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Jewish -- Thanksgiving is Actually in Our Name

These are words I shared in 2022 at the Nashua Area Interfaith Council service right before Thanksgiving.

The first words a Jew is supposed to say upon waking are: Modah Ani or Modeh Ani, which mean “Thankful am I”. Even before we bring ourselves into focus, we are we are taught to center gratitude, and to make being thankful the frame for our existence in the day that is just starting.

That short morning wake-up prayer goes like this in full:

Thankful am I before You
Power alive and enduring
For returning my soul/my breath into me with love
Great is Your faith

Rabbi Rachel Barenblatt, also known as the Velveteen Rabbi, says this last line isn’t just acknowledging the Divine faithfulness to us through giving us life. Rather, it’s actually a separate statement about Divine faith in us. God bets on me for the day to come, that I will pay off that faith even though all I have done so far is become aware that I am here. So in the first seconds of the day a Jew is to say: Thank you, here I am, I see that I’m breathing, great is Your faith in me. And then it’s off into the day.

Though Jews talk a lot about the significance of our name Israel, which means wrestler-with-the-Divine, we don’t talk nearly as much about our more common name Jews --  Yehudim, people of Judah. Judah was the fourth son of Leah and Jacob. Leah was the unloved wife, and when the first three sons were born, Leah gave them each names out of her yearning for more love from her husband, and those names did not come true. When the fourth was born she said instead, “This time I thank the Divine.” From the word for “I thank”, odeh, came the name Yehudah or Judah. (Along the way in the rendering of yehudi from Hebrew to Greek to the Europeans languages, the d sound fell away and the y hardened a bit, hence the word “Jew”.)

This thankfulness is more grounded in experience than the first-thing-in-the-morning “Thankful am I.” Leah’s naming-gratitude is gratitude despite, in the face of. But I wouldn’t say it’s only grudging, or through gritted teeth. In Hebrew words are generally built out of roots with three consonants, and often you can hear all three sounds regardless of the form of the word as a noun or verb. But all the many forms of the word for gratitude in Hebrew share only one sound, D -- the middle letter called dalet, which means: a door.

Thankfulness is a door. More specifically, it’s the decision to open a door from this place you are sitting, a place of perhaps not enough love toward you or from you, or not enough peace or not enough justice – open it and then look toward next-door where there is more of those waiting for you, where there are partners and friends and allies. Or open it and look toward an outside expanse of possibility.

Thankfulness is acknowledging that sometimes that door feels closed, or we don’t have faith enough or energy enough to open it – but then we realize we can, and hopefully we do.

Instant gratitude first thing every day, and gratitude in-spite-of as in our very name -- these are two very different ways in which gratitude is meant to be our essence as Jews. May this Thanksgiving help us become more thankful people each and every day.

After the Election: Take Love Seriously. Give Love Wildly.

 

This was my Dvar Torah last Shabbat, November 9, the first Shabbat after Election Day 2024.

First I want to say that the operation of a democracy is awe-inspiring. To experience a day when 300-million-plus people bring something of moral significance to a crescendo all at once. To contemplate what goes into that, philosophically and logistically. Which is why we are honoring today the people who have been closest to that process, as candidates and at the polls and in campaigns – and thank you to everyone who voted or brought a young person with you as you voted.

It has been an exhausting week. It has been an exhausting campaign, an exhausting thirteen months.

Also an exhausting pandemic and an exhausting decade. But right now, just an exhausting week. Regardless of how you assess the results, all or some of them. Which is why I am not going to tell you today how the Torah solves everything on our minds – like how you are feeling or how you think about other people who voted differently or what to do next. There’s no Torah insight that only suddenly became apparent this week, that we couldn’t have learned until now. Next Shabbat, I will speak toward those bigger pictures, but today I hope I can offer you something both more modest and more fundamental. Maybe soothing, maybe even useful, regardless of where you’re at right now.

There is a classic psychology study from 2008 by Lawrence Williams and John Bargh, in which participants were given a description of another person, and asked to make judgments based on that information about whether that person was generous or warm, or the opposite. Or in which they were given a short task and then had the opportunity to take a small reward for themselves or give something to another person. But the experiment actually began when the participant arrived and was met by a research assistant juggling a clipboard and papers and a drink, who then asked the participant to hold their drink for a moment. Sometimes, the drink was a warm coffee, and sometimes an iced coffee. Then the assistant took the drink back and escorted the subject to the research room.

And in this particular study, the subjects who held the warm drink were more likely to rate the person they read a packet about as a warm person, a generous person. Or to choose to give something away rather than take a small reward for themselves. Other things controlled, the very same person was judged more generously or more harshly based on this external physical factor, the warm or cold drink. Other things equal, a participant in this study was likely to be more generous or more selfish, if they had been primed by warmth or cold.

