Rabbi Jon's Website and Blog

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.

Medicine and Chicken Soup (The Day After)

Medicine, and chicken soup. When you’re sick both help you get better or at least feel better, in different ways.

 

My medicine yesterday was gathering for prayer in the evening, saying some psalms and a prayer for the country and singing together with others on Zoom.

 

My chicken soup, though, was actually a whole lot of civic activity in my Wednesday, all of it previously scheduled.

 

I started off in a conversation with someone I hadn’t met before, an Israeli Orthodox teacher and scholar. We were “fixed up” by a mutual friend. He was looking for someone with a different perspective on Judaism to speak with, because he felt that too many in his world wouldn’t do that. It was a terrific conversation that we’ll pick up next week. Among many other things, we discussed a classic passage in the Talmud about disagreement when “these and these are both the words of the living God.”

 

At noon I chaired the monthly meeting of the Nashua Area Interfaith Council. We gather across some profound religious difference, as clergy and lay leaders from congregations, as nonprofit leaders who are steeped in religion.

 

In the evening I helped facilitate a public meeting about the goals and vision of the new master plan for the City of Nashua. I got to help officials from City Hall, and talk in a small group with people who are connected to city government and news media. We talked about what an ideal community looks like on the neighborhood and city level, not just concepts but what it looks like as infrastructure and buildings and transportation.

 

In between I met with colleagues and teams within the synagogue, discussing goals of education and especially interconnection for the next 4-6 months.

 

What’s your medicine and your chicken soup right now?

Thinking Out Loud -- COVID Curfews

I'd like to be using my blog more to model and invite some ethical deliberation more of the time. This is something I dashed off to post on Facebook the other night. Particular references are to my locale of Nashua, NH, but it's relevant for elsewhere.

Wondering about the curfew debate. This isn’t an argument in favor of COVID-related curfews, but a wondering about policymaking in an situation that regular law doesn’t contemplate and where emergency regulations raise cultural and philosophical red flags.

 

The rationale being offered for curfews is that existing mandates and recommendations are not being followed to a degree that is controlling the spread of COVID-19. It’s not that the curfew is itself a safety measure; the virus is just as contagious before mid-evening as after.

 

So could it be that the curfew proposal is actually an attempt to create an enforcement regime that is less invasive than what it would take to zero in on the riskiest behavior? Rather than sending inspectors into restaurants and bars, for instance, to go table by table and cite people who are not respecting masks/distance etc., it could be less intrusive simply to limit people upstream from coming into a possible place of spread. This would in a certain way be less of an imposition on individual liberty than the alternative. Is this the actual rationale?

 

One problem with the initial policymaking around masks was a lack of transparency around officials’ reasoning. We heard the endpoint of their reasoning at two points. First, they knew we needed to keep enough masks for health care workers, so they told the rest of us not to hoard masks. Even though they knew that masks would be effective in the community as well, the initial priority was in hospitals. Part of how they got supply more focused to health settings was by discouraging the rest of us from taking all the masks, downplaying their importance to us. Second, after the mask supply expanded – before manufacturing ramped up, when people were engaged in home production – then what we heard was masks are effective and actually critical. It wasn’t the whole story in either part 1 or in part 2. We weren’t trusted with the nuance or given the chance to show some solidarity or think about sacrificing for others. Maybe that mistrust of the public was warranted even, but there were consequences in terms of credibility down the road that we’re seeing now.

 

So I’d love to know if my hypothesis is correct about curfews. If the real issue is how to choose between different unpleasant schemes of control, and an acknowledgement of different degrees of invasiveness, then why not challenge us as a community to interact with that dilemma by making it explicit?

 

To me, this makes more sense than concluding that curfews etc. are a power grab by political or other officials.

 

The most recent posted minutes of my local Board of Health suggest that my hypothesis is partly correct, at least in terms of what was actually said by participants. I’m wondering if there was more, either unstated or just not reported. I understand that those in authority right now are responsible around what may be a terrible tradeoff between time and lives. Again this isn’t an argument for or against curfews, but a question of how to do public ethical engagement, or at least how to explain soon after decisions are made and announced what all the ethical considerations actually have been.

