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After Pittsburgh: A Narrower Bridge, A Net Like Never Before

Here is my D'var Torah from Saturday, Nov. 3, 2018, the Shabbat after the killings at Tree of Life Congregation in Pittsburgh. You can read it or download it as a pdf file here.

It is so good to be here together this morning. I know that it is a great comfort to our friends, our sisters and brothers in Pittsburgh, to know that people are gathered in synagogues all over, thinking about them, mourning with them, and doing something to live in the legacy of the eleven people who were killed at Tree of Life Congregation, while they were doing what we are doing. I have been in touch with Jewish professional colleagues in Pittsburgh, and they are exhausted, and also amazing. It means a lot to them that we care and that we are here in our congregations this Shabbat.

We are drawn here this Shabbat, at a time when we need to reach beyond ourselves -- for the divine, for each other, and deep into ourselves. I know for me, having Shabbat waiting during a difficult week helps me find my footing -- knowing there will be a chance to take a breath, that precious words will be set up for me to sing with other people and say alone, that we will celebrate.  We are drawn to a Bat Mitzvah, so we can be inspired, and I want to acknowledge and thank Lexi and her parents, Matt and Kyle, for being Beth Abraham’s partners in this particular Shabbat which suddenly became different from what any of us anticipated.

I want to welcome you who have come for the occasion of Lexi’s Bat Mitzvah, and you who have come to be with us because all over America people have decided to join with the Jewish community, in solidarity and in defiance.

I hope all of you know that our synagogue leadership has been focused this week on taking care of you -- thinking about how you can be safe here, being available for you. We have had children and staff and members and guests here from first thing Sunday morning throughout the week. Many people have spent a lot of time going over security decisions and listening to anyone who has reached out and needed to talk on any level. I want to say a thank you to the Nashua Police Department for being so responsive to us from last Saturday onward, even anticipating our needs.

Last Saturday at the Tree of Life Congregation, eleven people were murdered and six were injured by a man who wanted to wipe out Jews, because he believes that we and the other people we stand by are a threat to white America.

And despite what he did, we have seen the unbelievable spirit of the Jewish neighborhood in Squirrel Hill, and the unstoppable force of mitzvah, even in the midst of horror and exhaustion.

The shomrim who stay with bodies before a Jewish burial who had to fulfill that responsibility at an active crime scene.The chevra kadisha groups who prepare bodies for burial, and the chevras from elsewhere who came to help, in case it was too much for the local people to bear to prepare friends whose bodies had been torn by bullets. The Jewish medical staff who treated and stabilized the gunman and even talked with him. Mitzvot are relentless.

I have had to give too many sermons at times like these. I have reread them all in the past few days. I don’t want to say the same thing again and again, with just the locations and details changed. I believe we are at a point of tremendous power and risk -- when we could tip into disillusionment, about anti-Semitism and white nationalism in this country -- or when we could help fuel a cascade in the other direction, the direction of tikkun. That would take some courage, and an ability to look hard into the darkness in new ways, but I believe the opportunity is there. And to Lexi, to you and to your classmates, I say that being Bat and Bar Mitzvah has never been more important, being a mitzvah person, and we need every single one of you to get to work with us.

I put on the study sheet a teaching from the Mishnah,the first book of Jewish law after the Torah, from about the year 200. Rabbi Elazar ben Azariah said: I am like a man of seventy years, and I did not achieve an understanding of why the Exodus from Egypt is said at night until Ben Zoma explained this verse from the Torah to me: “In order that you will remember the going out from Egypt all the days of your life” (Deuteronomy 16:3) -- “the days of your life” means the days; “all the days of your life” means the nights. But the Sages say: “the days of your life” means this world; “all the days of your life” means to bring the messianic days. [Mishnah Berachot 1:5]

If you have been to a Passover Seder, you might recognize this paragraph -- it’s one of the paragraphs you might gloss over with discussion or event skip. But this week the passage called out to me all of a sudden, the way Torah does when we really need it.

The Talmud says Rabbi Elazar wasn’t actually old when he taught this teaching -- he was eighteen. But looking out on his world one day, he suddenly felt like he was seventy.

As though there would not be enough time in his life to see the world he was dreaming of. As though he couldn’t escape the trauma of the persecutions of Jews before his lifetime. One day at the age of eighteen, all his hair suddenly turned gray.

Rabbi Elazar was thinking about how we recall the story of the Exodus from Egypt. It’s is the original story of anti-Semitism, the first violent attack on Jews as a group for being Jews, the first time someone gives a supposed “reason” for that. Rabbi Elazar had seen this story as a story about the day of liberation -- about the march of the Jews into freedom at high noon, with their hands held high. As a story about light -- of a mighty God whose outstretched arm could overpower any worldly oppression.

Ben Zoma taught him that it wouldn’t be enough to tell that story that way -- you have to face the story of the night as well. The Exodus is the power of God on the side of the hated -- but it is also a story about that hate. The worry that it is not actually gone but just something we ran away from, that will find its way back to us again.

I used to think that there were two kinds of Jews: those who were obsessed by the darkness, and those who could see light and be inspired by it. And I had no patience once upon a time, for the Jews who chose to look at the darkness so much. But as my own hairs are slowly graying, I think I have started to get what Rabbi Elazar learned from Ben Zoma.

When you are basking in the light of Jewish freedom, don’t pretend there is no darkness. And when you are in the darkness, as we have been this week, don’t close your eyes to lights that might in fact be growing.

Yesterday, the front page of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette had, across the top, in large Hebrew print the words יתגדל ויתקדש שמה רבה Yitgadal V’Yitkadash Sh’may Rabbah, the opening words of the Mourners’ Kaddish. And every single page of the paper’s desktop website had those words at the top. The business page, the sports page. Even the page with an article about the downtown Pittsburgh Christmas tree lighting. When has that ever happened?

Our U.S. Senator, Maggie Hassan, made phone calls this week to each one of the rabbis in New Hampshire personally. We are a minority in a small state, but Chuck Schumer and Dianne Feinstein can’t do what she did.

It wasn’t for a perfunctory conversation. We talked for some 15 minutes, and she asked if there was anything specific we needed. We talked together about how all the different levels of hate and animosity today do or don’t interact. She said that I should tell you that tens of thousands of Granite Staters are thinking about us and standing with us.

Some of the most remarkable things have happened when Jews were not even around. I’ve been carrying with me all week these notes that the Unitarian Universalist Church took time in their service last Sunday to write us, adult words and some scribbles and pictures from children even. This is just one example of all the support sent to me and to us this week.

And at Christ the King Lutheran Church in Nashua, something happened last Sunday, which was a special day in their calendar, the anniversary of the founding of Lutheranism, of the day Martin Luther pinned his theses on the church door.

Pastor Dave said to the congregation that they could not just celebrate all the wisdom and leadership of Luther --  they also had to mention Luther’s anti-Semitism, and to mention how Luther’s words were later used by the Nazis. They didn’t talk about this because he and I had spoken, which we haven’t, or because we were there, because none of us were.

This is people who don’t know that many Jews being told that they have to reckon with their own religious group’s responsibility in the history of anti-Semitism. Not during an educational program, or a joint Holocaust remembrance. When has that happened?

I have long said that we live in a time when Jews have more more allies than ever before. And this week we can see that we are standing in a new daylight, as Jews in this country. This is not the same as what has been before. Somehow, even in the dark, we need to see that.

And yet, Rabbi Elazar learns from Ben Zoma that it is foolish to say this unless we have the honesty to talk about the night and face it. Night represents anti-Semitism lurking where we didn’t see it coming and we don’t expect it. Night is where the factors that drive anti-Semitism and white nationalism are hard to sort out, where the relationships among them are murky.

I was a person who shut my eyes to extent of American anti-Semitism especially in its white supremacist form, for years. Last week was the anti-Semitism of hate and violence, but there is also an anti-Semitism and a white nationalism of ideas that sound, like the new Pharaoh’s words at the start of Exodus, kind of reasonable to enough people.

This predates the president, and I said before the election from this pulpit that if he lost, I feared that we would think we were out of the woods. He is not an anti-Semite personally; the white nationalists revile him for having Jews in his family and his inner circle and his cabinet. And he is in the next room over, so to speak, calling his political opposition people who have “launched an assault... on the safety of every single American,” as he said in Texas the week before the shooting. That’s talking about born Americans, not even outsiders. It’s not surprising if someone who hears that, and already wants to intimidate or harm someone in a minority group, is emboldened. Not when so many people who we wouldn’t call white supremacists hear this kind of thing and cheer enthusiastically. In the dark, we don’t know how exactly how all of that stirs together, but it does.

