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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

D'var Torah: Questioning and Certainty

This is my D'var Torah for Shabbat, Parashat Va-era, January 13, 2024. It also reminds me of a Rosh Hashanah sermon I gave in 2022/5783, "Right-ology: How To Be Right Better in the New Year"

In August we went down to New York for the simchat bat celebration for our newest grandniece, and when we were hanging out with the family afterward at the synagogue, my daughter Lela was playing with R. and P., and she offered to give them piggyback rides. I think it was R. who got the first ride, so P. began to scream that it was unfair, so Lela said how about I give you two rides. And then of course R. began to scream -- that’s unfair! -- and this went back and forth for a minute when I though I might help.

I tried a trick I learned from Laurie which she learned from her mom, Iris z”l, which is to distract a kid with some other words. And I thought the way I would do this was to bring my moral-educator skills to bear. So I said to one of them, R. I think, “What’s fair?”

And there was a pause for about a second, and can you guess what she said to my question?

R. said: “It’s not fair!”

At which point I left Lela to her own devices.

So R. was right about one particular thing, which I’ll tell her when she’s old enough to get it but I’ll tell you now. In Judaism, we say that we value questioning. We value it a lot, and sometimes we even say that questioning is the essence of Judaism. Questioning what everyone takes for granted, questioning authority, even questioning God. It’s why Jews are often b’gadol, in the big scheme, revolutionaries and social critics, and scientific innovators, and litigators.

What R. was responding to is something else which we also say is the essence of Torah, which is knowing right and wrong. We look to Torah for absolute moral principles, which b’gadol is also why Jews have been among the leading activists for civil rights and human rights, in any country we are in and around the globe.

Questioning and having absolute moral conviction are not the same thing.

R. was saying now is the time for moral conviction, not for questioning.

Sometimes questioning is the opposite of what the Torah wants. When Par’oh says “Who is the Divine, mi Adonai, that I should listen and release the people”, that is not: Ah, Moshe, you’ve brought me an interesting theological perspective I’ve never encountered. I have some questions, perhaps we could discuss divinity and its implications for social ethics.

No, this is Par’oh questioning something we don’t think should be questioned. People shouldn’t enslave other people, period-full-stop.

And even if Par’oh had said: Let’s talk about this God of yours and the implications for our current labor situation -- this was not a situation for questions like that. This was a situation for moral certainty.

It’s not just that certain things should be beyond question. It’s that if what you mostly know how to do is question, it’s hard to build up the commitment you need to follow through, or to stand up for someone. Sometimes questioning can prevent us from believing that we know right from wrong. We think: if you can formulate a question about this conviction, then maybe it’s not a conviction. But you need to be certain about something in order to fight for it, especially when the people who are convinced of the immoral opposite are certain and fight from that certainty.

Let me give you one example from the week, and I want to say something about it from this lens and then come back to from another angle. Israel is right now before the International Court of Justice in The Hague, responding to an accusation that the war in Gaza constitutes genocide.

To me this particular charge is in the category of when questioning is not spiritual strengthening but leads you astray. When you are in a just war, against an enemy that is real and continues to be dangerous on a day-to-day basis, when you make efforts even though they are imperfect to distinguish combatants from noncombatants by helping them escape the fighting so they won’t be killed and giving warning and even a map and schedule of the fighting -- raising the question of genocide is profoundly confused. And Israeli actions to take account of the human rights and humanitarian needs of Gazans aren't a ruse to cover up genocide or genocidal intent. Gaza isn’t some kind of Theresinstadt, that if no one was looking the whole area and all its people would be bombed to the ground.

On this issue there is moral certainty that self-defense is right and a enemy itself genocidal deserves to be fought.

Considering genocide on the part of Israel as though this were a real question, worthy of the international court, doesn’t further any moral certainty at all -- no matter what the court rules, and may they have the wisdom to rule justly. No result of this case, or of parallel actions on university campuses, will strengthen a moral principle in the world or in anyone’s mind.

The parasha and the Exodus story more broadly do teach us about the questions you should ask even in a situation where much is morally clear and absolute. I have this question of my own -- why does God insist so often that the purpose of the plagues is so that Par’oh and the Egyptians will know the Divine? Why doesn’t God say: It’s so they will know that slavery is immoral. Surely that’s a moral certainty that ought to come before anything else.

In fact, while the Torah is teaching us about moral certainty in Egypt, the Torah is also teaching about questioning at the same time.

The parasha begins with this interesting revelation by the Divine to Moshe. God says: I appeared to your ancestors in Genesis as El Shaddai, but by my name, Y-H-V-H, I was not known to them. (Exodus 6:3)

The commentators interpret this to mean that there was something about the One that Avraham and Yitzchak and Yaakov knew with certainty, and that there was something they didn’t know. Rav Ovadia Seforno says that they never stretched what they knew for certain beyond their own experience, and therefore couldn’t really pass on to their children what their moral convictions would mean for their lifetimes.

And Sara Wolkenfeld teaches a midrash from Shmot Rabbah which says the same thing this way: that before Moshe no one who really knew God ever asked questions at all, particularly when what they knew for certain from the Divine was contradicted by what was happening before their eyes.

They never asked why if the land was being promised to them they were continually fighting the people there, or finding it hard to dig a well, or I suppose why sacrificing my son was a coherent thing to do. They never even asked how their enslavement was supposed to be part of the big picture.

But Moshe asked the Divine at the burning bush: Who are You? What’s your name? I know that slavery in Egypt is wrong, and I tried to do something way back but I couldn’t, so what’s going on that you think I can help change this?

This is a questioning which is grounded in moral certainty. Which asks -- if I know this is right and I know this is wrong, how should I apply it? What do I need to do? What don’t I understand yet? What detail about the big principle might I be getting wrong -- or might you be getting wrong? (Even the angels by the way in one grueseome midrash ask God: If this oppression is so wrong, why do You allow babies to be baked into the bricks that Your people are still being forced to make?)

So Moshe reaches a level where he can ground himself in certainty and challenge Par’oh and also continue to ask questions of the Divine, about what flows further from his moral certainty and what he is charged with teaching the people.

And the Divine continues to say in our parasha and next week’s too and beyond that that it’s not enough to say slavery here and today is wrong, but knowing Me means knowing that the Exodus means something forever, in other places and times, and you will have to keep asking each other about that.

So we can and must ask questions about Israel and Palestine, and the war and its conduct and what comes after. We ask them out of our certainties about a Zionism of moral excellence and out of the certainly that all human beings are created B’tzelem Elohim (in the Divine image). Indeed these questions will strengthen and deeper our deepest moral convictions about right and wrong.

We can and must ask about how the Exodus certainties stretch out to civil rights and equality in the United States. What now, and what toward the future, and what have we been missing in this story, all of these we should ask as we mark this important weekend of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s birthday.

Some of these wise questions might be very challenging ones, ones that feel every bit as uncomfortable as the genocide quote-unquote “question.” But the point isn’t the doubt; the point is to question in service of conviction. This is the questioning of the chacham in the Pesach Seder, the wise child. Who is convinced that there are important testimonies and laws, and wants to dive further. As opposed to the one she-eino yode’a lish’ol, who doesn’t know to ask questions in the right spirit. I know that my grandnieces R. and P. will understand that one day, because of their parents and the great teachers they want for them.

The Torah calls of this throughout the Exodus narrative “knowing the Divine”, Yediat Hashem. To remind us that it’s impossible to know everything we need to about our certainties but that they are highest thing to strive for. Yediat Hashem is where certainty and questioning meet and then stretch higher. That’s the questioning that is indeed at the heart of Judaism, and as one of our most famous questions asks: If not now, when?

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.

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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.

Reflections on Marching and Lobbying for Israel on Nov. 14

This is the note I sent out to the congregation and posted on Facebook.

Dear Friends:

This past Tuesday along with about a dozen people from our synagogue, I was in for the March for Israel at the National Mall in Washington. About 20 people from the Southern New Hampshire Jewish community were there in total, along with a student group from Dartmouth and perhaps some others I’m not aware of. Together we helped make up a crowd of 290,000 people, according to the highest count reported. If that number is anywhere near accurate, something like one out of every thirty American Jews was together for an afternoon! I took a group before and after the rally to meet with Senator Jeanne Shaheen and Representative Annie Kuster and their aides, and others met with staff in the office of Representative Chris Pappas.