Chanukkah -- An Adult Festival About Today

You’ve probably heard over and over that Chanukkah is a “minor” holy day. Something we make a big deal about especially in modern America – something especially for Jewish children in a Christmas-saturated environment.

It’s true, Chanukkah is no Passover. But in fact, it’s not a new thing, this question about how significant Chanukkah really is. In fact, the Jewish religious authorities in the time of the Talmud were anti-Chanukkah. At a time when Jews were under the thumb of Roman, Byzantine, and Sasanian emperors, the rabbis were none too keen on celebrating an uprising against imperial power. They managed to wrestle Chanukkah down to just a couple of paragraphs in the sprawling Talmud and left pretty much a single story about divine light, the cruse of oil in the Temple that lasted eight days.

In fact, Chanukkah has always been about the relationship of Jews and Judaism to the majority culture, its values and its forces. That’s in fact what the original events were all about. So it’s worth taking an adult look at the Chanukkah story.

The events of Chanukkah took place in the period of about 180-160 B.C.E. This was about 150 years after the conquests of Alexander the Great of Macedon, who brought the Land of Israel into the cultural and political world of Hellenism.

In many ways, Hellenism was the American culture of its time. There was a language, Greek, that spread to become a common language through much of Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East. Hellenism was a dominant world culture. Its positive elements included philosophy, art, and international trade. All of these linked people together across a large proportion of the world, and brought prosperity and material advancement. The negative side of Hellenism included a worship of the physical body and a focus on beauty and strength above other values. Pagan values that at their worst crushed human values.

The Jews in the Land of Israel, as well as those in exile all around the Mediterranean Sea, were deeply influenced by Hellenism. Each regional Jewish community faced the question of how much to adapt to Hellenism, whether to assimilate completely in part, or whether to remain separate. Some Jews were ready to give up Judaism entirely as archaic and irrelevant. Most tried to integrate the new culture and ideas, and many leaders tried to enrich Judaism with the best of Hellenism.

It wasn’t a one-way street. Because the Hellenists valued learning and culture in general, some non-Jews learned about Judaism and decided that it was a kind of pure philosophy, a truth without all the trappings of pagan gods and rituals. About a century after Alexander the Great, who himself had been a student of Aristotle, the Torah was translated into Greek. According to a legend written around the same time as the story of Chanukkah, a Hellenistic emperor in fact commissioned a Greek version of the Torah. He thought his library would not be complete without it. He invited scholars from Jerusalem to be his guest in Egypt, threw them a kosher banquet, and treated them like respected Greek philosophers!

Meanwhile at the Temple in Jerusalem, there was corruption among the kohanim, the priestly leadership of the Jews. The Temple was not only a religious center, but a power and financial center as well because of the gifts and offerings that people would bring. Ambitious people among the priests were vying for authority over the Temple. Some tried to curry favor with different imperial officials, by offering political support or outright bribes.

Just like today, the Land of Israel was situated geographically at a military and economic crossroads. Just before the events of the Chanukkah story, the land changed hands. When Alexander died, his empire had been split in half, ruled from capitals in Egypt and in Syria. Initially the Egypt-based rulers controlled Judea, and they were on the whole tolerant of the Jews. But then the Seleucids, the “Syrian-Greeks” we know from the Chanukkah story, took over. Even then, the situation of the Jews did not change right away.

A new and crazy emperor, Antiochus IV, came to power in Syria. He believed that he was himself a god. He ordered the takeover of the Temple in Jerusalem and banned key Jewish practices. Some of the historical sources say that he took advantage of the weakness of both Jewish society and the officials beneath him. Others say that the Jewish assimilationists actively invited his intervention and his decrees.

The group we know as the Maccabees came to lead the revolt against Antiochus. They were themselves kohanim, but separate from the corrupt priests of Jerusalem. Their family name was Chashmonai (“Hasmoneans”); their patriarch was Matityahu (Mattathias) and his sons included Yehudah (Judah).

