraordinary man of chesed and such an extraordinary man of tzedek, not just the same person but the same day? To see all people as potentially good and essential for him, and to see people honestly as good and evil? To be generous up close and to make difficult justice decisions from 10,000 feet?
So I don’t know for sure, or at least I can say I haven’t learned how. There are some extraordinary people like that and they are in our local civic community and our Jewish community.
And I love to contemplate such people, and try to become like them, and I love to contemplate Avraham even when he is so beyond who I am. It is inspiring to be in the light of any real person who is an amazing ba’alat chesed or ba’al chesed, and to be in the presence of someone who is an amazing ba’alat tzedek or ba’al tzedek. There is a reason we were put in this community of Beit Avraham v’Sarah and connected to those two souls.
And I want to leave just three other points, which are not easy but are important.
One is that this analysis of Avraham is to remind us that chesed and tzedek are different and require different actions and words and thoughts. Avraham with the travelers is not the same as Avraham looking at S’dom. A thousand points of light are incredibly important, but they do not necessarily make one big light. Justice does not happen, injustice is not pushed back only by individual and small group acts of generosity and caring, no matter how many.
Nor can the right laws and the right policies by themselves create a compassionate society.
So second, most of us can’t be both Avrahams. But among us we can do both. So if you are more the person of chesed, make sure also to do anything you can for the people of tzedek, whether that means contributing to their causes and organizations, sharing their wisdom, or giving them moral support by taking them out for coffee if it’s a local person, or an encouraging word. And vice versa, if you are focused on tzedek work make sure to give to and support the chesed work even if that’s not what you yourself are mostly doing.
And finally I want to come back to where I started, which is that on the day Avraham did these two extraordinary things, he was not feeling great. It was right after his bris, so he didn’t feel physically like himself, and also I think he was carrying the weightiness of the brit, the covenant that God had just reaffirmed to him. Part of being so committed to a certain world, and knowing you and your descendants would be charged with making big dreams real, is feeling the weight of that responsibility. So whatever pain you are feeling right now, about the country and the world, know that it is covenantal pain. Avraham found extraordinary chesed and tzedek in himself precisely when he was not feeling like himself. So can we. So will you.
This was my Dvar Torah last Shabbat, November 9, the first Shabbat after Election Day 2024.
First I want to say that the operation of a democracy is awe-inspiring. To experience a day when 300-million-plus people bring something of moral significance to a crescendo all at once. To contemplate what goes into that, philosophically and logistically. Which is why we are honoring today the people who have been closest to that process, as candidates and at the polls and in campaigns – and thank you to everyone who voted or brought a young person with you as you voted.
It has been an exhausting week. It has been an exhausting campaign, an exhausting thirteen months.
Also an exhausting pandemic and an exhausting decade. But right now, just an exhausting week. Regardless of how you assess the results, all or some of them. Which is why I am not going to tell you today how the Torah solves everything on our minds – like how you are feeling or how you think about other people who voted differently or what to do next. There’s no Torah insight that only suddenly became apparent this week, that we couldn’t have learned until now. Next Shabbat, I will speak toward those bigger pictures, but today I hope I can offer you something both more modest and more fundamental. Maybe soothing, maybe even useful, regardless of where you’re at right now.
There is a classic psychology study from 2008 by Lawrence Williams and John Bargh, in which participants were given a description of another person, and asked to make judgments based on that information about whether that person was generous or warm, or the opposite. Or in which they were given a short task and then had the opportunity to take a small reward for themselves or give something to another person. But the experiment actually began when the participant arrived and was met by a research assistant juggling a clipboard and papers and a drink, who then asked the participant to hold their drink for a moment. Sometimes, the drink was a warm coffee, and sometimes an iced coffee. Then the assistant took the drink back and escorted the subject to the research room.
And in this particular study, the subjects who held the warm drink were more likely to rate the person they read a packet about as a warm person, a generous person. Or to choose to give something away rather than take a small reward for themselves. Other things controlled, the very same person was judged more generously or more harshly based on this external physical factor, the warm or cold drink. Other things equal, a participant in this study was likely to be more generous or more selfish, if they had been primed by warmth or cold.
My point is that our recent time has been like this. Not warm, but so cold, and so hot. Even beyond our awareness, our minds and our hearts are affected in ways we don’t even realize, by the touch of something that is at the same time physical and emotional and spiritual. As much as we are trying to live warmly and judge warmly, we are all being handed scalding after scalding after scalding cup of coffee.
We have to notice that. And it’s what any of us can and ought to do something about starting from now – whether you are more pleased or more disturbed by the results of the election, whether you are right now hopeful or despairing, whether you are thinking about what to do next or nowhere near ready for that. To put it negatively, what we need to address are the brutal and hateful words and calls. Everywhere around us. That brutality is the hot cup of coffee probably each of us has held to the point that it penetrates into our minds and our hearts.
