Rabbi Jon's Website and Blog

Who Were the Baby-Savers of Exodus and Who Are We?

Saving babies, according to the Torah, was the first crack in the oppression of the Israelites by Pharaoh.

In the first two chapters of Exodus, the start of this week’s Torah reading in the synagogue and Jewish study cycle, two sets of people save baby boy Israelites from the death decreed by Pharaoh. First it’s two midwives, then it’s Pharaoh’s own daughter with the help perhaps of her retinue and for sure of Moses’ sister and mother.

What do we know about each of them? Their motivations? Exodus 1-2 are both very schematic and very nuanced, worth a very careful read or re-read for the way stories that might be very familiar were first written out.

The midwives are introduced in 1:15 by name as Shifra and Puah, and they are the first characters given names in the text, other than the sons of Jacob who came down to Egypt generations before and had long since died. Pharaoh and all the other actors so far in the present story are described by title and role but not named.  And of course it’s very unusual for women who aren’t ongoing figures in a biblical story to be named, or for women at all in the Bible.

Not only did Shifra and Puah defy Pharaoh in their actions; they also defied him verbally to his face! (Clever talk in 1:19; they say the baby boys lived because the Hebrew women are “chayot”, which Pharaoh would have heard as “wild beasts” but also means “alive/full of life.”)

The first interpretive bump in the text is a brilliant gift made out of the fact that Hebrew is an alphabet primarily of consonants, and in biblical Hebrew most vowels are implied and not written. Generally if you know the rules of Hebrew grammar you know the patterns of vowels. But every so often there are two grammatical possibilities, and Exodus 1:15 is such a case. Pharaoh spoke either “to the midwives of the Hebrews” or “to the Hebrew midwives.” One vowel in one word affects whether they might be Egyptian or whether they are clearly Israelite. The names Shifra and Puah aren’t conclusive -- they sound like they could be Hebrew names, or non-Hebrew names made to sound like Hebrew. (Today Shifra has become a good Jewish name, but that’s no proof about ancient Hebrew.)

And then the Hebrew word for Hebrew itself adds to the ambiguity. “Ivri” means the one-from-across, one-from-over-there, one-from-across-the-river. As a rule of thumb, Israelites are described in the Torah as Ivri/Hebrew either by non-Israelites, or by Israelites in the presence of non-Israelites.

And as if that weren’t enough, the Torah says that Shifra and Puah kept the boys alive because “the midwives revered God” (1:17). You could use that to argue that they were Israelites, worshippers of the One. Or you could say the language calls attention to their unexpected reverence for this particular divinity, a stretch beyond their prior identities.

In terms of what this motivation is in substance, “revered God” sounds like deep spirituality. On the other hand, in the Torah “fearing/revering God” often refers to the most minimal standard of moral decency, and the absence of “fearing God” often means the absence of any moral standard at all. Was this standing up beyond any expectation, powered a strength from deep within the heart, or what any decent person should do?

So, were Shifra and Puah Hebrew midwives, or Egyptian midwives serving Hebrews? Or as some early post-biblical legends have it, Egyptian midwives who because of this experience went over to the Israelites or at least to their God?

Whoever they were, they saved baby boys whose death was an edict of the regime. The act is the same either way, but who they were matters. Did they act because this was their own people? (Later Jewish midrash identifies them usually but not always with Yocheved and Miryam, Moshe’s mother and sister.) Was it because of their guild, their duty to all mothers and babies? Because of their spiritual depth and attunement, or a simple and profound humanity? All of the above? Exodus 1 is a different story depending on the answer.

In the next chapter (2:6), Pharaoh’s daughter is bathing by the Nile when she sees a box floating there: “And she opened it, and she saw him, the boy, and look -- it was a little one, crying – and she took pity on him, and she said, ‘One of the Hebrew children this is.’”

Unlike the midwives, she does not have a name in the Torah. She is Daughter-of-Pharaoh. (Later Jewish tradition calls her Batyah, “daughter of Yah/the Divine.”) At least part of her motivation is clear: it’s a baby! And he’s floating for his very life. “She saw him, the little one” – the Hebrew adds an extra syllable. She saw extra.

What did she mean, “one of the Hebrew children”? It’s not just a surface descriptor, one of the babies who belongs to “them”; it’s a baby her own father has decreed must be killed. Anyone who found him was required to drown him in this very same Nile. No longer only midwives were under this command. Identifying a Hebrew baby boy meant seeing immediately a baby condemned to death.

One view: “She saw him, the little one” – Pharaoh’s daughter immediately saw this about him, a boy not just vulnerable but a specific target of her father. She went to great lengths after saving the baby to see to its care and presumably to hide him and his identity. She broke the law right under her father’s nose. She established a relationship with the baby’s mother across a boundary both geographical (Goshen) and national.

Another possibility: Tali Adler this week wrote something interrogating the meaning of pity, the root “ch-m-l” in Hebrew. Sometimes it’s a problematic term, a selective pity or even a self-serving one. (Tali herself I think concludes that in the case of a baby, one never doubts that “chemlah” is pure compassion.)

But in her general vein -- Why did Pharaoh’s daughter save this particular baby boy? Was this just the only one Pharaoh’s daughter happened upon? Was one enough for her, or would she have saved others? Did her retinue mobilize to hold her back from putting all of them at further risk if they were found out? In any case, Pharaoh’s daughter did this one act and didn’t disturb her father’s system any further.

Or did she? At some point, she gave the boy his name, Moshe/Moses, which works in both Hebrew and Egyptian. She says it’s about her “drawing him out of water.” We know for sure that in the Egyptian language his name locates him in the family of Pharoah. But in Hebrew the name is a charge or a prophecy that this boy will become a drawer-out-of-waters. He will, in a long time.

In the next set of episodes, the text toys with us around Moses’ awareness of his own connection. The narrator and we know he is Israelite, yet we don’t know if he himself does. Read the verses in the last half of chapter 2 very carefully! Moshe is identified later by Midianites as an Egyptian (2:19), and he calls himself a “stranger in a strange land” (2:22), which could mean every place he has ever dwelled.

