Rabbi Jon's Website and Blog

Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy -- A Map of Spring and Summer 2021

I've been wanting to get this down for weeks.... I’ve been very affected since March by Torah time – by how the cycle of reading the Torah in synagogue has mapped onto our experience of the pandemic since its one-year anniversary.

The first anniversary of the formal declaration of the pandemic and the massive shut-downs coincided with Jews’ reading the end of the book of Exodus and the start of the book of Leviticus. The Torah itself says that one year passed between the instructions Moshe received for the night of the Exodus, and the final assembly of the mishkan, the desert Sanctuary that would be a focal point for the Divine Presence. During that year in the Torah there had been war and thirst, a complete reorientation of the food distribution system to adjust to (i.e. manna), the new laws and covenant at Mt. Sinai, the in-fighting around the Golden Calf. Then finally a process of calming and reconciliation, and a collective project of building the “tabernacle.” Everyone gave something unique, with its own texture or color, from their life of that year – to be repurposed into a symbol of their unity. When the mishkan was finally assembled, the Divine Presence visibly infused it, with the cloud and fire that was going to lead the people ahead toward their new land and their new life.

That was what we read more or less on the first anniversary of the shut-down, as we were entering a new phase too – the ramping up of Covid-19 vaccination. I expected a turn toward dealing with the new ethical challenges of moving forward, the project of reconnecting and rebuilding a reality better than the one pre-pandemic.

But Leviticus opens with a cloud around the mishkan, and Moshe himself hesitating to approach it to hear these kinds of teachings. The cloud and fire do not in fact move forward. Something is not – was not ready.

Leviticus, the book that was the backdrop of our spring, is not actually a book of moving forward in the desert. And it’s not directly a book of society and ethical teaching, at least not for the first eighty percent or so. Leviticus does open with travel – but it does open with movement. It’s the motion of individuals coming one by one mostly, in a process the Torah calls korban or coming-closer, with offerings. People coming in closer, walking into the center, toward the cloud, with their offerings. Toward the cloudy place, with offerings occasioned by basic emotions – wellbeing, gratitude, guilt. Getting out and coming toward, to eat a sacred meal with a Kohen, to cleanse themselves of something, to burn up something completely and leave it behind.

Something got my attention in March, when I looked at the Torah and realized that it was telling me not to expect people to be ready to plunge ahead. Especially I shouldn’t expect people to be ready to engage in discussion about ethics and society fully just yet.

For a while, the Torah says n Leviticus, moving is just getting used to back and forth. It’s not one direction, from alone to together, from isolated to the Divine. It’s back and forth. Leviticus doesn’t command offerings from everyone on the same schedule. Yes, there’s some paying attention to right and wrong, sometimes you have to bring something in because of that. But mostly, we’re guided by ourselves, we know when to try moving. Closer and back out. The cloud and the fire are in the center and draw our eyes even when we’re still alone, to help us remember that there is something common even on the days we don’t bring anything. Do it like this for a while, move in your own directions, says the Torah for eighteen chapters, and then we’ll get back to ethics, and then we’ll try moving on together.

The commentaries on the opening verse of Leviticus focus on the last letter of its first word Vayikra. In the Torah scroll, the last letter alef is written as a small superscript. That alef has two dimensions. Its presence or absence changes the word from calling to happenstance. The letter alef signifies ani or anochi, “I” – which can stand for the ego in a strong sense or the Divine, “I am Adonai your God who brought you out of the land of Egypt.” Leviticus opens with a cloud around the tabernacle and a spiritual teetering between calling and being just tossed around, between a sense of our own “I” and not having it. Reclaiming what “I” feel like, who “I” am, is what a lot of us were doing as the pandemic hit its first year and we contemplated the next phase ahead. We were, and surely still are, disoriented. Leviticus gives that spiritual state a name and a picture and a pacing.

That was most of Leviticus, and it turned out to be not just accurate but for me soothing.