My point is that our recent time has been like this. Not warm, but so cold, and so hot. Even beyond our awareness, our minds and our hearts are affected in ways we don’t even realize, by the touch of something that is at the same time physical and emotional and spiritual. As much as we are trying to live warmly and judge warmly, we are all being handed scalding after scalding after scalding cup of coffee.

We have to notice that. And it’s what any of us can and ought to do something about starting from now –  whether you are more pleased or more disturbed by the results of the election, whether you are right now hopeful or despairing, whether you are thinking about what to do next or nowhere near ready for that. To put it negatively, what we need to address are the brutal and hateful words and calls. Everywhere around us. That brutality is the hot cup of coffee probably each of us has held to the point that it penetrates into our minds and our hearts.

Or to put it more positively: An antidote, even just for today, is love. It’s ahavah and chesed. It is simply, simply love. It is the practice of love. 

Love is the warm cup we have to hand each other, over and over and over.

At a few of our interfaith gatherings this week, Rev. Allison Palm, president of the Nashua Area Interfaith Council and minister for the Unitarian Universalist Church, shared this poem by Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer, called “Because”:

So I can’t save the world—
can’t save even myself,
can’t wrap my arms around
every frightened child, can’t
foster peace among nations,
can’t bring love to all who
feel unlovable.
So I practice opening my heart
right here in this room and being gentle
with my insufficiency. I practice
walking down the street heart first.
And if it is insufficient to share love,
I will practice loving anyway.
I want to converse about truth,
about trust. I want to invite compassion
into every interaction.
One willing heart can’t stop a war.
One willing heart can’t feed all the hungry.
And sometimes, daunted by a task too big,
I tell myself what’s the use of trying?
But today, the invitation is clear:
to be ridiculously courageous in love.
To open the heart like a lilac in May,
knowing freeze is possible
and opening anyway.
To take love seriously.
To give love wildly.
To race up to the world
as if I were a puppy,
adoring and unjaded,
stumbling on my own exuberance.
To feel the shock of indifference,
of anger, of cruelty, of fear,
and stay open. To love as if it matters,
as if the world depends on it.

Rev. Palm said to a few of us the other day that this love isn’t just that we should be kinder. Which certainly isn’t a bad thing. But more than that: To take love seriously./To give love wildly.

We know that kind of love right here, where love is saying Amen to everyone’s prayer, as if it were the most important prayer you yourself could say, even though you don’t know exactly what it is.

Love could be toward the people we are fearful for right now – the promise we make, even if it’s just right now to ourselves, that we will really follow through and love them, be there for them and speak up for them.

Love could be to stretch toward someone in our community or our society who baffles us, even if it’s just to appreciate their face or the beautiful sound of their voice when they speak about what matters to them.

Love must be toward yourself, so you can rest, have Shabbat, recharge for important things, or let yourself experience joy for no ulterior purpose at all.

Love is feeling that you are loved -- loved by the Divine; loved by someone else, perhaps in a church or a mosque somewhere, someone who is imagining you, appreciating your face or the beautiful sound of your voice when you speak about what matters most to you.

…practice
walking down the street heart first.
And if it is insufficient to share love,
I will practice loving anyway.

…To feel the shock of indifference,
of anger, of cruelty, of fear,
and stay open. To love as if it matters,
as if the world depends on it.

And whenever we are angry and frustrated and outraged, we can be serious about love, by reminding ourselves that we only feel those things because we love. And it’s only the love behind the anger and frustration that will ever make a difference.

So whether you are trying to take a stand or whether you are simply sad, today just love. Give love wildly. 

Detoxing our environment of the ugliness and the brutality of tone will not by itself eliminate our divisions; nothing can. Nor will it miraculously reveal new public policies we have not found yet that everyone will rally behind, and the brutality will recede into small corners. But it is the thing that is always possible, even right now.

And at least in here, every Shabbat, we can be together in love. As we juggle our prayerbooks and our handouts, our plates at Kiddush, we hand each other the warm cup of coffee. The warm cider, the cocoa, that helps us see the world as our hearts want to see it – full of warmth, full of generosity. Give it to each other, again and again and again. If we do that here, we will be better able to do that outside as well. 

So:

…today, the invitation is clear:
to be ridiculously courageous in love.
To open the heart like a lilac in May,
knowing freeze is possible
and opening anyway.
To take love seriously.
To give love wildly.
To race up to the world
as if I were a puppy,
adoring and unjaded,
stumbling on my own exuberance.
To feel the shock of indifference,
of anger, of cruelty, of fear,
and stay open. 

To love as if it matters,
as if the world depends on it.

Shabbat Shalom.