Was the Daughter-of-Pharaoh the one who gently set up her adopted son to “get it” on his own? Did she play a long game? Did she know how painful it would be for him to discover the oppression around him, that he would have to flee from the situation for decades and then from his own role in the revolution, until he couldn’t say no to the Divine voice any more?

“Hebrew or humanitarian” and the other interpretive questions aren’t just about nailing down the motives of these specific characters. The opening chapters of Exodus are parallel to the opening of Genesis. Genesis has 10+ chapters of creation and the origins of humanity before we get to Abraham and Sarah, the founders of Israel (and others) with their special relationship to the Divine. Exodus 1-2 are a kind of second creation saga. Idioms from Genesis 1 are sprinkled throughout. Humanity as an ethical principle prior to Israel and Israel’s Torah is in play, at least as a possibility.

Encountering this part of the Torah, we Jews are being asked whether this Exodus story is about our liberation alone, or about the nature of liberation in the scheme of the universe generally. It's about whose babies we have to see.

Can the story be ours, and also ours-toward-others, and ours-and-others’? Do we read our liberation story as something that has to finish before we can relate it to other people, or can our stories run ongoing in parallel, or are they actually interwoven?

And what if in one telling we are in a process of liberation, and in a simultaneous telling we play a role in oppression? Michael Walzer argues for this at an early stage in our history. He says  that the biblical prophets saw the Israelite ruling class during the era of the kings as both beset by empires and acting like Pharaohs to their own poor.

For me, all the answers are yes. Exodus liberation is past and present, ours and others’-near-us. The first law the Israelites receive after the Ten Commandments is to liberate their own “Hebrew slaves” (21:2). I would argue this means – the slaves which are Hebrew-to-you, the way you were Hebrew-to-others.

****

Now for the harder part, spiritually and morally. I hope you’ll read this part graciously toward me, particularly if you’re a committed Jew or a committed Christian. I hope it might spark some one-to-one or small groups conversations; it’s certainly not my definitive word.

The story of oppression and liberation of the Jews is not over yet for us. The century or less of tremendous Jewish freedom doesn’t mean the process is complete or the book is closed.

About a dozen years ago I first articulated to myself and to the congregation I serve that Palestinian liberation should and will be a Jewish story, a part of our own midrash on Exodus. When Palestinians are free it should be not begrudgingly or in spite of us, but because of us and because of our own liberation.

For a Jew, this focuses the challenge of the babies in Exodus 1-2 and the account of those who first saw them and acted -- what biblical scholar Jon Levenson has called “the universal horizon of biblical particularism.” In the past month, compassion for babies has been at the center of reactions to the Israel-Hamas conflict. The horrors inflicted on babies by Hamas on October 7. The babies in hospitals and homes in Gaza killed and wounded and put at risk in Israel’s military response.

This week how can we Jews not see our own people’s babies and the babies of Gaza at the same time, as we read of Pharaoh’s decree and the midwives and Pharaoh’s daughter? Which of those characters are we supposed to be?

For many Christians recently, there has been another powerful biblical anchor. So many people shared in December an image of or based on a baby doll amidst Gazan rubble set up outside the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem as this year’s nativity scene. How could people not perceive a link between then and now, especially Palestinian Christians and those who have bonds to them?

Yet if Jews face the challenge of “the universalist horizon of biblical particularism”, Christians face the other side of that coin. Call it “the particularlist horizon of biblical universalism.” How might my friends in Christian faith see particularity, multiple particularities, in the universalism of the Christian story?

When I first saw the image from Bethlehem, I was both upset and afraid. I was upset at exclusion. Does this mean you can’t see my babies during your holy season, only yours, only theirs? And also afraid of what happens when Christians map the war this way. If Jesus represents (only?) the Palestinian babies today, then we Jews today are also the ones who are King Herod in the Gospel of Matthew, ordering the massacre of babies, Herod who is described exactly as Pharaoh from Exodus 1-2.

What would happen if this was the takeaway from Advent and Christmas this year, absorbed on social media and in churches in the United States? How would people emerge from that and look at me and my people? That’s an immediate fear. In the wider picture, what would that do to the possibility of a story where Jewish/Israeli and Palestinian liberation are intertwined?

Seeing the Bethlehem image many times, I tried not to let it disturb my own compassion for Gaza, not to let me off from my own Torah imperative to keep Gazans in my view and in my prayers, even as I was fearful and upset for myself and my own. I felt better actually after seeing a Christmas Day post from one of my religious Jewish-Israeli friends visiting the U.S.: “Where I live, we could use hope and miracles. So if you pray today, keep us all in mind.” I had thought of asking that out loud too, and wish that I had.

I know many of my Christian friends in faith did just that. I prayed that the prayers of my friends during Advent and on Christmas would be capacious enough to see the babies of Gaza these past few months and the babies in Israel who were murdered on October 7 or who were present when their parents were killed; the babies and toddlers held underground as hostages, including baby Kfir Bibas, not even a year old, who is possibly still alive in captivity. All of these babies, and older children, who lost their lives or who will have to grow up and live with the trauma of this from their youth. Not to mention the babies of Ukraine during Putin’s bombings, and other places I forget even to think about too much of the time, who need to be in our stories too.

****

I have a strong memory of Mrs. Nussbaum’s Sunday School class at Shaare Shalom Congregation, when I must have been in first or second grade. We were making our own cut-and-paste versions of the Haggadah, the text of the Pesach (Passover) Seder. I remember myself doing a page with babies being thrown into the Nile. I picture it in the traditional old-style Hebrew School notebook, with the picture of Rabbi Moses Maimonides on the front, though that’s probably wrong. Cutting, pasting, maybe even coloring.