By the time the book of Leviticus turned to its code of ethics in chapter 19, and its social vision in chapter 25, things had in fact changed around us quite profoundly. The accelerating progress of vaccination in many places led just at this time to the CDC’s revision of its mask guidelines for fully vaccinated people. It was time to open the book of Numbers – the book of the march forward, the organization of people toward the battle for the new land, and the conflicts and delays along the way. But at least it’s the book of moving together, even if together is starting and stopping, and quarreling among ourselves.

Leviticus and Numbers share the perception that not everyone is spiritually ready to move in the same direction at the same time. But at some point, there is something you could call movement of the group, catalyzed by leaders or critical mass. Numbers acknowledges that deciding to move is hardly all there is. You’ve got plenty of opportunities to grind to a halt. In the Torah, these include questioning leaders and their motivations; people getting focused on immediate ease vs. longer-term goals; issues of justice and inclusion; people defining the end of the road in different ways. This last particularly struck me when we read about the tribes of Reuven and Gad who wanted not to go all the way to the new land with the other tribes, but settle where they were. To declare the journey and the fight were over. They and Moshe had it out, and eventually figured out a way for the tribes to work on setting up the common future together, even though tribe by tribe they would separate and live differently both economically and culturally. We should be so fortunate. In Numbers, some 38 years pass and if you read the book you can’t see where they went.

That’s more or less where we got in the Torah by early/mid-July. Now it’s time for Deuteronomy. What’s coming is preparation for the new year – the Jewish new year which starts this year in early September, as does the new school year. The new Torah year starts a few weeks later. Deuteronomy is about getting to the cusp of the new land, the future. It is a book of review of the teachings, going over them for the first time in a long time. At long last, Moshe gets to focus on the ethics and laws and teachings. He gets to talk about them, and also to remind people to continue to learn and study and talk about them from the moment they enter the new land. The time for putting that off – for delaying our ethical conversations, or pushing them to the side or to a small group of interested people – we’re being asked to consider that time over. To be fully human, ready to live, is also to be accountable ethically and intellectually and spiritually. That is what the Jewish new year is all about, and the intellectual explorations in Deuteronomy coincide in the Jewish year with weeks of spiritual introspection. And since this is hard any year, and especially this year, the rabbis of our tradition long ago paired Deuteronomy with (Second) Isaiah, with words of comfort and encouragement, with a welcome of people back to the Divine, back from exile toward home and each other.

I’m waiting to see how Deuteronomy maps onto the end of the summer. But I wanted to get this spiritual journal of the Torah cycle down now, because I am so grateful I had the Torah in this way these past few months. I’ve had more than the Torah’s specific teachings, each verse or each week – I’ve had this structure. It has helped pace me, and see the moment I’m in and some weeks ahead. I have always paid attention to the seasonal flow of the Torah readings, but this year I have seen in the Torah’s pacing through the desert so much I hadn’t seen before. I am grateful, and hope I’ll be attentive to the same things in the weeks and months ahead.

Rolling Waters, Mighty Stream -- Exploring MLK's Metaphor

This was my opening invocation for the annual Southern NH Outreach for Black Unity Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. breakfast on January 21, 2019.

I am so honored to be invited to join you for some opening words today. My name is Jon Spira-Savett, and I serve as rabbi for the Jewish community in our area through Temple Beth Abraham in Nashua. I’m a member of the executive board of the Nashua Area Interfaith Council and one of its recent past presidents, and it’s because of that network that I have met many of you.

Rev. King is one of my own most important religious teachers. I call him Rev. King because though he was Dr. King, a scholar and theologian, he was a pastor and a preacher and a teacher, for his own communities and for my community, the Jewish community of America.

Rev. King’s voice in our nation, and his many visits to synagogues and rabbinic conventions, inspired and mobilized people in the Jewish community, from college students to older rabbis. He inspired many in the Jewish community to march with him in Alabama, to travel down to Mississippi in that Freedom Summer, to work the pressure points in Congress for civil rights. There is even a story of a rabbi or two running into a Midwestern Senator at the airport in 1964, just by chance, quote-unquote, having been tipped off about where to find a man trying to hide out and to remind him there was no hiding from a vote for justice.