I know a lot of you are on the very narrow bridge between hope and disillusionment. This week the bridge seems even narrower, and it takes courage to keep walking. We are in an unstable situation. It takes strength and balance not to fall off. But we have a net below us like we have never had. I no longer believe it’s enough to stand pat, just bank the relationships we have and grow them with interest. Now we will have to take some risks. But the chance of reward has never been greater.

Some of us have to risk a venture into the darkness. We have to go where people misunderstand us, or invite people who misunderstand us or haven’t thought about us, to come and talk with us. Even people who already have biases or stereotypes about us. Tomorrow I have a piece in the Nashua Telegraph inviting people to talk to me, to arrange to come to the synagogue or to invite me to speak somewhere, and any question is on the table, no matter how potentially offensive.

And some of us have to take the final step of the Mishnah, the argument that the Sages make against Rabbi Elazar ben Azariah -- that these stories have to impel us toward messianic days.

I ask myself -- when communities and churches were attacked in other places, why have I and why have we not responded with the kind of concern and love that others have shown to us this week? Where were our songs, our flowers, our offers of food? And truthfully, have we even been there this way when Israelis have been victims of terror?

And I remind us: that as tenacious as anti-Semitism and white supremcism have been, they are at least easy to denounce. But doing so does nothing about even more tenacious problems of poverty, suffering, and injustice in our society. Those can’t be solved by humanizing the other -- that just gets us, barely, to the starting line.

I do not want to feel old and spent, before I understand all of this.

If I am going to be old about these things, I want to be old like one of our oldest members. Where is Shirley?

Shirley is our fourth oldest member -- born in Europe, a person who knows what that world was that she and her family had to leave. She is 94.

When we had our service on Monday evening, with about 100 people, what Shirley wanted to say into the microphone most of all was this: that in the first day, the Muslim community in Pittsburgh took the initiative to raise tens of thousands of dollars to help the Jewish community. This is the same Shirley, who feels every act of anti-Semitism in the world, and every small bigoted insult about Jews where in the complex where she lives, piercing her inside.

I called her over after the service and remarked on that -- that you Shirley contain in yourself the most finely tuned sensitivity and worry about our place in the world as Jews, and also the ability to see generosity and support and possibility in that same world.

Shirley can tell you that this is a difficult place to live, almost unbearable. But that is precisely where we need to be. That’s the message of the Mishnah about Rabbi Elazar ben Azariah, Ben Zoma, and the Sages. I say, let’s be old like our 94-year-old Shirley, and let’s be young like our newest mitzvah-people, like Lexi and all you B’not and B’nai Mitzvah. You young people already have a head start on these challenges of this world. Pull us with you back toward the idealism we need.

This week we have mourned, and we have looked at the darkness, but we can also tell a story of light, and even see to bringing our world toward messianic days. I will not let the gunman or the supremacists take my faith in America from me. I will be ever grateful for all of you here, for those who are with us, and for those who inspire us.

We will talk more and make plans. Anti-Semitism and white supremacism are violent, and they are largely built on words -- words that trick and deceive, words that bully, words on the web and words between people. We will fight it and we will defeat it with our own words -- words that love, words that encourage, words between people and even words on the web. Words that describe the real world and words that describe the world we dream of.

May God and may this gathering of ours bring some comfort to all those mourning those were killed in Pittsburgh, and may our lives make their memories a blessing.

Shabbat Shalom.

How to Use and Not Use Biblical Verses in Politics

This was my D'var Torah last Shabbat (June 16, 2018), in response to the back-and-forth between religious groups and Attorney General Jeff Sessions about what the Bible says about the policy of separating parents and children when families are suspected of crossing the U.S. border illegally.

One afternoon a young yeshiva bocher, a student immersed in the study of the tomes of the Sages, was on his break. He was wandering around the Bes Medrash, the library, going from aisle to aisle. Among all the tall and thick rabbinic treatises and commentaries, he came upon a book that was noticeably smaller than all the rest. He took it from the shelf and began paging through, and suddenly his face burst into a smile. The book was a Tanakh -- a Bible. The young yeshiva bocher took the book and sprinted to the study of the Rosh Yeshiva, the head of the yeshiva, and he screamed in excitement:

“Rebbe! You’ll never guess what I found! It’s a book full of quotations from the Talmud!”

This is often how the Bible is used -- it’s subordinate to something else. I’m poking fun at the world of traditional Jewish learning, but we see this too in politics, in political argument. I want to teach you two terms from the Talmud that I bet you’re going to want to start using -- and one is in Aramaic, so you will really sound like you’re in the know to boot. The terms are: מִדְרָשׁ midrash and אַסְמַכְתָא as’mach’ta.

Midrash is a word you may know -- it means inquiring into the meaning of words from Torah, digging into them, trying to figure out what the original words are saying as they apply to a situation today. As’mach’ta means, a prop. It’s the same root as a word you may know from the prayers, סוֹמֵךְ נוֹפְלִים somaych noflim, the one who holds up the fallen. As’mach’ta is when you don’t have a good argument, so you prop up your view with a verse from the Bible. Slapping a verse next to something for decoration. Or as’mach’ta is when you don’t really care whether people pay attention to your real argument -- but there’s a verse that’s related so you tack it on and figure people will pay attention to that.

In the Talmud, the rabbis often bring up biblical verses in the course of discussion, and they ask each other -- is that midrash or as’mach’ta? Is that your argument, are you really asking the verse what it says, or are you just trying to buy the power of a biblical verse without paying for it? The rabbis in the Talmud even have a way of rolling their eyes in writing when sniff out a weak as’mach’ta. You call that an argument? It’s just אַסְמַכְתָא בְּעַלְמָא as’mach’ta b’alma. That’s the yeshiva bocher, who finds a Bible in the house of study and thinks it’s just a book of things rabbis say to decorate an argument they are making.As I say, I’m really talking about the Bible and politics. When you hear the Bible quoted, when is it midrash, when is it really digging in for wisdom, for challenging the world, and when is it just as’mach’ta, a cheap trick to borrow some gravity and power and substance when it’s not really there?

This week we had a battle of the Bible verses, on the subject of immigration and in particular the policy of the United States at the borders of our country, to take children far away from their parents if they arrive illegally. On one side, the Attorney General of the United States, Jeff Sessions -- and on the other one side, well..... the Southern Baptist Convention and the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, and a whole bunch of others of us.

This week, at their national convention, the Southern Baptists passed, as they have before, a resolution on immigration reform including the principle of family unity, protesting at about the border. They gave a strong affirmation of the value and dignity of immigrants, making a whether Christian or not, and they issued a call to political leaders and clergy to speak and take action.

They quoted Genesis, Leviticus, and the prophets Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and Zechariah, and also the Christian Bible of course.

Attorney General Sessions gave a speech this week in direct response to the Southern Baptists. We should always read the whole speech before reacting, check what’s in the press, make sure they aren’t quoting out of context. His whole speech is in fact on the Department of Justice website already. This is some of what he said, and while it’s not the whole thing I’m not omitting any words in the middle.

“Let me take an aside to discuss concerns raised by our church friends about separating families.Many of the criticisms raised in recent days are not fair or logical and some are contrary to law.

“First- illegal entry into the United States is a crime—as it should be. Persons who violate the law of our nation are subject to prosecution. I would cite you to the Apostle Paul and his clear and wise command in Romans 13, to obey the laws of the government because God has ordained them for the purpose of order.

“Orderly and lawful processes are good in themselves and protect the weak and lawful.

“Our policies that can result in short term separation of families is not unusual or unjustified. American citizens that are jailed do not take their children to jail with them....”

The attorney general quoted from an epistle of Paul in the Christian Scriptures, but he could have just as easily cited from chapter 29 of Jeremiah, the same Jeremiah the Baptists quoted.

Bible and Bible. I know, I hope, that we’re agreed about the cruelty of this policy; I hope there is one vision here you find more compelling, for a whole lot of reasons. But this is a biblical standoff, and what do we do with that? If one side has their verses and one side has theirs, what do we mean when we say that one side is right, other than -- it’s what I already think, so that’s what right? Is the Bible really adding anything here? It’s very important to me that your response to this isn’t: anyone can just find a verse for anything.I want to give you a way to think about this, and it includes a challenge even if you know this week who you agree with. It’s not about who has the best interpretation of a specific biblical verse. I think the most important way to think about this battle of the Bible verses is: midrash vs. as’mach’ta. Who is really searching the meaning of the verse, and who is just propping up their view with a shiny ornament.