We were taught about the babies and assimiliated it very matter-of-factly as Jewish kids. I don’t remember being scared about it at the time. I, who became the father who wanted to shield my own small children from violence of any kind in TV and books as long as possible, who fast-forwarded past the Nazi parts of “The Sound of Music” with my kids.

Today, it’s the story on the shore with Pharaoh’s daughter and on land with the midwives than I’m eager to cut, paste, and color in. These women will help me see the liberation stories in which I as a Jew am involved – our own story, Palestinians’ and our story with them, African-Americans’ and other American’s and our story with them. It’s not only about babies, or even just children.

I can’t say that in any of the liberation stories of our time I have been active like Shifrah, Puah, Pharaoh’s daughter. I haven't saved any babies. I am perhaps most like Pharaoh’s daughter at the shore at the first moment, trying to see extra and able to say, “One of the Hebrew babies this is.” That’s the moment I guess I have to study so I can know what’s next.

Who were Shifra, Puah, Batyah. What’s the best version of them, the best place to put the vowels and the best way to interpret their words -- and how can I become like them.

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!

Gratitude Is Our Name (Even Now)

This is my D'var Torah for Parashat Vayetze, "Shabbat Thanksgiving" 5784. I wrote it while feeling grateful for the hostages who have been returned, heartbroken for those still captive and the families not returned whole, and grateful for the naming celebration at services this Shabbat.

It is Thanksgiving Shabbat and what a better time to be celebrating namings! It’s just what we need for the time we’ve been going through. Thank you to the family for giving us something extra to gather around in gratitude.

 

Giving thanks is not just an important Jewish spiritual practice. Gratitude is the essence of both Shabbat and the Jewish people.

It’s the essence of Shabbat, which we know from a song we sing from the psalms -- mizmor shir l’yom haShabbat, tov l’hodot l’Adonai -- a song for the day of Shabbat: Good to give thanks to the Divine (Psalm 92:1). L’hodot is the same Hebrew root or shoresh as todah, the familiar way to say thank you. The midrash says that is the first song ever written, by Adam and Chava in the Garden of Eden, and it was inspired by their first Shabbat.

 

And gratitude is the essence of the Jewish people because our name Yehudim comes from a moment of thankfulness. In our parasha, Leah Imeinu (our mother) gives birth to her fourth son and the Torah says: This moment I am thanking the Divine, ha’pa’am odeh et Adonai (Genesis 29:35), and she called his name Yehudah. Yehudah also comes from the same shoresh as todah. Yehudah is Judah, and Yehudi gets transliterated from Hebrew to Greek down the line eventually to English as “Jew”.

 

So gratitude is literally the name of the Jewish people, and it’s the original song of Shabbat. We are meant to be the thankful people, and Shabbat is Thanksgiving Day every week.

 

These two origin stories for Jewish gratitude have something in common, the Garden of Eden and the birth of Yehudah, and that thing is that both of them seem at first like non-gratitude moments.

 

The midrash makes Adam and Chavah the authors of the song tov l’hodot, it’s good to give thanks, and here’s how it happened. In midrash the whole drama of the Garden of Eden happened on the first-ever Friday afternoon. The people got to the Garden, learned their way around, heard about not eating the fruit, ate the fruit. Rupture with God, decree of exile effective immediately... and then according to the midrash, Shabbat itself came to God and said basically: I exist already but just in theory, I was getting ready to make my entrance into the world, and if you don’t let humanity have even one Shabbat in the Garden of Eden, the whole universe is going to implode.

 

So God said all right. And the first two people experienced Shabbat and it was a weird Shabbat. Because they knew what was coming after, that they would have to pack their bags. So they spent Shabbat looking around the Garden, and talking, and reflecting on their first six hours of existence before Shabbat and then what they had on Shabbat. And they wrote a song, and the first word is tov, which means good.

 

You’d think they’d write, I don’t know a breakup song -- how could you do this to me. You’d think they’d be basically angry, or basically scared, or plotting to get away from this God who has such an interest in which fruit they eat, and who showed them this glorious place and then said you can’t live here anymore.

 

Instead Chava and Adam start with tov, with good. They’re in a garden so they write what they know, which is botany -- the wicked flourish like grasses, miles wide but an inch deep, growing fast but withering easily, and the righteous like a palm tree will flourish, tzaddik katamar yifrach, deep- rooted righteousness overlooking everything. Even within themselves, they’re thinking, there’s all this that tempts us to act not right, it comes fast, but it can be cut off easily if we try, and we are capable of towering things. So Chava and Adam sing their way to gratitude, to tov l’hodot, for what they have glimpsed and what they can dream of, for this Garden that exists and is worth striving to get back to.

 

And that’s every Shabbat, a garden, where we sing together songs of what could be, where we make this beatiful garden of righteousness and righteous dreams, and we make it out of us, who we are and who we have been this week and all the stories we’ve been given as a people.

 

The other origin story for Jewish gratitude, about our name Yehudi, the Thankful-People: Leah doesn’t express gratitude immediately when she has her first child. We know there’s a long story of bitterness between Leah and Yaakov, between her and her sister Rachel. Leah has all kinds of good reasons to feel resentful and angry. She called the first son Reuven because the Divine has seen my suffering, and the next two names she gives are like that. But when the fourth child is born Leah says this time I am giving thanks.

 

Leah’s gratitude is not a contentment of having things good all in all. It’s not a blessing she says at a turning point in her life from bad to good. That doesn’t happen after Yehudah is born. Leah’s gratitude is a decision -- that to quote Rabbi Shai Held you can be disappointed and thankful at the same time. At a moment when it’s not easy in her life, Leah says todah, and she gives all of us our name.

 

The world right now isn’t making it easy to feel gratitude, and I know too there are many people among us for whom the holiday weekend makes a time of loss or loneliness harder. That’s the hardest part of gratitude for me, because when I’m so thankful I am impatient for anyone who is missing a blessing that I could be doing more to help them have or help you have. I don’t want my gratitude to become selfish or complacent.