And the last interview of Rev. King’s life took place at the national convention of the Rabbinical Assembly, just ten days before he was taken from all of us. There Rev. King spoke a verse from the prophet Amos that you have heard from him many times: Let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like a mighty stream.

Let justice
roll down
like waters
and righteousness like a mighty
stream.

Rev. King had preached those words in front of the Lincoln Memorial, and he had written them to send to religious leaders from his cell in Birmingham Jail, and he would preach these words of Amos again the night before he was killed, in Memphis. In front of the rabbis Rev. King didn’t preach them, he said them soberly, as quiet as he had ever said them, as he was in a tough time – let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like a mighty stream.

What was it about these particular words from Amos? I could read you fifty other equally beautiful verses about the virtue of justice, the glory of righteousness. But these words.

First of all, Rev. King was saying that justice is a power as natural as gravity, which just pulls the water down from the mountains into any place that is not already raised high. Justice is built in; it’s the hardware of our system. Just as gravity can take something small, and the longer it moves down, the more force it gathers, the harder it is to stop – so too justice can take any single person, any group no matter how small, and make them unstoppable.

In the verses before this one, Amos was talking about the so-called power of oppressors, all the work they have to do to twist justice, to feast on bribes, to take what they have not earned, to look away from the poor and drive them out of their community. The hard work it takes to look so pious and religious, when you are complicit in so much injustice.

Amos is saying: That so-called power -- that’s what’s unnatural. That kind of power is a wearying power, a power that spends itself and takes us constantly away from the Divine and from one another.

So why does that power seem so real? Because the verse from Amos really says that justice swells like waters -- like a rolling wave at the edge of the sea, like the piling up of the waters at the bottom of a waterfall – and behind that surge is an emptiness, an undertow, until the next wave.  A depression where the so-called power of the so-called powerful can slip in.

So when Rev. King spoke about justice rolling down like waters, he meant that we have to get down from up high where we see things so clearly but we are smaller than we could be, and we have to roll together and make ourselves more powerful. We have to plunge down together so we can surge together, and we have to keep grouping up and keep on coming, to leave no time after one wave of justice until another, no lull that makes it easier for the other so-called power to just slide in there. When I said yes that I would presume to stand in front of you and say some words, it is because I wanted to tell you that I am tired of being a small wave and seeing small waves, and I want to be with you and roll and surge together. Let justice roll down like waters.

And as for the mighty stream, there is only other place in the Hebrew Bible where that particular phrase occurs and it will knock you out. It’s in a remarkable law in the book of Deuteronomy that happened to be the text at my Bar Mitzvah, so I’ve never forgotten it.

Deuteronomy talks about the case of a dead body found in a field between towns, and no one knows who is responsible. The elders of each of the surrounding towns are required to measure from the body to the edge of their town. Whichever town is closest, the elders of that town have to take a pure young calf, one that has never pulled a yoke, and bring it to a mighty stream that has never been worked or tilled – a stream that is mighty only during the rainy season, when it gushes with water from the heavens that overflows onto terraces and fields, and the rest of the time is just the memory of a mighty stream, or the hope for one to come.

And there the elders wash their hands and sacrifice the calf, and they lead a call and response. The later rabbis of my tradition say the gist of what they say, back and forth to each other, is this: We, the leaders of the town closest to here, we swear that this man did not pass through our town without anyone noticing. We swear that in our town it’s not possible that no one offered him a place to stay, or a meal to eat, or protection when he was ready to leave and go out into the dangerous world. For if we had failed in any of those ways, then it would be as if we had killed him ourselves, and his blood would be on our hands.

This particular mighty stream was hiding in the background every time Rev. King preached from Amos. It’s the stream where the elders of the city go down together to ask: Have we been responsible for every person, every single person – or have we washed our hands and just pretended that our righteousness is flowing like a mighty stream?