I had about ten days’ notice about the rally, and I didn’t know at first that I would go. I am one of two working parents with a child at home, and even though I work for the Jewish community it’s not easy to take an impromptu midweek trip out of town. I don’t usually like mass events and the simplistic speeches. But it didn’t take me long to realize that I was going, or for Laurie and me to work out the details to make it possible.

I went first of all for you in our community who are Israeli, for my Israeli family and for yours, all our Israeli family and close friends. For people who have suffered losses, who know hostages held in Gaza, whose lives are in danger right now in the fighting. Your needs and their needs are important, and it was important to show you and the public that our community notices you and the people you are connected with. That I notice. One of the goals of the march was simply to show human solidarity in a hard time. Especially when Israeli grief and danger are being drowned out or denied entirely by so many.

I went for the hostages in Gaza and for their families, who have been screaming at all of us and at those in power to do something for the immediate release of about 240 people still being held, for 41 days as I write this. #BringThemHomeNow. The most powerful part of the day were the speeches of three family members, and you should take the eleven minutes to watch that (click here).

I went for our kids who are college and graduate students, including my own, who are suddenly living in environments of ongoing physical threat and danger across the country.

If you haven’t read a good news report on the rally and want to, look it up at the Times of Israel or the Jerusalem Post or Ynet or the Forward. Here I wanted to share my overall impressions and reflections, and then tell you about our meetings on Capitol Hill.

1. As I said above, the most intense moment of the rally program came when three family members of hostages spoke. Orna Neutra is the mother of Omer. She called out his name, and called on us to match Omer’s own compassionate being with our own compassion back to him and all the hostages. Alana Zeitchik has six family members being held, including small children – she began with love and ended with peace. Rachel Goldberg, mother of Hersh Goldberg-Polin, asked us present and asked the world in the name of each hostage, child and adult: Why are you letting them stay in the dark, buried in the earth’s crust.

The speakers challenged us to keep the more than 240 hostages in the consciousness of the public and our leaders every single day. They spoke about how inhuman it is subordinate the hostages’ lives to any political, military and diplomatic strategy. I don’t think any of us outside their circle know how to hold that perspective, other than to take action each day that keep the hostages’ lives front and center. (Small thing I did just now – a note to the White House, since the switchboard is closed today.)

2. Natan Sharansky spoke. He talked about what it meant to know he wasn’t alone when he was in prison in the Soviet Union, and how much the gathering in DC means to him and to Israelis now. I was a child and a teen when Sharansky was a refusenik, a household name among us, and I was in college when he was released. Almost thirty-six years ago was the massive march in DC for Soviet Jews, and now here he was in front of us. Just seeing him was a living hope, and he told his story to us with no anger, only reassurance.

3. The student speakers were amazing. Confident, proud, empowered. I hope they took some of the strength from us back home and back to campus with them.

4. This was not in any way an anti-Palestinian gathering. The enemy was defined over and over very specifically as Hamas. From the microphone I heard no gloating over deaths of Gazans in war. Some speakers mentioned peace and innocent Palestinians suffering. I don’t mean to say this was a peace rally, by any means, and there was no talk at all about what specifically will happen after the fighting ends.

Near me, one person was holding a sign calling all Gazans members or supporters of Hamas. Some people asked her to put down her sign, and in the end someone put up an Israeli flag to block the view of her sign, and when those arms were tired another bigger sign obscured hers, “LA Stands With Israel” I think.

The rally was sponsored only by two national umbrella Jewish organizations, so that no other organization would have to decide to endorse some specific other Jewish organization’s participation. As a result, the charedi Agudah movement was there with very secular Jewish groups; AIPAC and J Street were both there; the Zionist Organization of America, pretty right-wing on the Israel-Palestinian question, came and so did Americans for Peace Now.

5. It was remarkable that the one word I heard only a single time all day was: “Netanyahu.” The State of Israel was represented by President Isaac Herzog. (The president is not the head of government, but the head of state. He is elected every few years by the Knesset, the parliament, and functions like the British monarch minus the land and wealth.) Israel’s ambassador to the U.S. also spoke, Michael Herzog, and yes, the president is the ambassador’s young brother. This was all about solidarity with Israelis as a people. And because of Israeli Arabs and Druze, and because of so many visitors and foreign workers in the area outside Gaza on October 7, this was also about more than Jews and even more than Israelis. Near me was a sign for one of the Thai hostages, part of a set of posters you’ve probably seen for every single of the hostages.

6. The music was very special, songs I knew and songs in Hebrew I didn’t know but apparently every young person there did. (Generations present: When Debra Messing spoke, the college kids were trying to figure out who she was; one of them mentioned “Will and Grace” almost as though it was as old as “I Dream of Jeannie.”) At the end, Matisyahu sang his anthem “One Day”, and the Maccabeats joined him: All my life, I've been waitin' for/I've been prayin' for/for the people to say/That we don't wanna fight no more/There'll be no more wars, and our children will play”, and in the crowd that might have been the loudest song of all. We had sung “The Star Spangled Banner” and “Hatikvah” two hours before.

7. That actually wasn’t the end. There were some non-Jewish clergy who gave long sermons right after, but it was overtime and people left, including our group for a meeting on the Hill. Pastor John Hagee spoke, and this was the most controversial thing about the event. He is a prominent “Christian Zionist” with a history of hateful words and ideas, including anti-Semitic. It was absolutely correct to have the bipartisan leadership of the two Houses of Congress represented, even though everyone at the rally had someone among them whom they despise. Pastor Hagee wasn’t needed and his presence on the program was over the line. At least by then most people were leaving.

8. I stood on my feet stuffed in one place for at least four hours, having had only a small breakfast and some granola bars to nosh on. I didn’t have any water with me. I don’t get inspired by speech after speech saying much of the same thing, as was a lot of the program I haven’t mentioned. And yet, the time felt like nothing at all. I had a random talk with a man who was commuting to work on the train in from the airport at the start of the day, a man about my age with political opinions and life perspective, and we blessed each other. I was with hundreds of people I know who I didn’t get to see at all because who could find each other. And yet, something about the moment helped me feel connected, and when better days come we’ll tell more of our stories about Tuesday.

Before the rally six of us met with Representative Annie Kuster, and afterward with Senator Jeanne Shaheen. For me, this was an essential part of the day. Having something concrete to do, something more in my element. It grounded me.

Rep. Kuster and a senior member of her staff met us in the Capitol, in the members’ dining room. She told us how that morning, the House Foreign Affairs Committee had screened the video of Hamas atrocities for all House members who were willing to see it, and how many members were shocked beyond anything they had seen before. She talked about the efforts to move the supplementary appropriations for Israel’s military needs, which she supports. We thanked her for her personal support and outreach to our Jewish community, and her staff’s calls to me on a regular basis.

Much of our conversation was about increased anti-Semitism. Each of us in the group spoke about our own child’s experience on campus, and the physical and emotional danger to Jewish students that is accompanying certain slogans and accusations of genocide against Israel. The degree of all this was obviously surprising to Rep. Kuster.

We turned then to the matter of Rep. Rashida Tlaib and her use of phrases like “from the river to the sea”, “ethnic cleansing” and “genocide.” Rep. Kuster said she did not vote for the censure of Rep. Tlaib for a variety of reasons. She told us that she talks with Rep. Tlaib directly and within the Democratic caucus generally about why this language is unacceptable, and that she has made some public statements to that effect.

I am absolutely convinced that Rep. Kuster thinks and has done the things she told us. We pressed her to take more responsibility as a public official to be more specific about why specific characterizations of Israel are both false and physically dangerous to Jewish students in particular, to make her statements more frequent and audible, and to call on other public officials to stop making such characterizations. Already this week there is some evidence that she and her staff heard us. They asked for my help in drafting a statement about our meeting, and incorporated some of what I suggested. You can read her statement here.