Exaggerating the Exodus: The Siddur Is the Opposite of the "Slave Bible"

This is a slightly revised version of a D'var Torah I gave on the Shabbat that was the last day of Pesach in 5782 (2022).

 

Right before Pesach in 2022, a bunch of people mentioned to me an article they had seen from the New York Times by Rabbi Sharon Brous. Her piece referenced a book known as the Slave Bible, or as its inside title page says “Select Parts of the Holy Bible for the Use of the Negro Slaves in the British West India Islands.” This version of the Bible was published in 1807, and it was used in the Caribbean islands under British rule at that time to teach slaves to read and to teach them Christianity. As Rabbi Brous writes, this Bible is unique in that it has deleted the entire story of the Exodus. It jumps from Joseph’s uniting with his brothers all the way to the revelation of the Ten Commandments at Mt. Sinai, and then from there to the sternest and most warning parts of Deuteronomy, and that’s it for the Torah.

There are in the Deuteronomy section brief references to having been brought out of Egypt but no mention at all of being slaves there. So this was truly a Bible without an Exodus, and a Bible suffused in fact with justifications of slavery from various points in Genesis, as well as other parts of the Old Testament and New.

Rabbi Brous asks us to imagine how it’s possible to have a text without Exodus, without slavery and oppression and liberation, and call it a Bible. What kind of biblical religion could really be true to the Bible without that story -- it’s absurd. Yet that was the Bible and the biblical religion, quote-unquote, being fed to slaves in at least part of the English-speaking world into the 1800s.

After the third person mentioned this Bible to me, I found myself putting into focus an idea that’s been eating slowly at me for a while. I found myself thinking that there is a mirror-image Bible, not exactly a Bible but a book based on the Bible, and in this particular Bible the Israelites are continually being redeemed, over and over.

In this Bible, every mention of slavery and Pharaoh disappears quickly into a celebration of rescue and protection from not just oppression but hunger and pain and disilusionment.

In this version, God operates the world in every moment with compassion for every last creature, and has in every moment since the beginning of time, and God never naps from this concern and care for a moment, and never lets any creature fail to find at least a word to say or sing to describe this world.

In this version, the Sea is not a dangerous thing to try and cross, but a gushing out of gratitude.

In this version of the Bible, even our bones -- the least articulate part of our body, the part of us that can’t see out into the word at all -- even our bones proclaim Mi Chamocha, the words of the Song we sang at the Sea -- "Adonai Mi Chamocha, Who is like you, who rescues the powerless from the one who is stronger."

This Bible, where the liberation from slavery in Egypt is amplified and exaggerated -- it is the Siddur. It is our prayerbook. I’ve just been paraphraising for you most of pages 104-105 in our version of the Siddur, the prayer we call Nishmat Kol Chai after its first words, “the breath of all that lives.”

In recent years with all that has been happening in the world, I have been especially fascinated by what I will call the Nishmat Bible, which is the opposite of the Slave Bible. Part of my fascination is the flat-out contradiction between some of the words of the Nishmat prayers and what’s in our Torah. I mean the Torah is very clear that while Shifrah and Puah and Miryam and Yocheved were saving the lives of babies one by one, and while Moshe was taking matters into his own hands quite literally, God had to be reminded of the Israelites after some long period of time, finally snapping into action and setting a bush to burning. I mean: Is that the God who, in the words of the Nishmat prayer, “does not sleep and does not slumber”?

But that’s not even what fascinates me; it’s not a point of theology. What I’m amazed at is our ancestors of the year 1550, or pick another year like that, who sang these words in a medieval world where they had been oppressed for hundreds of years, who had a tradition of singing these words for least six or seven centuries and possibly more than a thousand years, when most Pharaohs in that time were not defeated and the many Jewish exits were not to promised lands.

The Jews of 1550 sang these words every Shabbat against all evidence to the contrary. What was that like? What did it feel like? What kinds of thoughts were they thinking about these words? Even as late as 1550, Jews had no idea that within a hundred years there might be the beginning of some kind of liberation in this world, in Amsterdam or Brazil or the North American colonies. And for most Jews in most places even in 1650 or 1750 or 1850 this was still the case. And yet they sang this Bible where “from the beginning of time to the end” without exception every moment God is taking care of them and “besides You we have no God who redeems and saves.”

I’m just gobsmacked. I can see in 1947 naming a ship Exodus, with Jews in peril still in Europe and in Palestine but it seems like a time that you could feel is those first chapters of the book of Exodus, where something may be coming and you’re in that fight.

I can see in churches in the 1950s and 1960s telling and singing about the Exodus, with protests and actions gaining energy if not always gaining momentum. I can see how in the 1960s and ‘70s and ‘80s we made “let my people” go a real watchword in solidarity with our people in the Soviet Union, when there was already liberation for Jews in this country and the State of Israel.