 

Leah Imeinu gives us our name, Yehudi or Jew. She teaches us gratitude in a moment and gratitude in-spite-of. The Jewish people know how to be thankful for the first moment of awareness every day, the first breath we take and turn into Modeh Ani (thankful am I), and for each chesed we experience. And when there’s not something right here to be thankful for, we’re thankful for knowing we are people who deserve blessings, and we’re grateful for our stubborn visions of what everyone deserves.

 

Adam and Chava give us Shabbat as gratitude. They teach us to stop and notice the perfect within the imperfect world, and the perfect dreams that we will use to mend the imperfect world.

 

Here we are, aligned as we sing here in the Sanctuary and learn Torah together and talk over Kiddush, sharing food that is enough for everyone, celebrating the gift of life and the next chapter in the lives of families and our people. Shabbat makes us stop to notice these things, so we don’t miss them during the week either and feel thankful -- whenever we hear voices joined together for joy or for justice, whenever there is enough food for everyone, whenever there is a Torah bringing its insights to the world. Shabbat teaches us to notice such things all week and to be profoundy grateful each day.

 

And so especially now, thank you for making Shabbat together a part of your Thanksgiving weekend, and thank you to the celebrating family for bringing us together today in joy and gratitude.

 

Shabbat Shalom!

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

 

Affordable Housing: A Sukkot Reflection and Charge

This is my D'var Torah for the first day of Sukkot 5784 and Shabbat, September 30, 2023.

 

Sukkot is actually the third part of the High Holy Days. It’s not just Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. Sukkot is the zany but nuanced third festival of our kickoff month of Tishrei.

And Sukkot is specifically a continuation of Yom Kippur. On Yom Kippur we go hyperspiritual, in the sense that we put away most of our material existence – eating, physical pleasures and adornments, even our homes as we spend more time in the synagogue than any other day. Then on Sukkot it seems like the opposite – we get hypermaterial, very earthy. Outdoors, building the hut, waving the Four Species, and in contrast to Yom Kippur the essential mitzvah in the Sukkah is to eat.

What we are actually doing is bringing our spiritually-realigned selves from Yom Kippur into a stylized version of our material life. A simple house, a week of meals, getting hands-on with four types of plants that represent four basic ways we interact with the physical world of things that grow and the water cycle. It’s like moving into a prototype of the materialist world, getting the basics straight before we step out into a more complex actual world of commerce and tangible things. On Sukkot we try to align our material selves on the basis of our reoriented spiritual selves.

So in the Talmud the Sukkah is connected to the Holy of Holies, which the High Priest used to enter on Yom Kippur. That’s where the ark was with the tablets, which means the Sukkah itself is a covenantal place. It’s a design statement meant to guide our relationship to material things and to people with whom we share meals, and to people in our neighborhood. And all through Sukkot we’re reminded that our relationships with people and food are connected directly to nature. We’re always eating in the shade of the s’chach on top of the Sukkah, the shadows that remind us of the divine protection that covers us even when we’re not paying attention, a spiritual mist made up of very earthy material.

So I want to talk about one way we can prototype our material world in the coming year, so it becomes more aligned spiritually and covenantally. I am part of a group of about ten clergy in the area who call ourselves the Greater Nashua Interfaith Housing Justice Group. We have been together for about six years but we’ve been working very publicly on issues of housing for more than four years. I want to tell you some of the what and more of the why, and invite you to engage in that work with us as members of the Jewish community and the faith community more broadly. Many of us are speaking in our congregations this week on this topic. Some of you were here four years ago when we did the same.

A Sukkah is defined in the Talmud as dirat ara’i, temporary dwelling. On a Torah level this is about bringing us back to the desert, where the Jewish people lived in a series of temporary places while we got our Torah and our training. In Egypt, even as slaves we lived in houses, as we know from the night of the Exodus with the blood on our doorposts. In the promised land we would again have homes, to live in and buy and sell. Sukkot is about the experience in between. In the desert every one of us knew a vulnerability about food and shelter survival, and it was the same whether you were Moshe or Miryam or a tribal elder, or anyone else. 

In our community, dirat ara’i for some people means not having any place to call home from day to day. All of our local shelters are full all the time. Thanks to the vision of many local leaders and the generosity of many including members of our shul, a new shelter on Spring Street in Nashua was opened recently by the Nashua Soup Kitchen and Shelter. Having a stable place to come back to each day, to rest and eat a meal and do homework, is a basic prerequisite for physical health, and mental health, and doing your job well or staying consistent in school. Too many kids have to couch-surf, which means moving also from school to school, and you can imagine the impact on educational progress and social development.

Because so many of our local nonprofits work so well on homelessness, our clergy group has picked up the next level from that, which has never had enough public advocates. So we work on affordable housing, which in practice turns out be primarily for renters – another kind of dirat ara’i, temporary dwelling.

In the city of Nashua, an increasing number of people rent as opposed to owning the place where they live. As a result, rents in the city are skyrocketing, outpacing inflation by about double in the past decade. In our part of the state, even beyond the city, about half of renters pay more than they can afford on housing, meaning more than 30% of income. If you work in health care, education, or retail, it’s almost impossible to find a place to rent in Nashua that’s affordable on your salary, and certainly that’s the case for people in lower paying jobs.

As a result, just the City of Nashua needs to add around 4,500 more units of housing by 2030 to stabilize our overall housing market, and of that at least another 1,800 units that would have to be affordable to people making far less than the area median income. Even this wouldn’t quite meet the needs of all the families emerging from transitional housing programs or everyone working as a nurse, a police officer, or a public school teacher who wants to live in the community where they work. It would still be a dramatic bite in the shortage.