I gave Rep. Kuster and her office a copy of a book I often recommend, Yossi Klein Halevi’s Letters to My Palestinian Neighbor, which also includes letters back from Palestinians. She wrote me subsequently that she plans to read it and then pass it along.

After the rally we met with Senator Shaheen. We were actually expecting only to meet with a couple staff members, since Sen. Shaheen had talked with some of us just a couple weeks ago at the Jewish Federation.

Sen. Shaheen is a member of the Foreign Relations Committee, and the subcommittee for the Near East. She talked to us about a briefing she had been at concerning negotiations for the hostages’ release, which we of course emphasized. Sen. Shaheen too has been a longtime supporter of U.S. defense assistance to Israel.

We asked her about a letter she and other Senators had sent to President Biden asking him to raise certain concerns with Israel about humanitarian issues in the war in Gaza. Her public statement about that letter is here.

Both Sen. Shaheen and her staff were also very affected by what we told them about college campuses. Despite a lot of recent stories about how aides to Democratic members of Congress are at odds with their bosses about Israel, everyone we spoke with in both offices told us how engaged they are with the issues facing Israel and American Jews, even after our meetings formally broke up. It has been my experience that all the members of New Hampshire’s delegation in Washington have some of the best and most knowledgeable staff on all of Capitol Hill.

Some of you have asked what you could do in terms of advocacy around these issues. I would say in brief that over the next week or two, you could send notes to Sen. Shaheen and Rep. Kuster thanking them for meeting with us. Then you could thank them for their continued support of our community’s needs and Israel, urge them to press for the immediate release of all hostages, and ask them to take a strong and specific public stance whenever any public official. I can help you craft that if you'd like.

A couple final personal spiritual thoughts after this week.

I have a pretty wide Jewish definition of joy. Sometimes I stretch it so far that means something like “feeling purposeful.” But to be honest with you, I can’t say that on Tuesday I felt particularly joyful. Sometimes rallies like this are like camp reunions. This didn’t feel that way for me at all. There were small moments of joy for me: Finding our group in front of the Capitol, a building that takes my breath away. Running into someone I have known for a long time. Dinner after all of it with my nephew. I hooted at times and waved my sign, and sang along when I could, but it wasn’t out of joy overall. Still, I know I feel different after Tuesday than before.

I feel better; that I can say. Part of it comes from the analogy of mourning that a lot of people have been using over the past month. I am not right now an immediate mourner for October 7, but I have been part of an extended Jewish family in mourning. As I tell every family, no one mourns the same way or on the same schedule. Just for me, Tuesday in DC was a kind of shloshim occasion, like the traditional thirty-day mark. Not an end, by any stretch. I just feel a bit more ready to talk with more people in more dimensions about what is going on, and a bit more ready to be in the wider community discussing and educating, returning to my familiar modes. It was good to be talking to our representatives. That seemed more like me, even though the conversations were unlike any I have ever had with them. I am not fine yet.

I am grateful: for the Jewish people, for the United States of America, for my family’s safety and wisdom, for community, for all the teachers and inspirations who brought me to this week, for everyone who is standing up for us and for what is right.

Please feel free to ask me more. I will go now and light an extra Shabbat candle and put some extra tzedakah in the box, for the people who need us now.

Shabbat Shalom,
Rabbi Jon

41 Thoughts on Genesis 18

This is not the D’var Torah I will be speaking from the pulpit, even though Genesis 18 is in this week’s Torah reading, Vayera. I’ve been making these tentative notes through the week, reading the chapter with the actuality of Israel and Gaza ever present. H/t to Rabbis Tali Adler and Aryeh Klapper, of whose types of Torah recently this is a very pale imitation, and they have nothing to do with anything specific I write here. It’s suggestions and questions more than pat interpretations or answers. 

1. This week in the Jewish cycle includes one of the most glorious chapters in all of Torah, Genesis 18. It begins with an act of radical hospitality, Avraham and Sarah taking three strangers into their home to feed them, and concludes with the argument between Avraham and the Divine over the fate of the evil cities of S’dom and its environs.
   
   
2. The chapter number, 18, is a special number in Hebrew. It’s traditionally written with the letters for “chai”=being alive, being living, related to the word l’chayim=to life, based on the numeric values of the letters. (That the two stories are in the same chapter doesn’t come from the original. There is a long Jewish tradition of paragraphs and longer sections, which predates the system that Christian scholars came up and now Jews use for reference too.)
   
   
3. I knew the two stories were near each other but somehow hadn’t noticed they were one immediately after the other, in the same chapter, until about 16 years ago. I’ve written and spoken about this chapter often, including before elections and at the interfaith CROP Hunger Walk.
   
   
4. I’ve talked about it in terms of two sides of a coin. Service and justice activities. Up close, and the view from on high. Action in the moment, conceptual work.
   
   
5. Rabbi Donniel Hartman has said something like -- There are two kinds of Jews: Genesis 18 Jews and Genesis 22 Jews. Genesis 22 is also in this week’s reading, the binding and near-sacrifice of Yitzchak. It’s the paradigm of faith as complete submission, of doing something specifically beyond (?) the humanistic and that’s how you know it’s devotion to God. It’s a source for religious extremism. Genesis 18 is about faith through a kindness and justice that is far beyond (!) caring, any normal human inclinations of empathy.
   
   
6. So, Genesis 18. Both the visitors episode and the debate with the Divine happen on the same day.
   
   
7. As I’ve been writing for weeks, I’ve been avoiding letting Avraham and Sarah stand squarely in front of me this year. Even though they are the ones my synagogue is named for. Our annual rewind to Genesis began in Israel on Oct. 7, the day of the Hamas atrocities, and outside Israel the very next day. Sarah and Avraham are a revolution and a high standard on all kinds of levels, a quantum leap for humanity. It’s hard to figure how to get to that height or into that discourse right now. Yet they have been camped in front of me for a couple weeks now, and we don’t not read the weekly parasha (Torah reading). So here goes, tentatively, with some things kicking around in me this week.
   
   
8. I have in the past emphasized that Avraham’s concern, in both the first and second stories, is not about the flowing of love to those he already loves or even those he knows in his community without love. The three strangers are not just strangers he bumps into. They are out far away, and he can’t know if they are friendly or not. Also, it’s incredibly hot outside. As for the people of S’dom: they are known from Genesis 13 to be “evil and sinners to the Divine very much.” Which I take to mean both terrible to each other in human terms and spiritually degraded in a way that sucks their religious ideology into justifying their brutality.
   
   
9. Also according to the Jewish midrashic tradition, Avraham is in physical pain this particular day after his (self-)circumcision.
   
   
10. The pain Avraham is experiencing is not just physical. It is bound up with the covenant. His difficult and important mission is experienced in his body not only as a euphoric rush, an excited heartbeat, but covenant pain. “Covenant placed in our flesh”, in the words of the Jewish circumcision ritual. For Sarah, there is also pain at this time, perhaps? As she and Hagar have been set against each other for more than a decade, two women enacting the consequence of a man’s (Avraham’s) doubts or impatience about the pace of the covenantal promises coming true?
    
    
11. So these acts of generosity and justice-seeking come somehow within (or even derive from?) a pain Avraham and Sarah feel in their bodies and a psychic, spiritual pain. At the same time, these acts are foundational to who Avraham and Sarah are. One Jewish interpretation is that when the strangers appear on the horizon, Avraham steps away from God, Who is trying to pay him a sick call and soothe him, because connecting with the strangers who might need something is irresistible to this man of the covenant.
    
    
12. Sarah and Avraham don’t have a party when the strangers turn out to be messengers bearing amazing, miraculous news about a birth of a son in their old age. The “party” is the initial meal itself, before the news. When Yitzchak actually reaches the age of weaning, when the promise is looking more solid, only then will there be a party.
    
    
13. I think it’s significant the messengers come to deliver a message about a birth in their old age specifically. Sarah and Avraham already know that their people’s destiny, to be populous and a blessing in this land, is far, far off and they won’t get much of a glimpse of it. But they will get to see just a bit of it beyond what they expected even in their lifetime.
    