It’s easy to see how you make the Exodus a present story when the moves are happening and it’s more than a midwife here and an upstander there but history itself seems in the making.

It’s easier to see how you tell this story after we relocated to America, not only a land of freedom but a land that sees itself as another version of the Exodus story.

But for centuries and centuries our ancestors sang these songs, and made the already Exodus-filled Torah into a turbocharged Exodus Bible through the Siddur. Especially on Shabbat when they sang Nishmat, but also every regular day morning and night. Twice a day Mi Chamocha, the Song of the first moment of freedom. In the morning every weekday it’s “protector and savior for their children in every generation”; in the evening every night it’s the power “Who redeems us from the hand of every earthly power.”

What was it like to sing the Nishmat Bible? How did they do it? When there was no end in sight to oppressions, to crimes against humanity; when there was no debate and no media to show anyone else what was happening to us -- our ancestors kept being the stewards of the story of Yetziat Mitzrayim, the Exodus. Against all the evidence of the actual world. There was no way anyone could have pulled a Slave Bible over them. The Siddur is even more Exodus than the Torah itself.

(And of course, the Slave Bible was no match for the people over whom it was lorded in the 1800s.)

It is those centuries and centuries of stewarding this story, protecting it and retelling it and sometimes adding to it and exaggerating it in profound ways and just crazy ways, that have made other Exodus stories and realities possible in the past centuries. We talk about the power of stories, but it’s more than the story and its content. A story stored up and charged with spiritual energy for that long becomes more powerful at some point than any powerful tyrant or tyranny. That’s what I mean each time I hand the Torah scroll to a BMitzvah and say: You can feel all the noise and energy of our ancestors talking about it; their energy is in here and when you add that up it’s just so much power. Enough to power our liberations in Israel and here, the first modern revolutions, and lest we forget the dramatic fall of the Iron Curtain and the collapse three decades ago of the longest and widest single brutal system of oppression in human history. So many have understood these as Exodus stories.

As real as the Slave Bible was in its time, it is really no match. At an interfaith gathering during Pesach one year, our congregation’s friend Olga Tines, the music minister at the New Fellowship Baptist Church, talked about the power of the Exodus in her own legacy as an African-American. She reminded us that Christianity was not the religion that her people brought with them from Africa to North America, but once the white slaveholders began to use Christianity they couldn’t keep those Exodus parts quiet. And like us, the slaves created a hyper-Exodus-Bible of song and prayer, in spirituals like “Go Down Moses” and in sermons. And things happened in the real world because of that, and when other things happened they had faith already because the liberation of slaves was a real thing.

I know it seems like we have discharged some of the energy in the Exodus story. There is so much Pharoah, isn’t there; he keeps coming back. I don’t have to recite the topical litany. A couple of years ago I was working with one of our BMitzvah kids, Benjamin, and we were studying another part of the Torah, the story of Noach, and Benjamin’s view was that we have not advanced at all since the time of the biblical Flood.

And I tried to come back to him with the scholar Steven Pinker and his objective, statistical study The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined. I don’t know if Ukraine or Burma or Afghanistan changes the calculus but Pinker said the world is less violent and more peaceful than ever before. Benjamin was having none of it.

I’m not blaming him. To make the world more free takes empirical things but it doesn’t happen without stories and without being captured back into those stories. That’s why we need more Exodus even when we might not entirely be feeling it.

If our ancestors for hundreds and hundreds of years, in their situation that was more like Israelite slaves than like anyone else in the story -- if they could keep singing the Nishmat Bible and studying the Exodus story, we certainly can from our position on the other side of the Sea as modern Jews. We can --  with our memories of the past century or two in our own lives and the lives of our families. This is not a time to go mellow on Exodus, but to crank it higher. And not just talk about Pharoah and not just about midwives and sprouts, but the splitting Sea and the full-on redemption out ahead.

That’s why we’re here as Jews. You can’t cut those things out of the Bible, and if anything as a Jew you have to multiply them. Somehow, we were the first people who had this story of the Exodus, of Yetziat Mitzrayim. We’ve had it the longest, it changed us and it’s changed the world already. It’s our job in the world to be stewards of this story, pour our energy into it no matter what is happening, and keep bringing it out over and over. And, as we say at the Seder, everyone who uses the Exodus to tell more and more stories is to be praised.

 

Chanukkah and Dreidel: A Portfolio of Hope

This is a version of a D’var Torah I've given in many variations over the past few years.

I’ve come to think about a lot of things in life in terms of “portfolio management.” People talk about investment portfolios –long-term and short- term, stocks and bonds. I think Chanukkah can teach us creating a hope portfolio. Chanukkah is a story that begins with hope – how this group of Jewish rebels somehow kept going, when they were up against an empire that wanted to squelch Judaism, and when they had to face people in their own community ready to give up and sell out or sell off.