Our municipal leaders and our state leaders have been paying more attention to this over the past five years. In Nashua, there have been some welcome achievements and our interfaith housing justice group has been part of a couple of them, as has the Granite State Organizing Project in these and others. Nashua created an affordable housing trust fund with $10 million from the American Rescue Plan, one of the Covid-19 relief programs passed by Congress. This money will increase the incentives for private builders to create affordable housing. Rentals are financed on the expectation of an income stream down the road, and when the apartment is going to be rented for less than the market rate, there’s a shortfall there that makes the project unprofitable – or in the non-theological lingo we’ve learned, “it doesn’t pencil.” To make it sensible for a developer to rent at a rate that someone could afford who is a teacher or a nurse or getting back on their feet with a new job, each unit requires an extra $25-80,000 of upfront financing. That’s what this fund will provide. This $10 million can help us bite off some 10-20% of the need we have. We’ll need more in the fund to hit our goal by 2030. As an example, a real-estate transaction surcharge on the order of a penny on every $1,000 of a sale could fund our need in Nashua in perpetuity. 

We have a new inclusionary zoning ordinance that passed our Board of Aldermen with not a single dissent, which requires new buildings of certain sizes to have a certain number of units of affordable housing within them, or else the developer has to pay per unit built into the housing trust fund.

Many of you have seen the redevelopment and expansion of public housing downtown on Central Street off the south end of the new parkway, formerly the Bronstein Apartments and now Monahan Manor.

All of these are an acceleration of the pace of creating new affordable housing, but we are still behind where we need to be for 2030. So we need to advocate for more funding from the state and other sources, as the Covid-related stimulus funding comes to an end.

If it were just about numbers, I don’t know that we would be involved specifically as people of faith. How we create housing matters. 

The Sukkah is about covenantal design. It’s about how housing links us together or divides us. When the Talmud discusses the construction requirements for the Sukkah, it connects the Sukkah to a chuppah, the marriage canopy, and to a mavoy, a neighborhood allyway where people often decide to collaborate in carry things around or share food on Shabbat. I’ve been thinking about the most bizarre design teaching about Sukkah, which is the booth has to be big enough for your entire head, a table, and most of your body but not all of it. Obviously this wouldn’t be a comfortable Sukkah, nor is it ideal to have a Sukkah where you can’t eat with other people. I think what it means is that you have to experience a full Sukkah mind yourself, but your eating has to keep you connected to what’s outside.

How we create housing is as important as the raw number of apartments. American public housing programs created clusters of high-rise buildings that concentrated poverty and had the effect of segregating many cities by race. The newest thinking even about publicly financed construction is that it makes a difference when attention is paid to how a building helps people connect with their neighbors, with local business and public space. Open space and common space matter, incentives to connect with other people in the building as opposed to fearing them. It makes a difference when people of different socioeconomic backgrounds and cultures live in the same building – so much informal networking happens, so much social trust can be built across difference, the outcomes are proven better for children. 

It makes a difference when the people who live in a building or a neighborhood that will be rebuilt to increase its capacity for housing have a voice, in the design and in what happens to them while they are displaced.

Our interfaith housing groups call this covenantal thinking. It’s what we hope for and are already lobbying to happen around the next big projects in Nashua: redeveloping the Elm Street Middle School when the new school opens, recreating the public housing on Major Drive, what will happen next now where the asphalt plant was proposed down the hill from here, and how to repurpose Daniel Webster College as proposed in the new city master plan.

Covenant thinking might lead any one project to have fewer units, which on its own seems like a missed opportunity. But as the lens widens, new people might see themselves as partners for affordable housing, and new projects can emerge that the existing stakeholders might never have thought of.

The Spring Street Shelter has some of this covenantal thinking in it. There are community rooms, rooms for education, and former director Michael Reinke’s vision was for community groups beyond NSKS to share a life in the building. Not just to see residents are people who need things from “the rest of us” like clothing, or even skills training. But a place where community groups could offer interesting cultural and educational programming for anyone, resident or not, in a location central in our city right downtown.

The last time a group of us preached on housing we were leading into a public event, which generated momentum and new relationships with city officials and led to some of the progress to date. We’ve been able to collaborate and to critique. So too this coming Monday the community is invited to a forum with candidates for mayor and the Board of Aldermen in Nashua. We will hear stories about the housing crisis from community members, and then ask the candidates for their policy priorities around equitable, affordable housing. The forum is at the Unitarian Universalist Church near here at 7:30, and you’ll have plenty of time to make it after our Sukkah dinner and event here that night. 

Whether or not you live in Nashua, you can advance the goals of more affordable housing created in a covenantal fashion in many ways. Attend the event on Monday. Sign up for our e-mail list, so we can keep you posted on public meetings of local planning boards and other bodies debating policies and budgets. We need people who are not the usual faces to come and be YIMBYs, Yes in My Backyard advocates, because almost every project is opposed by an organized group. Ask any candidate for office if they will accept a pledge toward 2,000 new units of affordable housing this decade if you live in Nashua. But things are happening all the time in the other towns too, and next year, the gubernatorial and legislative elections will have a big impact, because Gov. Sununu and the legislature the past few years have added tens of millions of new dollars statewide into affordable housing finance. The new governor and legislators should continue in that path and add even more.

And if you or someone you know has expertise in any area related to real estate or finance or construction, or philanthropy, help us connect. One of the things about our congregations is that we have so many different talents and resources among us, and it’s not just the same players as are around other tables who discuss and decide these matters.

Sukkot is a good time to reflect on the physical structures we live in and how they are connected as neighborhoods and as towns. On Sukkot we move out of our settled homes into dirat ara’i, temporary structures, which help us get our bearings as we relaunch into a year of commerce and consumption, neighborliness, political debate about how we marshall and share our collective resources. On this Sukkot, let’s complete the High Holy Day season by restoring our material lives to their spiritual roots, their covenantal roots, for the new year.

Shabbat Shalom and Chag Sameach!

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:

 

My American Tale -- What's Yours? (Or, Why Is Yaz on Masada?)

This is the D'var Torah I gave for Parshiyyot Chukkat-Balak 5783, July 1, 2023.