I think of the Bible like the equalizer on a stereo or amp, in your living room or on the stage of an arena. On a good stereo, a good amp there is a series of dials -- from deep bass to high treble -- and each one corresponds to a different part of the sound, and you can adjust each one of them separately. You can silence one completely, or crank it up pretty high.

And the Bible is like that. Every verse in the Bible is like one of the dials on the amplifier of the Divine Voice. The question is: how much are you cranking up the level on each dial? When you are presented with a question of today, a question of policy, what does your whole equalizer look like?

There is one dial that should always be cranked up; it’s the fundamental bass all the time. It’s in Genesis 1, the verse that reads: ‘God created the human being in God’s image.” וַיִבְרָא אֱ-לֹהִים אֶת הָאָדָם בְּצַלְמוֹ Vayiv’ra Elohim et ha-adam b’tzalmo. When it comes to that dial, to paraphrase Spinal Tap -- ours goes to 11, all the time. If someone is quoting the Bible about a public policy issue and they don’t have that dial cranked up to the maximum -- you should stop listening. You know there is no midrash there, only as’mach’ta.

But after that, every verse has a range of settings that could be appropriate. Even the ones like what the Attorney General quoted. As long as you are thinking about how to set the dials, you are doing midrash -- you are inquiring into the sound of each verse, the setting of each dial. How that verse or that combination of verses, mixed in different ways, vibrates, penetrates your thoughts and grabs your emotions, stimulates your nerves and flexes your muscles into action. It should make you tremble, or move you to a joyful noise.

These past three years in particular, I have been thinking about all kinds of verses relevant to issues of immigration. About ahavat ha-ger, loving the stranger, and its relationship to v’ahavta l’rayacha kamocha, loving the neighbor. The relationship between loving the stranger and not oppressing the stranger, which in different verses are about economics, power, or the words we use. These verse don’t all say the same thing. How high should each one be set? And what about the kinds of verses like the one the Attorney General quoted?

If you never mess with the dials, if you set them once upon a time and never change them, then I don’t care what your view is, you are doing as’mach’ta -- the Torah is just a prop. The verse isn’t really for meaning or argument, it’s not revelation, it’s just plastic decoration.

There are verses that should have a maximum setting, and some that should have a minimum. To me, when it comes to the Bible and public affairs, we always have to remember that every word of the Torah was revealed in opposition to the powers of the world, to people emerging from slavery or to prophets calling kings and leaders to account. So Attorney General Sessions has his settings wrong, in the sense that his verse about orderly government can be more than zero, but it is set too high, and his image of God setting is far too low. And you can tell that for him it’s just as’mach’ta, and not midrash. He doesn’t hear the other verses at all. And even the verses he cites aren’t really where he learned his views about government and law. They are just for effect; the verses aren’t making him tremble.

At the same time, you can’t set your levels just once, to vibrate with one political party or movement. There is “love the stranger”, and there is a minimum that that verse should never be set below. But there are other dials too -- and any party or movement or leader who doesn’t allow you to fiddle with the levels, becomes a power that also has to be critized and corrected. If you zero out every dial but one, if you hear only one verse or just a few verses, and that’s all you want or all you get coming out of your stereo -- even if it’s Tzelem Elohim, the image of God -- then you’ll stop trembling, you won’t be moved to a joyful shout.  Your sound will be tinny, not rich and lush, and that is not midrash. Our political friends too can make our verses no longer resonate, if they turn off all the other dials. Just because we like it doesn’t mean this isn’t also using the Bible as as’mach’ta, a prop, a talisman.

There is right or wrong about the separation of families at the border -- and it’s wrong. But when it comes to how the Bible speaks to that, what I’m listening for is right or wrong and also more -- it’s midrash or as'mach'ta. I believe the religious folks this week are more right than the Attorney General, and partly it’s because they have a richer sound. They bothered to set a bunch of dials, and the Attorney General sounds like he set only one, and he did it once and has never gone back. They did midrash, and he just did as’mach’ta.

Let’s not any of us settle for biblical verses as as’mach’ta, even when we are surely right. We must never get in a position where the citation of a verse from the Bible is ho-hum. The Bible might be the smallest book on the shelf when it comes to public policy -- but it should pulse in a way no other resource does. It should not just inform our policies, but stretch our humanity. When you think you have the truth, that’s when you should check the levels every time, to make sure they are right each time you listen, each time you perform the sounds. That’s what will make the verses of Bible matter. Especially when we’re right about an issue that affects lives, life and death -- especially then, we as Jews, as religious people, should be the ones teaching verses from the Bible as midrash -- making the sound of justice better, sweeter, edgier, richer, so that the voice of the living God vibrates like a revelation, penetrating thoughts and grabbing emotions, stimulating nerves and flexing muscles into action.

 

Shabbat Shalom.

 

How to Use and Not Use Biblical Verses in Politics

This was my D'var Torah last Shabbat (June 16, 2018), in response to the back-and-forth between religious groups and Attorney General Jeff Sessions about what the Bible says about the policy of separating parents and children when families are suspected of crossing the U.S. border illegally.

One afternoon a young yeshiva bocher, a student immersed in the study of the tomes of the Sages, was on his break. He was wandering around the Bes Medrash, the library, going from aisle to aisle. Among all the tall and thick rabbinic treatises and commentaries, he came upon a book that was noticeably smaller than all the rest. He took it from the shelf and began paging through, and suddenly his face burst into a smile. The book was a Tanakh -- a Bible. The young yeshiva bocher took the book and sprinted to the study of the Rosh Yeshiva, the head of the yeshiva, and he screamed in excitement:

“Rebbe! You’ll never guess what I found! It’s a book full of quotations from the Talmud!”

This is often how the Bible is used -- it’s subordinate to something else. I’m poking fun at the world of traditional Jewish learning, but we see this too in politics, in political argument. I want to teach you two terms from the Talmud that I bet you’re going to want to start using -- and one is in Aramaic, so you will really sound like you’re in the know to boot. The terms are: מִדְרָשׁ midrash and אַסְמַכְתָא as’mach’ta.

Midrash is a word you may know -- it means inquiring into the meaning of words from Torah, digging into them, trying to figure out what the original words are saying as they apply to a situation today. As’mach’ta means, a prop. It’s the same root as a word you may know from the prayers, סוֹמֵךְ נוֹפְלִים somaych noflim, the one who holds up the fallen. As’mach’ta is when you don’t have a good argument, so you prop up your view with a verse from the Bible. Slapping a verse next to something for decoration. Or as’mach’ta is when you don’t really care whether people pay attention to your real argument -- but there’s a verse that’s related so you tack it on and figure people will pay attention to that.

In the Talmud, the rabbis often bring up biblical verses in the course of discussion, and they ask each other -- is that midrash or as’mach’ta? Is that your argument, are you really asking the verse what it says, or are you just trying to buy the power of a biblical verse without paying for it? The rabbis in the Talmud even have a way of rolling their eyes in writing when sniff out a weak as’mach’ta. You call that an argument? It’s just אַסְמַכְתָא בְּעַלְמָא as’mach’ta b’alma. That’s the yeshiva bocher, who finds a Bible in the house of study and thinks it’s just a book of things rabbis say to decorate an argument they are making.As I say, I’m really talking about the Bible and politics. When you hear the Bible quoted, when is it midrash, when is it really digging in for wisdom, for challenging the world, and when is it just as’mach’ta, a cheap trick to borrow some gravity and power and substance when it’s not really there?

This week we had a battle of the Bible verses, on the subject of immigration and in particular the policy of the United States at the borders of our country, to take children far away from their parents if they arrive illegally. On one side, the Attorney General of the United States, Jeff Sessions -- and on the other one side, well..... the Southern Baptist Convention and the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, and a whole bunch of others of us.

This week, at their national convention, the Southern Baptists passed, as they have before, a resolution on immigration reform including the principle of family unity, protesting at about the border. They gave a strong affirmation of the value and dignity of immigrants, making a whether Christian or not, and they issued a call to political leaders and clergy to speak and take action.

They quoted Genesis, Leviticus, and the prophets Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and Zechariah, and also the Christian Bible of course.

Attorney General Sessions gave a speech this week in direct response to the Southern Baptists. We should always read the whole speech before reacting, check what’s in the press, make sure they aren’t quoting out of context. His whole speech is in fact on the Department of Justice website already. This is some of what he said, and while it’s not the whole thing I’m not omitting any words in the middle.