But hope isn’t always like that – impossible odds, yet you win anyway. That’s one scenario of hope paying off. But I think Chanukkah teaches us about a whole hope portfolio that is essential to our spiritual wellbeing. I get my hope portfolio not from some expert with a technologically sophisticated algorithm, but from a very simple device: the dreidel, with its four sides, its four symbols. Each one represents a certain kind of hope, and together as a portfolio they keep us in the right balance.

The way the dreidel game works is that you’ve got a pot of M&Ms in the middle (better yet little wrapped Fair Trade chocolates) and you take turns spinning the dreidel. If it lands on Gimel you get everything. Hay, you take half. Shin, you put something in. Nun, nothing happens.

To me, these are four different kinds of hope. Gimel hope, Hay hope, Shin hope, Nun hope.

Gimel is when you get everything in the pot. Gimel stands for gadol, great or large. Gimel hope is going for broke, hoping and praying for everything, and actually getting it. Gimel hope is the final definitive cure from an illness. It’s seeing someone you love come out of a rough phase of life and seem happy again. It’s when a neighborhood in an American city or a village in the developing world that had been mostly poor is transformed, through schools and solar power and clean water.

It’s when all the hostages are released, and the fighting ends, and a vision of peace becomes a reality.

Gimel, the great miracle, doesn’t always happen. But when it does, it means that the world or life is exactly the way we dream it should be. If there weren't some Gimel in the world, we could never hope at all. It’s the Gimel every so often that keeps us going. When the world as it is suddenly crosses with the world that we know is supposed to be.

When the dreidel lands on Hay, you take half the pot. Hay hope is hope for something part-way to amazing. It's a remission in cancer. It’s a good few days during the months after a concussion. It’s when some basically good and decent people win elections, even if they don’t have a policy solution for everything. It’s when some time after a divorce, you’re with people and feel connected, feel like the new version of yourself is someone you might be happy being.

A lot of the good things that happen to us, or that we achieve, are Hay. Hoping for a Hay isn’t settling – it’s a real kind of hope. It’s looking at what is or could be, and not at what’s missing.

A third scenario in dreidel is Shin. If you get a Shin, you don’t get anything – actually you have to put something back into the pot.
That doesn’t seem like any kind of hope. It seems like the opposite of hope.

But it’s not. Shin is what you do that gives someone else hope. Shin stands for the Hebrew word sham, which means "there", somewhere else.

When we get together in prayer, we might have prayers for ourselves, things that we need or are concerned about, things we are thankful about because of what happened to me this week.

But just as important is what we do for each other. When we get to the prayer for healing, some of us will say the names of people we know who are sick. And all of us are going to hear those prayers, and acknowledge them. All of us are going to say Amen, and stand by you who are praying, and hopefully be willing to support you and the person who is not here who you are caring for in whatever way you are. That’s our Shin.

Some of the most profound hopes I have ever heard have been at funerals and shivas. People talk about how they have been transformed by someone who is no longer here. While that loss is so palpable, so is the hope that came from that person’s life. That’s Shin hope.

I’ve talked before about a congregant who was saying her mother's name for Misheberach for healing for many weeks a few years ago, until her mother died. When she and her husband came back to services the first time after returning from shiva, I had a pit in my stomach, thinking about the name we couldn't say. But then, she did something remarkable – she said someone else's name. She offered up a prayer for someone else's healing. Surely that prayer wasn't a Gimel, a hope for a certain cure. The prayer was a Shin, a response to personal loss by doing for someone else who had a need for prayer and a need for hope.

The other outcome in dreidel is Nun, where nothing happens. You don’t get anything from the pot and you don’t put anything in. Strangely, Nun in Hebrew is the first letter of nes, the word for miracle. So how can hope be connected to nothingness?

Nun is looking where others would have no hope – and having hope anyway. It’s living by your values even when you don’t get rewards or recognition. It’s believing in the goodness of the world and the goodness of people, even on the days when you don’t see any of it. It’s looking at the Chanukiyyah the moment before you light the candle, seeing the darkness and believing that a bit of light is somewhere anyway. Hope in a Nun way isn’t about optimism or predicting outcomes. It’s a way of saying that some things are true and worthwhile no matter what is actually going to happen.

This is the portfolio of hope: Nun, Gimel, Hay, Shin. Hope for the biggest things imaginable, the ones that sometimes happen. Hope for partial healing and partial justice and partial happiness. Hoping for others, and just hoping when you can't give any good reason for doing so. We don’t get or shoot for a 25-25-25-25 portfolio. But we all need some of each of the letters. Hope isn’t all or nothing; a spiritual person isn’t one who has Gimel hope all the time. A skeptic isn’t someone who refuses to hope.