This is a picture of me at the age of 17 on top of Masada in Israel, wearing a baseball cap that says “YAZ”. I remember asking someone to take this picture, and to get me and the Yaz cap and as much of Masada behind me in the phot as possible – hence the odd composition. I was on my end-of-11th-grade trip with the Alexander Muss High School in Israel program, and getting this picture was significant to me at the time for reasons I cannot remember.

But now, this photo stands for a whole story of who I am, which I focus on especially on the Shabbat leading into Independence Day and the first Shabbat that my daughter is in Israel for her very first time.

The Yaz hat I had for about nine months, and I wore it a lot even before Israel. I got the cap I think on the bridge between Kenmore Square and Fenway Park in probably August of 1983, when our family went to a Red Sox game during Carl Yastrzemski’s final season.  Yaz merch was everywhere. It’s a white kind-of-painter’s cap and by the first couple weeks of Israel it had become a bit discolored under the rim with sweat from our hikes. The cap came to an untimely end a week or two after Masada when our group was on a long bus ride and I was in front telling jokes on the microphone (we used to trade that off during our tiyyulum, our excursions from our base) and my friend Judy became carsick and needed to stop the bus and run off. I got out of her way, but didn’t get the last bit of the very top of my head out of the way quite in time. End of Yaz cap!

Masada is half of what’s important about the Yaz cap. Being at Fenway during Yaz’s last season is the other important part. When I was 1 to 3 years old, before I can even remember, my family lived in Rockport, Massachusetts. My father had recently completed his medical training and wanted to practice in a small town, and my mother did not want to live in a small town -- so they made a deal that they would try it for two years. Dad found a practice looking to add two young doctors in Gloucester. We lived there, but after the two years, Mom called it off.

What I do remember, for as long as I can remember anything, is that every year after the experiment ended we would make a summer trip out East -- a week in Utica, New York, with Dad’s family (Utica, a/k/a the Garden of Eden and the founding spot of all civilization, in Savett family lore), and a week on Cape Ann on the ocean down the street from where we had lived. And one of those days was always spent in Boston, often split between visiting our cousins and doing something in the city. Over the years growing up, we went to the Bunker Hill monument, the Freedom Trail, Lexington and Concord, the USS Constitution, Faneuil Hall, the North End. I grew up when Schoolhouse Rock was new on Saturday morning TV, so none of this Hamilton-The-Revolution’s-Happening-In-New-York garbage -- it was the Mayflower and Plymouth Rock and the Boston Tea Party.  I was fascinated for a time with how it wasn’t Paul Revere or William Dawes but Col. Prescott who actually rode out to announce the “British are coming!” I did not like reading Thoreau and Emerson in high school – but I did love that I had actually been to Walden Pond. The Boston history and landscape seeped into me, along with the ocean in Rockport, as a second home and as a central part of my own story and history.

So I wore the Yaz hat to connect me to my Boston, American-history roots, and I wore it on Masada as we sat as a group and debated as though we were the Zealots making our last stand against the Romans -- should we resist or flee or take our own lives. I wore it as we hollered into the canyon as Israeli soldiers do, shenit m’tzadah lo tipol, Masada will never fall again. I added a few weeks onto my HSI trip to stay in Israel longer, and the moment I landed back in the U.S. I started to plan for getting back to Israel in college.

I wrote about that day on Masada for my college essays-- it was in a way both Yaz and Masada who got me back to Boston, to Harvard. I loved living there, walking the streets of our colonial founders each day with the signs of how many hundreds of years ago a particular path or road was first laid down. In the middle of that time I did fulfill my intention of going back to Israel (without the Yaz cap). Yet on the heels of a year when I was convinced I would make aliyah, I returned to Boston and found myself surprised to discover that I was deep down an American and I couldn’t give that up, and I didn’t want to.

And so, about a century after my great-grandparents came to the U.S. and Canada in flight from the czar, and had become Americans as my family had become Russian or Lithuanian or Ukrainian or Latvian some generations earlier for the very same kind of reason after living somewhere else -- I made a choice to be American.

When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation. The Declaration begins in this passage, and in the famous passage that follows, by announcing the choice of the people of this country to become Americans and not British. And at the same time words like necessary and impel and duty suffuse the opening lines as if to say -- we choose to become who we had no choice to become. That is how it felt to me and how it feels to me, as I think about choosing to be American and feeling compelled to make that choice.

And it’s important to declare the causes of that publicly, for me and for others of us who are American Jews. And I find myself this time of year when I have a kid in Israel and so many people I know are spending time there -- I find myself feeling like a “decent respect to the opinions of Jews and Zionists” requires me to declare why here and not there. Respect to Jews and Zionists here, in this room and this community as well as in Israel. For me, living in the land of Yaz is something I can’t separate from the part of me tied to the land of Masada, and my American-ness and my Zionism are so tightly connected.

Last fall when I was in Jerusalem, I brought with me the journal I kept from my year in college there. I read to myself the statements of the me who was declaring why he couldn’t live here and had to live there, and the values I thought were at stake in becoming an Israeli Conservative Jew in the religious peace movement. I took a walk with myself and talked to myself in Hebrew about whether I could have become anything like this version of me, with whatever strength of moral character and whatever leadership it has taken decades to develop, if I had made aliyah. Who can know.

But I think not. I have spoken to you on many Shabbatot before Independence Day about this and written about it -- you can check out the USA page on rabbijon.net so I’ll just summarize it here. I discovered, back in the fall of 1988, that I was American to the core, that American ideas and the paradigm questions and American politics were all I wanted to think about and talk about and study. And it was not only my Boston marination, but my Judaism and my Torah that were making me American.

To quote and paraphrase myself from last year and a few years before:

Jewish experience and Torah were my path to America. In my mind, this is how I think about freedom and individuality: Thomas Jefferson with his self-evident truths speaks to Moshe demanding that Pharaoh let our people go. Henry David Thoreau, who would not compromise one bit with conventional society and went off to live in the woods all on his own, who went to jail rather than pay taxes that would help fund what he thought was an unjust war – Thoreau is talking to Rabbi Eliezer ben Hyrcanus, who in the Talmud is banished by his colleagues after he couldn’t persuade the rest of the rabbis to set the law his way, even when God sent miracles and a voice down from Heaven to back him up.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, who wrote the classic essay on individualism, speaks with Rav Yosef Soloveitchik, who wrote about sh’lichut, one’s unique individual mission in the world.