“Let me take an aside to discuss concerns raised by our church friends about separating families.Many of the criticisms raised in recent days are not fair or logical and some are contrary to law.

“First- illegal entry into the United States is a crime—as it should be. Persons who violate the law of our nation are subject to prosecution. I would cite you to the Apostle Paul and his clear and wise command in Romans 13, to obey the laws of the government because God has ordained them for the purpose of order.

“Orderly and lawful processes are good in themselves and protect the weak and lawful.

“Our policies that can result in short term separation of families is not unusual or unjustified. American citizens that are jailed do not take their children to jail with them....”

The attorney general quoted from an epistle of Paul in the Christian Scriptures, but he could have just as easily cited from chapter 29 of Jeremiah, the same Jeremiah the Baptists quoted.

Bible and Bible. I know, I hope, that we’re agreed about the cruelty of this policy; I hope there is one vision here you find more compelling, for a whole lot of reasons. But this is a biblical standoff, and what do we do with that? If one side has their verses and one side has theirs, what do we mean when we say that one side is right, other than -- it’s what I already think, so that’s what right? Is the Bible really adding anything here? It’s very important to me that your response to this isn’t: anyone can just find a verse for anything.I want to give you a way to think about this, and it includes a challenge even if you know this week who you agree with. It’s not about who has the best interpretation of a specific biblical verse. I think the most important way to think about this battle of the Bible verses is: midrash vs. as’mach’ta. Who is really searching the meaning of the verse, and who is just propping up their view with a shiny ornament.

I think of the Bible like the equalizer on a stereo or amp, in your living room or on the stage of an arena. On a good stereo, a good amp there is a series of dials -- from deep bass to high treble -- and each one corresponds to a different part of the sound, and you can adjust each one of them separately. You can silence one completely, or crank it up pretty high.

And the Bible is like that. Every verse in the Bible is like one of the dials on the amplifier of the Divine Voice. The question is: how much are you cranking up the level on each dial? When you are presented with a question of today, a question of policy, what does your whole equalizer look like?

There is one dial that should always be cranked up; it’s the fundamental bass all the time. It’s in Genesis 1, the verse that reads: ‘God created the human being in God’s image.” וַיִבְרָא אֱ-לֹהִים אֶת הָאָדָם בְּצַלְמוֹ Vayiv’ra Elohim et ha-adam b’tzalmo. When it comes to that dial, to paraphrase Spinal Tap -- ours goes to 11, all the time. If someone is quoting the Bible about a public policy issue and they don’t have that dial cranked up to the maximum -- you should stop listening. You know there is no midrash there, only as’mach’ta.

But after that, every verse has a range of settings that could be appropriate. Even the ones like what the Attorney General quoted. As long as you are thinking about how to set the dials, you are doing midrash -- you are inquiring into the sound of each verse, the setting of each dial. How that verse or that combination of verses, mixed in different ways, vibrates, penetrates your thoughts and grabs your emotions, stimulates your nerves and flexes your muscles into action. It should make you tremble, or move you to a joyful noise.

These past three years in particular, I have been thinking about all kinds of verses relevant to issues of immigration. About ahavat ha-ger, loving the stranger, and its relationship to v’ahavta l’rayacha kamocha, loving the neighbor. The relationship between loving the stranger and not oppressing the stranger, which in different verses are about economics, power, or the words we use. These verse don’t all say the same thing. How high should each one be set? And what about the kinds of verses like the one the Attorney General quoted?

If you never mess with the dials, if you set them once upon a time and never change them, then I don’t care what your view is, you are doing as’mach’ta -- the Torah is just a prop. The verse isn’t really for meaning or argument, it’s not revelation, it’s just plastic decoration.

There are verses that should have a maximum setting, and some that should have a minimum. To me, when it comes to the Bible and public affairs, we always have to remember that every word of the Torah was revealed in opposition to the powers of the world, to people emerging from slavery or to prophets calling kings and leaders to account. So Attorney General Sessions has his settings wrong, in the sense that his verse about orderly government can be more than zero, but it is set too high, and his image of God setting is far too low. And you can tell that for him it’s just as’mach’ta, and not midrash. He doesn’t hear the other verses at all. And even the verses he cites aren’t really where he learned his views about government and law. They are just for effect; the verses aren’t making him tremble.

At the same time, you can’t set your levels just once, to vibrate with one political party or movement. There is “love the stranger”, and there is a minimum that that verse should never be set below. But there are other dials too -- and any party or movement or leader who doesn’t allow you to fiddle with the levels, becomes a power that also has to be critized and corrected. If you zero out every dial but one, if you hear only one verse or just a few verses, and that’s all you want or all you get coming out of your stereo -- even if it’s Tzelem Elohim, the image of God -- then you’ll stop trembling, you won’t be moved to a joyful shout.  Your sound will be tinny, not rich and lush, and that is not midrash. Our political friends too can make our verses no longer resonate, if they turn off all the other dials. Just because we like it doesn’t mean this isn’t also using the Bible as as’mach’ta, a prop, a talisman.

There is right or wrong about the separation of families at the border -- and it’s wrong. But when it comes to how the Bible speaks to that, what I’m listening for is right or wrong and also more -- it’s midrash or as'mach'ta. I believe the religious folks this week are more right than the Attorney General, and partly it’s because they have a richer sound. They bothered to set a bunch of dials, and the Attorney General sounds like he set only one, and he did it once and has never gone back. They did midrash, and he just did as’mach’ta.

Let’s not any of us settle for biblical verses as as’mach’ta, even when we are surely right. We must never get in a position where the citation of a verse from the Bible is ho-hum. The Bible might be the smallest book on the shelf when it comes to public policy -- but it should pulse in a way no other resource does. It should not just inform our policies, but stretch our humanity. When you think you have the truth, that’s when you should check the levels every time, to make sure they are right each time you listen, each time you perform the sounds. That’s what will make the verses of Bible matter. Especially when we’re right about an issue that affects lives, life and death -- especially then, we as Jews, as religious people, should be the ones teaching verses from the Bible as midrash -- making the sound of justice better, sweeter, edgier, richer, so that the voice of the living God vibrates like a revelation, penetrating thoughts and grabbing emotions, stimulating nerves and flexing muscles into action.

 

Shabbat Shalom.

 

How to Use and Not Use Biblical Verses in Politics

This was my D'var Torah last Shabbat (June 16, 2018), in response to the back-and-forth between religious groups and Attorney General Jeff Sessions about what the Bible says about the policy of separating parents and children when families are suspected of crossing the U.S. border illegally.

One afternoon a young yeshiva bocher, a student immersed in the study of the tomes of the Sages, was on his break. He was wandering around the Bes Medrash, the library, going from aisle to aisle. Among all the tall and thick rabbinic treatises and commentaries, he came upon a book that was noticeably smaller than all the rest. He took it from the shelf and began paging through, and suddenly his face burst into a smile. The book was a Tanakh -- a Bible. The young yeshiva bocher took the book and sprinted to the study of the Rosh Yeshiva, the head of the yeshiva, and he screamed in excitement:

“Rebbe! You’ll never guess what I found! It’s a book full of quotations from the Talmud!”

This is often how the Bible is used -- it’s subordinate to something else. I’m poking fun at the world of traditional Jewish learning, but we see this too in politics, in political argument. I want to teach you two terms from the Talmud that I bet you’re going to want to start using -- and one is in Aramaic, so you will really sound like you’re in the know to boot. The terms are: מִדְרָשׁ midrash and אַסְמַכְתָא as’mach’ta.

Midrash is a word you may know -- it means inquiring into the meaning of words from Torah, digging into them, trying to figure out what the original words are saying as they apply to a situation today. As’mach’ta means, a prop. It’s the same root as a word you may know from the prayers, סוֹמֵךְ נוֹפְלִים somaych noflim, the one who holds up the fallen. As’mach’ta is when you don’t have a good argument, so you prop up your view with a verse from the Bible. Slapping a verse next to something for decoration. Or as’mach’ta is when you don’t really care whether people pay attention to your real argument -- but there’s a verse that’s related so you tack it on and figure people will pay attention to that.

In the Talmud, the rabbis often bring up biblical verses in the course of discussion, and they ask each other -- is that midrash or as’mach’ta? Is that your argument, are you really asking the verse what it says, or are you just trying to buy the power of a biblical verse without paying for it? The rabbis in the Talmud even have a way of rolling their eyes in writing when sniff out a weak as’mach’ta. You call that an argument? It’s just אַסְמַכְתָא בְּעַלְמָא as’mach’ta b’alma. That’s the yeshiva bocher, who finds a Bible in the house of study and thinks it’s just a book of things rabbis say to decorate an argument they are making.As I say, I’m really talking about the Bible and politics. When you hear the Bible quoted, when is it midrash, when is it really digging in for wisdom, for challenging the world, and when is it just as’mach’ta, a cheap trick to borrow some gravity and power and substance when it’s not really there?