    
14. Avraham walks the people-messengers out along their way after their meal and conversation – hospitality extends far past the front door. It’s dangerous territory they are headed into, and taking responsibility for people heading into dangerous territory becomes in Jewish tradition part of the hospitality paradigm, and part of the broader responsibility paradigm.
    
    
15. Okay, enough stalling. So the Divine “above” decides that this issue of the evil cities in the valley below is a matter that Avraham has to be involved in, if Avraham and his people are indeed going to become a blessing for the earth through justice.
    
    
16. The words the Divine uses to describe what is happening below are murky, even in the original Hebrew. They involve outcry, wrongdoing, the question of whether the outcry and the wrongdoing are entirely aligned, and whether the entire story in the cities is the wrongdoing. It’s a muddled introduction, and indeed the Divine God’s-self states to Avraham a desire to know more of the story.
    
    
17. Avraham waits until the messengers leave to open his mouth. Does he not want to be heard in public saying these words? Does he not trust other people to hear his words as he intends them? Does he not want to be distracted from his kavvanah, his intention? Is this a paradigm of intimate, individual prayer?
    
    
18. When he starts, he leaps to a question: “Will you sweep away innocent with guilty?” Then comes even stronger language from Avraham. First summoning an image of humanity, fifty hypothetical innocents. Something about not just sparing the innocent individuals, but “lifting” something off the city (guilt and responsibility? Just the coming destruction?). Then the big quote, something like “Profane-of-You it would be, will the judge of all the earth not do justice?” Imagine accusing the Holy One of becoming the Profane One!
    
    
19. Avraham has no illusions about S’dom and its four neighboring cities. They have been up to now lush and beautiful places on the outside. But Avraham knows what corruption and brutality are like from his whole life. What is amazing is that he has some picture of justice, because other than himself (and not even all the time) he has never seen it. Only his spiritual quest has given him that picture, or at least an idea.
    
    
20. It’s hard to know what to make of the negotiation that follows. Does the Divine accept Avraham’s bigger premise, about what it means to deal with this situation justly? I would think yes, because of what the Divine had said to the-Divine’s-self right before. Yet there is no statement from God, “Good job, that’s what I hoped you’d say.”
    
    
21. Maybe it’s an act from “God”, the character that the Divine is playing in this conversation. I should be clear – the whole thing to me is somehow metaphor. But even in the narrative’s own terms, it’s hard to make out God’s “position” in this negotiation. Except if God is coaxing and scaffolding Avraham’s own judgment, saying things back to him to place the responsibility for the situation entirely on Avraham.
    
    
22. Avraham’s position is hard to pin down also. He starts with what seems like an argument about individuals – no innocent should be killed because a guilty one nearby deserves to be punished.
    
    
23. Our tradition links Avraham with Noach – Avraham making the argument that Noach never did when being forewarned by God about the Flood.
    
    
24. Then the argument shifts to numbers. The final number in the argument – ten -- comes in Jewish tradition to be the minimal definition of community. Ten could represent the smallest group whose righteousness, or innocence, could still possibly influence the wider environment for good.
    
    
25. Some Jewish commentators say it’s not even ten in a city, but two in each of the five cities. All it would take is two, what Judaism calls a chavruta, a Torah study partnership.
    
    
26. So which is it, the protection of innocent individuals or an argument about even the smallest hope for the cities?
    
    
27. It should be said that Avraham is not arguing for his own people, or on behalf of people who have fought against him. He is not exactly analogous to Israelis today. Is he the Americans? (With trembling I wonder who God would be analogous to, not the real God but God the character. If there were such a thing as enemies of God, the people of S’dom seem to be like that.)
    
    
28. Avraham *could* have been a citizen of S’dom in some alternate history. Back in Genesis 13, when he and his nephew Lot needed to split from each other and divide up the land, Avraham let Lot choose where to live, and if Lot had chosen the mountains Avraham would have moved to S’dom.
    
    
29. The Torah suggests that Lot was always going to choose S’dom. It was at the time one of the most beautiful places on earth. The midrash suggests that Avraham knew enough about the area that he would have subtly influenced Lot to be the one to choose that place, so Avraham himself wouldn’t have to live there and endure that test of his character.
    
    
30. Still Avraham had some connection to S’dom in addition to Lot. When the kings of S’dom and the other four cities had been engaged in a war with the powers of Mesopotamia, and Lot was taken prisoner along with others of the local kings’ peoples, Avraham mobilized a group and rescued all of them. But no enduring relationships came out of that event.
    
    
31. In the end, it’s total destruction for the cities and their people, and a humanitarian corridor out for Lot and his family.
    
    
32. Is the rescue justice or mercy? Lot we soon discover is only marginally better than the people of S’dom generally. Though one could argue, as Resh Lakish does about Noach, that he was doing the best one could expect given where he lived and who he was surrounded by.
    
    
33. The rescue of Lot was not part of Avraham’s justice argument. The remaining messenger, presumably on behalf of the Divine, urged Lot to leave with him.
    
34. I certainly wish that there were clear statements to derive here for right now. Such as: as a matter of justice if there are any innocents in an area it cannot be destroyed utterly, though some other kind of action is justified and warranted. That’s not what the story says. I think the rescue of innocents, even relative innocents, is a clear implication.
    
    
35. On the way out of S’dom, the remaining Divine messenger-escort cautions them about looking back. Looking at S’dom in the process of destruction is dangerous. Not look back is also dangerous. Lot’s wife looks, and turns into a pillar of salt. Salt is: a static look? The loss of one’s blood, one’s humanity? By not looking back, what does Lot lose?
    
    
36. In the Torah, S’dom foreshadows Deuteronomy’s “wayward city”, the ‘ir nidachat. If an Israelite community in the land turns completely to idolatry, the Torah says destroy it and let nothing ever be built on its site again. The Talmud, in one opinion, says this is a thought experiment, never a law to be implemented. This whole story of S’dom then would also be a thought experiment (I am sure it is). The thought experiments are important. So is the notion that they are only thought experiments.
    
    
37. Avraham does look on. From afar, from the hills above. He sees not the individual deaths, but the smouldering smoke. The people of S’dom and the other cities remain as they were to him, abstract but significant.
    
    
38. The Torah says that in that moment, “the Divine remembered Avraham.” Rashi explains it this way: In S’dom, the Divine remembered one act of difficult loyalty Lot had displayed toward Avraham in the past, at a time when they were together still but Avraham’s life path had put Lot in danger. For that one act, in spite of anything evil Lot had done, the Divine had compassion on Lot and rescued him.
    
    
39. What did seeing the destruction of the cities do to Avraham? Some say after this he was never the same, that the person who argued with the Divine and was present through Genesis 18 disappeared. That Avraham didn’t even do as much for his two sons as he did for all the strangers in this chapter. Genesis 22 Avraham is all that’s left. I don’t agree. I think there are signs in the chapters that follow this one that Avraham and Sarah are who they were in chapter 18, in his prayers for the Philistines in Gerar (which is not far from Gaza) and his actions in their land after, and the rest of his life. That’s a whole other thing to write.
    
40. Hope springs eternal? Out of the absurd story that immediately follows, where Lot’s daughters get him drunk and sleep with him, comes the line that will become the line of Ruth. Lot and his family become the ancestors of King David, the ancestors of the Messiah. Lot the citizen of S’dom becomes necessary to the puzzle of redemption.
    
    
41. I will end here. Even though there are callbacks and ripples to Genesis 18 in the chapters that follow immediately and so many other places in the Torah. I didn’t expect easy-to-map parallels and equivalencies, to Hamas and to the Gaza operation. May we find ways nonetheless to persist in the pain-draped, difficult kindnesses and just acts that Avraham and Sarah show us in Genesis 18. May this Torah somehow help, and be lifted up for the sake of the lives of the hostages, all the mourners, all the innocents, those who are in danger as they press a just fight, those who continue even this week to work for a deeper peace.

41 Thoughts on Genesis 18

This is not the D’var Torah I will be speaking from the pulpit, even though Genesis 18 is in this week’s Torah reading, Vayera. I’ve been making these tentative notes through the week, reading the chapter with the actuality of Israel and Gaza ever present. H/t to Rabbis Tali Adler and Aryeh Klapper, of whose types of Torah recently this is a very pale imitation, and they have nothing to do with anything specific I write here. It’s suggestions and questions more than pat interpretations or answers. 