We live for the Gimel and the Hay -- or so we think. But I think the Nun and the Shin are at least as profound, at least as hopeful. Hope doesn’t just come, we don’t just have it or not. It comes from somewhere else, from Shin, and it stays when there is nothing, Nun. We need all four in our portfolio.

Before the Maccabees found the cruse of oil, someone had to store it away. It took a Shin, someone to give that oil. Someone to buy the M&Ms for the game, someone to put them on the table in the first place.

That’s what’s happening here in a Jewish community all the time.

We can hope because our ancestors kept passing along the Torah – a story about a people who were so far from freedom, the farthest possible, trapped by the most powerful tyrant on earth-- but who became free. A story of a God who could reach absolutely anywhere, take the lowliest people and rescue them, make them the first people close to God and then charge them with a mission to spread into the world.

We can hope because every Shabbat there’s a gathering where we dare to say words like love, peace, justice, ahava, shalom, tzedek, over and over, to keep them real in a world where they seem not to be.

We can hope because of young people learning Torah and Jewish values, taking our Shin and experiencing it as their Gimel.

So this Chanukkah, think about that hope portfolio. And don’t put all your M&Ms, all your investments, in Gimel and Hay; it’s not only about those times when everything turns out, or when a lot goes right. Each of us needs a life of some Gimel, some Hay, some Nun and some Shin. Think what you can do to hope, when hope seems unreasonable. When our people are at war. Think about what someone has done for you when you weren’t hopeful, and how you can pay that forward and make the next person’s life more hopeful.

Chag Urim Sameach -- Happy Chanukkah!

Two Kinds of Darkness, Two Kinds of Light, Two Kinds of Torah

This is (I think) the D'var Torah I have for services this Shabbat tomorrow. The Torah reading begins with the very beginning of the Torah. It's one week since the Hamas atrocities began. Thank you to Rabbi Rebecca Rosenthal and Rabbi Aryeh Klapper for helping me unlock this, though if anything is off it's on me and not them.

*****

Last week on Simchat Torah, as we tried our hardest to celebrate especially for our youngest kids, knowing what we already knew, there was a verse I was chanting in the Torah that just gutted me even more. It’s the very last line attributed to Moshe in the Torah, his last words. The final line of Moshe’s blessing to the people said:

 

Happy are you, fortunate are you, people Israel, who is like you,

a nation saved by the Divine

your helping shield, whose sword is your pride.

Your enemies shall recant themselves to you

and you on their high places will tread.

 

Ashrecha Yisrael, mi chamocha, am nosha b’Adonai

magen ezrecha, asher cherev ga’avatecha

v’yika-chashu oyvecha lach,

v’atah al bamoteimo tidroch

 

And I thought in that moment, is it possible that not a single word or phrase of that Torah is true?

 

Not happy, not fortunate. Not saved; no helping shield. No Mi chamoacha, no callback to the moment of escape from Egypt, from danger into freedom, An enemy far from recanting, from going back on its essence -- and who is treading on whom today.

 

Was even our own Torah going to be turned on us, to mock us, and on our holy day no less and in the presence of our sweet little ones. Or was this some kind of invitation toward even more faith, a faith that Torah can be as powerful as the weapons and mutated imaginations that define our reality right now.

 

And with those wonderings ringing in my soul we turned on Simchat Torah to the very first verses of the Torah, the first words of our parasha today, and they too seemed unreal: the creation of light in a reality hitherto dark and formless all the way down.

 

This is the week we are starting the Torah again. Against the backdrop of murder and kidnapping and mobilizing and bomb shelters, mourning and fearing for our loved ones and our people, this is the week we start again fresh. Each year when we get to Parashat Bereshit we’re supposed to have become better prepared by the chagim (fall holy days) for a new year of Torah, to be more receptive to it than ever before. Yet we know ahead of us is for certain a week of more death, and certainly weeks and who knows how much of 5784. What kind of strength will Torah have, this week and beyond, and what kind of strength and wisdom can it give us?

 

Parashat Bereshit begins with perfection, everything in its orderly place, and humans created in the Divine image, b’tzelem Elohim, and the first humans, placed in a perfect garden -- with closeness to the Divine, the end of loneliness, and a charge simply to work and to protect their beautiful place.

 

Everything about the opening chapter was a revolution in human consciousness in its time, and I usually say in our time as well. But so quickly it all falls apart, and the parasha descends into exile, violence between brothers, and then violence enveloping the world. Until the parasha ends with only a single glimpse of hope, the birth of Noach: -- zeh v’nachameinu, this one will comfort us, will turn us around, mi-ma-aseinu ume-itzvon yadeinu, from our actions and the sadness our hands have wrought, min ha-adadmah asher erera Adonai, what we’ve made out of this earth that the Divine has cursed.