Have we been responsible for every person we don’t know personally, but we know she is here, he is here, yet still isolated from the rest of us, and we let that be all right?

Have we been responsible for education in every school, have we been responsible for dignified housing in every neighborhood, have we made it clear that no one can be bullied or harassed by another kid or by someone in authority because of how they look or how they speak, or where they were born, or who and how they love?

Have we been responsible not just to run after problems righteously, but to build the community that can sustain and love every person who passes our way?

Maybe we are the elders who ought to go down to the river, to the mighty stream that runs just a few hundred feet from here, maybe every year right around Martin Luther King Day, and see who else is there and ask these questions.

I believe Rev. King would say to us that the very same stream, the same place, can be a place of sorrow, or it can be flowing mightily with righteousness. All it takes is for us to be those leaders who gather there, who between us blend the wisdom of elders who have seen it all, the sweep of history and the big picture, with the freshness that comes from seeing people one at a time in dark corners. The mighty stream is a place for leaders who come for rituals that rivet us, and words that drive us, with measuring sticks of analysis and loving eyes. The mighty stream is a place for all of us, and not just on this one day a year.

Let justice roll down, like waters
and righteousness, like a mighty
stream.

These are words to hear preached in hope; and these are words to say soberly in difficult times. There is a hydropower in justice, and it is time for us to generate it together, to harness our power together.  

Holy One of love and mystery, known to us by many names, or by no name at all – we pray that we will be blessed by the memory of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., who taught us how to be sisters and brothers, to be colleagues and teachers for each other in justice and righteousness, to be the leaders we need with each other and for each other. Amen.

How To Be Judgmental

This was my D'var Torah in services on Sept. 10, 2016, Parashat Shoftim.

On my first Rosh Hashanah here, I recounted a small vignette that happened to me, that happened in me, when we were living in an apartment in Queens more than ten years ago. I was walking out the basement exit, near the laundry room, and I bumped into a friend. Not a close friend, but part of a couple I really found interesting. The two of them were creative people, a playwright/director and a dancer. I officiated at their wedding, and we had had many many long and deep conversations about life.

Anyway, I bumped into the playwright outside the building, and he was smoking a cigarette. It was a good place to smoke for an apartment dweller. I didn't realize he ever smoked – and I was kind of flustered, and said hi quickly, and walked along fast. And as soon as I was out of sight, these thoughts went running through my head: I can't believe this; he has a new baby and doesn't he know it's not good for the baby and he should really take care of himself; I thought I knew him and he was a smart guy; and he's younger than me and maybe not as mature and wise as I thought he was....

And then I stopped myself and thought: Wow, am I judgmental!

Today we read from the Torah Parashat Shoftim – shoftim means judges. And these are the weeks leading us to Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year that is also known as Yom Hadin, the Day of Judgment. So I want to help us get oriented to this theme of judgment.

There is a dominating image from the liturgy of the High Holy Days about the Day of Judgment. God is depicted sitting like a judge on a high seat, reading a book that contains all of our actions from the whole year – written in our own handwriting and witnessed by the Divine, God's-self. And on the basis of that record our fate for the coming year is decided – “who shall live and who shall die, who shall be tranquil and who shall be tormented.”

Now first of all, for the record I want to say that I don't believe that's how God works or how our destiny is worked out. I don't believe we are judged that way, and I don't believe in a God like that (which is a whole other topic).

But I do very much want to hold onto some of the imagery. The prayer itself is called Unetaneh Tokef, which means “we acknowledge the power” – the power of the day of judging. I love the idea that all our actions, good and bad, no matter how big or small, are significant. I believe that the decisions we make can affect life and death – whether it's how we drive or how we vote. And I believe our actions affect how we and others experience life – whether someone is more tranquil or more troubled because of me, because of us. I love the idea that we need to get focused on all this – that we need times of judgment.