They believed in Jewish distinctiveness, but they also believed in some modern adaptation to Hellenism. So for instance, during their three-year revolt that begin in 165 B.C.E., they made certain decisions that were not so traditionally Jewish. They decided fighting on Shabbat was permitted in order to save lives. Their battle plan had some of the same features that the modern Israel Defense Forces would use in 1948 and 1967.

When they finally drove out Antiochus' forces, the Maccabees led both a traditional religious revival and a new approach to Jewish culture and power. They instituted a new annual festival, Chanukkah, but based it on the Sukkot festival that had gone unmarked in the Temple in the prior years. (That's initially why Chanukkah is eight days; the story of the oil came hundreds of years later.) They installed themselves as kings, even though they were not descendants of King David. Their leaders were known by both Hebrew and Greek names.

For me, celebrating Chanukkah reminds me that these issues of politics, value priorities, war, corruption based on money, and majority-minority relations are not new things. The candles remind me that light has to be shed on these matters, all the time.

The candles, against the darkness, are a symbol of the dedication and integrity it takes to keep our eyes open and to find and hold our moral center of gravity. The candles also remind me that Judaism could have been extinguished, could have burned out against all the political, military, economic, and cultural forces of that time. But it was not –Judaism bounced back, renewed and even began to reinvent itself.

In recent years, I’ve come to understand that the real miracle is that someone thought to store away a cruse of oil in the first place. Not in a literal sense. Someone knew there could be a time when the light of Judaism entirely, or our individual lights, would seem like they are running out. Someone knew we would encounter times individually when we feel that the tank is just completely empty, and we would need a reminder that we are still here, and that there is more light to find.

Our ancestors didn't run away from the challenges of identity and moral compass that they faced. By standing up, and passing down their story, they hid away a spark that we can find and then expand. Into the dedication we need, to do what's right and to define our place as Jews in the wide world.

So Chanukkah is not just a children’s story. It resonates for us in America today for all the same reasons it has resonated since the days of the Maccabees. Maybe it’s not Passover, but Chanukkah is hardly minor.

Chag Urim Same'ach – A Joyous Festival of Lights!

School Opening -- Ethical Idea #1

School-related ethical idea #1.

Whenever I have a lot on my plate and try to figure out what’s more important, one strategy I try to use is “2-for-1.” Which items on this list are both important once for themselves, and also valuable for what they enable me/my organization to do down the road?

So as I think about the urgent need to make the opening of school successful in all ways this fall, I thought of this 2-for-1 approach to deciding when, whether, and how to be with other people for, say, the next 6-8 weeks.

(This is very contextual. I live in New Hampshire, where the infection rate has been very low recently compared to the country as a whole. There are possibilities for the opening of schools here that don’t exist in many if not most other places in the U.S.)

Here is a four-part ethical maxim, first draft, a kind of emergency ethical order:

1. We will go out in public around people (in accordance with the recommended health/safety guidelines) if it is for something that could help our community learn how to open schools safely and successful for students, teachers, staff, and families.
2. We will share whatever we learn with those responsible for opening schools and with each other.
3. We will go out in public around people for something that is urgent for someone’s wellbeing (myself or someone else) and can’t be put off.
4. Otherwise, we will not go out where other people are even if it’s considered safe and permitted, because not being with other people is the surest way to block the spread of the virus, and every pathway blocked makes it more likely that schools can operate safely and successful in my community.

As an ethical approach, this puts care (including self-care) at the center and focuses our action on one of the top social solidarity issues at hand right now, which is schooling.

I should say that I am proposing this as a collective action. It doesn’t make much sense as an individual maxim; it wouldn’t hurt but it wouldn’t make that much impact. My whole point is to think about social solidarity, what we can all do for the public good

I am leading a synagogue, and this intrigues me because it gives a purpose for some of the things we are working on for in-person gathering. We focused first on care – stretching for funerals and shiva (mourning). Our outdoor, small group parking lot services have tested out procedures and refinements, and have yielded observations about what works and what doesn’t (for adults; no kids involved yet). What we learn as we plan and pilot for the Jewish high holy days in mid-September can be very valuable for schools in a number of ways.