This week we had a battle of the Bible verses, on the subject of immigration and in particular the policy of the United States at the borders of our country, to take children far away from their parents if they arrive illegally. On one side, the Attorney General of the United States, Jeff Sessions -- and on the other one side, well..... the Southern Baptist Convention and the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, and a whole bunch of others of us.

This week, at their national convention, the Southern Baptists passed, as they have before, a resolution on immigration reform including the principle of family unity, protesting at about the border. They gave a strong affirmation of the value and dignity of immigrants, making a whether Christian or not, and they issued a call to political leaders and clergy to speak and take action.

They quoted Genesis, Leviticus, and the prophets Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and Zechariah, and also the Christian Bible of course.

Attorney General Sessions gave a speech this week in direct response to the Southern Baptists. We should always read the whole speech before reacting, check what’s in the press, make sure they aren’t quoting out of context. His whole speech is in fact on the Department of Justice website already. This is some of what he said, and while it’s not the whole thing I’m not omitting any words in the middle.

“Let me take an aside to discuss concerns raised by our church friends about separating families.Many of the criticisms raised in recent days are not fair or logical and some are contrary to law.

“First- illegal entry into the United States is a crime—as it should be. Persons who violate the law of our nation are subject to prosecution. I would cite you to the Apostle Paul and his clear and wise command in Romans 13, to obey the laws of the government because God has ordained them for the purpose of order.

“Orderly and lawful processes are good in themselves and protect the weak and lawful.

“Our policies that can result in short term separation of families is not unusual or unjustified. American citizens that are jailed do not take their children to jail with them....”

The attorney general quoted from an epistle of Paul in the Christian Scriptures, but he could have just as easily cited from chapter 29 of Jeremiah, the same Jeremiah the Baptists quoted.

Bible and Bible. I know, I hope, that we’re agreed about the cruelty of this policy; I hope there is one vision here you find more compelling, for a whole lot of reasons. But this is a biblical standoff, and what do we do with that? If one side has their verses and one side has theirs, what do we mean when we say that one side is right, other than -- it’s what I already think, so that’s what right? Is the Bible really adding anything here? It’s very important to me that your response to this isn’t: anyone can just find a verse for anything.I want to give you a way to think about this, and it includes a challenge even if you know this week who you agree with. It’s not about who has the best interpretation of a specific biblical verse. I think the most important way to think about this battle of the Bible verses is: midrash vs. as’mach’ta. Who is really searching the meaning of the verse, and who is just propping up their view with a shiny ornament.

I think of the Bible like the equalizer on a stereo or amp, in your living room or on the stage of an arena. On a good stereo, a good amp there is a series of dials -- from deep bass to high treble -- and each one corresponds to a different part of the sound, and you can adjust each one of them separately. You can silence one completely, or crank it up pretty high.

And the Bible is like that. Every verse in the Bible is like one of the dials on the amplifier of the Divine Voice. The question is: how much are you cranking up the level on each dial? When you are presented with a question of today, a question of policy, what does your whole equalizer look like?

There is one dial that should always be cranked up; it’s the fundamental bass all the time. It’s in Genesis 1, the verse that reads: ‘God created the human being in God’s image.” וַיִבְרָא אֱ-לֹהִים אֶת הָאָדָם בְּצַלְמוֹ Vayiv’ra Elohim et ha-adam b’tzalmo. When it comes to that dial, to paraphrase Spinal Tap -- ours goes to 11, all the time. If someone is quoting the Bible about a public policy issue and they don’t have that dial cranked up to the maximum -- you should stop listening. You know there is no midrash there, only as’mach’ta.

But after that, every verse has a range of settings that could be appropriate. Even the ones like what the Attorney General quoted. As long as you are thinking about how to set the dials, you are doing midrash -- you are inquiring into the sound of each verse, the setting of each dial. How that verse or that combination of verses, mixed in different ways, vibrates, penetrates your thoughts and grabs your emotions, stimulates your nerves and flexes your muscles into action. It should make you tremble, or move you to a joyful noise.

These past three years in particular, I have been thinking about all kinds of verses relevant to issues of immigration. About ahavat ha-ger, loving the stranger, and its relationship to v’ahavta l’rayacha kamocha, loving the neighbor. The relationship between loving the stranger and not oppressing the stranger, which in different verses are about economics, power, or the words we use. These verse don’t all say the same thing. How high should each one be set? And what about the kinds of verses like the one the Attorney General quoted?

If you never mess with the dials, if you set them once upon a time and never change them, then I don’t care what your view is, you are doing as’mach’ta -- the Torah is just a prop. The verse isn’t really for meaning or argument, it’s not revelation, it’s just plastic decoration.

There are verses that should have a maximum setting, and some that should have a minimum. To me, when it comes to the Bible and public affairs, we always have to remember that every word of the Torah was revealed in opposition to the powers of the world, to people emerging from slavery or to prophets calling kings and leaders to account. So Attorney General Sessions has his settings wrong, in the sense that his verse about orderly government can be more than zero, but it is set too high, and his image of God setting is far too low. And you can tell that for him it’s just as’mach’ta, and not midrash. He doesn’t hear the other verses at all. And even the verses he cites aren’t really where he learned his views about government and law. They are just for effect; the verses aren’t making him tremble.

At the same time, you can’t set your levels just once, to vibrate with one political party or movement. There is “love the stranger”, and there is a minimum that that verse should never be set below. But there are other dials too -- and any party or movement or leader who doesn’t allow you to fiddle with the levels, becomes a power that also has to be critized and corrected. If you zero out every dial but one, if you hear only one verse or just a few verses, and that’s all you want or all you get coming out of your stereo -- even if it’s Tzelem Elohim, the image of God -- then you’ll stop trembling, you won’t be moved to a joyful shout.  Your sound will be tinny, not rich and lush, and that is not midrash. Our political friends too can make our verses no longer resonate, if they turn off all the other dials. Just because we like it doesn’t mean this isn’t also using the Bible as as’mach’ta, a prop, a talisman.

There is right or wrong about the separation of families at the border -- and it’s wrong. But when it comes to how the Bible speaks to that, what I’m listening for is right or wrong and also more -- it’s midrash or as'mach'ta. I believe the religious folks this week are more right than the Attorney General, and partly it’s because they have a richer sound. They bothered to set a bunch of dials, and the Attorney General sounds like he set only one, and he did it once and has never gone back. They did midrash, and he just did as’mach’ta.

Let’s not any of us settle for biblical verses as as’mach’ta, even when we are surely right. We must never get in a position where the citation of a verse from the Bible is ho-hum. The Bible might be the smallest book on the shelf when it comes to public policy -- but it should pulse in a way no other resource does. It should not just inform our policies, but stretch our humanity. When you think you have the truth, that’s when you should check the levels every time, to make sure they are right each time you listen, each time you perform the sounds. That’s what will make the verses of Bible matter. Especially when we’re right about an issue that affects lives, life and death -- especially then, we as Jews, as religious people, should be the ones teaching verses from the Bible as midrash -- making the sound of justice better, sweeter, edgier, richer, so that the voice of the living God vibrates like a revelation, penetrating thoughts and grabbing emotions, stimulating nerves and flexing muscles into action.

 

Shabbat Shalom.

 

Reverend King and the Rabbis -- Fifty Years Later

My D'var Torah of April 7, 2018:

Fifty years ago last month, ten days before he was assassinated, Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., appeared before the national convention of the Rabbinical Assembly, the annual gathering of Conservative rabbis. It turned out to be Rev. King’s last interview. He was greeted, for the first time in his life he said, by the singing of “We Shall Overcome” in Hebrew -- Anu nitgaber. Deep in my heart, I do believe -- the rabbis sang: Ani ma’amin be’emunah shlaymah, nitgaber b’vo hayom.

