From the Bimah: Jewish Lessons for Life

How do we understand the double absence of God since October 7? The first absence is obvious: where was God when Hamas butchered, maimed, kidnapped, and performed unspeakable atrocities upon the innocent? Not there. The second absence is less obvious but still noteworthy: in the countless articles, podcasts, and conversations, we hear very little about God. Yes, we recite psalms every day. Psalms are poetry about God. Yes, we recite a prayer for the IDF and for the hostages every day, and we pray that God will protect the IDF and rescue the hostages. But for all of our daily prayers, how relevant is God to this moment? Winning the war is relevant. Destroying Hamas is relevant. The courage of IDF soldiers is relevant. Maintaining America’s support for Israel’s war effort is relevant. Maintaining awareness of the hostages (see the unbearably painful exhibit outside the State House of 240 empty chairs at a holiday table) is relevant, the posters are relevant, and the blue ribbons are relevant. Rallies like last week’s in Washington are relevant. Raising millions upon millions of dollars for Israel continues to be hugely relevant. But God? Is God relevant? Our text will be Jacob’s vows in this week’s portion: If God is with him in certain ways, he is with God. The implication is clear. If God is not with him, he is not with God. Is that us, now?

The State of Israel has a religious establishment that is totally out of touch with most Israelis and a school system which does not teach Judaism. What can be done about this dual problem?

This is a Talmud class like no other for a moment like no other. One short story encapsulates the moment. There are tragically so many moments like it. On Sunday, Shira was speaking with her brother Ari and sister-in-law Tziporit who live in Jerusalem. They had just returned from the funeral of a close friend who was a member of their shul in Jerusalem. This man was 44. He had aged out of being required to do miluim. He could have taken a pass. He could have opted out. He is married and has five children. But he, and 360,000 others, believe that Israel’s very existence is at stake. This is Israel’s Second War of Independence. So, he volunteered to fight even though he did not have to fight. His life is about something larger than his life. He died in battle, leaving a widow, five fatherless children, and a grieving nation. My siblings had no words for their heartbreak. Funerals, shivas, sleepless nights (their children are in harm’s way) are how they are spending this war. How are Israelis living through this? They can never press pause. Rabbi David Golinkin, who lives in Jerusalem, shares his reflections. The rest of his teaching on Shabbat, as the Scholar in Residence for the Rabbi Samuel Chiel Kallah, is replete with sources, texts, precedents. Talmud class is from his heart.

This morning I want to tackle a question that is granular, sensitive, painful, common—and coming soon to a Thanksgiving table near you.  What do we do when different generations in our family disagree, passionately, about Israel?  This is not a new question.  It is an old question.  What is new is the urgency of the question in light of the massacre of October 7, and Israel’s ongoing response in the weeks since.  If this war continues to be protracted, if both Gaza civilians and Israeli soldiers continue to die,  the latent differences among the generations will only get exacerbated. Several families have come to see me asking how they should respond to views of their children that are very different from their own.  My son told me that he attended a rally to pressure Israel into a ceasefire.  My daughter told me that she has been calling our Senators to force Israel into a ceasefire.  I can’t even believe it.  What do I say?  What do I do?  What happens when these different views are expressed around the Thanksgiving table?  

About the daily stories of rising anti-Semitism, two questions. First question: How does this current chapter compare to previous chapters? The Haggadah contains the famous passage vehei she’amdah: This promise has stood us and our parents in good stead. For not only has one enemy stood over us to annihilate us. But in every generation enemies have stood over us to annihilate us. Yet the Holy One keeps the promise to save us from their hands. Take a look at the one-page rendering of Jewish history in the Haggadah entitled A Night to Remember. It is a timeline of Jew hatred. In what ways is the current chapter like previous chapters? In what ways is the current chapter unique? How would you compare this present moment to our long history of anti-Semitism? Second question: What should we do about it? What is the response of Elie Wiesel in Souls on Fire? What is the response of Dara Horn in People Love Dead Jews? How do Elie Wiesel’s and Dara Horn’s responses compare? What works for you as a response?

November 4, 2023

All of us worry about the courageous soldiers of the IDF going into the alleys and tunnels of Gaza. It fills us all with deep dread. The ground invasion, and what it will mean to Israeli soldiers, has resurfaced a very important text in Israeli history, Moshe Dayan's brief remarks at the funeral of an officer named Roy Rotenberg who was murdered in 1956 patrolling the Israeli-Gaza border in the same area where more Israelis were murdered on October 7. Dayan's brief speech is called Israel's Gettysburg Address. In few words, he nails the reality of what it will take to keep a Jewish state alive. The words seem exhausting, depressing and all too true. They were true in 1956. They remain true today. Shavit tells the story of why the conflict which eventuated in death along the Gaza border in 1956 and again in 2023 will never be resolved, which will make Dayan's words the eternal cost of an eternal Jewish state.