I think about how freedom is the basic, precious truth we learn from the Exodus, and how much more precious that freedom is than what John Locke or Thomas Jefferson ever wrote about. How Torah freedom compels us to stop at Mt. Sinai and enter into covenant, and what that required stop teaches about the kinds of covenants free people in America are able to make or ought to make.

I think about how freedom is also the fundamental challenge to our humanity, even the most basic idol. It was free people after all who chose the make a golden calf and worship a thing made of gold. It was free people who imagined themselves trading the challenge of rising spiritually for the fleshpots back in Egypt and the thought of a life free of difficult decisions and moral agency. The Torah of freedom talks to the challenges today, of freedom that opens up to mere materialism, to unrestrained competition in the economy and social competitiveness. A freedom that can make everything a commodity, including ourselves — allowing our interests, our time, even our unique talents to be valued in our own eyes by what they are worth in the short term to others. All of which can disconnect us from the larger and longer stories we are part of, which we author and co-author.

I think about how the long Jewish practice of tzedakah as more like taxation than charity wants us to understand the blessing we say first thing in the morning, praising the Divine she’asanu b’nai chorin, who has made us free people. I think about how Jews have been stewards of both freedom and self-government for more than three thousand years, carrying the Exodus story and wearing it around our bodies in tallit and tefillin, running even our medieval communities in a principled self-government. How does the person who wakes up into freedom also wake up into responsibility? I want to know how freedom and responsibility are linked — in talmudic detail and American detail, in philosophical detail and political detail.

It’s because of America that Torah has had to speak to issues beyond our group and its wellbeing, and become a wisdom for this nation and the world. American has brought Torah to answer questions about totalitarianism, the nuclear age, technology, racism, human rights, compelling Jewish thinkers to explore the ethics of power and the limits of human potential. And because of America, Jews export that wisdom back to Israel, whether it’s to the Conservative and Reform communities, the religious Zionist movement, or many creative secular and non-governmental initiatives and communities and think tanks. There could be no democratic, modern Israel without the Jews and Judaisms of America.

Some look at the phrase “Jewish American,” or “American Jew,” and see a space between the words, a yawning gap between two aspects of consciousness. Or they see a dash like a minus sign, where one word or maybe both take something away from the other. I see rather a chemical bond. Not ionic – charged, each trying to take something from the other. But covalent. A sign of the energy that flows uniquely when two entities are bound together, and something new emerges that is different from either atom on its own.

The hyphen in “Jewish-American” is one of the most exciting things I know. The identity, and the specific moral dilemmas that come with the hyphen -- I wouldn’t trade that hyphen for anything.

That’s why I chose to be American, and why I had to make that choice, once thirty-five years ago and over and over again since.

So that’s my story, my journal of ideas and my photo albums. The picture I showed you might not look like it has anything to do with this American tale. But the photo on top of Masada of me wearing a cap of the great Carl Yastrzemski is one photo of an overall equilibrium of how Jewish history and American history flow toward me and within. We don’t share these stories and declarations enough of why we are here and why we are us, the way we share stories of Zionism and persecution. Last Rosh Hashanah I charged us to look ahead to this year and the coming two years after, and to make a Jewish leap of faith in American democracy. Whether right now the America you experience is more like the crises of leadership and national direction in our first parasha today, Chukkat. Or whether like in the second, Balak, you’re reassuring yourself that from ten thousand feet and from the outside, we are a beacon still or at least okay.

So on this July 4th, tell your story, at least to yourself. If you have chosen to be here, be proud you made that choice -- that you have chosen this place with the moral questions that come with this place and time. Baruch she-asanu b’nai chorin -- thank you, to the One who has made us all free in this place and this time.

Being One, Being Two, Being Seven, Being Eight

My D'var Torah for Shabbat Chanukkah 5783 (December 24, 2022).

A question I often get around Chanukkah is: Is it true that all the candle hae to be at the same level, other than the shamash? Usually the question comes from creativity -- someone who wants to repurpose another item as a chanukkiah, or who has a new vision of the candles and their combination visually or symbolically or both. So for example, artists have asked me if they can make a thing with a spiral or a certain kind of zigzag and still call it a kosher chanukkiah. Growing up I never learned that this was an issue, but you hear the question a few times and you start to think it must be a thing.

Well, as a matter of principle in halacha (Jewish law) the answer is yes, you can have these kinds of chanukkiot! Though if you think you heard that Jewish law says “no” you’re not wrong, and I’ll get to that.  The Jewish law books say first that you have to be able to differentiate each flame when you are looking at the chanukkiah. This is the opposite of a medurah, which in modern Hebrew is a campfire or a bonfire. Medurah in itself is cool, and in a medurah like a chanukkiah because you have a lot of flames, but with a medurah or a campfire they are jumbled up together and you can’t perceive each one because they are mixed up and move around. Anyway, one easy way to make sure you have a sert of distinct burning wicks, and not have it appear like a medurah, is to space them out in a sequence on the same level. That’s what the books of Jewish law actually say about the straight line. Personally I don’t really get the same level part, because if you follow the logic of the Talmud out each night representing another level of holiness, you should be able to set up the candles like a staircase or an upward ramp. The Ashkenazi tradition is to stick to the straight line but to me it’s like eating legumes on Pesach, so be Sephardi if you like and spread your candles out however you find intriguing!

What is this all about, the difference between a line of flames and a campfire? Why shold we care?

In the Torah in the Mishkan (desert tabernacle), and in the Beit Hamikdash (the Temple in Jerusalem), there were oil lamps and a wood fire, both of which were always going day and night. Oil lamps we think of in connection with Chanukkah because of the ancient seven-branched menorah, and the Temple also had the ner tamid, the eternal light fueled by olive oil.