 

This is not an easy parasha to begin with, a parasha about new beginnings and immediate troubles. I thought about going to other Torah this Shabbat for the comforting we all need. But maybe it is the parasha we need nonetheless.

 

On the first day, darkness hovers over the face of the deep seas and chasms, and God says let there be light, y’hi or -- and there is. Vayehi or, light was, all of a sudden. And God saw the light, that it was good, ki tov, and immediately God separated the light from the darkness.

 

God wants light. And then God makes a decision to name the darkness. In the ancient world prior to the Torah, even in parts of the Bible composed earlier than the first chapter of Genesis, the creations stories would tell of realms beyond the reach of the gods, symbolized by deep and vanquishing waters and by endless darkness. But in our Torah God stakes a claim even to darkness. Gives it a name: laila.

 

Why would God want in on that? Especially if the light of the first verses is considered not physical light but Torah. Why would God want there to be something that is so profoundly opposite to Torah, as one of the first things in creation?

 

I can only think that there are two kinds of darkness. There is a darkness that says there is nothing in the world but violence, and even seeming goodness is just self-interest, or huddling together for safety and nothing more. Darkness is believing that is all there is, not just from time to time as we all do, but fundamentally all the time.

 

The Torah claims, I think, that darkness is something else. Some of it and maybe all of the moral darkness is made out of imagination and language and even out of connection, out of the capacity for organization and sustained effort -- twisted for sure, and encased in the hardest and thickest klippot, cases of iron and hatred.

This kind of darkness is made of the same things as its opposite -- as goodness, as light, as Torah. So God has no choice but to claim this darkness. And our hearts, connected as they are to all hearts with their roots in the Divine Heart, have no choice but to acknowledge it too.

 

And God is ambitious, and ambitious for the power of Torah against this darkness. Even knowing that it’s only through us, Divine image that we are but earthy nonetheless, that Torah will show its energy in the world.

 

So we have been taugh each day to say this blessing precisely when it’s actually light outside: Baruch Atah Adonai, Elohaynu Melech Ha-Olam, Yotzer Or u’Voray Choshech, Oseh Shalom u’Voray et Hakol. We thank God for fashioning light and creating darkness, making peace and creating everything.

 

On the fourth day, God comes back to work more on light, and God creates the sun and the moon. According to the midrash -- and thank you to my friend and colleague Rabbi Rebecca Rosenthal for pointing me to this Torah this week -- the sun and the moon were originally made the same brightness, and both were charged to shine all the time. The moon approached God and said: Is it possible for two kings to serve with only one crown? And God said: Then go and make yourself smaller. The moon said: I raised a valid point, so why should I shrink myself? And God said: Go and share the day with the sun, and also rule the night by yourself. The moon said: What good am I that way, as a candle during the day that no one sees? And God said: Then go and let Israel count its days and years by you. And let people see that sometimes you are small, and sometimes you disappear, and sometimes there is no other light but yours.

 

As there are two kinds of darkness, there are two kinds of light. A bright and certain light, so obviously guiding and warming the world, at times of peaceful unity and justice -- yes that is the light of the sun. But there is also moonlight, and Rabbi Rosenthal quotes a teaching from Rabbi Sharon Brous: That we Jews are moon people. “[T]he moon, like our spirits, is an object in motion. It will always come back around. For moon people, that is the essence of our spiritual mobility. ... the moon teaches us that even when no light is visible at all, even in the deepest darkness, our hearts trust and remember that the light will shine once again. Maybe even tomorrow. And—though it seems impossible to imagine today—it will even eventually reemerge in its fullness. Orienting our calendar around the moon means that hope is a muscle we practice month after month, year after year, generation after generation. It is a muscle that gets stronger as we use it.” We Jews have had long experience exercising that muscle, and now we need to build it even more.

 

Sometimes Torah is a light powerful like the sun. Twelve years ago, the week of this parasha, Hamas released Gilad Shalit, an Israeli soldier it had held captive for more than five years. It was among other things a testimony to the idea from our parasha that what Tzelem Elohim means is that we are accountable for the life of even a single individual, and the State of Israel did not break that faith with Gilad Shalit. That’s actually the Torah I taught for Parashat Bereshit right here on Shabbat twelve years ago.

 

Today, the light of Torah we need is more like the light of the moon. To continue to believe that the sanctity of human life is a powerful and guiding Torah, even during the weeks we are seeing more and more pictures of those who are captive and those being buried and more bombs. There is no Torah we can learn and go out and fix this with right now, even if we brought it to every minister and general and world leader. There is no Torah as that absolute a light. Still there is a Torah like the crescent moon that will help us locate ourselves, as I am trying to do right now with this Torah I am teaching, and Torah that will help us take a few steps in the right direction, even in the dark time we’re in.