Now, “judgmental” is a bad word. We often say that we're supposed to be nonjudgmental and accepting, so we don't drive people in our lives away. We shouldn't impose our own outlook on someone else. Look at the example of myself that I described: the torrent of negative judgments, just pouring out, almost out of my control. And there are a lot of places where judging goes wrong. It's really hard to do a good workplace performance assessment, or to get grades that really describe what kind of student you've been in a class. It's almost like we are programmed for negative judgments, and for inaccurate judgments. So we should just stop being so judgmental, no?

But we have this Yom Hadin, this Day of Judgment, and I don't want to let go of the possibility of judging – even judging each other and inviting judgment toward ourselves. The first line of the Torah reading today points us toward a couple of guidelines, when it says that we are to appoint judges lishvatecha – “for our tribes”, v'shaftu et ha-am mishpat tzedek -- “they should judge the people with just judgment.”

Judging is the most stinging when it's in our tribes – in our families, in our small social groups. That's the stuff that really eats at us. And it's also where it feels the best when we're judged to be good, from people who are close enough to see. We forget that we need that. When someone describes some way we are good, worth praising, it's easy to shrug it off, but it means something when it comes from inside our tribe. From the same people who are also critical and judgmental.

The second point is in the last words of the verse – “just judgment.” There is bad judging and good judging, and we want to get just the good judging.

The natural thing is that it's all mixed up together; careful judgment and being judgmental in a bad way. Thinking about myself outside the laundry room that day, there was this cascade of negative judgments about my friend the secret smoker. And, all of that was battling against my very good and positive judgments of this person, built up over a period of time. And there was a real issue in there and some concern for him and his family – I was thinking about a possibly unhealthy behavior in someone I cared about. So, bad judgmental and good judgmental, all in a bundle.

Can we get ourselves to extract from this kind of mixture the good judgmental, the mishpat tzedek?

We need a practice for this, to start working on for this time of year. The Baal Shem Tov suggests one: that every time we are judging another person, we should stop and imagine that we are judging ourselves. We should look to find the same flaw or the same habit in ourselves. If we can understand it, we will have more compassion for the other person. If we deny it, or we can't understand it – well, then we'll also have more compassion for the other person, who maybe can't understand it or is in denial. If it's something we can fix it in ourselves, we can figure out if it's something we can help the other person fix. Or maybe it was so hard for me to fix that I realize I can't really help the other person, and it's time to stop being so judgmental and upset.

Well, I have never been a smoker. But I can tell you that during the time when I discovered my friend outside smoking, I with my own small children was having an extra ice cream soda late at night while I was washing the dishes. It took me a long time to work on that.

And the Baal Shem Tov says that God never declares a judgment against us until we have made the judgment first. There is really no harsher judge than ourselves. We shouldn't be worrying about God's judgment, and we don't have to worry even about the judging eyes of others. They only matter when we realize we are judging ourselves.

The Baal Shem Tov is really reminding us that judging is dynamic. It's looking at good things and bad, it's looking at other people and ourselves. It's overshooting and then noticing that. It's thinking about our standards and what in our makeup and habits contribute to our better and our worse. For some small number of people in our lives, we can be really good judges. We should want those kinds of judges to judge us.

And when I'm the synagogue on Rosh Hashanah, this is how I plan to use the image of God judging us on Yom Hadin. For each thing written down in the book of a person's life that's not great, I will think of God asking – why did he do this, is this within her power to learn, what can I as God do to teach her or teach him. How might this one help another one be more alive next year, more tranquil and less troubled. And what should I, God, be less judgmental about in human beings... because even God hasn't figured out how to get everything right in the world.

 

Election 2012 -- Quick Roundup of My Links

Here are a few of my Divrei Torah that relate to political philosophy and the upcoming election.  I'll be speaking more about this tomorrow at Shabbat morning services.