Rev. King was introduced by Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel. Indeed, he was supposed to be just a few weeks later at Heschel’s house for the Seder. Questions had been gathered from the convention, and they were presented to Rev. King by Rabbi Everett Gendler, who had been the catalyst for Heschel’s own now-famous participation in the Selma march five years earlier. Listen to what the questions were about:

• the president of the United States
• extremist vs. more moderate approaches to social change, and which do Blacks support on the whole
• what integration really would look like, politically and economically
• the relationship between racism and poverty
• anti-Semitism and anti-Israel rhetoric in the Black community
• and finally -- what one thing would Rev. King most want the rabbis and their communities to do right now, beyond what they called “simple tutoring and palliative efforts”

Fifty years after Rev. King was taken from us, and we are still asking the same questions.

I don’t think that in and of itself means that we are stuck in the same place, that we have not moved in fifty years. As the arc of history moves toward justice, in fits and starts and slides backward, there are always certain running themes, questions of values and basic truths about society and ethics, and we should keep asking them, return to them. That’s what our weekly Shabbat gatherings are for -- to figure out the timeless questions beneath the news of the week, so we can ask them and apply some answers in the week to come.

But there is no question that a great leader and a great religious teacher was stolen from us in Memphis fifty years ago, at the age of 39. I call him Rev. King and not Dr. King because he was a teacher about the prophets and the ethics of the Bible to Jews as well as Christians. His core teachings are important to share, to label and present on many occasions. They have depth and they have significance because he was not only steeped in faith, steeped in the prophets, but also steeped in the detail work of a movement and of politics. So Rev. King’s Torah is a kind of steel sharpened and polished not like the Talmud envisions by argument among scholars, but by the test of the world and its Pharaohs.

The Rev. King who spoke to the Rabbinical Assembly fifty years ago was sober and somber, more so than the King who spoke at the Lincoln Memorial so famously. Where 1963 was a year of protest and demonstrations, organized by a pretty united civil rights leadership -- 1968 was a year with violence and riots, controlled by factions or by no one. There was no talk of dreams before the Rabbinical Assembly that day; the goal was harder to see in a single focus. But the enduring truth of the man and the consistency of his teachings were still there, and I want to tell you what we should be learning right now from that Rev. King.

There was a quote from the prophets that he frequently invoked, from the book of Amos: “Let justice roll down like water, and righteousness like a mighty stream” (5:34). It’s not just beautiful poetry, or just one of any number of exhortations to justice and righteousness in the Bible.

To the ancient Israelites and their prophets, water could be one of two things. It could be rain, scarce and inconsistent, whose every drop had to be caught and channeled, or gathered in cisterns, in a hard fight against nature. Or it could be a never-stopping river, fed from the mountains or from deep within the earth; or the waves of the vast sea -- the most natural and easy and dependable thing in the world.

Some people believe that justice is against human nature and the nature of society. Plenty of people and plenty of thinkers. Rev. King believed that justice and righteousness were built into the world, that in the nature of things they simply flow and gush as simply as gravity, rush into every corner to give it life. That’s a proclamation of faith. That’s not a description of a reality -- it was the opposite of the reality he was fighting against. But Rev King’s fundamental lesson was that justice simply is the true nature of the world, no matter what we see. It takes a deep faith to hold onto that, it took a deep faith for him to hold onto that despite all he had experienced and seen.

And these same words of Amos were also his view of power -- that there is a natural power of justice that cannot be matched by any opponent or any earthly power.

This verse, in fact, comes at the end of a passage in which Amos describes the hard work that oppressors have to do, the labor they have to go through to twist justice, to feast on bribes, to look away from the poor and drive them out from their communities. And the hard work that it takes to present yourself as religious before God, bringing sacrifices and organizing celebrations, when you are the author of so much injustice. Amos is saying: this is unnatural. The power it takes to do these things is a wearying power, a deadening power, a power that spends itself and takes us away from each other and away from the divine.

“Let justice roll down like water, and righteousness like a mighty stream.” Rev. King was teaching us about power. First of all, we need to think in terms of power, of acting powerfully and creating real power, because righteousness needs to feel and to be experienced like a mighty stream. Power is not a dirty word. He asked us to believe in the power available to those who will be just and link arms together, to roll ahead and stream forward mightily.

In front of the rabbis that day, Rev. King talked about the upcoming Poor People’s March, and talked about power:

I can’t see the answer in riots. On the other hand, I can’t see the answer in tender supplications for justice. I see the answer in an alternative to both of these, and that is militant non-violence that is massive enough, that is attention-getting enough to dramatize the problems, that will be as attention-getting as a riot... And this is what we hope to do in Washington through our movement.

And he pointed out to the rabbis their power, the prophetic power of their pulpits:

...the religious community, being the chief moral guardian of the over-all community should really take the primary responsibility in dealing with this problem of racism, which is largely attitudinal.

It is time for us to claim this power that we have, as religious leaders and religious people. This should be the easiest kind of power, the power of our speech and the clarity of words that distinguish what it just from what is unjust.

In front of the rabbis, Rev. King was in one of the toughest times of his life and his work. He was embattled within his community, and it was an angry time and a fearful time. And Rev. King can teach us something about anger and fear. And I think again that it was the prophet Amos that he was drawing from, because Amos was at times an angry prophet.

Rev. King taught and spoke in a way that addressed power, anger and fear from the vantage point of faith, and particularly the vantage point of love.

Anger on its own is destructive and divisive, and violent. Anger with love is simply a station on the path to jsutice. Anger with love, Rev. King taught by his words and his actions, anger with love is indignation. That becomes fuel for righteousness and for service. And somewhere along that way, anger is transformed even into joy and into song. And then comes another phase of anger, but it is again just a station, through love, on the way to righteousness and service.

The prophet Amos began in fear -- he compared himself to someone reacting to the roar of a nearby lion. But he transformed that into a message about the cleansing waters of justice, and into a message of love, challenging love.

In front of the rabbis, Rev. King talked about anger unmoored from faith and love in both the Nixon campaign and the Black Power leadership. Today we see of course that same kind of anger and fear unmoored from any faith and any love, in the president and the destructive part of his following, and in too many leaders of the protest movements as well.

We need to look at our own anger and fear, and channel it back through faith, into love and commitment and service.

Justice, power, fear, anger -- Rev. King’s teachings about all of these are a roadmap we need for today. We need first of all to see the justice issues behind the suffering of people in our country, in our city and region. To say it straight and simple -- a city with pockets of affluence and pockets of poverty like ours is not a just city.

We need to believe, even so,that justice is how God’s creation is built, that it is the nature of justice to flow like a mighty stream.

When we are angry at those who deny the possibility of a just society, or who argue that the steps of change are not realistic, we need to transform that anger into love and service to those who are suffering.

And we need to believe that success will come from power rooted in nonviolence, in true words magnified by prophetic voices and mass presence and mass action -- the truest real power in the world.

Deep in my heart, I do believe . אֲנִי מַאֲמִין בֶּאֱמוּנָה שְׁלֵמָה  Ani ma’amin be-emunah shlaymah. There is so much yet to do, and so much yet that we can do, to repair and heal our society. We were privileged, as Jews and as rabbis, to be partners so often with Rev. King,  and to have him speak directly to us. May we continue to learn from him, zichrono livracha, that his memory may bless us and through us bless many others.

Shabbat Shalom and Chag Sameach!

Pesach and Who We Are

My Temple Beth Abraham bulletin column before Pesach in 2015, still spot on!

Why do we care about what's in the past?  Why do beginnings interests us, whether it's the origins of the universe or the first lines of a book?We look to the beginning to give us the essence of the whole.  Origin stories are about identity and values.  Yetziat Mitzrayim, the Exodus from Egypt, is the story of the origin of the Jewish nation.  And it doesn't disappoint.

We talk about being in Egypt – because who were are, are people who know how important a home is, and that you don't take that for granted.  We talk about being slaves – because we are defined by our identification with people who are oppressed and not free.

We talk about God fighting on our behalf against Pharaoh – because we were the lowest on the ladder, worth nothing, yet we were designated to carry a message of hope and possibility into the world.

When the world looks at the Jewish people, it looks in the mirror.  Our story reveals that there is Pharaoh in the world, and there is God.  Our origin is testament to the idea that the Mishnah teaches about the story of Pesach.  Mat'chil big'nut um'sayaym bish'vach – start with shame and end with glory.  On the road from Egypt to Mt. Sinai, through the desert toward Israel, we taught the world that no people and no person is too broken to be a vessel for divine wisdom and compassion.

That's all right there, at the start of Jewish history.  Almost everything else is commentary.  The stories we tell on Pesach are the seed, the Big Bang, the constitutional convention for the Jewish people and Judaism itself.

At our Seders, we talk about this and act it out.  For the rest of the week, we ingest it and digest it.