October 28, 2023 Jonathan is the CEO of the JCC in Krakow Podland

Elie Wiesel talked about madness descending on Europe in the 1930s. Cultured, urbane, sophisticated Germans who loved opera and philosophy, and who were nice to their dogs and cats, warmed to the Nazis. A similar madness is descending on American college campuses and universities today. It is madness because throngs of students feel that Israel is an apartheid regime; that it is morally always in the wrong; that Hamas was justified in doing what it did; and therefore, these undergrads and graduate students will criticize Israel only and will not criticize Hamas at all. J.J. Kimche, a graduate student in Jewish history at Harvard, recently published a piece in the Wall Street Journal entitled “Harvard Shrugs at Jew-Hatred.” This is his concluding paragraph: As a grandson of an Auschwitz survivor and a student of German-Jewish history, I was always incredulous that highly cultured Germans, the people of Goethe and Beethoven, could have displayed sympathy and even enthusiasm for the Nazi slaughter of the Jews. Now I believe it. I have seen it happen here [at Harvard]. All of this creates a darkness and heaviness in our heart and in our soul. Question: Do psalms help? Twice a day, every morning and every evening, we offer Psalm 121 and Psalm 130. The act of saying psalms, together with other Jewish communities in Israel and throughout the world, feels like an important statement of solidarity. But do the words of the psalms, if we actually think about what they mean, address the pain in our hearts? Do they give us a helpful insight in how to think, how to feel, how to act, in this fraught moment?

            I would like to start with something lovely, the most beautiful words in the world:  I love you forever. Think of the people and places that have inspired these magical words.             I have a question.  How long is forever?  How long do we get to keep who and what we love forever?              This past Monday, our beloved friend and teacher in Jerusalem, Micah Goodman, was speaking to 100 Conservative Rabbis about what is going on in Israel, and he said something about forever love that is so quintessentially Micah.  I had never heard it before.  But once he said it, it was obviously true.             Micah observed that there is a paradox about what we love forever.  Namely, if we assume that what we love forever, we will have forever, then we will not have it forever; we are at serious risk of losing it.  But if we worry that what we love forever we may lose, it may not last forever, and if we work hard on preserving it, there is a higher chance that we can hold onto it.  If we assume it, we lose it.  If we don’t assume it, if we worry that we could lose it, we have a higher chance of keeping it.             The most obvious example is marriage.  When a couple gets married,  they pledge to love one another forever.  What all of us who have been married for any length of time know is that this pledge is not self-executing; it cannot be sustained by the power and beauty of the chuppah; it must be sustained by both spouses investing in their marriage every day.  It must be sustained by both spouses making their marriage their highest priority.  Taking a marriage for granted, taking anything for granted, puts what we love in grave jeopardy.             Micah’s lens for understanding Israel today is the paradox of forever love. 

The weekly Torah portion always speaks to our world, but never more so than now. The word hamas is in the third verse of the portion. The presence of hamas spells the ruination, death, destruction of the entire world. "The earth became corrupt before God; the earth was filled with lawlessness (hamas)." Genesis 6:11 In his JPS Commentary on Genesis, Nahum Sarna observes “hamas here refers predominantly to the arrogant disregard for the sanctity and inviolability of human life.” A violent society will meet a violent end. The world filled with hamas must come to an end. Innocent people will die. That is our portion. Tragically, that is our world. The story is well known, but it is the less well-known coda to the story that also speaks so loudly to our times. Noah and his family survived. They were alive and well. Plus, God promised repeatedly that God would never again destroy the world. The first never again is spoken by God. You might think that Noah was in for better days. The flood is behind him. The death and destruction are behind him. His family is intact. He can now rebuild the world in blessing. Happy days are here again. But the coda tells us precisely the opposite is the case. He gets drunk. He commits some kind of embarrassing sexual immorality, the details of which are deliberately vague. He repeatedly curses his grandson. He sews discord and hatred among his sons and grandchildren. He dies rageful and broken. Oh, and this sad coda chapter lasted hundreds of years, a third of his life. What does Noah’s sad end—after he and his family had survived the flood and the destruction of the world—say about him and, more importantly, about Israel and about us now?