• 2009 Dvar Torah on this week's parasha, Shoftim -- my letter to President Obama about health care reform
• last week's on-line Dvar Torah on Parashat Re'eh -- some Torah thoughts on economics and society
• Dvar Torah on Parashat Vayera before the 2010 Congressional elections
  

Dear President Obama -- A Response to a Conversation about Faith and Health Care

On Wednesday, August 19, I participated in a conference call with President Obama on the subject of health care reform.  The call was organized by the Religious Action Center of the Reform movement, in conjunction with the Conservative and Reconstructionist rabbinical associations.  I formulated my response in the form of a letter, which I read in shul last Friday night and am sending to the president.

August 21, 2009

Erev Shabbat

Dear President Obama:

I was honored to join a thousand of my rabbinic colleagues on the telephone with you this past Wednesday, to hear your charge to speak about health care reform in this country when Jews gather next month for the High Holidays.  Just to hear the voice of the president of the United States coming out of my own telephone -- I confess I put it on speaker, so my children could hear too -- it brought me once more to appreciate the great blessings of freedom and equality that we enjoy as citizens of this country.  Little more than a century ago, all my family still lived as they had for centuries in places where because they were Jewish, they did not enjoy the privileges of citizenship.  In places where the government was often their enemy, and certainly not their agent.

Mr. President, you approached us this week as fellow people of faith.  I wondered how you would do that, what would be different in this conversation from your other talks about health care.

You began by reminding us of the most vivid of our prayers on Rosh Hashanah.  We say that on our choices depend who shall live and who shall die, who will have the chance to live out the fullness of life's years and who will not.  Who will be serene and who will be tormented because they don't have the means they need to face life's challenges.

You reminded us that the discussion throughout the country right now is about how we take care of the sick, and whether in fact we do take care of everyone who is ill or injured.  While the talk is about dollars and cents, public options and cooperatives, the real issue is life and death.  Who has the care they need to live, and who will die because they cannot afford it.  You said that caring for our brother and sister and for our neighbor is a teaching of every faith.

Then you told us that you know we hear the stories of medical care denied, as pastors and counselors and open ears in our communities.  And you told us the principles and goals of your reform proposals.

To be frank, Mr. President -- it was a good beginning.  But that was all it was, and I was disappointed.

If we rabbis, and the many other pastors and people of faith you addressed later that day, are going to ask people to raise voices for the changes you seek, you are going to have to do more.  And you are going to have to rely on us, religious people and religious leaders, in a deeper way, as more than a possibly sympathetic interest group.

We're going to need you to be a better teacher.  We're going to need that voice of yours, that prophetic voice, that captivated so many people last year.  Then we might be in a position to speak out, about health care bills moving through Congress, from a standpoint of faith.

So let me presume to give you some teaching advice, and some Jewish advice.

If you are going to teach us, you'll need to remember that telling us the goals of your proposals is not the same as explaining how and why they'll work.  When the financial system collapsed in the 1930s, President Roosevelt's fireside chats were models of clarity.  He explained what a bank is, what a system of banks is, what happens when there's a run and exactly how, step-by-step, his acts would reopen the banks.  Slow down with us.  If someone would trust us and break it down, any of us would listen, even those on the far right or the far left.

For goodness sake, find one of the kids who has been working at Pixar on Toy Story 3 and get her to stand you in front of a green screen.  They do wonders digitally these days -- you could appear to walk with a dollar as it moves from employer to insurance company to hospital to employee or equipment maker.  You could use split screens to show how medical dollars are spent for the same need in Miami on one side, and the Mayo Clinic on the other.  Help us see the savings that are supposed to pay for all this.  Surely all those young folks Tweeting for you in the campaign can help you out here.

On the moral level, I want to tell you some things you can learn from the Jews.

It's true, a lot of people use the word "community" or talk about the general idea of "love your neighbor as yourself."  It's common language, and I know you want to use it to reach across religious lines.  In Jewish ethics, we are very practical about this.  Who is your neighbor?  What is loving your neighbor?  What is the community?