1. This week in the Jewish cycle includes one of the most glorious chapters in all of Torah, Genesis 18. It begins with an act of radical hospitality, Avraham and Sarah taking three strangers into their home to feed them, and concludes with the argument between Avraham and the Divine over the fate of the evil cities of S’dom and its environs.
   
   
2. The chapter number, 18, is a special number in Hebrew. It’s traditionally written with the letters for “chai”=being alive, being living, related to the word l’chayim=to life, based on the numeric values of the letters. (That the two stories are in the same chapter doesn’t come from the original. There is a long Jewish tradition of paragraphs and longer sections, which predates the system that Christian scholars came up and now Jews use for reference too.)
   
   
3. I knew the two stories were near each other but somehow hadn’t noticed they were one immediately after the other, in the same chapter, until about 16 years ago. I’ve written and spoken about this chapter often, including before elections and at the interfaith CROP Hunger Walk.
   
   
4. I’ve talked about it in terms of two sides of a coin. Service and justice activities. Up close, and the view from on high. Action in the moment, conceptual work.
   
   
5. Rabbi Donniel Hartman has said something like -- There are two kinds of Jews: Genesis 18 Jews and Genesis 22 Jews. Genesis 22 is also in this week’s reading, the binding and near-sacrifice of Yitzchak. It’s the paradigm of faith as complete submission, of doing something specifically beyond (?) the humanistic and that’s how you know it’s devotion to God. It’s a source for religious extremism. Genesis 18 is about faith through a kindness and justice that is far beyond (!) caring, any normal human inclinations of empathy.
   
   
6. So, Genesis 18. Both the visitors episode and the debate with the Divine happen on the same day.
   
   
7. As I’ve been writing for weeks, I’ve been avoiding letting Avraham and Sarah stand squarely in front of me this year. Even though they are the ones my synagogue is named for. Our annual rewind to Genesis began in Israel on Oct. 7, the day of the Hamas atrocities, and outside Israel the very next day. Sarah and Avraham are a revolution and a high standard on all kinds of levels, a quantum leap for humanity. It’s hard to figure how to get to that height or into that discourse right now. Yet they have been camped in front of me for a couple weeks now, and we don’t not read the weekly parasha (Torah reading). So here goes, tentatively, with some things kicking around in me this week.
   
   
8. I have in the past emphasized that Avraham’s concern, in both the first and second stories, is not about the flowing of love to those he already loves or even those he knows in his community without love. The three strangers are not just strangers he bumps into. They are out far away, and he can’t know if they are friendly or not. Also, it’s incredibly hot outside. As for the people of S’dom: they are known from Genesis 13 to be “evil and sinners to the Divine very much.” Which I take to mean both terrible to each other in human terms and spiritually degraded in a way that sucks their religious ideology into justifying their brutality.
   
   
9. Also according to the Jewish midrashic tradition, Avraham is in physical pain this particular day after his (self-)circumcision.
   
   
10. The pain Avraham is experiencing is not just physical. It is bound up with the covenant. His difficult and important mission is experienced in his body not only as a euphoric rush, an excited heartbeat, but covenant pain. “Covenant placed in our flesh”, in the words of the Jewish circumcision ritual. For Sarah, there is also pain at this time, perhaps? As she and Hagar have been set against each other for more than a decade, two women enacting the consequence of a man’s (Avraham’s) doubts or impatience about the pace of the covenantal promises coming true?
    
    
11. So these acts of generosity and justice-seeking come somehow within (or even derive from?) a pain Avraham and Sarah feel in their bodies and a psychic, spiritual pain. At the same time, these acts are foundational to who Avraham and Sarah are. One Jewish interpretation is that when the strangers appear on the horizon, Avraham steps away from God, Who is trying to pay him a sick call and soothe him, because connecting with the strangers who might need something is irresistible to this man of the covenant.
    
    
12. Sarah and Avraham don’t have a party when the strangers turn out to be messengers bearing amazing, miraculous news about a birth of a son in their old age. The “party” is the initial meal itself, before the news. When Yitzchak actually reaches the age of weaning, when the promise is looking more solid, only then will there be a party.
    
    
13. I think it’s significant the messengers come to deliver a message about a birth in their old age specifically. Sarah and Avraham already know that their people’s destiny, to be populous and a blessing in this land, is far, far off and they won’t get much of a glimpse of it. But they will get to see just a bit of it beyond what they expected even in their lifetime.
    
    
14. Avraham walks the people-messengers out along their way after their meal and conversation – hospitality extends far past the front door. It’s dangerous territory they are headed into, and taking responsibility for people heading into dangerous territory becomes in Jewish tradition part of the hospitality paradigm, and part of the broader responsibility paradigm.
    
    
15. Okay, enough stalling. So the Divine “above” decides that this issue of the evil cities in the valley below is a matter that Avraham has to be involved in, if Avraham and his people are indeed going to become a blessing for the earth through justice.
    
    
16. The words the Divine uses to describe what is happening below are murky, even in the original Hebrew. They involve outcry, wrongdoing, the question of whether the outcry and the wrongdoing are entirely aligned, and whether the entire story in the cities is the wrongdoing. It’s a muddled introduction, and indeed the Divine God’s-self states to Avraham a desire to know more of the story.
    
    
17. Avraham waits until the messengers leave to open his mouth. Does he not want to be heard in public saying these words? Does he not trust other people to hear his words as he intends them? Does he not want to be distracted from his kavvanah, his intention? Is this a paradigm of intimate, individual prayer?
    
    
18. When he starts, he leaps to a question: “Will you sweep away innocent with guilty?” Then comes even stronger language from Avraham. First summoning an image of humanity, fifty hypothetical innocents. Something about not just sparing the innocent individuals, but “lifting” something off the city (guilt and responsibility? Just the coming destruction?). Then the big quote, something like “Profane-of-You it would be, will the judge of all the earth not do justice?” Imagine accusing the Holy One of becoming the Profane One!
    
    
19. Avraham has no illusions about S’dom and its four neighboring cities. They have been up to now lush and beautiful places on the outside. But Avraham knows what corruption and brutality are like from his whole life. What is amazing is that he has some picture of justice, because other than himself (and not even all the time) he has never seen it. Only his spiritual quest has given him that picture, or at least an idea.
    
    
20. It’s hard to know what to make of the negotiation that follows. Does the Divine accept Avraham’s bigger premise, about what it means to deal with this situation justly? I would think yes, because of what the Divine had said to the-Divine’s-self right before. Yet there is no statement from God, “Good job, that’s what I hoped you’d say.”
    
    
21. Maybe it’s an act from “God”, the character that the Divine is playing in this conversation. I should be clear – the whole thing to me is somehow metaphor. But even in the narrative’s own terms, it’s hard to make out God’s “position” in this negotiation. Except if God is coaxing and scaffolding Avraham’s own judgment, saying things back to him to place the responsibility for the situation entirely on Avraham.
    
    
22. Avraham’s position is hard to pin down also. He starts with what seems like an argument about individuals – no innocent should be killed because a guilty one nearby deserves to be punished.
    
    
23. Our tradition links Avraham with Noach – Avraham making the argument that Noach never did when being forewarned by God about the Flood.
    
    
24. Then the argument shifts to numbers. The final number in the argument – ten -- comes in Jewish tradition to be the minimal definition of community. Ten could represent the smallest group whose righteousness, or innocence, could still possibly influence the wider environment for good.
    
    
25. Some Jewish commentators say it’s not even ten in a city, but two in each of the five cities. All it would take is two, what Judaism calls a chavruta, a Torah study partnership.
    
    
26. So which is it, the protection of innocent individuals or an argument about even the smallest hope for the cities?
    
    
27. It should be said that Avraham is not arguing for his own people, or on behalf of people who have fought against him. He is not exactly analogous to Israelis today. Is he the Americans? (With trembling I wonder who God would be analogous to, not the real God but God the character. If there were such a thing as enemies of God, the people of S’dom seem to be like that.)
    