The fire on the altar reminds me of the burning bush, fire weaving and moving around through the scraggly scrub. One midrash says that the burning bush represents the suffering and the prayers of all the Israelites, and the presence of the Divine with them -- but as a whole, undifferentiated, all of their pain and groans and prayers jumbled together. Vast but trapped in place. In contrast to all that stood Moshe, a single person in that moment, not yet a leader; and the Divine, also singular, not yet in action to save them.

These ancient fires and lamps got me thinking again about this halacha about the differentiated lights. It’s not just about what you see on any given day: six candles, rather than a blazing fire pit with six or more sticks or branches somewhere in there. I think the law is also about perception across eight nights. It’s about the ability on the first night of Chanukkah to say this is one candle, the next night to perceive that these are two candles, and so on all the way to eight.

There is a difference between each candle, and there is a also a difference between perceiving one candle, and five, and eight.

Do you experience something different about the chanukkiah on different nights?

I really noticed this year on days 4 and 5 how different the chanukkiot looked by my window, compared to day 1 and 2. I mean Captain Obvious, I know -- but it’s gotten me to challenge myself about not looking at one as a means to two, not always looking at a couple candles in order to be excited about seven or eight. In my home, the effect is especially pronounced because we have several chanukkiot going each night; the effect of the change from night to night is dramatic. For me the meaning of these teachings about perceiving one, perceiving two, etc. is not to see two people in our community primarily as a strategy for connecting with a third one. How do we get ourselves toward appreciating each of the groupings in the Chanukkah story? Really appreciating just Judith or Matityahu in action; or just Yehudah Ha-Maccabee and his brothers; and just their small band; and their large force. I know I sometimes need to remind myself not to see small numbers of people just as inferior or miniative versions of larger numbers.

My colleague and classmate Rabbi Sue Fendrick once gave a talk in which she mentioned the distinctness of different numbers of people in Judaism.

Two people together are a chavruta, a study pair. There’s something unique about two people facing each other over words of Torah, with no one else to hide behind when your partner expresses and idea or asks a question. You experience Torah differently in a pair, differently than in a Torah service and even a small discussion group.

Three people make a beit din, a court of law. They can rule on a conflict over money and property; they can proclaim officially that someone has become Jewish. Three are enough to call each other formally after a meal in gratitude -- chaverai, n’varech! -- to say the blessing called Birkat Hamazon.

Ten of course are a minyan, enabling us to have a Torah service or say the Mourners’ Kaddish and respond. Ten defines a public according to Jewish law. If you do an act that is seen in the presence of ten or more and is particularly ethical and does honor to the Divine and our people -- a Kiddush Hashem -- that’s a bigger deal than if fewer were around to see it. And the same for Chillul Hashem, if in the presence of ten one does something particularly unethical and shames us or the name of God.

I think about the 208 delegates at the First Zionist Congress in Basel in 1897 -- that’s far fewer than make up this congregation today. So too the 23 on the ship that landed the first formal Jewish community in North America in 1654, in New Amsterdam.

Seven, I learned in group psychology, might be the ideal size of a committee or task force -- the point where the chemistry of introverts and extroverts, creatives and analyticals, has the best chance of combining a good end product with good feeling about the experience.

Eight is the extra on top of that seven -- it’s the number of covenant, the leap from the best of what people can accomplish together in our reality to something we might deem messianic.

Even one, in Judaism, is a kind of group. You may be solitary, but you are never alone. Moshe, alone at the burning bush, was with the Divine, and the singular Divine, Adonai Echad, had Moshe. The first candle of Chanukkah has the shamash, the fire that links them to someone else who stored the oil and planned for you to arrive, waited for you to make them less alone.

Jews today are conditioned in a good way to think of how the people in any given “here” can spread what we have -- but our weakness is to get caught up too much on who is missing. The Chanukkah miracle of the oil was meant to reframe scarcity as not just sufficiency, but abundance and overflowing. So too we should see whoever is in the room or around the table, in any number, as abundant and overflowing. You may by now be thinking of Margaret Mead, who could have been talking about each night’s chanukkiah when she famously said, “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it's the only thing that ever has.”

So part of the sweetness of the Chanukkiah is the chance to appreciate all the numbers we find ourselves in, the partnerships and discussions and services and protests and parties. The unique and distinct character of each group where we act and learn and reflect and grow. Each day of Chanukkah is a unique festival of lights.

My colleague Rabbi Fendrick closed the talk I mentioned with this beautiful last part from a poem by Marge Piercy called “The Low Road”, and it’s a perfect kavvanah (intention) as we look at our candles each night:

Two people can keep each other sane
can give support, conviction,
love, massage, hope, sex.

Three people are a delegation
a cell, a wedge.
With four you can play games
and start a collective.
With six you can rent a whole house
have pie for dinner with no seconds
and make your own music.

Thirteen makes a circle,
a hundred fill a hall.
A thousand have solidarity
and your own newsletter;
ten thousand community
and your own papers;
a hundred thousand,
a network of communities;
a million our own world.

It goes one at a time.
It starts when you care to act.
It starts when you do it again
after they say no.
It starts when you say We
and know who you mean;
and each day you mean
one more.

Shabbat Shalom, Chodesh Tov and Chag Urim Sameach!
A Good New Month and a Joyous Festival of Lights!

This Chanukkah -- Many Ideas

I am still trying to keep on top of my many channels, between this blog and the Tov! podcast and Temple Beth Abraham's site and blog, not to mention social media. (Not complaining!) I haven't put a link here yet to the many thematic Chanukkah-related writings I've got, some of them reposts from prior years and some of them new, whether it's my own thoughts about courage or links to others. You can scroll through all of that here, for now just on Beth Abraham's site and I'll get them up here eventually too. Also related is my reflection on science and religion through the lens/light of Chanukkah via Sinai and Synapses.

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!