In our Torah reading for this week, in Deuteronomy 21, we get some very specific answers. Here is a fascinating law.  A body is found -- God forbid! -- out in the open, outside a town, and no one knows who killed the person.  The elders and judges of the nation go out, and they measure the distance from the corpse to each one of the towns in the area.  Whichever town is identified as the closest -- the elders of that town are now presumed to be guilty of a murder.

Their only way out is to perform a ritual, involving the blood of a calf that has never pulled a plow, at a pristine river bed not used for irrigation.  They wash their hands, and then they must declare out loud -- "Our hands did not spill this blood, nor did we see what happened."  They say:  We know that we cannot bear to live in a land where innocent people are killed.  Only after the ritual, and their words out loud, is their guilt cleared.

Who is your neighbor?  If it's not a friend or relative, the Torah says:  Take out a measuring stick, and the closest community in miles, that's how you define neighbors.  It's as simple and concrete as that -- you are responsible for a neighbor's life because she has passed this way.

As this ritual was interpreted later, the Talmud sharpens a few details.  The death took place in a remote place, but the leaders of the nation respond, personally.  They can't staff it out.  Whichever town is responsible can't send a small delegation of its leaders to perform the cleansing ritual -- every leader of that town has to show up.

Finally, the Talmud interprets the words at the ceremony.  "Our hands did not spill this blood" -- It's not that anyone thinks the leaders murdered someone.  Rather, the leaders say -- We did not let this person come into our town hungry and leave without feeding him.  We did not let this person think it was safer to go away from us into the wilderness, rather than stay in an unfeeling place.  We did not let this person leave town without an escort as he went into unfamiliar, dark terrain where there might be bandits.  We didn't act like we were responsible only until he left our sight.  If we had seen him, we would have cared for him and protected him, until we could see him to another safe place.  Though we didn't see him, we know that his death is a blot on our community -- because he passed through, and the last place he was whole was with us.

What is "love your neighbor"?  Keep him safe, keep him fed, keep him alive.  What is community?  Community is who does those things, because there won't always be an individual looking who can do it.

Mr. President -- the words of "love your neighbor" don't answer the question by themselves.  So say more than cliches. Tell us that each person who falls ill without access to health care walks with an invisible string unfurling from behind, attaching back to every place she passed while she was in good health.  Ask us what we would do if, God forbid, she became incapacitated or died, and the measuring led back to our community. Ask us if we can truly wash our hands and say we don't see the person who chooses between food and drugs, between paying the rent and seeing a doctor.  I know you like the positive, Mr. President, but as you yourself said, this is about who shall live and who shall die.  Don't let us hide from that.  A little fire and brimstone wouldn't hurt.

To your credit, Mr. President, you are stepping up, just like the leaders in the field from Deuteronomy.  So are many other leaders, at all levels and in both parties.  Some aren't.  Some of those who aren't read the Bible too, so you may want to bring this story from Deuteronomy to them.

I am sharing this letter with my congregation as we welcome Shabbat in our synagogue.  As a religious gathering, we embody even more about the meaning of community.  Some of the people here tonight live here, some come from elsewhere -- yet we know that we are linked.  We know in our bones to identify with people welcoming Shabbat all over this country and the world.  So we know that community is not only the measuring stick, the potentially visible, but also our unseen distant connections.  When you speak to us as people of faith, remind us to teach others what we know about community.  That we are linked, and responsible beyond what our eyes see.  That we as faith communities have a unique role to play because we experience community ourselves in a unique way.
 
You asked us rabbis on the phone to be a shofar, and call out on this matter of caring for the sick.  You please do that better, Mr. President.  Help us see that to you and our other leaders ,this is a matter of conscience and faith.  Then we will find words appropriate to our role.

You closed your call by wishing us a Shana Tova.  Right back atcha, Mr President -- I hope you have a good year too.  I know we need you to.

Shabbat Shalom,
Rabbi Jonathan Spira-Savett