    
28. Avraham *could* have been a citizen of S’dom in some alternate history. Back in Genesis 13, when he and his nephew Lot needed to split from each other and divide up the land, Avraham let Lot choose where to live, and if Lot had chosen the mountains Avraham would have moved to S’dom.
    
    
29. The Torah suggests that Lot was always going to choose S’dom. It was at the time one of the most beautiful places on earth. The midrash suggests that Avraham knew enough about the area that he would have subtly influenced Lot to be the one to choose that place, so Avraham himself wouldn’t have to live there and endure that test of his character.
    
    
30. Still Avraham had some connection to S’dom in addition to Lot. When the kings of S’dom and the other four cities had been engaged in a war with the powers of Mesopotamia, and Lot was taken prisoner along with others of the local kings’ peoples, Avraham mobilized a group and rescued all of them. But no enduring relationships came out of that event.
    
    
31. In the end, it’s total destruction for the cities and their people, and a humanitarian corridor out for Lot and his family.
    
    
32. Is the rescue justice or mercy? Lot we soon discover is only marginally better than the people of S’dom generally. Though one could argue, as Resh Lakish does about Noach, that he was doing the best one could expect given where he lived and who he was surrounded by.
    
    
33. The rescue of Lot was not part of Avraham’s justice argument. The remaining messenger, presumably on behalf of the Divine, urged Lot to leave with him.
34. I certainly wish that there were clear statements to derive here for right now. Such as: as a matter of justice if there are any innocents in an area it cannot be destroyed utterly, though some other kind of action is justified and warranted. That’s not what the story says. I think the rescue of innocents, even relative innocents, is a clear implication.
    
    
35. On the way out of S’dom, the remaining Divine messenger-escort cautions them about looking back. Looking at S’dom in the process of destruction is dangerous. Not look back is also dangerous. Lot’s wife looks, and turns into a pillar of salt. Salt is: a static look? The loss of one’s blood, one’s humanity? By not looking back, what does Lot lose?
    
    
36. In the Torah, S’dom foreshadows Deuteronomy’s “wayward city”, the ‘ir nidachat. If an Israelite community in the land turns completely to idolatry, the Torah says destroy it and let nothing ever be built on its site again. The Talmud, in one opinion, says this is a thought experiment, never a law to be implemented. This whole story of S’dom then would also be a thought experiment (I am sure it is). The thought experiments are important. So is the notion that they are only thought experiments.
    
    
37. Avraham does look on. From afar, from the hills above. He sees not the individual deaths, but the smouldering smoke. The people of S’dom and the other cities remain as they were to him, abstract but significant.
    
    
38. The Torah says that in that moment, “the Divine remembered Avraham.” Rashi explains it this way: In S’dom, the Divine remembered one act of difficult loyalty Lot had displayed toward Avraham in the past, at a time when they were together still but Avraham’s life path had put Lot in danger. For that one act, in spite of anything evil Lot had done, the Divine had compassion on Lot and rescued him.
    
    
39. What did seeing the destruction of the cities do to Avraham? Some say after this he was never the same, that the person who argued with the Divine and was present through Genesis 18 disappeared. That Avraham didn’t even do as much for his two sons as he did for all the strangers in this chapter. Genesis 22 Avraham is all that’s left. I don’t agree. I think there are signs in the chapters that follow this one that Avraham and Sarah are who they were in chapter 18, in his prayers for the Philistines in Gerar (which is not far from Gaza) and his actions in their land after, and the rest of his life. That’s a whole other thing to write.
40. Hope springs eternal? Out of the absurd story that immediately follows, where Lot’s daughters get him drunk and sleep with him, comes the line that will become the line of Ruth. Lot and his family become the ancestors of King David, the ancestors of the Messiah. Lot the citizen of S’dom becomes necessary to the puzzle of redemption.
    
    
41. I will end here. Even though there are callbacks and ripples to Genesis 18 in the chapters that follow immediately and so many other places in the Torah. I didn’t expect easy-to-map parallels and equivalencies, to Hamas and to the Gaza operation. May we find ways nonetheless to persist in the pain-draped, difficult kindnesses and just acts that Avraham and Sarah show us in Genesis 18. May this Torah somehow help, and be lifted up for the sake of the lives of the hostages, all the mourners, all the innocents, those who are in danger as they press a just fight, those who continue even this week to work for a deeper peace.

Righteous Enough for the Time

This is my D'var Torah for October 21, 2023, Parashat Noach.

When Noach was born, the human world had only just stopped being young. If you do all the math, you see that Adam had lived to see nine generations including his own. I can imagine that people had begun doubting whether Gan Eden had ever existed, whether the ideal mattered anymore, but there had always been Adam to respond. Noach’s generation was the first one who had no Adam, no one with them who could say I saw it with my own eyes, I was there.

The Torah isn’t clear whether humanity’s spiral into violence and lawlessness began before Noach was born, while Adam was still alive. (The Hebrew word for this situation is actually chamas. The name of the terrorist group is actually not related linguistically to the biblical word, but it’s hard to not hear the similiarity.) Whether or not Adam was there as a presence, things were bad enough that Noach was given a burden the moment he was born. His father Lemech named him: Noach, meaning rest. And also he added more layers of meaning -- Zeh y'nachameinu mi-maaseinu u'mei'itzvon yadeinu, min ha-adamah asher eir'rah Adonai. This one will comfort us, or maybethis one will turn us around, because of our deeds, and the sadness of what our hands have done out of this earth that the Divine has cursed (Genesis 5:29).

Imagine being given that name, that hope, right at birth.

Maybe all of Noach’s life or maybe just some of it, the earth was beyond redemption, except without drastic and unthinkable measures.

When the point of no return had been reached, the Torah tells us this about the adult Noach had become: Noach ish tzadik tamim hayah b'dorotav -- Noach, a man, righteous, blameless was he in his generations (Genesis 6:9).

Our medieval guide Rashi says: Some interpret this as praise and some interpret it as an insult. He references this argument in the Talmud about it: Rabbi Yochanan said: Noach was righteous in his generations -- the many generations he overlapped -- but in other generations he wouldn’t have been considered righteous. Resh Lakish says: If Noach could be righteous in the era he was living, when there was not a single other righteous person, how much more so would he have become righteous in any other generation?

Rashi seems to take Rabbi Yochanan’s side, that the Torah is giving Noach faint praise, adding: About Noach the Torah says he walked with God, meaning he needed God’s assistance to be a tzaddik; but about Avraham the Torah says he walked in front of God, by himself. Noach built an ark to save a small number. Avraham argued to save every life in the five most evil cities of the land.

But Resh Lakish stands for the idea that Noach was as righteous as one could be in his time, and that he was righteous enough. You know I don’t use the word “righteous” a lot as a translation for tzaddik, but I think for us today it gets the job done. When you can’t fix everything, or maybe anything, and when there’s nothing to do but gather who you can in an ark -- you gather who you can in an ark, and that’s what it means to be righteous.

As much as we might want to be Avraham, as much as we are sitting today in Beit Avraham  after all -- I think we need to consider whether there’s a time to be okay being Noach the way Resh Lakish sees him.

I think about this every year the week of Parashat Noach -- about being a good-enough parent or a good-enough citizen or a good-enough man -- and all this week I’ve been thinking about what it means at the moment to be a good-enough Jew.

It’s only two weeks since the atrocities of Oct. 7. It’s not really  two weeks in the past, because it is still happening, funerals and hostages and more rockets and our soldiers and our people displaced from their homes. And in the newnes and the overwhelm, there is so much pressure on Jews to be more righteous than our generation, to be righteous against the standard of a time we’re not in. And that pressure comes from the outside world, and from within our community, and inside our own neshamot and our hearts.

It sure seems that the world expects the Jews to be more perfect than our generation, to be the ones to turn us around from sadness and the terrible deeds that human hands have done in the world.

We Jews are expected to be the best universalists, to look out for every human life as much as those of our own people, while we are in mourning and we are shaking and we are physically overwhelmed.

We Jews are expected to take care of Israeli and Jewish lives, and also to take care of another people whose own leaders aren’t taking care of them and have repeatedly betrayed them and even now put them in harm’s way.