In fact as I write this, I think about making this a kind of prayer/kavvanah/intention for any in-person gatherings we have: “Behold, I am here today for the sake of the children in our community, their parents, their teachers and all who support the education of our youth in every way.” This could itself be the test of an action right now – if one can make that statement one is about to do something worthwhile, and if one can’t make the statement one should reconsider.

Thoughts?

First Thoughts After George Floyd: Justice Torah From Rabbi Akiva and Ben Azzai

This was my Dvar Torah for (Zoom) services on June 6, 2020. I'm making reference here to the Bar Mitzvah of Seth Brown.

I want to thank the Browns again for this simcha and as I told them, usually my words of Torah are light on days like this, but sometimes the world thrusts events at us that call for some Torah that can’t wait. So I will take a few minutes for words of Torah after the week we have had. I am going to speak quietly and with humility, not pretending to be possessed of every insight about race in America or to be a tzaddik myself in this area. I will add some more to this at our program on Monday evening.

And this is Torah from a particular point of view, the Torah of this particular Jew who is white and has many privileges, who has been thinking most of all about the black people who are closest to me, namely my own cousins and members of this Temple community, some of whom are children. I have been thinking about how I see the world and change in the world, because of where I come from. My formative experiences center on the mid- to late-1970s. Saturday night TV in that time in my house was The Jeffersons, Bridget Loves Bernie, Mary Tyler Moore – the television of a world moving toward integration of every kind – and I was a Sesame Street child, who took for granted Gordon and Susan and Bob and Luis and Maria. In there was the struggle for Soviet Jewry, which was everywhere in my Jewish world, and seemed like the same thing.

And one of the records always playing in my home was Marlo Thomas’s “ Free to Be You and Me.” Here’s the verse that for a long time was my anthem: “There’s a land that I see where the children are free, and I say it ain’t far to that land from where we are.”

I was taught to see that better world not too far away, to know it wasn’t here but to believe it was being created by people like my parents and their friends and my teachers and by me and my friends. The question I never had until a few years ago is how far is that land, really, from where we are. If it has taken so long to get there since the mid-1970s, is that because it is in fact farther than I thought, or is it close enough to see but there is a river in between with dangerous rapids and we have not built the bridge, is it close enough but we have for some reason refused to pay the money to clear the road that would get us there straight and fast.

Or to say it like the Torah would, as we are in the book of Numbers -- why is such a short walk from Egypt to the promised land taking forty years.

So what is the basic spiritual outlook of someone trying to get us to that land?

In the Talmud (Yerushalmi Nedarim) two rabbis debate: If you had to sum up the Torah, basically, how would you do it? Rabbi Akiva says that the most important principle of the Torah is in Leviticus, “Love your neighbor like yourself” (19:18). Ben Azzai, who was a younger scholar, said it’s a different verse, from back in Genesis: “This is the book of the story of humanity: In the day God created the human, in the likeness of God God created him" (5:1).

Rabbi Akiva says: It’s all about of love of other people, and the action that flows from that love. The major thing is to stretch yourself – first to the limit of the comfort zone you have with people who are like you, and then a bit beyond that. Get to the person who is near you, and figure out how they are not basically different from you but basically like you. There is effort to care, the effort is to look for something in common, and the effort is actually to do something helpful or caring.

Ben Azzai says, basically, Okay Boomer. Flower child. Love is great, but if you’re really loving you’re going to reach a limit pretty soon. We can only love so many people. It’s exhausting and there’s going to be resistance because of that. At some point you’ll make your neighborhood of concern bigger, sure, and then you’ll stop and you’ll decide that the other people aren’t your neighbor. You’ll say that you can’t find anything like yourself, you tried but you couldn’t. You’ll start coming up with reasons not to love certain people.

No, says Ben Azzai, we need a bigger frame. This is the book of the story of all humanity. If you’re going to stretch, stretch your imagination to include all people. In the Torah, a book is a place to keep records. A book is bigger than our hearts. It’s where the data is, whether we have an emotional attachment to it or not. And we know that a book is also stories, and stories take us farther than neighbors can and stories get us talking about them. Books and stories are going to take us to neighborhoods we’re just not going to get to otherwise even in our own towns, to prisons we’re never going to visit ourselves. Get some data, learn some history. Learn where your neighborhood itself comes from, who built it.

