From the Bimah: Jewish Lessons for Life

I recently attended a wedding where the bride and groom shared beautiful vows under the chuppah.  Both of their words were poignant, but the bride’s words landed especially powerfully for me. The bride offered that in general she is nervous. She is anxious. She is a worrier.  She is nervous about money. Nervous about her career.  Nervous about where they are going to live, what they are going to do.  Nervous about health.  But, she said, the one thing she has never been nervous about is marrying her beloved.  She always knew that marrying him was just right, a rare oasis in an otherwise anxious world.

Should we be judged on the basis of our finest moments, our worst moments, or our final moments? Do our worst moments vitiate our finest? Or should we properly consider our worst moments part of a complex package of our flawed humanity—but without the power to diminish the good we have also done? Case in point: King Solomon, who starts out so bright, and ends up thoroughly corrupted.

Serendipity. When was the last time that you personally experienced serendipity? Serendipity is defined as something good happening to you accidentally.  The classic case is finding a twenty-dollar bill in the pocket of a coat you haven’t worn in a while. When you find that twenty-dollar bill, you weren’t looking for it, you just find it, it sparks joy, maybe even the feeling that there is some benign force that has our back. But is serendipity limited to something good happening to us accidentally? Is there any way to exercise some agency over serendipity? Is there any way for us to make serendipity happen?

Let’s draft off the energy of Yom Kippur. We are back in person on Shabbat morning. Please join us for coffee, conversation, and community as we discuss a Norman Rockwell Sukkot. One of Norman Rockwell’s classic paintings—it commands its own room in the Norman Rockwell Museum in the Berkshires—is a family Thanksgiving feast entitled Freedom From Want. Follow this link. A family gathered happily together. A turkey ready to be gobbled up. Fine china. Fine stemware. Big smiles. Warmth. Home. Safety. Security. Plenty. There is only one problem. The year of the painting is 1943. America is in the middle of World War II. After Pearl Harbor. Before Omaha Beach. By the way, the Holocaust is happening. How are we to think about this family’s feast in the middle of World War II and the Holocaust? Is their celebration of plenty the right move morally, or the wrong move? What impact should the war and the Shoah have had on their feast? Should they have feasted as if World War II and the Shoah were not occurring (which seems to be the case)? Look at the easy smiles on their faces. Should they have canceled their feast due to the sorrows of the world? Should they have had their feast, but done some readings to acknowledge the war and the Holocaust that were both happening that very day? This theme—how do you do daily life when the world is in tumult—is a recurrent theme for Norman Rockwell. A companion painting, also a classic, entitled Freedom From Fear, shows parents putting children to bed, domestic tranquility, parents grounding their children in the serenity of home and hearth, while the father holds a newspaper that has headlines about the war. Follow this link. Roll the film forward to 2022. Roll the film forward to Sukkot which begins Sunday night. If we sit in our Sukkah smiling and enjoying our festival meal, eating our fine food, drinking our fine wine, making pleasant conversation, is that a problem given the problems of the world? As just one small example, the New York Times Daily catalogues the infinite misery engulfing Pakistan as a result of biblical-like floods that are causing death, devastation, and hunger on a massive scale. How do we think about enjoying our holiday when there is so much pain in the world? What do Jewish sources teach us about navigating this tension between the world in grief and our world as sanctuary from the world in grief?

This summer I studied with my 94-year-old father-in-love a classic text that I had encountered before, but seeing it at the age of 61, I saw something I had never seen before, which now seems obvious. We were studying Robert Frost’s poem about being at the crossroads which famously concludes: I shall be telling this with a sigh Somewhere ages and ages hence: Two roads diverged in a wood, and I— I took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference. What I picked up this summer is the narrator’s lingering uncertainty, wistfulness, regret, about whether the decision at the crossroads was the right decision. The title jumped out at me this summer: The Road Not Taken.  The sigh jumped out at me: I shall be telling this with a sigh. Maybe I messed up. Maybe I should have taken the road not taken.

Erin Alexander sat crying in her car in the Target parking lot. Her beloved sister-in-love had just passed away suddenly, and she was overwhelmed with grief. When the worst of it had passed, she wiped away her tears and decided to stop by Starbucks to get some green tea before attempting to complete her errand. As soon as she opened the Starbucks door, she could tell the barista was not having a good day. She kept explaining to customers that the espresso machine was broken and was trying her best to accommodate their caffeine requirements with workarounds, but was clearly stressed and struggling to keep up. When it was her turn in line, Erin smiled as brightly as she could and told the barista to “hang in there.” A few minutes later, when she picked up her iced green tea, she was surprised to see a message scrawled on the side of the cup. “Erin,” it read, “your soul is golden.” That barista didn’t know her sister-in-love had died, she didn’t know how rough it had been to get through every day or the strength it was taking just to face an errand to Target, but that message meant everything to Erin. As she shared recently with the New York Times, “that little thing made the rest of my day.”