Or to put it more positively: An antidote, even just for today, is love. It’s ahavah and chesed. It is simply, simply love. It is the practice of love.
Love is the warm cup we have to hand each other, over and over and over.
At a few of our interfaith gatherings this week, Rev. Allison Palm, president of the Nashua Area Interfaith Council and minister for the Unitarian Universalist Church, shared this poem by Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer, called “Because”:
So I can’t save the world— can’t save even myself, can’t wrap my arms around every frightened child, can’t foster peace among nations, can’t bring love to all who feel unlovable. So I practice opening my heart right here in this room and being gentle with my insufficiency. I practice walking down the street heart first. And if it is insufficient to share love, I will practice loving anyway. I want to converse about truth, about trust. I want to invite compassion into every interaction. One willing heart can’t stop a war. One willing heart can’t feed all the hungry. And sometimes, daunted by a task too big, I tell myself what’s the use of trying? But today, the invitation is clear: to be ridiculously courageous in love. To open the heart like a lilac in May, knowing freeze is possible and opening anyway. To take love seriously. To give love wildly. To race up to the world as if I were a puppy, adoring and unjaded, stumbling on my own exuberance. To feel the shock of indifference, of anger, of cruelty, of fear, and stay open. To love as if it matters, as if the world depends on it.
Rev. Palm said to a few of us the other day that this love isn’t just that we should be kinder. Which certainly isn’t a bad thing. But more than that: To take love seriously./To give love wildly.
We know that kind of love right here, where love is saying Amen to everyone’s prayer, as if it were the most important prayer you yourself could say, even though you don’t know exactly what it is.
Love could be toward the people we are fearful for right now – the promise we make, even if it’s just right now to ourselves, that we will really follow through and love them, be there for them and speak up for them.
Love could be to stretch toward someone in our community or our society who baffles us, even if it’s just to appreciate their face or the beautiful sound of their voice when they speak about what matters to them.
Love must be toward yourself, so you can rest, have Shabbat, recharge for important things, or let yourself experience joy for no ulterior purpose at all.
Love is feeling that you are loved -- loved by the Divine; loved by someone else, perhaps in a church or a mosque somewhere, someone who is imagining you, appreciating your face or the beautiful sound of your voice when you speak about what matters most to you.
…practice walking down the street heart first. And if it is insufficient to share love, I will practice loving anyway.
…To feel the shock of indifference, of anger, of cruelty, of fear, and stay open. To love as if it matters, as if the world depends on it.
And whenever we are angry and frustrated and outraged, we can be serious about love, by reminding ourselves that we only feel those things because we love. And it’s only the love behind the anger and frustration that will ever make a difference.
So whether you are trying to take a stand or whether you are simply sad, today just love. Give love wildly.
Detoxing our environment of the ugliness and the brutality of tone will not by itself eliminate our divisions; nothing can. Nor will it miraculously reveal new public policies we have not found yet that everyone will rally behind, and the brutality will recede into small corners. But it is the thing that is always possible, even right now.
And at least in here, every Shabbat, we can be together in love. As we juggle our prayerbooks and our handouts, our plates at Kiddush, we hand each other the warm cup of coffee. The warm cider, the cocoa, that helps us see the world as our hearts want to see it – full of warmth, full of generosity. Give it to each other, again and again and again. If we do that here, we will be better able to do that outside as well.
So:
…today, the invitation is clear: to be ridiculously courageous in love. To open the heart like a lilac in May, knowing freeze is possible and opening anyway. To take love seriously. To give love wildly. To race up to the world as if I were a puppy, adoring and unjaded, stumbling on my own exuberance. To feel the shock of indifference, of anger, of cruelty, of fear, and stay open.
To love as if it matters, as if the world depends on it.
Here's the note I sent to the congregation today. You can see the gatherings referenced in the letter at tbanashua.org
Dear Friends:
Tomorrow is of course Election Day. I imagine that almost all of you know who you will be voting for. Though if you are still deliberating about any of the choices and are looking for someone to bounce your thoughts off of, feel free to call me any time up to when the polls close... If you need help getting to a voting place call me too.
This note is partly for before you vote, and largely about after the election.
Here's a terrific statement I came across a couple weeks ago, attributed possibly to the writer Rebecca Solnit: A vote is not a valentine. You aren’t confessing your love for the candidate. It’s a chess move for the world you want to live in.
This is an incredibly important perspective to have, for at least two reasons.
First -- We should be much more committed to the world we want to help create than to the idea that any single candidate or party is all-virtuous.
