Rabbi Jon's Website and Blog

A Lot of Tov! Podcasts to Share

I've gotten so behind on posting each new Tov! podcast here!

So here's a way to find all the ones you haven't heard yet. The most recent one features two college students, Sadie Meltzer and Lela Spira-Savett!

 

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

My Rosh Hashanah Sermons (5784/2023)

Read or watch/listen:

Click to read the text of the sermons:

Day 1 — Glimmers

Day 2 — Through Regret

Or watch or listen on YouTube:

 

My American Tale -- What's Yours? (Yaz on Masada)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This Chanukkah -- Many Ideas

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

Inheriting America, Choosing America

This is another take on something I've written and spoken about before, how and why I chose to stay in America because of my engagement with quintessential American themes of freedom and individuality. I spoke about this last Shabbat, in anticipation of Independence Day 2022. It's published here at the Times of Israel.

In the Midst, All at Once: A Torah for Pride 5782

This was the D'var Torah I gave for Parashat B’haalotcha on June 18, 2022.

When the same passage of Torah comes at you from four different sources the same week, you have to pay attention.

I always look forward to Parashat B’haalotcha because it’s the start of the frisky Torah, the Torah of complaining. It’s the beginning of the Torah’s textbook on group dynamics once the community of Israel starts moving out from Sinai toward the promised land. It’s easy to see our groups in these next few Torah readings. That’s the lens I usually bring. But I was thinking particularly this week about Pride Month, and I had said that I’d speak related to that on this Shabbat, since I plan to be away next week. And from some Torah e-mails I subscribe to and podcasts and such, about four times I found myself face-to-face with this from the parasha:

It was the first anniversary of the Exodus and Moshe instructed the people to observe Pesach and to offer the Pesach sacrifice. Then this (Numbers 9:6-8):

וַיְהִ֣י אֲנָשִׁ֗ים אֲשֶׁ֨ר הָי֤וּ טְמֵאִים֙ לְנֶ֣פֶשׁ אָדָ֔ם 
וְלֹא־יָֽכְל֥וּ לַֽעֲשֹׂת־הַפֶּ֖סַח בַּיּ֣וֹם הַה֑וּא 
וַֽיִּקְרְב֞וּ לִפְנֵ֥י מֹשֶׁ֛ה וְלִפְנֵ֥י אַֽהֲרֹ֖ן בַּיּ֥וֹם הַהֽוּא:
וַ֠יֹּֽאמְר֠וּ הָֽאֲנָשִׁ֤ים הָהֵ֨מָּה֙ אֵלָ֔יו 
אֲנַ֥חְנוּ טְמֵאִ֖ים לְנֶ֣פֶשׁ אָדָ֑ם 
לָ֣מָּה נִגָּרַ֗ע לְבִלְתִּ֨י הַקְרִ֜יב אֶת־קָרְבַּ֤ן יְיָ֙ בְּמֹ֣עֲד֔וֹ בְּת֖וֹךְ בְּנֵ֥י יִשְׂרָאֵֽל: 
ויֹּ֥אמֶר אֲלֵהֶ֖ם מֹשֶׁ֑ה עִמְד֣וּ וְאֶשְׁמְעָ֔ה מַה־יְּצַוֶּ֥ה יְיָ֖ לָכֶֽם:

"There were people who were ta’meh [usually translated “impure” but we’ll get back to that] -- ta’meh for the human soul." And they were not able to do the Pesach on that day. So they came up close in front of Moshe and in front of Aharon on that day. And these people say to him: We are ta’meh for the human soul. Why are we held back, why are we subtracted, from bring close the close-up offering of the Divine in its time among the Children of Yisrael? And Moshe said to them: Stand, and I will hear what the Divine will command for you."

Lamah ni’gara. Why are we subtracted. Why are we not included.

We, who are in a state of tum’ah for life of a person. This requires some elaboration. At first blush this group seem to be held away from the Sanctuary because they had recently been in contact with a dead body and need to go through a purification ritual and the passage of a certain amount of time.

Tradition broadens the interpretation to all matters of tohora and tum’ah, which are usually translated as “purity” and “impurity.” Better to understand them, however, in terms of our embodied human experience and our attraction to the Divine.