We Jews are expected by the world to be the ones to figure out the solution to complexities of nationalism and democracy, group solidarity and minority rights. Or some people expect us Jews even right now to go first and transcend the nation as the basis for a state, to give that up and be a pilot project in binational democracy, even at the risk of our lives.

We Jews are expected to know how to go from powerlessness to the kind of power we’ve had in the world for maybe half a century, maybe that long, without being affected by the collective trauma of centuries that fifty years does not erase. 

We Jews are expected to be the best in the world at wielding ethical power. To figure out how to fight an asymmetric war both successfully and ethically, and not fight until we've figured it out. Or else to decide not to fight a war necessary to defend lives and defend the state, to choose instead to leave in place a group that would do what Hamas did, who would do it again, because somehow the alternative is worse.

And right now it’s just not possible to be expected to be all of these things. I don’t know if you feel those expectations but even if you haven’t articulated them, I think you do feel them. It is exhausting to carry that weight anytime, as we often do, and it’s particularly exhausting right now.

And I think we experience these as impossible pressures because in our neshama we do want to be much of that list. Along with our current agony and along with our collective generational trauma, we have generational idealism, and we don’t want to put in a position right now where it feels like we have to lose it or to have it taken from us by Hamas, or by the harsh hearts of some in the world around us.

I think it’s all right to be Noach as Resh Lakish sees him, and not Avraham, in the context of the current war. Maybe for a week or two, or maybe at moments ahead of us off and on as the war goes on, or maybe through the whole time of this mabul, this Flood.

Some of this pressure to be more righteous than our generation comes from within our group also. I’ve been registering how people seem in conversations the past week or so. It’s dawned on me that we may be putting certain pressures on each other unintentionally.

I’ve noticed that my question to people about who you have right now in Israel and how are they can also be taken as a kind of pressure. Like if you don’t have someone directly who you know, who you’re WhatsApping with regularly, or if you don’t have the name of a hostage that you know, then maybe you don’t have the same right to speak among peole who do. 

If you do post something about Israel or Gaza on social media, you have to know the perfect way to say that your concern for Israelis is paramount, otherwise you’re not entitled to speak or raise a question. You have to know the perfectly convincing response to an outrageous post, informed and ethically airtight.

I’m concerned that these kinds of expectations, intentional or unintentional, push some of us away from each other and from the synagogue community. So to everyone within our community I want to say it’s all right as a Jew to be Noach, and to show up to take care of people any way you can.

It’s okay to be Noach, sometimes and more than sometimes. It’s impossible right now to be zen y'nachameinu, the one who will turn everything around. Pirkei Avot 5:2 teaches that there were ten generations from Noah to Avraham, to teach us how patient is the Kadosh Baruch Hu, how patient was the Divine, for as much as the world was infuriating during those times, there would be a generation where Avraham could start to make a difference, and then everything that happened before would not be in vain.

It’s hard to be that patient with ourselves.

And it’s hard to be that patient with others. On Monday and Tuesday I was very off -- I mean we’re all off, but just in my particular way I was off. But the more I tried to take Resh Lakish to heart, the more I could also release my need for all my non-Jewish friends and colleagues to be at the level of Avraham. I started to see and appreciate the Noach-ish things as righteous enough for right now.

I see all the mutual support people are giving here. One parent last Sunday, with very close ties in Israel to Kibbutz Re'im, said how grateful she was just to sit in a room with other Jews for the first time since it all began.

I sat with a Muslim acquaintance over coffee and we exchanged concerns for each other’s safety in our places of worship, and offered to help protect each other’s communities and to come and teach.

I heard from and had my usual get-togethers with Christian colleagues whose denominations have published statements that sicken me, in underplaying what Hamas has done. I realized that people here didn’t write those, and they are listening to what we say because they know us, and they are reading what I write, and they are worried for us and are not abandoning us.

We learn from the Torah too that there is a certain basic level of righteousness that goes with being a Noach. After the Flood, the Divine says even though the nature of people’s hearts includes harm from when we are young, nonetheless there will be a covenant which our tradition says includes a basic code of seven mitzvot.

So I think we each have to define what it means to be like Noach, righteous for the time we are in and the generations we have been a part of. We have to find a few certainties that we cling to no matter what.

One certainty is chesed. Each of us needs to bind our hearts to a mitzvah of caring, for people here  in our Jewish community and in Israel, for anyone at all. Zeh y'nachameinu -- if Noach’s name means  simply “this one will comfort us”, we can be a comfort by our presence and our mitzvot. We need to infuse our spiritual bloodstream with chesed; we need that even physically to steady ourselves.

Another certainly is that all people are created B’tzelem Elohim, in the Divine image. Rabbi Aryeh Klapper has pointed out that the Torah reteaches this after the Flood, and that the first meaning is that when lives are taken by human hands, they demand justice in response. So lives taken by Hamas require response; it is a moral obligation.

And being a people who believe in Tzelem Elohim means we recognize that when Israelis kill enemies in a just war, it is still a spiritual burden, and it lasts far longer than the war itself. Which is why that burden is shared across society in Israel. It is too much for only a small group to live with.

And Tzelem Elohim means that when innocent civlians are killed in the course of a just war, sometimes their death is not a crime and sometimes their death is a crime, and we remain accountable for the difference, but always their death is a tragedy. When Golda Meir z”l famously said that when peace comes at last, she could forgive the Arabs for killng our children but she could not forgive them for forcing us to kill their children, I think all this is what she was trying to say.

And these kinds of minimal things we can in fact expect from others, to do and to understand. Too many university leaders, by and large, are not doing the minimum for our kids -- not taking care of them, not standing up for a principled understanding of Tzelem Elohim, whatever language they would use for that.

Noach ish tzaddik tamim haya b'dorotav -- Noach was a man, righteous, blameless was he in his generations. I know this community well enough to know that we want to be righteous and we have done so much the past two weeks in that spirit. Thank you. And whatever it is for you to be in this mini-Mabul, flooded emotionally or spiritually or physically, some of the time or all of the time, I hope you’ll let yourself in those moments just be as good as Noach. Get yourself into an ark, take someone in or let someone see you and take you in. That what it means to be righteous in this time.

Shabbat Shalom.

Righteous Enough for the Time

This is what I think will be my words in the synagogue tomorrow, October 21, 2023, for Parashat Noach.

When Noach was born, the human world had only just stopped being young. If you do all the math, you see that Adam had lived to see nine generations including his own. I can imagine that people had begun doubting whether Gan Eden had ever existed, whether the ideal mattered anymore, but there had always been Adam to respond. Noach’s generation was the first one who had no Adam, no one with them who could say I saw it with my own eyes, I was there.

The Torah isn’t clear whether humanity’s spiral into violence and lawlessness began before Noach was born, while Adam was still alive. (The Hebrew word for this situation is actually chamas. The name of the terrorist group is actually not related linguistically to the biblical word, but it’s hard to not hear the similiarity.) Whether or not Adam was there as a presence, things were bad enough that Noach was given a burden the moment he was born. His father Lemech named him: Noach, meaning rest. And also he added more layers of meaning -- Zeh y'nachameinu mi-maaseinu u'mei'itzvon yadeinu, min ha-adamah asher eir'rah Adonai. This one will comfort us, or maybethis one will turn us around, because of our deeds, and the sadness of what our hands have done out of this earth that the Divine has cursed (Genesis 5:29).

Imagine being given that name, that hope, right at birth.

Maybe all of Noach’s life or maybe just some of it, the earth was beyond redemption, except without drastic and unthinkable measures.

When the point of no return had been reached, the Torah tells us this about the adult Noach had become: Noach ish tzadik tamim hayah b'dorotav -- Noach, a man, righteous, blameless was he in his generations (Genesis 6:9).

Our medieval guide Rashi says: Some interpret this as praise and some interpret it as an insult. He references this argument in the Talmud about it: Rabbi Yochanan said: Noach was righteous in his generations -- the many generations he overlapped -- but in other generations he wouldn’t have been considered righteous. Resh Lakish says: If Noach could be righteous in the era he was living, when there was not a single other righteous person, how much more so would he have become righteous in any other generation?