Rabbi Akiva would say back: You young people, you think you share enough brilliant articles on Facebook you’ll change the world. The brain might see farther than the heart, but it is weaker. If you learn more than you can do, you are in danger of overwhelm, and of not being able to see an ending that’s different from the terrible stories that have been told so far. At some point you have to decide to care, or you have to decide to act, and you can only do that by knowing someone new or by knowing someone familiar in a new way. So work on stretching what like-yourself means to you. And when you made your neighborhood a bit bigger, now try to love all the neighborhoods in your city. This is how it really works. Most people need relationships to change. We don’t have a book with the right ending yet, because no one has written it, and the only way to write it is to love our way there.

Who’s right – I find something compelling in both approaches and both critiques. I wish I knew if one was more right. But be one of them, commit to at least one of these middot, these qualities, and get someone to hold you accountable. If you’re an Akiva, get yourself an Akiva-guide and also a Ben Azzai to challenge you, and vice versa. Please please, I beg you here, please hold me accountable.

I would like to think that this week’s protests happened because we have all been living for weeks in a daily reality of being more attuned than usual to life and death. The germ that is killing is literally novel, that’s its very name, and we have been hiding because that’s what is necessary. The way George Floyd was killed – from that we have been hiding too long. We have been saving lives for months now, lives we know and lives of strangers we can’t see, all of a sudden we’ve been doing it, and at great personal discomfort and sacrifice. When it comes to black lives, why can’t we do the same.

Shabbat Shalom.

Post 3 After George Floyd's Killing

Post #3 – okay, more snide and angry, and still not the heart of the matter.

If we set the presidential bar at cynical, even I could do a better job than President Trump did last night:

1. Call George Floyd’s killing murder. Sure, that might make it impossible for there to be a fair trial anywhere in the U.S. but you’ve never been that concerned about the niceties of the legal process, so why start now.

2. Declare that you are ordering the Attorney General and the Department of Justice to set up a special unit right now to solve police brutality against African-Americans once and for all. You plan to be the president to do what no Democratic leader has ever succeeded in doing and you’re going to be the greatest protector of civil rights ever.

3. Co-opt the people you think are the “good protesters.” Don’t just give a litany of who all the bad ones are. Tell one of the many vivid stories of protestors protecting people or property. Your commanders surely told you that their job would be easier if the peaceful protestors had the upper hand on their own. Why not get the credit for making that happen?

4. Do some I-told-you-so. Say how the current protesters who are out in masks and respecting distance are just like the freedom-loving protesters against COVID-19 restrictions, and you are big supporter of everyone’s First Amendment rights. (That’s the Amendment right before the Second Amendment.)

5. Throw your opponents a bone. Mention that many of the violent protesters are actually using the past week to advance a pro-gun, anti-government agenda that has nothing to do with George Floyd. Call on them to clear the field and tell them “I alone can get that done”, so they should trust you or get ready to be put away for a very long time.

Presidential Speechmaking 101 involves telling stories of hope in the middle of a bad time. Bad transformed to good, that’s the arc. Sure, we see through that and it’s not enough. But it’s the formula you start with. Some even find it reassuring. The president has no ability in this area. Whenever he mentioned positive figures last night – a nurse, an African-American law enforcement “hero”, etc. – the sentence or thought always ended with disaster – “shot and killed”, “afraid to leave their homes.” Look through all his major speeches and this is the overall pattern. It’s all backward.

And that’s what scares me about the president. He doesn’t know what direction hope is in, even when constructing a sentence.

He doesn’t have the human emotions that go with telling those kind of narratives genuinely or even cynically. Which is just the starting point before you are anywhere near getting complex good things done. Why this is the case -- that’s for him and his loved ones to deal with if they so choose. The country is paying the price of having presidential power in such hands. That’s why I hold for dear life onto other leaders at all levels who are not like this, to get us through what I hope are the final months.