Tum’ah and tohora are all about cycles and blood and child-birth and intimacy. These are intensely spiritual and we experience them through our bodies, our gender, our sexuality, our relationships. How is it, they ask Moshe, that these would take us away from Pesach. Why should we be the ones deprived of the Pesach offering -- the offering of freedom, the sacrifice whose blood is compared to the blood of the covenant. How could our embodied experience cause us to be held back from the Divine Sanctuary, the holiest place.

We aren’t complaining to you, Moshe, like the others who kvetch about the desert food or challenge your leadership. We’re not complaining about you or your religion or your rituals or your teachings. On the contrary, we want in. We want it all, b’moado b’toch b’nai Yisrael --  at its proper time, in the midst of all the community of Yisrael. Lamah ni’gara. Why should we be substracted. Why should we not be included.

I think we can see something even in their phrasing -- "we are tam’eh to the soul of a person". Move from seeing us as “impure”, toward seeing us as “the soul of a person.”

Moshe according to one commentary says to them: I am over the moon that you asked this question of me, and that you want this question asked of the Divine. And I too want to hear what the Divine has to say.

And the answer that came back at the time of our ancestors is what we call Pesach Sheni, a second Pesach. The message they understood, as recorded in the Torah written at that time, is that one month later, anyone who was ta’meh come and do the Pesach offering one month later, exactly as would have been done at its scheduled time. Not only they, but anyone who was on a journey too far away or someone who is a ger, a person within the community but who has not yet become a full citizen of the community. Each of you can do Pesach Sheni. This is how you will be included.

The Talmud says that being distant doesn’t mean just far, far away. Even someone who at the time of Pesach is just a step outside the area of the Temple where the sacrifice is done is far enough away for Pesach Sheni. If you’re not quite inside, physically. If you’re not let in, or don’t feel let in by the community, or if you’re not quite ready to come in fully -- you still are entitled to Pesach, to the celebration of the covenant.

I have been mulling over whether this Pesach Sheni is the answer to the question lama ni’gara, why are we not included. Part of me hears this as a bit of separate but equal, or as still “we” insiders who celebrate Pesach together on time and you others who will include with us.

So many of our people who are lesbian or gay or bisexual, transgender or intersex or nonbinary or queer, or any truer description that I still strain to know and understand -- so many have asked nothing more or less than to be b’toch b’nai Yisrael, to be part of the community of Israel full stop. Not to have to frame the matter in terms of lama ni’gara, why are we not included, how can we be included. To have to ask that way means we still are incomplete.

And the Torah recognizes this, because at the end of the teaching of Pesach Sheni the Torah says: chukkah achat yih’yeh lachem. One law there will be for all of you. As if to say -- Whatever you have just read, it is not one Torah for all of us yet. There is work yet to do. Keep working on it, now and in future generations.

This Pesach Sheni is a step forward, a step of inclusion, and it is not the final answer. Somehow, our Sanctuary needs to be spacious enough for all our people, for people who experience in all different ways love and intimacy and longing and connection. Who in all different ways understand ourselves as the image of God in our bodies and genders and sexualities and gender identities.  Where no one of those is the norm that others have to be compared to and have to ask to be included around, or justified in terms of.

That part of the Torah reading spoke about people coming close, toward the Sanctuary where the altar and the Ark were. A bit later in the parasha, we read how the Ark with the tablets of the covenant would go out into battle with the people, and then come to rest when battle would pause or end. 

The Talmud teaches that the biblical ark had both the broken tablets that Moshe had shattered after the Golden Calf, and the new set of whole tablets Moshe had carved on the mountain. Rabbi Yehudah ben Lakish taught that the whole tablets would stay back in the Holy of Holies, while the broken tablets would go out into battle.

It is so important for Torah to go out with us, as we battle to defend the lives of transgender youth, and all LGBTQ+ young people. As we battle for the rights and reputations of caring adults in schools who listen to them and try to be their mentors and advocates. As we battle against those trying to pit parents against teachers. It is so important for us to carry our religion into this battle, because others battle with theirs and claim to speak for God. So we have to speak in the name of our covenant as well.

It is so important as we do so to recognize that we are marching with broken tablets. That our own Judaism is not yet whole, we have not finished doing teshuvah for the ways we have not seen, for the times we have not stood by queer people of all ages and their family members. We have to carry honestly the broken hearts of our own community, the mourning over opportunities to do better and care better that we missed over the decades. When we work on matters of justice and safety and wellbeing for LGBTQ+ people in our lives, when we battle, we have to hold close the broken times, and our own brokenheartedness about times in the past we’ve each fallen short and our community and Judaism have fallen short.

It is so important to think about the ways the traditions of our past need to be creatively broken and rebuilt. The Talmud in one place praises Moshe for breaking the tablets. Because anything we have written down no matter how inspired is incomplete and could be used to shut down our vision, to say that this much progress is all we need. We need to challenge ourselves to see more like the Divine sees, to see every expression of human love and connection as an image of Divine ahavah v’chesed (love).

The broken tablets go out into battle, because it’s by fighting out of Divine love that we learn how to repair them. It’s by going out and learning from other communities that are full of love, religious and secular communities, that we find the light that helps us see better what is hidden in the crevices of the covenant we already have. It’s by going out with our tablets that we bring them and bring ourselves, who have in the past wondered if our covenant was at war with them. To them, we bring what is broken and ask to work together to refashion them and refashion ourselves together.

Our movement of Conservative Judaism has been confronting our brokenness over sexual orientation and gender identity for the past three decades. Every since possibly the lowest point our movement has ever touched in 1992, when I was a rabbinical student and watched the shameful deliberations on stage in the Seminary auditorium -- which slammed the door on lesbian and gay Jews seeking to live openly in our communities. To fifteen years ago last winter, when our Committee on Jewish Law and Standards made it possible for gay and lesbian Jews to become our rabbis, to have intimacy,to marry.

Even then, we only as a movement could talk about the G and the L. We have been trying to catch up since then, including in our shul and including myself. It’s not only ritual and rabbinical status, but relationships and love and intentionality in every realm. From changing the nomenclature on our membership forms to listening to young people we educate to changing our assumptions about people we meet of any age. I am still learning the language, carrying broken tablets, figuring out which ones to break still and refashion. I am proud, and more than that I am grateful, that we have lay leaders who have taken the intiative to make sure we have a Pride Shabbat as a matter of course, and that this year for the first time we will march and have a table at our city’s Pride Festival next weekend. What a way to carry the ark of our covenant where it needs to be seen, where its power is so needed.

I try to look at my own kids with wonder and openness, and to wait for them each to tell me I’m queer or straight, rather than make assumptions. And indeed I try to look at each of you that way too, not to assume what I don’t know.

Each of us carries Divine love, for us, and through us for others. Each of us, young and old, has our own way, spiritual and embodied all at once, to love and connect, to yearn and commit. We are all in the center. We are all part of the same covenant at the same time. We are all blessed.

Tov! Chapter 7 -- Lying!

On “The Good Place” Chapter 7 is the classic lying episode, and on the podcast Rebecca Rosenthal and I jump off from the Talmud’s analysis of white lies to talk about truth and relationships, how and when we tell people important truths, and how truth emerges between people not just by telling.

(Also the Klingon death ritual....)

Listen and delve into the show notes here!

Tov! Podcast Chapter 6 -- Promises

The new episode is published!!! Listen and read the show notes here!

Rabbi Dan Ross and I co-host once again. On “The Good Place”, Eleanor tries both to keep and not keep her promises to Michael — and on the podcast, Dan and I trade stories of dog-watching gone wrong and explore why promising is such a big, Yom-Kippur-level matter in Judaism. (That's Dan below!)

Tov! Podcast Chapter 5 Is Published!

That's Rabbi Sari Laufer, my partner for Chapter 5 of Tov!

"To Measure or Not to Measure" -- on “The Good Place” Eleanor is excited when she is polite for the first time without thinking, Tahani’s philanthropy doesn't score enough points with her parents or the algorithm, and Chidi doesn’t find pleasure in doing the most good. So on the podcast Jon has his first stomach ache and Sari Laufer (new rabbi on the team) helps us think more about where measuring goodness does and doesn’t make sense. Oh, and where intellectual vs. sensual pleasure fits in!

Check it out here or wherever you get podcasts!

Tov! Podcast Chapter 3 Is Up!

On “The Good Place” Michael tries to guide Chidi and Janet toward new things, but it’s Eleanor who finds unexpected inspiration because of Tahani. So on the podcast, Jon Spira-Savett and Audrey Marcus Berkman explore reincarnation Jewish-style and who the teacher you need turns out to be.