How many of you have seen the play or the movie Golda’s Balcony?  If you have, you know about that powerful moment, early in her career for Israel, she is Golda Meyerson at the time, it is January, 1948, it is three years after the Shoah, it is five months before Israel’s independence would be declared and the war for independence would start, and Golda is with American Jews, at the General Assembly of Jewish Federations, held in Chicago on January 21.  Her mission was to inspire American Jews to support the incipient Jewish state and the Jewish army in the war for its very existence.  She was supposed to raise $25 million.  She ended up raising $50 million.  Make no mistake.  This is our Golda moment.  Golda’s secret sauce contained three ingredients.  They apply to us with equal force. First, American Jews in 1948 learned of horrors and atrocities, murder and death, that befell innocent Jews of Europe.  Slaughter.  It made American Jews angry, sick to their stomach, nauseous, worried, grief-stricken, and determined to fight back. Check.  American Jews in 2023 woke up last Shabbat morning, and every day and every sleepless night, through our insomnia, through the pits in our stomachs, we read stories that claim us, stories of horrors and atrocities, murder and death, that befell innocent Jews in the towns and villages near Gaza.  By the way, none of these areas were settlements.  None of these areas could in any remote way be called occupied lands.  None of these areas carry moral complexity.  These were indisputably and properly Jewish communities whose Jews, celebrating Simchat Torah, celebrating a peaceful music festival were slaughtered precisely because they are Jews living in Israel. There was a second secret sauce to Golda’s success:  American Jews in 1948 knew that if Jews were to make good on their promise of Never Again, we would have to create, sustain, and defend the State of Israel. Europe was a killing field for Jews. Part of the infinite tragedy of the Simchat Torah massacre was that Israel also became a killing field for Jews; and that peaceful Kibbutzim and villages were soaked through with Jewish blood.  The Kishinev pogrom came to Israel.  It was not supposed to be that way. Hatred of the Jewish people continues in these shores.  Elias and Lorena are in New York, with Mikey at Columbia for a freshmen parents’ weekend.  But in our Talmud conversation yesterday, Elias shared that on Thursday night Mikey called him and Lorena and was very rattled.  New York, and Columbia, have a significant Jewish population. You would think in the week that Hamas had committed these atrocities, Columbia would be a safe space where Jewish students could protest.  Two hundred Jewish students showed up.  But there was a counter protest of 700 Palestinian students and sympathizers.  Campus police were so concerned about the safety of Jewish students at Columbia that they were whisked away to the Kraft Hillel Building, where the 200 students could continue their protest, in private, behind locked doors. What? How could it be? How could it be that 700 people at Columbia University, or the Harvard students that signed that odious statement, would walk with Hamas?  The American Jews to whom Golda spoke knew what we now must also know: that evil is real, hatred is real, and if never again was to be real, it would take a partnership between Israeli Jews and American Jews.  Israeli Jews, then and now, are on the front lines.  What do we do to help? Which leads to the third ingredient of Golda’s secret sauce: we are not helpless and we are not hopeless.  We have agency and we have power.  That’s what those American Jews on January 21, 1948 understood when Golda raised 50 million dollars. David Ben Gurion, Israel’s first Prime Minister, called Golda Meir the “Jewish woman who got the money which made the state possible.” Golda’s generation in America helped create the state.  Our generation in America now can help sustain the state. 

At the rally for Israel on Monday at the Boston Commons, there were two clarifying moments. When Senator Markey called for de-escalation, he was loudly and roundly booed. When Congressman Auchincloss observed that Israel did not ask America to de-escalate on 9/12, he was loudly and roundly cheered. What is that about?  Last Shabbat was the worst day for the Jewish people since the Holocaust. This week is the worst week for the Jewish people since the Holocaust. The prayer we say about Nazis on Yom HaShoah applies with equal force to Hamas. It is as if it were written for Hamas. The obscene and ongoing barbarism, savagery, cruelty, inhumanity of Hamas raises a question: what do we do with the hatred that can take root in our own soul as a result of Hamas’s evil?  Consider the Haftarah for Shabbat Zachor, wherein God commands genocide:             Thus said the Lord of Hosts: I am exacting the penalty            for what Amalek did to Israel, for the assault he made upon them            on the road, on their way up from Egypt. Now go, attack Amalek,            and proscribe all that belongs to him. Spare no one, but kill alike men            and women, infants and sucklings, oxen and sheep, camels and            asses! I Samuel 15:2-3.   What did you think of this Haftarah before this week? What do you think of this Haftarah now?  I get hatred. I get the desire to exact revenge. But what does that do to our soul? In response to the Harvard students who “hold the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all unfolding violence,” Rabbi David Wolpe, as is his wont, cut to the core issue poignantly and concisely: “If mutilation, rape and caged children cause in you a swelling of nationalistic pride, an impulse to parade and celebrate, then your soul has rotted to its roots.” Israel has an unquestionable right and responsibility to protect Israeli citizens and rescue hostages. How do we destroy our enemy, while not becoming like our enemy? How do we destroy our enemy, while preserving our soul?

The last chapter of any book is critical to understanding the meaning of the book. The last chapter of the Torah, Deuteronomy 34, which we encounter this weekend on Simchat Torah, is in several ways a surprising last chapter, given the book as a whole. The Torah is supposed to be about life. Choose life. But Deuteronomy 34 is about death. Why end with death when the book is supposed to be about life? Why does Moses have to die on the wrong side of the River Jordan? Why does God command Moses to climb to the top of Mount Nebo to see the river he can never cross and the land he can never enter? How is this fair and just? We only read this sad chapter--Moses’s death on the wrong side of the River Jordan, his life work unfulfilled--on Simchat Torah, which celebrates the joy of Torah. How does Moses’s death fit with the larger agenda of the joy of Torah? What do we learn about how to die, and more importantly how to live, from the last chapter of the Torah?

October 1, 2023