You don’t have to love a candidate to vote for them. Related to that: You are not a reflection of every aspect of the people you vote for. You are, however, responsible for what they are likely to do. That’s where our own honesty and integrity are at stake. We ought to be utterly honest about what we do and do not admire in the people we vote for. Honest with ourselves and accountable to others. We should not lie.
Second – Like chess, there’s a lot we do know about the current position of the board, the powers of the various pieces, the moves available from here. There is a lot we can surmise about what moves will likely come after our move, and a lot we do our best to predict about what the next moves might be after our own.
We are trying to know how the candidates intend to address our own needs, the needs of the most vulnerable, the security of the Jewish community here and worldwide. We are trying to know their relevant experience, management qualities, leadership qualities, commitment to the Constitution. We each know a lot about some of these aspects of candidates and less about others. No candidate is equally strong on every dimension. We might rate one candidate higher on one dimension but lower on another. And the candidate who you think is superior on something important may be inferior on another -- this is probably the hardest thing.
So, we make our best calculations. It is most definitely a calculation, a weighing of moral pluses and minuses. So we do our best. We have to take responsibility for our choices, and to be honest about how we weighed all the factors, and to be clear about what we know for sure and what we're making educated or wild guesses about.
Remind yourself of all this on Election Day, as you vote or even if you have already voted. Say a blessing in the booth or sometime during the day that we have the freedom to vote, which our ancestors and most Jews in history and most humans in history have not had. Be grateful to the people who operate the election system, who are doing all the detail things that give us the well-run and fair elections whose outcomes we can trust.
During our regular hours Tuesday through Friday, feel free to come to the synagogue for a quiet or contemplative place. When you’re in the building, channel some civic energy into making holiday cards for those who serve or have served in our country’s military.
Tonight before minyan Laura Hegfield is leading a pre-election meditation time online. After the voting, join at the Temple or any of the interfaith gatherings this week. All these and the times and links are below.
We will gather and talk at minyan times too, and I imagine some of our other group study and social gatherings will be times for this as well.
No matter what the outcomes of the voting are, there will be reflecting and strategizing we need to do, as Americans and as Jews and as both of those things together. I will of course be in touch about those, and if you have ideas or want to help facilitate something please be in touch anytime this week or after.
May our Election Day reflect our glorious freedom. May the coming days be days of peace.
The story of the Tower of Babel teaches that diversity is both a tikkun and a curse. A tikkun, a fix for some problem of humanity, a repair – and also a curse. And doesn’t that seem like the paradox we are grappling with as America right now.
It was many generations after the Flood, and all the people of the earth had a single language. They gathered in one area. They began to make building materials together, and then used them to set up a city and start construction on a tower with its head reaching the sky. God’s response to that was to interfere with their communication by introducing multiple languages. The people stopped building the city, and the tower as well, and they scattered over the earth. Somebody hung the name Bavel on the place, which is the Hebrew word for the area of Babylon or Babylonia. The Torah says it comes from the word balal, which means “confused” or “mixed up”. Obviously this is the origin of our word “babble”, to talk without being understandable. In Hebrew today something all jumbled up is m’vulbal.
The Torah seems to be saying that unity was the problem and a diversity of languages and groups was the tikkun. But don’t we yearn for human unity? I don’t mean people generally, but even Jews specifically? Bayom hahu yihyeh Adonai echad ushmo echad – don’t we dream daily at the end of every single service, that one day all the world will reflect the unity of the Divine, and all the world will be able to say the Divine name the same way?
The theme of diversity and unity is a defining theme right now for America, so we all need a deep dive into it over time. Regardless of who is elected this week to be our national leaders. Diversity is what we live with every day, but we need more than a practical experience with it; we need some philosophical clarity. It starts with the paradox of Migdal Bavel, that diversity is both a curse and a tikkun. That story is the setup in the Torah for our emergence in the next chapter as one small family within the diversity of humanity.
So what is the unity-diversity issue in the story of Migdal Bavel? Chapter 11 of Bereshit tells us that the people of the world found a place to begin their city and their tower in a valley in the land of Shinar, mi-kedem, which is usually translated “from the east.” In Hebrew the word for “east” has the same shoresh, the same verbal root, as the word for “earlier” – kedem is east, because that’s where the sun appears earliest every day. So in Midrash Bereshit Rabbah, Rabbi Yehuda notices that the Torah says not the people were heading geographically east, la-kedem or ked’ma, but mi-kedem, away “from the Earlier One” with a capital O -- the Old One, meaning God. Away from God.