In October 1973, singer and songwriter Leonard Cohen was hating his life. He struggled with depression.  He struggled with drugs like acid and LSD. He had had a child with a woman to whom he was not married, and he struggled with monogamy.  His creativity was stymied. He couldn’t write. He couldn’t find joy in performing.  At 39 he felt he was past his prime, that he should retire. In his own words, that he should “shut up.” As Leonard Cohen was in the throes of his mid-life crisis, Israel was attacked on Yom Kippur, October 6, 1973. Israel was unprepared for this war. The initial weeks were brutal. Israel’s air force, so dominant six years earlier, was dramatically undermined by new Russian anti-aircraft missiles. Israeli ground troops suffered horrendous casualties. These two stories—Leonard Cohen’s personal crisis, and Israel’s national crisis—came together because somehow, in the midst of the war, Leonard Cohen decided to go to Israel. The day he arrived, he went to a Tel Aviv café to ponder his next steps. Just then, a group of Israeli singers walked by. One of the singers, named Ilana Rovina, recognized him. Are you Leonard Cohen? I am. What are you doing in Israel? I don’t know, I’m not sure, but I think I will go to a kibbutz. Why don’t you join us? We are going to the Sinai to sing to the fighters. We’d love you to join us.  I don’t have a guitar.

September 24, 2022

This summer Shira and I tried a new move. We started riding e-bikes. An e-bike is like a regular bike, with a seat, handlebars, two wheels, shifting gears. You pedal, and the bike moves. There is only one difference. The e in e-bike is for electricity. There are three settings, and you can give your bike a jolt of a little electricity, a moderate amount, or a whole lot of electricity when the going gets tough. All summer, I felt vaguely like this was not kosher. This was not authentic. A real cyclist would eschew an e-bike. I particularly felt this pang of inauthenticity while going uphill because the steeper the hill, the more electricity I summoned, with the result that it kind of felt like I was Lance Armstrong, climbing the steepest hills with ease, while all the while I knew it was the electricity, it was not me. It felt off, but I couldn’t place why it felt off—until this week. This week I was listening to the Andy Stanley Leadership Podcast. Andy Stanley, as I have shared before, is in my view the greatest religious thinker and speaker in America today, and he speaks not only about sacred texts, but also about leadership. In the most recent episode he was interviewing a leadership guru named John Maxwell. John Maxwell has sold 30 million books on leadership. Maxwell is 75 years old. He has been teaching leadership for decades. He said something simple that really stuck with me. He often asks people: what is the greatest life lesson you have ever learned?

For my money, the best, simplest, shortest expression of the complexity of Israel remains the opening chapter of Ari Shavit’s classic My Promised Land.  Shavit’s grandfather was among the first Zionists who settled Eretz Yisrael. Shavit himself served in the Israeli army as a paratrooper. The book opens: “For as long as I can remember, I remember fear. Existential fear.” Two pages later: “For as long as I can remember, I remember occupation. Only a week after I asked my father whether the Arab nations were going to conquer Israel, Israel conquered the Arab-populated regions of the West Bank and Gaza.” How do we, and our children and grandchildren, respond to this complexity? One response is, it’s exhausting. We have enough problems here in America. Disconnection. Another response is indictment. Using words like Apartheid. Hostility. That is where a lot of American Jews (especially young American Jews) are, somewhere between disconnected and hostile. Tomorrow we are going to consider a model of wisdom from an unlikely source: Stephen Sondheim mentoring a young singer in singing Send in the Clowns . Could this model a different move to keep American Jews in loving dialogue with Israel?  This clip of Sondheim working with a young singer embodies a classic source, Maimonides’ teaching on repentance, which is about a directional energy of moving towards in love rather than away from in anger. Maimonides offers: “Repentance brings near those who are far away.” What does this text about directional energy have to say about bringing our disconnected or hostile generations closer to Israel?

September 10, 2022

We bring two great thinkers to one of the Jewish people’s biggest challenges and opportunities: reclaiming Zionism. Danny Gordis’ excellent and thoughtful piece shows how, shockingly, Zionism has become a dirty word among certain segments of the American Jewish community. There are American synagogues today who are ideologically opposed to Zionism. There are rabbinical students today who are neutral or negative on Zionism. How is it possible that Zionism, which gave birth to the Jewish state, is a source of negative energy among some American Jews? Please read or reread Danny’s piece. What is his diagnosis, what is his prescription, and do you agree with him? Our second thinker is Yehuda Kurtzer. We will examine the sources and how he framed them in his lecture called The Zionist Idea delivered at the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem this past summer. While Yehuda does not mention Danny Gordis or the issue of anti-Zionism, his lecture and his sources are an incredibly persuasive response to both. Yehuda talks about the idea of an idea that is a North Star, that is a compass for a system. Such an idea has to be (a) short, sweet and to the point (in Yehuda’s words, “essentialized”); and (b) it has to be so powerful that it galvanizes action. We will examine Yehuda’s treatment of the Rabbinic Idea and the American Idea as a prelude to his treatment of the Zionist Idea. What is Yehuda’s wisdom here, and does it allow us to reclaim Zionism in Israel’s 75th year for people who love Israel and are troubled by significant questions and doubts? In this special year of Israel’s 75th, let’s recommit to a conversation about Israel, and Zionism which made Israel possible, that welcomes diverse points of view and that deepens all of our love for the miracle that is our Jewish homeland reborn after 2,000 years.

What is true for our Torah portion this morning is also true for every human being who has ever lived, including all of us here today. Also true for our country. What we all have in common is complexity: our Torah, our nation, each of us, contains multitudes. Charlie spoke with a wisdom beyond his years about the complexity in our parsha. The same parsha which begins with “Justice, justice shall you pursue” also commands genocide in God’s name. Also commands, in God’s name, “You may take as your booty the women, the children, the livestock, and everything in the town—all its spoil—and enjoy the use of the spoil of your enemy, which the Lord your God gives you.” We wrestle with Charlie’s question, how can the same portion that is emphatically concerned about justice in Deuteronomy 16 also command what we now know to be war crimes in Deuteronomy 20? The Torah contains multitudes. But isn’t that true for us all?  We can be generous and ungenerous, forgiving and unforgiving, gentle and cruel. We can be present and not present,  responsive and not responsive, caring and not caring,  depending on the day, depending on the context. All of us contain multitudes. Isn’t that also true of our beloved country?

In 1961, Sandy Greenberg was wallowing in despair. Up until that moment, his life had been full of promise. He was brilliant, musical, and athletic. In high school, he was elected president of the student council and of his senior class, upon graduation, he won a full scholarship to Columbia University in New York and was pursuing his dreams of becoming a lawyer. He had close friends and was dating the love of his life, whom he had met in the 6th grade. But in 1961, Sandy felt like all the promise of his life had abandoned him. For years, ophthalmologists had failed to diagnose his vision challenges correctly, resulting in a botched treatment that hastened the deterioration of his remaining vision and forced doctors to perform a surgery which ironically saved his eyeballs while destroying what remained of his sight. Sandy was deeply depressed. He left college, moved back home to Buffalo, gave up on his dreams of becoming a lawyer, and had resigned himself to being a burden on his family for the rest of his life. But suddenly, out of the blue, his best friend and college roommate, Art, showed up at his door.

Serena Williams.  Everyone, even the most sports illiterate, knows Serena Williams.  Ever since she hit the professional stage in 1996, she has dazzled the world with her strength, skill, determination, and success.  She won her first Grand Slam at 17, spent 319 weeks—more than 6 years—ranked as the No. 1 player in the world by the Women’s Tennis Association, has held all four Grand Slam titles at the same time twice, and has won more matches than all but 4 women in the history of tennis—and achieved that even though she would often turn down matches for which she qualified so she could focus on Grand Slams. For me and so many other women, Serena has been not only a great tennis player, but also a very personal she-ro.  As a young woman, I remember watching her, thinking about how amazing it was that she wasn’t afraid to be strong.  She wore clothes that highlighted her muscles, that made her look like a superhero, and avoided outfits designed to be sexy.  She was aggressive on the court and didn’t try to modulate her behavior to fit within a cultural norm of demure femininity.  On and off the court, she was always laser-focused and clear, and as a teenager, I was most struck by the fact that people liked her not because she was trying to be someone else, but because she was comfortable in her own skin and people are drawn to those who have confidence. Last week, Serena published an article in Vogue Magazine announcing that after decades of dominating the tennis world, she has decided to evolve and will soon stop playing tennis professionally.  The article, titled “Serena Williams Says Farewell to Tennis On Her Own Terms—And In Her Own Words” made me think this was one more classic Serena Slam—a powerhouse woman who was moving on to another powerful vista and chapter of life with confidence and joy.  I was surprised to learn just how much pain and vulnerability is wrapped up in this choice.