For a lot of people, the Seder is the big highlight and then there is a slog.  Eight days of matzah in various forms – crunched, spread on, microwaved with sauce and cheese, crumbled into kugel.

This year, think different.  First of all, think about difference itself.  Why is this week different from all other weeks?  We're sitting at work eating (making crumbs) different things from other people.  Give an answer when they ask:  Why are you doing that?  It's because of what happened to me when I and my people went out of Egypt.  It takes us a week to meditate on that, and we're using our bodies and not just our mouths and minds to sort out the meaning of it.

Second, don't get hung up on what a friend of mind calls the “Passover-industrial complex.”  Ditch the boxes of cake mix and dissolving noodles, and eat simple.

Matzah itself a simple food, while chametz (leavened food) represents human complexity and arrogance.  Did you know that according to the Torah, Pharaoh built his tyranny as a system of food production and distribution?  Eating fresh produce and simple dairy products cleanses our bodies, humbles our souls, and collapses the distance between us and God, the Source of sustenance.

Once again, the American Jewish World Service and Equal Exchange are partnering on Fair Trade chocolate, which you can find in our Sisterhood Gift Shop.  And don't forget tomatoes, which many American rabbis have adopted as our anti-slavery project.  Try to eat.... (I need to add a couple sentences here, doing a little research)

And don't forget, as we say at the Seder, “let all who are hungry come and eat.”  If you have a place at your Seder even now for someone who doesn't have one, let me know and I'll make the match.  And while we focus on our own food, please remember to give to organizations like the Nashua Soup Kitchen and Shelter especially at this time of year.

Pesach connects with us high and low – in stories and how we reflect on them, in food and how our bodies process them.  There is a lot to chew on, in both senses!

Chag kasher v'samayach – Wishing you a joyful and kosher holy day,
Rabbi Jon

Letter to the Telegraph on Pat Buchanan and Immigration

My letter in today's Nashua Telegraph, in response to the most recent column on immigration by Pat Buchanan. 

To the Editors:

Is Pat Buchanan the best the Telegraph can do for analysis that contributes to our thinking about immigration?

Buchanan’s fixed point, in column after column that you publish, is the idea that there is a white, Christian core of America, and that America will fail if enough people come here who aren’t already like “us.” In his most recent piece, Buchanan points out the long American history of discriminating against immigrants by religion, skin color, and nation of origin. That’s all true. What’s incredible is that Buchanan defends this as part of the core essence and meaning of America!

That’s not a writer who can help Greater Nashua think through the concrete challenges of immigration in our time. Every time I read him, I experience it as an attack on me. My family was part of a mass immigration of millions like them, and they certainly would never have been let in by the Buchanan test. Our religion, ethnicity, poverty, and supposed communism were all held against our group by many in the Congresses of that time. But here we are. We have served in the armed forces, started businesses, taught American history and citizenship, inspired others to believe in American values. Yet somehow, it’s Pat Buchanan who gets column inches in my town to attack us and other people who have arrived in similar patterns from other lands, in the name of America’s “national unity and national character.”

As I’ve written to the paper before, Buchanan’s divisive words overpower what in other hands would be reasonable questions. When does immigration lead to integration, and when does it fail to do so? When is a society’s “unity and character” enriched by immigrants, and when is it overwhelmed? Buchanan’s presence in the Telegraph does not help us think about these issues. “Arabs, Africans, and Turks” do not assimilate, period, Buchanan says. This isn’t analysis; it’s just lazy thinking. And that’s my neighbors and colleagues who love America that you’re letting him talk about in this way.

Buchanan’s ideology is actually a denial of many tenets of American greatness. Buchanan doesn’t believe in the power of capitalism. He doesn’t accept the power of free markets and commerce – the way the invisible hand causes people to accommodate to each other, the way that immigrants become part of our society through enterprises they create and new wants that businesses can serve, thus generating more wealth in society.

Buchanan doesn’t believe in American exceptionalism. He denies that we have unique institutions and a culture that together increase our capacity to avoid the troubles caused by the mass movement of people in other parts of the world.

And of course Buchanan’s perspective on biblical religion ignores the core. Whether it was the Israelites of the Exodus or the family of Jesus, the Bible starts with God’s choice of “undesirables” as servants to bring divinity into a corrupt world.

Surely there are columnists out there who believe in America, who specialize in the experience of small cities, who write up close about the processes of immigration and integration led by civic leaders, businesspeople, new and veteran immigrants, city governments. Give Pat Buchanan’s space to one of them.

Sincerely,
Rabbi Jonathan Spira-Savett

MLK's Letter From Birmingham Jail

"In those days the church was not merely a thermometer that recorded the ideas and principles of popular opinion; it was a thermostat that transformed the mores of society..."

 

Reading Rev. Dr. King's "Letter from a Birmingham Jail" should be part of our annual recognition of MLK Day. It's one of the most important statements about religion in American history.

 

As a non-Christian, I have no trouble transposing all his church-specific references. (One of the people he was writing the letter in response to was a rabbi.) What would it mean for the Jewish people to be a thermostat that transforms the mores of society?

 

Read the entire letter here:

https://www.africa.upenn.edu/Articles_Gen/Letter_Birmingham.html

and here Rev. Dr. King reading it out loud here: 

http://okra.stanford.edu/transcription/audio/630416001.mp3

Ki Tetze -- Learning from a Vigil at ICE

These are fairly unprocessed reflections, on a day when I went up to the Federal office building in Manchester, NH, to be part of an interfaith prayer vigil. Today, as on many days, people are being summoned to ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) to show they have plane tickets to leave the country, or they will be detained. My understanding is that the first family we saw this morning got a reprieve until March. Otherwise today, the parents would have had to leave and their children would have been taken home by someone else. They were in tears when they came out of the building, after a harrowing experience no doubt.

The Torah portion opens: Ki tetze lamilchama al oy'vecha... "When you go out to war on your enemies." Today it strikes me why the Torah uses wording that seems extraneous. Who else would you war against, if not your enemies? What else should you do against your enemies, but go to war? The Torah says -- war and fighting is for enemies, and enemies alone.

But in fact, today we get confused about who our enemies are. Immigration politics for over a century has been about turning groups of people into enemies. That happened to Jews, as in the 1940s during and after World War II, when the arrival of Eastern European Jews was resisted because we were accused of being not refugees but Nazi (!?) or communist infiltrators.

But when people in any group actually adapt to America, contribute not just economically but by becoming part of the community, become grateful patriots of this country -- those people are not our enemies. One person drove by our vigil and a car, a young man in his late 20s, and asked us why we want to commit suicide by bringing in people who want to destroy our faith. He doesn't know that the family in the Federal office building is not our enemy. There is a real issue of law, and people are working to reform our laws and figure out how to enforce existing laws. But we have to distinguish between who is our enemy and who is not.

This week I have been reading a book that I have mentioned almost annually on the High Holy Days the past few years, called Countrymen, by Bo Lidegaard. The book is about the safe escape of the Jews of Denmark during World War II after the Nazi authorities called for their deportations to camp. I'm only about a third of the way through. The part of the story that current grabs me is the specific day when Danes generally and Danish Jews particularly began to process the Nazi charge that Jews were enemies and not Danes.

For both Jews and non-Jewish Danes, there had been through the 1930s and early 1940s no language to even talk about "the Jewish problem", no language of separation even though Jews were Jews and other Danes weren't. It's heartbreaking to see Jews facing this question about themselves, and wondering about what other Danes would think and do under pressure. It's also illuminating, and inspiring, to see how many Danes rose to the occasion, and not just the infrequent "righteous gentile." Something was going on that enabled a whole society to refuse to see Jews as the enemy, despite being told so by propaganda backed by force.

This same society was clear about the difference between citizens and war refugees, or between patriotic citizens and totalitarians, whether Nazi or communist. It's possible to define your enemies, and fight specifically against them.

I know the language of enemies is harsh, but the Torah uses it. It's not a language of hate. Most of what we did this morning was a "Jericho Walk" around the block of the Norris Cotton Federal Building, seven times around the block in silence. This gave me the chance to take in everything -- the families we were there for, the flags of the USA and the state of New Hampshire and what they stand for, the fire station nearby, the ICE agents trying to do their jobs and enforce the law. The people who talked to us with encouragement, or honked horns. The people who laughed and jeered at us casually, who aren't neo-Nazi activists. There is nothing to hate here. There are some battles to fight, and some specific enemies.

May we have the wisdom to know the difference between enemies and not. May we have the courage to fight the right wars.

 

Building Mountains After Charlottesville

This was the sermon I gave on Saturday, August 19, 2017.