 

In a few minutes we will bench Rosh Chodesh. We will anticipate the day this week when the moon disappears entirely and a new month commences, and we will beg God to give us a new month of blessing for us and for all the people Israel. How hard that prayer will be.

 

The name of the new month is Marcheshvan, which means “the eighth moon.” Eight is a special number. Marcheshvan is the only month of the Jewish year with no holy day at all beyong the new moon itself and Shabbat-- no celebrations, major or minor, not even a minor fast. Tradition says this particular new moon coming this week, the sky left only with stars, will some year launch the month when the Mashiach comes, when the messianic era begins. The month is beyond saved for the biggest festival that could ever be, the light that doesn’t ever end.

 

It won’t be this month. I pray that with as much darkness as already grips our souls, with as much fear as we have, that we will help each other perceive the light of the moon, even as a sliver, and not lose all hope even as we acknowledge the power of the darkness, the darkness still claimed by God. I pray that we will find a Torah of moonlight to guide us, and remain committed to finding it. May our loved ones be safe, may our mitzvot be powerful in the days ahead, for ourselves and for them.

 

Shabbat Shalom and Chodesh Tov

 

Sukkot, Science and Religion

My extended D'var Torah on this topic at Sinai and Synapses!

My Rosh Hashanah Sermons (5784/2023)

Read or watch/listen:

Click to read the text of the sermons:

Day 1 — Glimmers

Day 2 — Through Regret

Or watch or listen on YouTube:

 

Hope, Chanukkah, and the Dreidel

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Shabbat Shalom and Chag Urim Sameach!

My Rosh Hashanah Sermons From Last Week

Here are my sermons from Rosh Hashanah 5783:

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

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

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

Getting From Here to High Holy Days, Starting With a Party!

This is based on what I said on Shabbat morning, August 27, 2022 at the start of the month of Elul. It was the day of a Bar Mitzvah and an aufruf (blessing to a couple about to get married)!

Usually I think of Elul as a time of introspection before we get together in a big way on Rosh Hashanah. But the past few years I’ve been thinking that it would be great to start the month leading to the ten particularly intense days with a dance party, a disco party! First we should celebrate that we’ve gotten here -- we should look at each other and who’s in this together with us and going to help us look back and look ahead. And wow, this past year having been what it’s been and the year before that, we ABSOLUTELY should start it with a party. And my dream came true and I didn’t even realize it when we scheduled Jonah’s Bar Mitzvah celebration and when Rachel and Joel told me the date of their wedding. So this is how it should be. A new month, that little sliver of moonlight that says to the shade: You are going away, we’re going to make our own energy here and we’re going to gather our powers together so we can make a new year.

It's been quite a year, and we need more than the three days of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur to do our reflecting and our redirecting and our rebooting – our teshuvah, our returning. The spiritual recalculating on the GPS of our hearts. I don’t even know if a month is enough.

The point isn’t to come to services on the holidays. The point is to figure out what we each need from the next 40 days (really it’s more like 52!) – and what of the many offerings of spirituality and learning can support each of us:

• What do we need from parties like this when services are like a party
• What do we need from the retreats we might do in services around other people
• What do we need from the time ourselves thinking and writing and talking with loved ones and friends and mentors and therapists
• What do we need from the things we’re going to read or the music and the silence

I’ll send you daily e-mails with thoughts and ways to gather for conversation or learning or spiritual practice. But the point isn’t to read the e-mails! It’s to use them. It’s really simple: Use this month and the next for you, for the better life you’ve been thinking about having or creating. Use it to figure out your piece of making the world better -- boy do we need that.

Say thank you as many times as possible, in a world that doesn’t do that enough and where there’s plenty you’re not happy about. You don’t have to decide if the world is more bad than good, or maybe you have decided there is more bad now -- but just find gratitude every day and express it, out loud, to someone or to your own ears. That will ripple out. No one can change only out of sadness and anger. Not unless you can connect it to someone you love whose suffering is what powers your anger, your sadness. Not unless you can find a lighthouse ahead for hope, powered by someone you deeply appreciate.

This time of year is serious, but it doesn’t have to be solemn. That’s why it needs a party today, and at the end of the season on Simchat Torah we have another one! I am so happy we’re together, and thank you for listening to my prayers this first hour and saying Amen, even if you don’t know what all my prayers were. Thank you, even if you didn’t know that’s what you were doing.

So I hope you’ll tap into the energy of today, not just the energy of joy but of words of Torah in many forms, to help you launch into Elul and a month of individual reflection that’s good for you and good for us all when you do it.