Rabbi Yehuda says they tried to find a place to accommodate all of humanity away from God, but the only place they could find was this valley. I think this might be a big key to the whole story. If you go back to your earliest world history or world studies class, you know that Mesopotamia is a flood valley. It’s good when it floods moderately each year, to support dependable crops. But humanity at the time is still traumatized by the Flood, capital-F, and according to Rabbi Yehuda they were not about to put their survival in this valley in the hands of God. Rashi says that even though God had promised that a Mabul, a world-destroying Flood, would never happen again, the people were skeptical, or least hedging their bets. That’s what the Tower was for – it was a human-made Mt. Ararat. It was meant to be a place to escape up to in case of a massive flood, and not just for one family. Rashi imagines the people being suspicious of God, thinking next time it wouldn’t be a big flood but a plague sent by God to divide and scatter them. Or maybe, the Maharal of Prague suggests, the regular flooding of the Tigris and Euphrates was just a trigger for them and they felt they couldn’t live in a valley no matter how good it was there, without a tower like this.
So the unity agenda of humanity at the time of the Tower was born out of trauma and out of fear. It was potentially a tikkun, a repair and an advancement of humanity -- because before the Mabul in Noach’s time, when humanity became afraid it had torn itself to pieces. This tower seems like a so-much-better response.
Then why was God not pleased?
One interpretation which permeates the early midrashim is that this unity was a superficial and very tenuous unity. It was built only on survival and on fear, and against a common enemy, which the people or at least the leaders named as God. There was no faith in anything higher, no faith in anything other than themselves. Rabbi Yishmael in the midrash calls it worship of the collective.
And there was no indication that this initial unity project was something the people were building on, so to speak. The only building they were doing was literal and material, with bricks and mortar. They were not building any kind of deeper human unity.
Which means that this unity of all humanity was actually illusory, even on its own terms. If there was (God forbid) another Flood, or a smaller flood or a plague, this tower was never going to be able to shelter everyone. Maybe some groups with common origins would not be preferred over other ones, but surely there would be people who declared themselves superior or more deserving of going up to the top. And the fact that the people all had one language meant that the ones at the top would use language to twist the story, would continue to describe this as unity even while saying you can be saved and you can’t.
So the tikkun was some version of diversity. There are two fascinating pictures of what this diversity tikkun was like that I found for the first time the other day in the midrash in Bereshit Rabbah.
Rabbi Nechemya imagines that everyone came initially to the Valley of Shinar from somewhere specific, in groups from their own city of origin, attracted to this one-world, humanity project. When they were scattered, Rabbi Nechemya says they went back to their earlier place and rediscovered that each place had its own mountain. Not a human-made tower, but a mountain that was big enough to sustain that group. And now, whenever they were fearful of calamity, they would go all together up their mountain. No one would be abandoned or declared unworthy of saving.
From this there would be built a unity, a unity of each place, in their own language, connected to the land and its own mountain. There would be unity and solidarity built on fear, on the need to survive, absolutely -- but also on a shared history; on chesed, mutual care, and on trust. We wouldn’t worship ourselves as builders of the mountain either.
Rabbi Nechemya makes the case for diversity as a tikkun for the dangers of the wrong kind of human unity, the false kind, the superficial kind, the kind that will find someone to throw out. He tells in shorthand the basics of a whole literature that I’ll teach another time, about how it’s within groups with their own mountains that we learn the things that help us stretch toward a more encompassing unity.
It only works, though, if our diverse groups are indeed places where we learn the habits and ideas of love that stretches beyond those who are most similar to us within the group. I like to think that’s also in Rabbi Nechemya’s imagination. At times of fear, when we all head for the hills, at least we notice the other people on their hills, and begin to wonder about them, how they got there, how they learned what we know about taking care of each other. What their story is too. Otherwise, diversity is just a curse.
We cannot put off any longer a deep engagement with the question of diversity within America and our place within that. That will be the case no matter who is elected this coming week. It’s not a fifteen-minute-at-a-time project. There have been some amazing Jewish American intellectuals and social scientists who have reflected on our experience here in this country. We’ll have to ask some questions about the different things that make group identity deep or superficial, part of the tikkun and part of the curse, especially when the group in question is us.
So I’ll leave it where the Torah does for now, as a cliffhanger. We wait for Sarah and Avraham, who live in the new city in the Valley of Shinar, to think their next thoughts and make their next moves. As we wait to see a bit more about the world we live in next week, so we know what our next moves will be as American Jews. May we play our role this week and after, to do our best for both diversity and for unity.
********** Some links to things to read on this theme, all from Jewish authors:
Ze'ev Maghen, "Imagine: On Love and Lennon" -- a super-fun exploration of Jewish particularity, among other things taking off on John Lennon's song "Imagine" and saying a huge no!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