There is a sweet little film from about twenty years ago starring Hugh Grant, called “The Englishman Who Went Up a Hill and Came Down a Mountain.” The story is that two government cartographers come to the small Welsh town of Ffynnon Garw, to measure the height of the mountain just outside the town. The cartographers determine that in fact it is not a mountain, but a hill, because it is slightly short of the 1000 feet required for classification as a mountain.

The villagers are of course dismayed, because they have always lived by a mountain. Their first response is just to assert to the surveyors that Ffynnon Garw is in fact a mountain village. But failing that, they develop a plan. They conspire to keep the cartographers from leaving town with their official measurement and their verdict. And while they are occupied, the townspeople begin to bring sacks of dirt to the hill, to dump there one on top of the other, in order to raise the height. They are going to make a hill into a mountain.

Of course they battle rain, which washes down their pile as it grows, but they keep going. Eventually, just before they have to leave town, the cartographers are brought back. And sure enough, by a small margin, Ffynnon Garw has its mountain.

This week the Torah portion talks about two mountains:

רְאֵ֗ה אָנֹכִ֛י נֹתֵ֥ן לִפְנֵיכֶ֖ם הַיּ֑וֹם בְּרָכָ֖ה וּקְלָלָֽה׃

See, this day I give before you blessing and curse:

וְהָיָ֗ה כִּ֤י יְבִֽיאֲךָ֙ יְהוָ֣ה אֱלֹהֶ֔יךָ אֶל־הָאָ֕רֶץ אֲשֶׁר־אַתָּ֥ה בָא־שָׁ֖מָּה לְרִשְׁתָּ֑הּ

וְנָתַתָּ֤ה אֶת־הַבְּרָכָה֙ עַל־הַ֣ר גְּרִזִ֔ים וְאֶת־הַקְּלָלָ֖ה עַל־הַ֥ר עֵיבָֽל׃

It will happen, when Adonai your God bring you to the land that you are coming there to possess it, you shall put the blessing on Mount Gerizim and the curse on Mount Eival. (Deuteronomy 11:26, 29)

Later on, Moshe instructs that half the people should stand on the top of one mountain and half on the top of the other. As Rashi describes it, from the valley the Levites would face Mount Gerizim and shout out what blessing is, and then face Mount Eival and shout out what curse is.

Blessing and curse. Clear as the tops of two mountains. Clear as an echoing voice.

There are things in the world that you have to strain to see. Where goodness, where harm, is in the shadows or in a small corner. But there are times when good and evil are in clear view and clear sound.

Last weekend – last Shabbat – was one of those times. We got a look at blessing and curse in Charlottesville. The mountaintop of blessing, of good, in the people who put their bodies and their lives on the line, to stand up for unity, to block hate from moving forward. To show an understanding of what African-Americans experience when they see icons of the era of slavery in public places.

The mountaintop of curse, of evil, in the neo-Nazis, the white supremacists, who came with terror, hoping to hurt, armed to the teeth. Not to speak but to beat.

If you’re not sure – or if you don’t know what the answer is to the president’s analysis of good people and violent people in roughly equal measure – there is a documentary of about 20 minutes that I linked the other day and can send again. It has the whole story, the supremacists and the peaceful counterprotestors and the antifa, and you can see the relative numbers and the relative force. You can see Christopher Cantwell – he’s a prominent white supremacist who lives in Keene. He said he’s holding out for a president who doesn’t “give his daughter to a Jew”, someone like Trump but a lot more racist. I can’t imagine why the president of the United States wouldn’t stand up for the honor of his own family, why that wouldn’t engage him in standing up for us and the others who were targets of the demonstrators’ hate.

Blessing and good are a mountain, and curse and evil are a mountain.

What are the real sizes of those mountains? Which mountain should be looking at now? How long should we stand and face Har Eival, probing the details of the curse? And when is it time to turn around, to face Har Gerizim and shout, urging ourselves along in blessing?

Rashi wrestles with this in his commentary on the Torah. The Torah says that first the Levi’im look at Har Eival and call out the curse, and then they look at Har Gerizim and call out the blessing. But Rashi says it’s the reverse – first we are to hear the words of blessing ring out. Only then are we to listen to the curse. Only then can we appreciate what is evil, what evil deprives us of. Only after the blessing can we summon what we need to hear the words of the curse as they echo all around, without being flattened in the process.

Rashi’s insight is that hearing the curse is both necessary and dangerous. That mountain is there, and we need to see it. But no amount of looking at it will make it smaller. We can overwhelm and demoralize ourselves by gazing too much at it, railing about the fact that it is there at all. But we cannot afford to be dragged into helplessness. Offensive monuments can be taken down, but the mountain of the curse will not fall into the sea so soon.

There are people who choose to stand on that mountain, and we can’t pull them off in a day. All we can do is to keep them there, and set up to prevent other people from going up there. That’s what the counterprotesters were doing in Charlottesville last Shabbat, and in Boston today.

It is not healthy to keep reading the same opinion summaries over and over, and to be stuck in rage about people who don’t understand. At some point, that is self-indulgent. At some point, the issue isn’t how bad we feel and how outraged we are, but the actual effects of institutionalized racism on African-Americans. I myself have made this mistake, even this week. As I spent time reading and writing and networking, it took me until Thursday to reach out to the local African-American leaders I actually know.

The shadow of Har Eival, the mountain of the curse, will still be there no matter what we are doing. We don’t have to stare at it directly all the time.

And it is good for us to look at Har Gerizim, the mountain of blessing – the mountains of blessing. Look at how many people, increasing all the time, are opening their minds and opening their hearts to people who are different, who suffer more because of their difference. More in every age group, not just young but old as well. More in every ethnic and religious group – those established in this country for centuries, and those that are newer. More people in both political parties. This is also part of the news, but it’s not always in the news. We have to make a conscious effort to stand on the mountain of blessing.

But it’s not just about where we look – how we center ourselves spiritually, in reflection. Sometimes it seems like the mountain of blessing isn’t quite as high as it needs to be. In geographical reality, in fact, the blessing mountain of Har Gerizim is just a bit shorter than Har Eival, the mountain of the curse. We are, then, exactly in the same position as the residents of Ffynnon Garw. Our mountain looks, this week, like it is not quite high enough.

I don’t believe that the mountain of the curse is truly higher. But there is no question that we need to make the mountain of blessing taller than it is.

That work is the work of passion, and of community, and of grit.

I don’t doubt that there is passion.

Community – I have been looking for that one place in Greater Nashua where you find all the leaders of different groups, communities of color and ethnicity and faith, civic and government and business leaders. There are only incomplete groups. The interfaith council does not have enough congregations. One Greater Nashua is perhaps the biggest table, and we are missing wide swaths. Within our congregation, the most developed relationships are between our Klezmer band and the Gospel choir. We need to build on that.

Community is crucial, because fighting back against public hate is only the surface level. To get beyond general proclamations, to change society, we need to be where we can talk – about what different groups have in common, and about the competitions and conflicts and jealousies between hated groups. About what we can learn from other groups’ experiences, and about what they can learn from ours.

It’s out of that talking and those challenges that a deeper e pluribus unum comes out. It’s more than what we aren’t, what we’re against – it’s what we build. And we have to know each other better to do that, and there’s no shortcut. It takes time.

And the gritty work is about finally building the society that the mountain of blessing is beckoning and promising. Taking down the monuments, standing off with hate – those will seem easy in comparison. Our passion, our community, and then our detail work are necessary, because the answers we need are in good housing, which has to be designed and built. In education that doesn’t give up on anyone and teaches young people to live together with difference through their many years together in school. In good law enforcement. And in an economic life that invests in the people of all backgrounds and all regions who have been left behind, who haven’t had something to believe in and who are at each other’s throats as a result.

That’s what the mountain of blessing will be built of. Those are the sacks of soil, passed from hand to hand, slipping sometimes and sliding down, but building up if we keep at it.

And when we do, we will see that the two mountains are in fact different. The mountain of evil may seem like a monolith sometimes. But the mountain of blessing will be a sight to see. It will have a mighty foundation, set in place by the God of the universe, and it will bear the mark of the human hands that have raised it, that have lifted it high above the other mountains.

This is about more than two Shabbatot, in Charlottesville and Boston. See, I set before you today a blessing and a curse. We will have to keep at this work, and return here to talk about it often. But I know that we will. We will keep climbing up this hill, no matter how steep it seems, no matter how rough the path to reach the blessing.

And we will find that we are, as we always thought we were, a mountain village.