Rashi seems to take Rabbi Yochanan’s side, that the Torah is giving Noach faint praise, adding: About Noach the Torah says he walked with God, meaning he needed God’s assistance to be a tzaddik; but about Avraham the Torah says he walked in front of God, by himself. Noach built an ark to save a small number. Avraham argued to save every life in the five most evil cities of the land.

But Resh Lakish stands for the idea that Noach was as righteous as one could be in his time, and that he was righteous enough. You know I don’t use the word “righteous” a lot as a translation for tzaddik, but I think for us today it gets the job done. When you can’t fix everything, or maybe anything, and when there’s nothing to do but gather who you can in an ark -- you gather who you can in an ark, and that’s what it means to be righteous.

As much as we might want to be Avraham, as much as we are sitting today in Beit Avraham  after all -- I think we need to consider whether there’s a time to be okay being Noach the way Resh Lakish sees him.

I think about this every year the week of Parashat Noach -- about being a good-enough parent or a good-enough citizen or a good-enough man -- and all this week I’ve been thinking about what it means at the moment to be a good-enough Jew.

It’s only two weeks since the atrocities of Oct. 7. It’s not really  two weeks in the past, because it is still happening, funerals and hostages and more rockets and our soldiers and our people displaced from their homes. And in the newnes and the overwhelm, there is so much pressure on Jews to be more righteous than our generation, to be righteous against the standard of a time we’re not in. And that pressure comes from the outside world, and from within our community, and inside our own neshamot and our hearts.

It sure seems that the world expects the Jews to be more perfect than our generation, to be the ones to turn us around from sadness and the terrible deeds that human hands have done in the world.

We Jews are expected to be the best universalists, to look out for every human life as much as those of our own people, while we are in mourning and we are shaking and we are physically overwhelmed.

We Jews are expected to take care of Israeli and Jewish lives, and also to take care of another people whose own leaders aren’t taking care of them and have repeatedly betrayed them and even now put them in harm’s way.

We Jews are expected by the world to be the ones to figure out the solution to complexities of nationalism and democracy, group solidarity and minority rights. Or some people expect us Jews even right now to go first and transcend the nation as the basis for a state, to give that up and be a pilot project in multiethnic democracy, even at the risk of our lives.

We Jews are expected to know how to go from powerlessness to the kind of power we’ve had in the world for maybe half a century, maybe that long, without being affected by the collective trauma of centuries that fifty years does not erase. 

We Jews are expected to be the best in the world at wielding ethical power. To decide not to fight a war necessary to defend lives and defend the state, to choose instead to leave in place a group that would do what Hamas did because we might not do it right, or to figure out how to fight a war where innocents on the other side are almost never killed and not fight at all until we’ve figured out how to do that.

And right now it’s just not possible to be expected to be all of these things. I don’t know if you feel those expectations but even if you haven’t articulated them, I think you do feel them. It is exhausting to carry that weight anytime, as we often do, and it’s particularly exhausting right now.

And I think we experience these as impossible pressures because in our neshama we do want to be much of that list. Along with our current agony and along with our collective generational trauma, we have generational idealism, and we don’t want to put in a position right now where it feels like we have to lose it or to have it taken from us by Hamas, or by the harsh hearts of some in the world around us.

I think it’s all right to be Noach as Resh Lakish sees him, and not Avraham, in the context of the current war. Maybe for a week or two, or maybe at moments ahead of us off and on as the war goes on, or maybe through the whole time of this mabul, this Flood.

Some of this pressure to be more righteous than our generation comes from within our group also. I’ve been registering how people seem in conversations the past week or so. It’s dawned on me that we may be putting certain pressures on each other unintentionally.

I’ve noticed that my question to people about who you have right now in Israel and how are they can also be taken as a kind of pressure. Like if you don’t have someone directly who you know, who you’re WhatsApping with regularly, or if you don’t have the name of a hostage that you know, then maybe you don’t have the same right to speak among peole who do. 

If you do post something about Israel or Gaza on social media, you have to know the perfect way to say that your concern for Israelis is paramount, otherwise you’re not entitled to speak or raise a question. You have to know the perfectly convincing response to an outrageous post, informed and ethically airtight.

I’m concerned that these kinds of expectations, intentional or unintentional, push some of us away from each other and from the synagogue community. So to everyone within our community I want to say it’s all right as a Jew to be Noach, and to show up to take care of people any way you can.

It’s okay to be Noach, sometimes and more than sometimes. It’s impossible right now to be zen y'nachameinu, the one who will turn everything around. Pirkei Avot 5:2 teaches that there were ten generations from Noah to Avraham, to teach us how patient is the Kadosh Baruch Hu, how patient was the Divine, for as much as the world was infuriating during those times, there would be a generation where Avraham could start to make a difference, and then everything that happened before would not be in vain.

It’s hard to be that patient with ourselves.

And it’s hard to be that patient with others. On Monday and Tuesday I was very off -- I mean we’re all off, but just in my particular way I was off. But the more I tried to take Resh Lakish to heart, the more I could also release my need for all my non-Jewish friends and colleagues to be at the level of Avraham. I started to see and appreciate the Noach-ish things as righteous enough for right now.

I see all the mutual support people are giving here. One parent last Sunday, with very close ties in Israel to Kibbutz Be'eri, said how grateful she was just to sit in a room with other Jews for the first time since it all began.

I sat with a Muslim acquaintance over coffee and we exchanged concerns for each other’s safety in our places of worship, and offered to help protect each other’s communities and to come and teach.

I heard from and had my usual get-togethers with Christian colleagues whose denominations have published statements that sicken me, in underplaying what Hamas has done. I realized that people here didn’t write those, and they are listening to what we say because they know us, and they are reading what I write, and they are worried for us and are not abandoning us.

We learn from the Torah too that there is a certain basic level of righteousness that goes with being a Noach. After the Flood, the Divine says even though the nature of people’s hearts includes harm from when we are young, nonetheless there will be a covenant which our tradition says includes a basic code of seven mitzvot.

So I think we each have to define what it means to be like Noach, righteous for the time we are in and the generations we have been a part of. We have to find a few certainties that we cling to no matter what.

One certainty is chesed. Each of us needs to bind our hearts to a mitzvah of caring, for people here  in our Jewish community and in Israel, for anyone at all. Zeh y'nachameinu -- if Noach’s name means  simply “this one will comfort us”, we can be a comfort by our presence and our mitzvot. We need to infuse our spiritual bloodstream with chesed; we need that even physically to steady ourselves.

Another certainly is that all people are created B’tzelem Elohim, in the Divine image. Rabbi Aryeh Klapper has pointed out that the Torah reteaches this after the Flood, and that the first meaning is that when lives are taken by human hands, they demand justice in response. So lives taken by Hamas require response; it is a moral obligation.

And being a people who believe in Tzelem Elohim means we recognize that when Israelis kill enemies in a just war, it is still a spiritual burden, and it lasts far longer than the war itself. Which is why that burden is shared across society in Israel. It is too much for only a small group to live with.

And Tzelem Elohim means that when innocent civlians are killed in the course of a just war, sometimes their death is not a crime and sometimes their death is a crime, and we remain accountable for the difference, but always their death is a tragedy. When Golda Meir z”l famously said that when peace comes at last, she could forgive the Arabs for killng our children but she could not forgive them for forcing us to kill their children, I think all this is what she was trying to say.

And these kinds of minimal things we can in fact expect from others, to do and to understand. Too many university leaders, by and large, are not doing the minimum for our kids -- not taking care of them, not standing up for a principled understanding of Tzelem Elohim, whatever language they would use for that.

Noach ish tzaddik tamim haya b'dorotav -- Noach was a man, righteous, blameless was he in his generations. I know this community well enough to know that we want to be righteous and we have done so much the past two weeks in that spirit. Thank you. And whatever it is for you to be in this mini-Mabul, flooded emotionally or spiritually or physically, some of the time or all of the time, I hope you’ll let yourself in those moments just be as good as Noach. Get yourself into an ark, take someone in or let someone see you and take you in. That what it means to be righteous in this time.

Shabbat Shalom.

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: