Darkness and Light

Sermon Shabbat Bo 5784

Rabbi Samuel M. Cohon, Congregation Beit Simcha, Tucson, AZ

I was speaking with our upcoming visiting scholar, Dr. Joel Hoffman, this week, who will be right here speaking about “Ancient Answers to Good and Evil” two weeks from Monday night, in a talk we are co-sponsoring with Church of the Apostles.  He lives back East, and he said, “it’s 17 degrees here; I’m looking forward to being in Arizona!”  Of course he is.

Look, here in Tucson we live in a world of sunlight most of the time.  We enjoy well over 300 days a year of sunshine, and soon come to take it for granted.  Especially this time of year, when much of our country is cold and frozen, we are typically blessed with beautiful weather and sunny days, like today.  The fact that at Beit Simcha for three years we were located next door to a tanning salon is one of the truly astonishing things you could ever imagine.  Who needs a tanning salon in the Sonoran Desert?  Apparently even in a place filled with sunlight there are those who crave even more illumination.

Light is considered a blessing in Jewish tradition.  It is, after all, God’s very first creation in Genesis, Y’hi Or, “let there be light”; we light candles each Shabbat and every festival to symbolize the special blessing of light that we are granted on these holy days; Hanukkah, of course, brings an abundance of light into a period of darkness.  In Zohar, the amazing Kabbalistic text we study every Tuesday at noon and again at 7pm, light is understood to be the way in which divine energy emanates into our own universe; the very name “Zohar” means a kind of illumination, divine light.  And the great movement of the 19th century that brought the great light of reason to bear on our entire tradition is called the Haskalah, the Jewish enlightenment; my grandfather was a part of that, as were the leading lights of early Zionism and all other modern Jewish movements.

So the denial of light would be, in nearly all circumstances, a challenge of the first order.  Which makes the ninth plague, the penultimate punishment of the Egyptian slaveholders, such a dramatic moment in a narrative replete with them.  The description of this event, the advent of deepest darkness, is eloquent in our Torah portion of Bo in Exodus:    

Then the Lord said to Moses, “Hold out your arm toward the heavens that there may be darkness upon the land of Egypt, a darkness that can be felt.” And so Moses held out his arm toward the sky and thick darkness descended upon all the land of Egypt for three days. People could not see one another, and for three days no one could get up from where he was. (Exod. 10:21-23)

There is something uniquely powerful in this particular plague that differs qualitatively from the plagues that preceded it.  It’s not as though the earlier punishments were trivial.  Indeed, they were vivid and awful, each in its own way.  But this plague of darkness somehow has a different quality to it.

There is a Midrash on this, in Shmot Rabbah (14:2) that calls the plague of darkness “The darkness of Gei-Chinom, Hell, connecting the darkness visited upon Egypt with the primordial darkness that preceded God’s command “Let there be light!”  Remember, the Torah tells us this is a darkness that is so deep it can, literally, be felt.

Have you ever explored a deep cave, like the wonderful ones at Kartchner Caverns near Tombstone?  Sometimes when you tour a cave they do a little demonstration for you, as a visitor, and shut off the artificial lights, so that you can see what it feels like when the lights go completely out, when it’s truly black.  You can hold your hand in front of your face and not see it.  When you have that experience, of utter darkness completely devoid of all sources of light, you begin to understand what it might mean to “feel the darkness.”  A period of a minute in an utterly dark cave is enough to cause some serious anxiety, I can promise you.  A period of three days would be utterly terrifying. 

We know that the long-term effects of being deprived of light, especially sunlight, are very negative.  Most people consider Scandinavia to be a place where people generally are very content; those countries are quite well off, their educational systems and health care are excellent, their governments well thought-of, they have many advantages that most nations don’t enjoy, including elegant furniture designs and incredibly safe cars.  Lots of people in many parts of the world would love to live in Scandinavia.

Only not so much in the winter, when wonderful countries like Sweden, Norway, Denmark, and Finland have spectacularly high suicide rates, among the very highest in the entire world.  It’s not the cold that causes this; it’s the long days in the far northern winters with minimal light.  It’s the darkness.

Darkness is closely associated with depression in psychological literature, and the causality is well established.  Even when there are no other stressors, research shows that darkness causes depression, and can even damage the brain, limiting its ability to accept positive neurotransmitters. That is, prolonged darkness provokes a kind of anti-endorphin response, and we sink down into a dark tunnel.  The response it provokes is also one of alienation. We see, or rather feel the darkness, and simultaneous believe we are alone in this.  We perceive that we are alone in the dark, as it were.

Our Torah commentators focus on this when considering the plague of darkness.  You see it wasn’t just the darkness that was the problem; it was that those afflicted with it were unable to see anyone else.  They became locked in the prison of themselves. 

The darkness is not just an inability to see things.  It is in particular an inability to see people, other people, to recognize them as similar human beings who have similar needs. 

As one commentator says, “Just as the special light of Shabbat is an appetizer, a foretaste of the world to come, the reward that awaits the righteous, so the darkness of the ninth plague is a foretaste of Geihinnom, the punishment that awaits those who cannot truly see their neighbors, who cannot feel the pain and recognize the dignity of their afflicted neighbors…  The person who cannot see his neighbor is incapable of spiritual growth, of rising from where he is currently.” 

There is a famous passage in the Babylonian Talmud (Berachot 9b) that explores how we know when dawn has come and darkness has ended.  Although I first studied that tractate during high school with my father, Rabbi Baruch Cohon, it was brought to my mind by an Episcopal Rector named Clay Turner when I served a congregation in South Carolina.  The rabbis are discussing when it is we know that dawn has come and the darkness of night is over.  They debate, and argue about whether night is over and the morning has come when you can tell a white thread from a black one; or perhaps it’s only when you can tell a blue thread from a green one, a much harder thing to judge, a tougher standard.  After pages of discussion another answer is offered: the night is over and morning has come when you can look on the face of a fellow human being and see the face of God. 

That is, dawn has come and darkness is over when you can look at another person and see the divine image, the face of God.  When we can see the other, and recognize the Divine image shared by all humanity, then darkness ends.

In Bo the Torah describes the effect of darkness as, “People could not see one another, and for three days no one could get up from where he was.”  Rabbi Yitzchak Meir Rotenberg, the Alter Gerrer Rebbe, founder of the Ger Hasidim near Warsaw, comments that the greater darkness is when a person does not see his neighbor and does not sympathize with his pain; the result is that his capacity to feel becomes dull and he is paralyzed, and therefore no one could rise from his place, nobody could move.  It was lack of empathy that caused this paralysis, a total inability to realize that they—meaning we—are all in this together.  Each of us must seek a way out of the darkness, and when we realize that we are not alone we find others to help us.

Remember, this plague of darkness in Exodus is no accident.  For the darkness the Egyptians experience, the terror and depression that overcomes them and make them feel the deep angst of their existential aloneness, is closely tied to how they have acted for 400 years as enslavers of the Israelites. The Torah tells us that the Israelites suffering under Egyptian slavery were so afflicted with hard labor that they had kotzer ru’ah, depressed spirits. 

Yet the Egyptians did not see the despair of the people of Israel. They did not look into the eyes of their fellow human beings, the suffering Hebrews, and acknowledge their pain.  Metaphorically, they already were stumbling about in moral darkness, tripping over core values like basic respect and human freedom.  These Egyptians were a people already blind, engulfed by spiritual and emotional darkness.

Now, how does darkness become a plague? By blocking the light, turning off our awareness, shutting down relationships, and preventing us from feeling, from changing our behaviors and our culture and society.

It is notable that even after the plague is lifted the Pharaoh and his people do not allow the Israelites to go free.  For the plague of darkness they have so recently experienced is still mirrored in the darkness of their own souls.  They act unjustly, inflicting slavery and darkness on those weaker than themselves.  A little object lesson in obscurity does not prove to be enough to change their dark habits.  A greater, even more powerful and destructive punishment will have to be employed in order to free the captive Israelites.

But perhaps this lesson of darkness may prove to be enough for the rest of us.  For the great message of this plague is that when we can bring light to bear we will see that we are not alone, that others suffer more than we do, that we have the capacity to rise from despair and bring hope and blessing to others through our own actions.  Proverbs, Mishlei, teaches us that Ner Adonai nishmat adam, the soul of a person is the light of God.”  We each have the ability to bring light into our world by our own actions, by truly seeing those people all around us, feeling not the darkness but their warmth and need, and helping them.

At the end of Shabbat each week we kindle light once more, at Havdallah.  We light the braided candle and illuminate our Saturday night, bringing the special light of the Sabbath into the week to come, assuring that it will not begin in darkness, allowing its flames to remind us that we each have an opportunity to bring our own nitzutzei Elohim, our own small sparks of God into our own society and world.

In my own home, we always put some coins in the Tzedakah box right after Havdallah.  It’s a small reminder that this light of God, this illumination that prevents the plague of darkness, is within our capacity to ignite, even in the smallest of ways.  May we each find ways to do so now, on this Shabbat, in this coming week, and always.

Tunnels

Sermon Parshat Va’era 5784, Rabbi Sam Cohon, Congregation Beit Simcha, Tucson

 There was a strange incident last week at Chabad headquarters in Brooklyn.  For reasons that remain unclear, a group of young Chabadniks had illegally constructed a significant tunnel under the center for Lubavitch international at 770 Eastern Parkway in Crown Heights.  Police accounts say it was over 60 feet long, and while it was empty, it was some 8 feet wide.  It was apparently designed and built by a group of fanatical 19 to 21 year-old young men who believe that the late Rabbi Schneerson, the last Lubavitcher Rebbe who died in 1994, was the Messiah.  T

This passageway started in the basement of an empty apartment building behind the headquarters, snaking under a series of offices and lecture halls before eventually connecting to the Chabad synagogue.  This allowed the young diggers to have unauthorized access to the Chabad shul so they could pray and study at unusual times that they favored.

The current Chabad leadership characterized the tunnel’s construction as a rogue act of vandalism committed by a group of misguided young men, condemning the “extremists who broke through the wall to the synagogue, vandalizing the sanctuary, in an effort to preserve their unauthorized access.”

Those who dug and supported the tunnel, meanwhile, said they were carrying out an “expansion” plan envisioned by the former head of the Chabad movement, Rebbe Menachem Mendel Schneerson.  They felt the Chabad headquarters synagogue should expand outward and encompass the surrounding the properties.

When a cement truck hired by the Chabad leadership at 770 Eastern Parkway arrived to fill in the tunnel, some of the young fanatics refused to leave the tunnel and had to be forcibly removed.  Nine of them were arrested by police and are being charged with various forms of malicious mischief and other crimes.

Look, when something weird happens in Chabad it should not surprise anyone.  Chabad’s understanding and practice of Judaism is, frankly, very close to the practices of a bizarre cult.  Their version of Judaism includes hanging photos and pictures and samplers of the late Lubavitcher Rebbe everywhere in their homes, businesses, and synagogues, a direct contradiction of the 2nd Commandment in the Torah.  They focus their studies not so much on traditional texts such as the Torah or Talmud as on the Tanya, a text written by the founding Lubavitcher Rebbe that mixes Mussar teaching, an idiosyncratic version of highly simplified Kabbalah mysticism and a preference always for the spiritual greatness of Jews over non-Jews.  Chabad sends out its emissaries, shlicihim, quite young and barely trained rabbis, with orders to bring Jews into their synagogues—and they eagerly seek to take Jews away from other non-Chabad synagogues whenever they can, and of course to raise money from them to support their eternal efforts at expansion.  No one outside of Chabad knows the value of all the real estate they have amassed over the last few decades, because of course it is a registered non-profit—but it’s huge. 

And religiously speaking, Chabad has many, shall we say, unique practices that are not aligned with other Orthodox Jews, let alone liberal or progressive Jews.

Still, tunneling under the Chabad headquarters in Crown Heights at 770 Eastern Parkway is not something we would have suspected of even the most fanatical and weirdest Chabadnik—nor is the Lubavitcher leadership calling the police and having its own people charged as “extremists” something we see every day; or ever.

But it did trigger for me, at least, an exploration of how much we have been hearing about tunnels lately, and their import and impact for Jews.

Of course, in Gaza the Israel Defense Forces have been confronted with a complex network of underground fortifications, that is, a tunnel network nearly as extensive as the New York subway system.  This has required a complex way of fighting the Hamas Palestinian terrorists who built it over the past 17 years; mind you, they built it mostly by using international aid resources intended for humanitarian use and redirected it—that is, stole it—in order to construct this deadly system of fortifications.  Israel has been fighting in these tunnels now since October 7th—and in reality, Israel has been dealing with terror tunnels for nearly two decades.  And now recent reports highlight that Hezbollah in Lebanon has an even more extensive and much more sophisticated tunnel system on the northern border of Israel, protecting its own terrorist leadership from both scrutiny and attack while allowing it to prepare for war with an Israeli military establishment that is located aboveground.

You see, in today’s world you use tunnels when you want to do something others don’t know about…

This is not exactly a new practice, of course.  At my recent ONEG conference this past week one of the topics we explored was the ways that museums are sometimes today being forced to return artifacts taken—well, kind of stolen—from other countries.  It took a while for the museums involved—which, it turns out, includes the most famous and prominent museums in the entire world—to steal—er, acquire—these treasures from former conquests and colonies, or sometimes to buy them from the people who stole or extorted them in the first place.  While much attention has been paid to the incredible treasures that the British Musem and the Louvre have in their collections—I believe that the British Museum should really be renamed “The Museum of Imperial Kleptocracy”—and the fact that they are quite unwilling to return them to their countries of origin, one of the most interesting objects of all, taken in a pretty typical act of colonial theft, sits in the Archeological Museum of Istanbul. 

That Turkish museum is utterly fascinating, containing incredible treasures taken by the Ottoman Empire from the many lands it conquered and controlled, including wonderful Greek sarcophagi, great Roman sculptures, incredible Byzantine mosaics, and artifacts taken from everywhere in the Middle East.  Of particular Jewish interest is a plaque located, when I last visited, on the third floor next to an open window.  It’s quite old and famous in archeological circles, as well among those of us who love Jewish history.

If you have ever visited Israel, particularly if you have gone on an Israel pilgrimage with me in the past, you have probably walked through Hezekiah’s Tunnel, cold water rushing over your sandalled feet as you went from Jerusalem to the source of the water.   That tunnel was built when Jerusalem was about to be attacked by the powerful and terrible Assyrian Empire in the 8th century BCE, 2700 years ago.  Hezekiah’s tunnel was constructed to give the city of Jerusalem a steady supply of water from the Gihon Spring, allowing it to survive the siege of Assyrian general Sennacherib’s army, and for the nation of Judah to survive and keep Judaism alive.  King Hezekiah ordered the construction, and it worked, an incredible feat of engineering, a tunnel that was used not to kill but to save lives.  When the workman hacking out the rock with axes, coming from both directions to save time, somehow managed to reach one another and open the tunnel they celebrated.  We know this because a plaque commemorating this incredible event was carved and put up in the tunnel itself.  It was discovered back in the 19th century by archeologists—and the Ottoman Empire government was so impressed with this plaque, which had been underground in the tunnel for over 2500 years back then, that they grabbed it and stuck it into the Istanbul Archeological Museum.  Where it still lies, its ancient Hebrew inscription testifying to the fact that there was a Jewish state in Israel for a thousand years.  The plaque has been radiocarbon dated to 700 BCE, the time of King Hezekiah.

That plaque also testifies to the fact that this tunnel brought water to Jerusalem and saved the country of Judah, and all Judaism, from the Assyrian Empire 2700 years ago.  Because, you see, tunnels can save, too… More recently there was the tunnel system—really, a reuse of the underground sewer system—that was used by the Jews during the Warsaw Ghetto uprising against the Nazis, and allowed some of the survivors of that heroic doomed fight to survive; there, tunnels were used to escape captivity and death.  And I’m told that for the superrich today, including Jews like Mark Zuckerberg, when they construct their own private compounds they inevitably include a fortified secret tunnel network so that they can survive the inevitable end of civilization. 

Now, for those of us who are not in the process of building out own survivalist compounds, tunnels can also be a kind of powerful metaphor.  Tunnels can be used to hide, and to damage; but they can also be used to save and protect, or as a means of escape.

So, in your own lives, what sort of tunnels have you constructed?  Have you built private, secret networks to hide your worst tendencies from others, and from the world?  Are you utilizing these inner tunnels to protect aspects of your life that you don’t want others to know about?  Are you hiding things, perhaps even from yourself, that you would be better off dealing with openly?  Are these tunnels below the surface concealing problems you really should seek to solve?

Or are you using these tunnels to escape from a harsh reality in your own life, an area of challenge or even danger that would be better addressed above ground?  Are you tunneling out from under the pressure of daily life as you seek a different reality?  Or are you simply using those tunnels to hide?

I suspect that none of us will be arrested for trying tunnel into the Chabad headquarters’ synagogue any time soon.  But perhaps over this Shabbat we can all examine the ways in which we use our own subterranean spaces for our benefit—and the ways in which we might change from the ways we are using them to our own detriment.  For only when we bring those things to the surface, and face them honestly, can we repair ourselves, and begin to repair our world.

Infinite Possibility

Sermon Shabbat Shmot 5784

Rabbi Samuel M. Cohon

Congregation Beit Simcha, Tucson, Arizona

You may be aware of the tendency of Jews who immigrated to America to change their names, particularly last names.  Greenberger became Green; Katznelson became Katz, or sometimes Nelson; Beilin became Berlin, and so on.  Movie and TV stars were legendary for doing this, of course.  Issur Danielovitch became Kirk Douglas; Jacob Garfinkle became John Garfield; Bernie Schwartz became Tony Curtis.  Jon Stewart Leibovitz became Jon Stewart. 

First names, too, changed with the geography.  Lazer and Soreh became Louis and Sarah, but they named their kids Sidney and Fanny, and they named their children Steven and Heather.  But sometimes things changed in the next generation. 

This is an update on a classic Jewish joke about names. 

A young boy is walking with his father in the middle of the 21st century. A passerby is impressed with their interaction, and says to the father, “Your little boy is so smart and handsome.”  And the father says, “Thank you. I'm flattered. And so is my son.”  And the stranger says, “What's your son's name?”  And the father says, “His name is Shlomo.”  The man is taken aback.  “Shlomo? What kind of name is Shlomo?”  And the father says, “It’s Jewish.  He was named after his late grandfather, whose name was Scott.”

Well, this week the name of the Torah portion is Shmot which in Hebrew means “names.”  That is, the name is “names.”  Which raises an interesting question: how much does what we name someone or something matter?

Superficially, a name seems unimportant, an arbitrary designation.  Would you really be a different person if you had been given a different name? 

William Shakespeare famously has Romeo say, “What’s in a name?  A rose by any other name would smell as sweet.”  It would, surely, and yet, names do matter.  Would that play have been nearly as successful if it was, as Tom Stoppard suggests, called “Romeo and Ethel”?

In another sense names can hold great meaning indeed.  For example, in Ashkenazic Jewish tradition we never name a child after a living relative, partially out of the superstition that it will be a jinx to both the child and the one he or she is named for.  But if you are given a name after a relative of distinction or great regard, you are supposed to live up to that, no?  Now, Sephardim often name after living relatives, leading to jokes about all Sephardim being named David ben David ben David on Israeli comedy shows.  But again, that sense of carrying on a name has resonance for the recipient of the appellation.

Some authors are quite good at creating memorable names for characters: Oliver Twist’s life takes many turns; Holly Golightly floats elegantly just above reality.  “Call me Ishmael” is the beginning of Moby Dick, predicting disaster.  Sometimes names appear to predict greatness; at other times they foreshadow misfortune.  Can anyone forget the acronym of the Committee to Re-Elect the President when Nixon ran in 1972—CREEP?    

The significance of a name is just as true of places as it is of people.  Would the town of Tombstone be quite as infamous if it was called instead “Silver, Arizona?”  And how many of us would like to admit that we were natives of a place named “Oxnard”?  Of course, there are places that seem almost miraculously misnamed: Yerushalayim, Jerusalem, where I’ll be in a couple of weeks, means the City of Peace.  Yet it has been forcibly and brutally conquered at least 44 times throughout history.

I leave tomorrow for a rabbinic conference that I have attended nearly every year for over 20 years.  We meet annually in Colorado at this time of year, and for five days we become a warm, supportive, caring community, who learn together, pray together, share sorrows and joys, and grow immeasurably from the experience.  It is a true chevrei, in the Hebrew word, an association of diverse people who respect and enjoy one another and help and support one another.  The name of the organization is ONEG, and I can’t for the life of me recall what it is supposed to stand for; but of course, the Hebrew word oneg means a fulfilling celebration, as in Oneg Shabbat.  In this case it’s a particularly appropriate name.

In a previous conference we studied with this week’s Torah portion of Shmot, the great parsha that begins the Book of Exodus.  Naturally we looked at the Burning Bush episode that lies at the heart of our portion, and raises a deep and elusive subject: how do we understand the essence of God?  But it begins with which names we use for God, which is at the heart of the burning bush episode itself.

So, what’s the right name to call God?  In Genesis, Jacob, our patriarchal ancestor, has a great dream of a stairway to heaven, with angels ascending and descending.  At the top, God appears, and offers reassurance to Jacob that he will become the father of a great and populous nation, and that the land he is lying on will become his people’s eternal home.

Jacob awakens from this dream and says, “achein, yesh Adonai bamakom hazeh v’anochi lo yadati,” usually translated, “Behold, God was in this place and I, I did not know it.”  That translation doesn’t truly capture the nuances of Jacob’s statement, in particular the ways he refers to God.  First, God’s name is given as Yud Hay Vav Hay, the holiest four-letter name of God.  And hamakom is another name of God, meaning “the place,” which seems particularly appropriate since by tradition the place that Jacob is lying on will someday be the location of the Holy of Holies of the Temple in Jerusalem, the “place” where God dwells most intensely in all of Jewish belief. 

But most interestingly, when Jacob says, “God was in this place v’Anochi lo yadati,” that is, “and I, I did not know it” he uses Hebrew in a peculiar way.  First, he need not actually say Anochi at all, since by saying lo yadati he has already said, “I didn’t know it.”  By adding the grammatically unnecessary extra “I” he has done something Biblical commentators see as a theological statement, a description of God and God’s essence.  That is, he says not “God was in this place and I, I did not know it,” but “God was in this place and Anochi, I did not know God by that name.”

The word Anochi means “I” or “me,” but it means a very specific kind of “I” or “me.”  It is a stronger word than the more common and basic Hebrew word Ani.  It is a word of presence, a definitive “I”, a powerful statement of existence.  What God is saying to our father Jacob is, “I exist, and I am here; do not be afraid.”  That extra letter, the Hebrew letter kaf, changes the innocuous pronoun ani, I, into an actual name of God, Anochi.   In fact, there is a custom among some Jews, Sephardim in particular but also Chasidim, to make the symbol of the letter kaf with their hands, signifying the presence of God. 

Our patriarch Jacob, in one of the great moments of his life, comes to understand God as Anochi, the God who is always present and will be with him through all of his trials and tribulations.  Anochi, the God who is most definitely here. 

That name will eventually be the way that God begins the Ten Commandments: Anochi Adonai Elohecha… that is, I, Anochi, am the Lord your God; I, God, am here, now.

And then, in our Torah portion of Shmot this week, Moses has his own first great moment of personal revelation.  Like Jacob, the encounter comes as a surprise to him.  Unlike Jacob, the meeting with God is not a dream sequence, but occurs in the form of a vision.

Moses is pasturing sheep in the desert when he sees that famous bush that burns but is unconsumed.  This Burning Bush is an arresting site, and he turns to approach it.  Out of the bush comes the voice of God, and Moses, startled, engages in a long dialogue with God.  God urges and finally demands that Moses take up the call to fight for the freedom of the Israelites, that he become God’s emissary to free the Hebrew slaves serving Pharaoh in Egypt.  Moses is beyond reluctant to take on this great task, arguing repeatedly that he is unqualified and should not have to go.  At one climactic moment in this dramatic dialogue, Moses asks God to identify God’s self, so that Moses can tell Pharaoh—and even the Israelite people—just who is demanding freedom for the slaves.

God’s answer appears ambiguous in the extreme: Ehyeh asher Ehyeh, God says, I will be what I will be, or I am that I am.  

Ehyeh shlachani elayich, God continues—Ehyeh sent me, you should say to the people.  That’s My eternal name and that’s how I will be remembered from generation to generation.  And God also says that the four-letter name, Yud Hey Vav Hey, is a name by which God was not known to Abraham, Isaac or Jacob.

But simply put, that part’s factually wrong.  God was known by that holiest of names to all three patriarchs, and this is not actually a new name at all.  What’s going on here?  What is God trying to tell Moses?

Again, the commentators weigh in.  It’s not the Tetragrammaton, the four-letter-name of God, Yud Hey Vav Hey, that’s a unique new designation, a fresh name for God.  They say that it’s actually Ehyeh that’s a new name for God.

So just what does Ehyeh mean?  Literally, “I will be.”  That is, God is infinite potential, capable of anything, up to and including redeeming the nation of Israel from slavery, splitting the sea, and bringing us to Mt. Sinai and an eternal covenant.  Ehyeh, God can do anything.  Ehyeh, God is absolute potential, the unlimited divine energy to transform things as they are to things as they should be.

According to this interpretation, Jacob knew God as Anochi, the God who is, the God of what is, a reassuring presence.  But Moses comes to know God, through this Burning Bush episode and more elaborately in the next four books of the Torah, as the God of infinite possibility, the God of what will be.  It is this not-so-small difference between God as Anochi and God as Ehyeh that transforms an acceptance of what is into the realization that something great can be, and that we have the potential to be part of that greatness.

I believe that this has resonance for each of us.  Faith in God as an existent reality is a wonderful thing, Anochi, and it can provide reassurance and support throughout our lives.  But belief in a God of infinite possibility, a faith that supports the incredible potential God has implanted in this universe of ours: that is the God of the Burning Bush, the Ehyeh that provides hope and promise that anything can happen if God wills it, the assurance the redemption can come for each of us.  What’s in a name?  In this case, it is a gift: a gift of hope in times of distress, of light in times of darkness, of belief in moments of doubt. 

We need this reassurance when things seem bleak, when we are faced with challenging and even depressing times.  Knowing that the God of infinite promise exists, and cares can bring us out of our depression towards hope once again.

On this Shabbat of Shmot, of names, may we each find reassurance in these unique names, and discover promise and inspiration in our own understanding of Ehyeh, the God of the infinitely possible. 

Perspective at a Tough Time

Vayechi וַיְחִי  Sermon 5784 Rabbi Sam Cohon, Congregation Beit Simcha, Tucson, Arizona

Shabbat Shalom, and an early L’shana Tova, a happy secular New Year—or as Israelis say, Happy Sylvester.  So why, you may ask, do Israelis call the secular New Year’s “Sylvester”?  And, well, who was Sylvester?

It’s a little complicated, but essentially, in Israel they name this upcoming holiday, which was more or less established by the Roman Empire for bureaucratic reasons—consulships began January 1—with the name it was later called by Christians in the 4th century in honor of the anti-Semitic pope in place at the time of the Emperor Constantine and the Council of Nicaea.  In other words, they, and we, are celebrating a festival that honors both a pagan administrative holiday and an Anti-Semitic pope.  Oh, and if Christmas actually commemorates Jesus’ birth then New Year’s, the eighth day after that, would celebrate his bris.  That is how it is celebrated among a variety of Christian denominations still, as his bris, his circumcison and naming day.

To say the least, a rather odd occasion for Jewish festivities of any kind.

In truth, even in an ordinary year—and this 2024 beginning is far from ordinary for Israel with the Gaza war ongoing—but even in an ordinary year they don't care much about this holiday in Israel, and perhaps neither should we, since we already had our own Jewish New Year back in September at Rosh HaShanah… still, the opportunity to gain some perspective, to look around and see where we are, should never be wasted.

Beyond the personal desire to make new year’s resolutions and seek a better year in 2024 it is impossible not to reflect on how we ought to be thinking about things in Gaza right now.  I was asked by my sister Deborah last week exactly when Bibi Netanyahu, Prime Minister of Israel for all of these years and in charge when the disastrous atrocities of October 7th occurred, would have to take responsibility and step down.  The standard Israeli response after October 7th has been that Netanyahu must go—but not now, not while Israel is at war with a genocidal, vicious, antisemitic Palestinian terrorist group armed to the teeth by Iran that has just perpetrated the worst atrocity since the Holocaust.  So, my sister asked: do I think that its finally time for Bibi to go?

While polls put Israeli support for Netanyahu now at something like 25%, and there is a nearly universal belief that the horrifying disaster of October 7th and the subsequent war is to a good degree his fault, the standard answer has been that it’s not yet time for him to go.  I agree.  In my view, he must prosecute the war against these Islamist Hamas Palestinian murderers, rapists, torturers, and kidnappers to the fullest extent that Israel can do so.  After they are eradicated and their power destroyed, he should resign, allowing Israel to blame him for the tragic and terrible human destruction that is unavoidable when you are fighting Palestinian terrorists who hide behind children and women, who put their terror tunnels and rocket launchers in schools and hospitals, and who steal life-saving supplies for their own stockpiles.

My answer may impress you as cynical.  But if Netanyahu truly cares about Israel more than his own skin, he has a unique opportunity now to destroy Israel’s most proximate and most horrifying enemy, and also take the international heat for doing so.  And then he can accept responsibility for the monumental failure of his policies in Gaza and leave the scene.

I also believe that the best way to get him to leave is to guarantee he gets to stay out of prison on those corruption charges, which are, frankly, small potatoes in all of this.  Let him ride off into the sunset already—but only after Hamas is destroyed.

And then a new Israeli government, under a new leader, can seek sane partners among the Arabs who will constructively work for a far better future for everyone.  That is optimism in a time of deep darkness; but there will be a brighter day, ultimately, after the destruction of the Islamist terrorists and the fall of this Israeli government.

Now, back to Sylvester, or the artificial New Year’s we are about to enjoy.  Again, the opportunity to gain some perspective, to look around and see where we are, is always meaningful.  And the Torah itself helps us this Shabbat.

This week’s portion of Vayechi concludes the great book of Genesis, Breisheet.  And while Vayechi is itself interesting, the fact that we are concluding the first book of the Torah just before completing a calendar year is just too tempting a coincidence to miss.  At this new-secular-year time, when we try to figure out just what happened over the past 12 months and what it all means going forward, we have the opportunity to do the same thing for the first of the five books of the Torah.

As hard as it is to comprehend just what this shocking year, 2023, especially the last quarter of it, has taught us, concisely summarizing the formative book of all western civilization, Breisheet, seems perhaps harder.  Genesis ranges in its scope from the creation of the world to the development of human beings, from the first natural disaster to the first murder, from the first city to the first war, from God’s initial covenant with Abraham to the tumultuous events that led to the creation of the children of Israel, from wandering nomadism to the entry into settled civilization, from Babylon to Canaan to Egypt.  Its stories and themes of faith and family, conflict and resolution, love and hatred, universal truth and simple beauty resonate today.  The triumphs and failures of the individual human lives portrayed in Genesis remain fresh and fascinating.  You can spend your life reading and exploring these tales and learn new lessons each and every time.   

First, there are the great theological messages of Genesis: there is only one God; we are engaged in a covenantal relationship with that God; each of us has the ability, and sometimes the obligation, to argue and wrestle with God over the right course in life; there is a greater plan than we can fathom at work, yet we have the free will to choose a good and moral course in life. All of this is central to everything that Judaism ultimately becomes. 

But even beyond the great religious mission of Breisheet, there is the wonderfully human dimension of this book.  The characters we meet, from fallible Adam and Eve to stolid Noah to the complex and exceedingly human patriarchs and matriarchs all the way to the remarkable figure of Joseph, remind us that the greatest of our ancestors, so many generations ago, were essentially just like us.  They show courage and cowardice, are honest and manipulative, fail and succeed.  After all that happens in this rich narrative, we find that in so many ways we are just like them, and can learn from their accomplishments, and learn more from their many mistakes.

Each year teaches us lessons, both positive and negative.  The Torah, and its Book of Genesis, is unique in the way this single text teaches us new lessons continually.

This week’s portion of Vayechi is somewhat anticlimactic.  The 12 Israelite brothers, the true B’nai Yisrael, have all been reunited, our great ancestor Jacob finally passes from the scene, as Niles has told us, and the whole family journeys to Canaan to bury Jacob with his ancestors in the cave of Machpeilah in Hevron.  It is at this time that we are given the opportunity to try to glimpse the future.  And a wonderful Midrash gives us insight into the best way to do just that. 

The Midrash Tanchuma recounts that when Joseph is returning from his father’s burial in the Cave of Machpelah, he passes the very pit into which his brothers had cast him, and he looks into it.  What might Joseph have been thinking as he peered into that dark crater?  How did he remember that moment in his life? What future could he imagine with his brothers, those who had threatened to kill him?

The Midrash answers, “Joseph stood up and prayed, ‘Blessed is God Who performed a miracle for me in this place!’”  Gazing into a barren pit, the place of his greatest danger and fear, Joseph looks back and sees the wonder, mystery, and graciousness present in his life.  In personal terms, such belief and understanding are what we might describe as a consciousness of God, and the goodness of God.

But his brothers fear that as he stands there staring into the very place of his original captivity, he is dwelling on the evil they perpetrated against him; and now that Jacob is dead, Joseph will finally take revenge. So, they send him a message—which they fabricate—with Jacob’s concubine Bilhah, saying Jacob had urged Joseph not to take revenge.  

Joseph weeps, continues the Midrash, because his brothers have so little trust in his affection. When they appear, bowing abjectly, he speaks to them gently and puts their fears at rest. “Ten stars,” he tells them, “Could do nothing against one star, how much less could one star do against ten? How could I lay a hand on those whom both God and my father have blessed?”

Rabbi Ron Shulman comments on this moment and ponders the different perspectives with which we see our lives. He says, “Some people look at life and see only the facts. Others are able to look at life and see the meaning…”

Joseph sees so much farther than his brothers.  He sees that internal hostility, divisiveness, negativity, and fraternal rivalry are not the way to act.  His brothers see only danger and potential revenge, and are willing to lie and mislead in order to save their own skins from imagined evil.

But Joseph, in these final chapters of Genesis, uses this moment of perspective, this opportunity to assess and understand the past and look to the future in order to bring healing and reassurance. 

It is a great lesson for us.  May we, too, learn to capitalize on this secular new year’s gift of perspective, conveyed artificially or otherwise, to see how to heal the wounds in our own society, and to move from division to unity.

I don’t know how long it will take to heal the terrible wounds of October 7th, or to build a new leadership among the Palestinians who will actually work for the betterment of their own people.  I only know that this will ultimately take place, and that in the long run, in the future that true visionaries like Joseph can see, it must occur.  We can gaze into a pit and see darkness and loss; or we can remember not only the pain, but the opportunities that may arise out of it in the end. 

May you all be blessed with a happy secular New Year.  But more importantly, may we all be blessed with the ability to continually turn to this great text of Torah, and find inspiration in its depth, beauty, and brilliance, and to use this unique gift to bring healing, hope and health to our troubled world.

In Praise of Chutzpah

Sermon, Shabbat Vayigash 5784

Rabbi Samuel M. Cohon, Congregation Beit Simcha, Tucson, AZ

I have a new favorite definition of chutzpah.  You know the classic definition of chutzpah, don’t you?  It’s the tale of the guy who kills his parents—and then throws himself on the mercy of the court because he’s now an orphan.  But I like this one better:

A little old lady sells pretzels on a street corner for $1 each.

Every day a guy leaves his office building at lunchtime, and as he passes the pretzel stand, he leaves her a dollar, but never takes a pretzel.

This goes on for 3 years. The two never speak, just each day he puts down a dollar. One day, as the man passes the old lady's stand and leaves his dollar as usual, the pretzel lady says, “Hey. They're $2 now."  Chutzpah.

Chutzpah is what makes many Jewish jokes work, because we know there is truth to the notion that chutzpah is an important part of Jewish life.  Like the old restaurant complaint—the food in this place is awful—and the portions are so small…

Or the old Jewish bubbie who limps onto a crowded bus. Standing right in front of a seated young man she clutches her chest and says, "Oy! If you only knew what I had, you'd get up and give me your seat."

The man looks at the old woman, and reluctantly, gives up his seat. The woman sitting beside the bubby takes out a fan and starts to fan herself. Grasping her chest, the bubby turns and says, "If you knew what I have, you would give me that fan." So the woman gives her the fan.

Fifteen minutes later the bubbie gets up and says to the bus driver, "Stop, I want to get off here."

The driver says, "Sorry, lady, but the bus stop is at the next corner. I can't stop in the middle of the block." Again, the old woman clutches her chest and says, "If you knew what I have, you would let me out right here." Worried, the bus driver pulls over and lets her out. As she's climbing down the stairs, he asks, "Ma'am, what is it, exactly, that you have? "

She smiles sweetly at him, and she says, "Chutzpah."

Chutzpah is an especially Jewish attitude, or at least it has always seemed so.  In fact, it has probably been an essential Jewish expression, for without chutzpah we would never have survived two thousand years of statelessness and maniacal persecution.  Easygoing people who don’t push in where others think they don’t belong don’t survive the Holocaust, or defeat overwhelming enemy armies, or even retain their identity in a season when everything seems designed to cater to another faith and tradition.  Not that we have any evidence of that in here tonight.

Chutzpah is what makes it possible for a tiny people, less than 1% of the world’s population, to produce world-beaters in so many, many areas of human accomplishment.  Chutzpah is what, in part, motivates a guy like Mark Zuckerberg to drive Facebook into an entity with 3 billion monthly users—3 billion!   More than 1/3 of the total world’s population—and what drove Bob Dylan to redefine popular music and Albert Einstein to re-imagine the universe and remake the world.  It’s what was required for Jews to win numerous Nobel Prizes and to be elected to the Senate in large numbers—in states like Wisconsin and Minnesota, which have few Jews—and to invent Hollywood and the contemporary music industry and even comic books.  It’s what made it possible for so many of our ancestors to migrate across the Atlantic in steerage with no money to make remarkable new lives in an alien land.  Chutzpah was an utterly indispensable ingredient in creating the modern miracle of the State of Israel when no one else in the world believed it was possible, or even desirable, what in part allowed small Jewish armies, from the Maccabees’ time to the Israel Defense Forces, to defeat larger, better armed, and better trained enemies, partly through sheer audacity.  Chutzpah is what motivates Jewish hyper-achievers now, and always has.

There is a downside, of course, to chutzpah.  It can make Jewish groups of people less than tolerant of error, and occasionally, well, slightly critical of others, and even of ourselves.  The ubiquity of chutzpah can make working with Jews, even for rabbis, into a challenging experience, because they are willing to say and do anything if they believe it can lead to results they think desirable.  Let’s be honest: most Jews do not lack chutzpah.

I’m reminded of Jackie Mason’s routine about the difference between a Jew and a non-Jew entering a restaurant.  The non-Jew comes up to the hostess and when he’s told that there is a 40-minute wait for his reservation he says, “OK”, and takes a seat.  The Jew asks for the manager, and somehow convinces the staff that they are in the wrong and he needs to be seated immediately.  After a long wait, the non-Jew finally gets seated in the back of the restaurant next to the kitchen and accepts it meekly.  The Jew says, “You call this a table for a man like me?” and starts moving tables and chairs to make a better space.  Then he tells the manager to turn up the air conditioning, or turn it down.  It’s not always pleasant to experience, but it certainly works…

The eternal Jewish lesson is that without Chutzpah we would be exactly nowhere.  When the game is rigged against you there are two choices: knuckle under, or rise to the challenge and find a way to succeed in spite of the odds.  And that is exactly what we have always done.  It goes back to Abraham arguing with God on behalf of Sodom and Gomorrah, insisting that God be certain that there were no righteous men there: as he puts it, memorably, shall the Judge of the whole earth not act with justice? 

Pure chutzpah… and Abraham handed it down to his descendants.  Jacob consistently demonstrated more chutzpah than any three men usually have in their whole lives.

All of which is especially relevant to this week’s Torah portion of Vayigash.  At the start of the portion Joseph, the grand vizier of Egypt, the high poobah in charge of everything, has his brothers in the palm of his hand.  Remember, these are the half-brothers who tortured and tormented Joseph, who beat him and sold him into slavery and reported him dead to their mutual father.  Now they have come down to Egypt to buy food to stave off starvation back home.  They don’t realize that the renamed Egyptian prime minister who teases and tricks and torments them is actually their hated little brother.  And so, after last week’s portion, filled with an intricate cat-and-mouse game in which Joseph has his wild, powerful brothers twisting and turning at his whim, we come to Vayigash and the climax of this great story.

The chutzpah here is embodied in the most powerful, and probably the smartest of the other brothers, Judah.  Judah sees that all this tzoris they are experiencing must come from somewhere.  This much trouble can’t just be bad luck, or even fate; someone is behind it.  Perhaps—no, probably—Judah even has some inkling that the dictatorial Egyptian bureaucrat they are facing, the one masterminding all of their terrible misfortune, is actually their long-lost, unlamented brother Joseph. 

And then Joseph plays yet another, perhaps final card in this elaborate game of high-stakes poker.  Having forced his bad half-brothers to bring the youngest, innocent brother, his only full brother Benjamin, down to Egypt he now insists they leave Benjamin with him and depart Egypt immediately. 

Judah knows this will kill their father Jacob and destroy the family.  And in this moment of extremis Judah makes an impassioned speech, an excellent speech, a speech that somehow combines plaintive request and apparent humility with pure, unadulterated chutzpah.

First, without being asked, Judah steps forward towards the throne on which Joseph sits.  This is a huge breach of protocol, and might have proven to be a fatal one.  It is hard to imagine how much chutzpah this took: it’s as though someone had crashed a White House audience with the president, just bodied his way forward to make his point.  It’s pure chutzpah.  In any case Judah steps right up to the throne and says, “Don’t be mad at me, I’ve got to talk to you personally and privately.  You won’t want to miss this…”

And then Judah proceeds to tell the real story of their lives.  Well, kind of.  He leaves out all the ways in which the brothers betrayed and sold-out Joseph.  He plays on all the heartstrings, though, emotionally pleading on behalf of their mutual fathers’ distress, the strain of the potential loss of his beloved youngest child. Judah’s speech is a model of schmaltzy manipulation—seemingly a manly declaration of personal responsibility, under closer examination it sounds like the guy who has killed his brother and asks for mercy since he is now an only child.  It is really, really chutzpadik—and, of course, it works.  There is a reason we are all named Jews after this guy, Judah.

Joseph knows who he is dealing with, of course.  And yet, in spite of his supreme self-control, his astonishing ability to think and reason and manage and lead, he cannot help but be overcome by family-tinged emotion.  He sends out all the advisors and interpreters, the whole kitchen cabinet and the entire court, and faces his brothers alone, as he did twenty years earlier when they tossed him into a pit and sold him into slavery.  And now, in one of the most dramatic moments in the Torah, Joseph cries aloud, admits his identity—“I am Joseph”—and asks plaintively, “Is my father still alive?”
   

It is a stirring moment of reunion.  And without tremendous chutzpah it would not have happened.  And without that reunion, we would never have come down to Egypt, been enslaved, experienced the Exodus, reached Mt. Sinai, received the Torah, been given the Promised Land of Israel.  Without this chutzpadik speech there would be no Jews today at all.

We owe our very existence to chutzpah.

Of course, there are many aspects of this ingrained Jewish Chutzpah that may seem undesirable—the so-called pushy Jewish stereotype is part of it, as is the tendency most of our people have to be utterly certain that we are always right about, well, everything. 

But the truth is that what many people call fate or destiny is often the result of the determination of those who most need it to make something positive happen.  Our chutzpah needs to directed toward positive goals like feeding the hungry, housing the homeless, fighting injustice.  Even growing our congregation and finding a permanent home.

In an interesting way, how much chutzpah we display can be the most accurate measure of our own Jewish commitment and energy, the truest measure of how serious we are about our Judaism.  So how much chutzpah are you willing to demonstrate for a good cause?  Are you willing to be chutzpadik to make the world a better, holier place?  To seek justice where it is absent?  To build meaningful Jewish lives, and valuable Jewish institutions?

Judah took a chance, and created a future for our people.  It’s now our responsibility to do the same.

Wait, Genocide of Jews is Wrong?

Sermon Shabbat Mikets 5784

Rabbi Samuel M. Cohon, Congregation Beit Simcha

Hanukkah is over now, which means that we can sit back and just nod our heads at all the crazy rushing around everyone is doing for their own holidays these last couple of weeks of December.  I mean, we did a whole lot of rushing around last week and the week before, so it’s a bit of a relief to relax and watch someone else rush around this week.

Now, I must make one more Hanukkah comment, this one about First Gentleman Doug Emhoff, husband of Vice President Kamala Harris, who is Jewish.  He posted a picture of himself lighting the Hanukkiah on social media with a remarkable version of the Hanukkah story below the photo.  In his telling, he said Hanukkah commemorated a time when the Jews had to hide from persecution for eight days and nights, and only had enough oil to last for a little while—but the oil lasted all eight days that they had to hide.  

Well… not exactly.  As every five year old Jewish kid knows, we Jews had to fight for our religious freedom, and when we recaptured the Temple in Jerusalem we only found enough oil to light the menorah for one day, but it lasted for eight days and nights instead.  Whether this is the way it really happened or not, that’s what everybody likes to believe about Hanukkah.

Except, perhaps, for the First Gentleman. 

You know, if you are going to screw up a Jewish story, this isn’t the one to mess up.  I mean, this is probably the best known and most told Jewish tale after the Exodus from Egypt.  I wonder where Doug Emhoff went to Hebrew School, and if he flunked out?

In any case, I hope everyone had a great Hanukkah.  Now, if you haven’t yet cleaned your Hanukkah menorahs yet, the best way to do so is to use very hot water to melt the wax, and then to dry them off thoroughly before you put them away.  Oh, and next year, in 2024, Hanukkah begins on December 25th… Only 373 more shopping days to go.

With Hanukkah now in our rear-view mirror, we are approaching the end of 2023, and I’m not sure just what to make of it all.  As a Jew and a rabbi, so much of what happened before October 7th has receded into memory, having been replaced by the sense of intense shock and ongoing crisis ever since that dark day.  Things don’t look at all the same now as they did before Hamas’ horrific attack and the atrocities they perpetrated.  The war that these Palestinian terrorists began that day has brought great destruction, including to the terrorists’ own Palestinian people, and it has catalyzed waves of antisemitic actions and attitudes that we mistakenly believed were no longer possible in 2023. 

Which brings me to this week’s Torah portion of Mikets.  At the beginning of this week’s portion Joseph lies in an Egyptian prison, having experienced a traumatic fall from favor, comfort and privilege into the depths of dark despair.  He is forced more than once to confront dramatically changed circumstances, and must find a way to rise from disaster and fear and find a new way to be.  Ultimately, Joseph does so in a remarkable way here in Mikets.  But the initial situation is so shocking, so intensely different than what he must have been expecting in life that it reminds me a little of our situation as American Jews in the aftermath of October 7th. 

Last week, finally, the president of Penn, Liz Magill, resigned under fire for her inability to condemn calls for Jewish genocide, as did the chair of the board of that Ivy League university.  Magill, along with the presidents of Harvard and MIT, were called to testify before Congress a couple of weeks ago about the tremendous level of Antisemitism on college campuses since the Hamas atrocities of October 7th, particularly antisemitic rallies and public statements by students and professors at those prominent universities.  None of the three presidents would agree that calls for the genocide of Jews was automatically to be considered hate speech. 

So far, only Penn’s Magill has resigned, as the boards and, to some degree, the alumni of the two Boston area elite universities have backed their presidents in spite of the moral blindness that prevents these individuals from seeing that calls for genocide of anyone are ethically indefensible.

If the student groups, and university professors, some of them tenured, who were quoted calling for Jewish genocide had instead demanded the genocide of, say, Greeks or Hutus or Guatemalans or aboriginal Australians or Muslims there is no doubt that university administrations would have fallen all over themselves to condemn them and expel the perpetrators of such hate speech.  Imagine what would have happened if Jewish student groups had called for the genocide of Palestinians! 

No, it is only acceptable in the name of free speech to call for the murder of Jews, and the genocide of Israelis and Jews everywhere in the world.  Otherwise, you can’t do it on American university campuses.  But demand the annihilation and mass murder of Jews?  Oh, that’s protected free speech.

Magill’s performance before Congress was egregiously embarrassing to anyone who believes in the moral standing of American universities as bastions of actual ideas.  But the other presidents called to Congress with her, including Harvard’s Claudine Gay, and Sally Kornbluth, M.I.T.’s president, also had trouble answering forthrightly.  For Kornbluth, who is Jewish, this is particularly ironic, isn’t it?

Harvard’s Gay wasn’t any better, really; when asked in Congress if calling for the genocide of Jews would violate Harvard’s code of conduct, Gay said it depended on the context, adding that when “speech crosses into conduct, that violates our policies.”  You can see why Rabbi David Wolpe resigned from Harvard’s advisory board on Antisemitism after Gay’s performance.

You know, it takes a lot for me to agree to with anything U.S. Representative Elise Stefanik says, since she is an election denier and a bomb-thrower in Congress, but I am actually forced to agree with her about Harvard and its president.

“There have been absolutely no updates to Harvard’s code of conduct to condemn the calls for genocide of Jews and protect Jewish students on campus,” she said.

Still, Gay is holding onto her job, so far.  But if you think that the codes of conduct at American universities have any connection with morality, you are deeply mistaken.  And US universities and colleges should not be the recipients of the huge donations that people have been giving them in the mistaken belief that they represent something meaningful.  They do not.  Donate to a synagogue instead, where values are actually taught and lived.

We return to a basic statement that simply cannot be lawyered or argued away: calling for genocide, the total annihilation and murder of an entire people, is morally indefensible.  It is wrong in such a profound way that no organization or institution or social media entity or government or court or rational human being can possibly pretend that it isn’t completely wrong. Pure and simple, it is hate speech, and should be banned.  For God’s sake, if you call for the genocide of anyone you should be banned and in many countries you would be arrested and charged with a crime.  Any Jews who call for the genocide of Palestinians should be locked up, in my opinion, either here or in Israel.  But no one is calling for the genocide of Palestinians.  Instead, on campuses all across the country and all across the world, they are calling for genocide of Jews.

To shout for the murder of all Jews in the world less than 80 years after it was attempted by one of the most powerful nations on earth in a campaign of Holocaust horrors during which 6 million people were murdered, a third of all Jews then alive and more than half of all the Jews of Europe—in a post-Holocaust world to call for genocide is a disgusting level of evil that the presidents of some of the most prestigious universities in America cannot recognize. And to pretend that it cannot quickly metastasize from words to violence is to deny all the evidence of history—including the last two months when we have seen antisemitic violence spike in the United States. 

Look, this is a shocking and terrible time.  There have been rallies to boycott Jewish businesses in Philadelphia and New York. There have been physical attacks on Jewish students and on older Jews, too, some fatal, in the name of solidarity with Hamas’ Palestinian terrorists.  But we must expect—indeed, demand—better of our hugely expensive and publicly funded university communities.  This is egregious immorality dressed up as academia.  It needs to change, and the sooner and more dramatically the better.

This requires some re-thinking on our parts.  In Mikets, Joseph rose from personal devastation to great heights indeed.  He did so through talent and intelligence, by remaining true to his ideals, through his faith in God.  But he also did so by growing and changing, maturing, becoming fully aware of the people around him and the situations he lived in. 

We 2023 Jews need to do the same, and we need to respond to the changed circumstances in which we are now living.

As we approach the end of this strange and strained secular year, may we ultimately triumph not only over those who seek our destruction, but over those who allow them to flourish through their own moral blindness.

The Practical Power of Dreams: Hanukkah and Joseph

Sermon, Shabbat Vayeshev 5784, December 8, 2023

Rabbi Samuel M. Cohon

I don’t know how many of you spend time viewing the Hanukkah videos that are popular on YouTube.  This is not exactly a noble pursuit, but it is a highly entertaining one.  My favorite this year is the a capella group Six13’s Taylor Swift send-up—you know, Time Magazine’s person of the year—using her biggest hits reimagined as Hanukkah songs.  There are many of these every year—who can forget Hamilton star Daveed Diggs’ song a couple of years ago, “A Puppy for Hanukkah”—if you haven’t seen it, you should, since Daveed Diggs is Jewish and his Hebrew on the blessings is impeccable.  And then there was James Corden’s boy-band version of a Hanukkah song with, among others, Zach Braff and Charlie Puth, called “Boys to Menorah.”  For obvious reasons, there were a lot of Taylor Swift parodies this year… 

One group, the Maccabeats, took its original identity from its Hanukkah parodies.  Most of these music videos, while silly, capture the essence of the Hanukkah story, the victory of the few over the many, the ability to rise in revolution against an oppressor who denies us liberty to be who we really are. 

And the truth is that these parodies also capture the nature of our own contemporary struggle against assimilation, the tendency we have to get swallowed up into a larger culture that doesn’t necessarily understand or accept other views or beliefs.  If anything, American society at this time of year, when we are supposed to be sharing goodwill towards one another, tends towards a monolithic approach to popular and religious culture.  But we Jews have always been something different, a unique culture, and belief system, a people who believe in one God and the greater mission we have to further justice in this world.  We confirm that uniqueness through our ethics, our texts, our prayers, our rituals, our music.  It is a kind of sacred dream in which we have persisted for 3800 years.

This Shabbat we begin reading the great story of Joseph in the Torah and, of course, continue to celebrate Hanukkah.  In a beautiful and meaningful way these stories connect.  They are all about exploring unlimited potential—or really, seeking to fulfill your dreams, in a pragmatic way.

Of course, in the festival of Hanukkah commemorates the victory of the Jews over their Syrian Greek overlords who wished to destroy their religious and political freedom, we remember another time when practical dreaming overcame huge obstacles.  Nearly 2200 years ago a small group of dreamers insisted that their religious freedom mattered more to them than life itself, and that they would fight and struggle and work to overcome seemingly impossible odds to claim it.  And their victory—not easily, but over years of fighting and working and, yes, dreaming—meant that today we can celebrate that freedom by praying and living as we wish.  Without the events that Hanukkah commemorates there would be no Judaism today—nor any Christianity nor Islam for that matter, nor Western Civilization as we know it.  The Maccabees dreamed of freedom and fought to achieve it for all of us.    

And, much earlier in history, in this week’s Torah portion dreams also play a central role.  Our Biblical ancestor Joseph dreamed of personal greatness, but through tribulations he learned that dreams are only achieved through work and struggle.  And so, he came to interpret others’ dreams, and eventually to act on them in pragmatic ways.  His actions eventually reunified his family and brought him back together with his father and brothers: a personal dream that became the genesis of our entire people.

To me, Judaism is pragmatic idealism, practical dreaming.  In much more contemporary times, the Zionists of the 19th and 20th century imagined Jews returning home to Israel and building a nation of our own.  It was a wild dream too; but as Theodore Herzl, the founder of modern Zionism, said, “Im tirtzu ein zo Agadah—if you will it, it is no dream.”  And they created a vibrant nation that flourishes today, out of their own dreams and a great deal of extremely hard work. 

Now, when the only Jewish nation on the globe is at war against truly evil enemies who seek its total destruction, we can see how fragile that dream can be and how much care and dedication, Hanukah, it requires to preserve it.  That tiny geographical place that magnetically draws so much of the world’s negative attention, much of it focused on finding ways to assist in its destruction.  It takes a belief in that dream, and its realization, to preserve and protect it in this time of peril.

My friends, to make any dream come true you must always work in practical ways to make it become real.  That certainly has been true of our own dream here at Congregation Beit Simcha, whose 5th Anniversary we celebrate Sunday night, and it is true for every dreamer who seeks to change the world for the better—even to change just a small portion of the world.  Dreams alone don’t get it done.  But of course, if there is no dream in the first place nothing ever changes, and we never improve the world.

I think it is particularly important for young people to realize that it is their dreams, and their own ability to hold onto those dreams, that will drive the future of this society and our world.

This has been a frightening and threatening period for Jews.  Five years ago, we saw synagogues brutally shot up in Pittsburgh and then San Diego.  Three years ago a New Jersey kosher market was shot up.  But it is this year when an explosion of Antisemitism has seen groups chanting for Jewish genocide—in rhyme—on UCLA’s campus, and complete breakdown of moral standing by the presidents of Ivy League universities, who this week in Congressional testimony were unable to say that calling for the genocide of Jews was hate speech or unethical.

For years now Anti-Semitic rhetoric has cascaded on the right and the left, but since October 7th it has particularly flourished on the political left.  It is a disturbing time for our people in this incredible land of Jewish opportunity, this golden country that America has been for our people nearly since its founding.  The dream has had some overtones of nightmare lately, hasn’t it?

There have been a number of stories about Jews who normally wear them in public choosing to remove their kipot, their yarmulkes, of younger Jews hiding their Chai pendants or mezuzahs under clothing.  While understandable, this is not the right way to act.

Thirty years ago I served a small synagogue in Billings, Montana as its student rabbi.  There were antisemitic acts taken against that community, concrete blocks thrown through windows decorated for Hanukkah, hostile leaflets circulated.  The community was divided in how to respond. 

But the Christian and secular communities were not.  They came out strongly in support of their Jewish neighbors, putting up Hanukkah decorations in their own homes, rallying against hate.  I will never forget the advice I got from an older rabbi when I discussed how some Jews wanted to duck and let the wave of antisemitism pass, to avoid the publicity from the amazing non-Jewish community’s response.  He laughed: you can’t hide, he said.  And we chose—most of us—to join with those who supported us in acts of public affirmation of our Judaism and rejecting the hate that was directed towards us.  It certainly worked there in Montana, a place with few Jews but a great respect for religious freedom, for freedom in general.

At times when religious freedom, our right to live openly and proudly as Jews, has been assailed, the best response to such times is not to shrink or hide, nor is it to abandon our dreams.  In fact, the opposite is true.

This kind of challenge emphasizes the fact that it is especially true that at times of darkness it is crucial to believe in the power of dreams.  Without our Jewish ability to dream beyond the obvious, to believe in greater and higher ideals and better realities than the present ones, we would never have survived to carry on our mission.

The great poet Saul Tchernikovsky wrote a poem 125 years ago that he called his creed: it is called Sachki sachki al hachlomot, laugh, laugh at my dreams:

Laugh, laugh at all my dreams!

What I dream shall yet come true!

Laugh at my belief in humanity,

At my belief in you.

Freedom still my soul demands,

Unbartered for a calf of gold.

For still I do believe in humanity,

And in human spirit, strong and bold.

And in the future, I still believe

Though it be distant, come it will

When nations shall each other bless,

And peace at last the earth shall fill.

The reality is that we need to remember always to dream of how things can be, and we must work to achieve those dreams.  For when we do so we have the capacity to fulfill all the unlimited potential that God has implanted within us.  We can achieve truly great things, and make this a better, more just, freer, holier world.

Holding fast to our dreams gives us the strength to move beyond our fears, to embrace our proud heritage and seek to help it grow and flourish, to spread its ideals of justice, decency, faith, courage and good to the world.  This is particularly true at this time of year.  Like our patriarch Joseph, like our ancestors, the Maccabees, like the founders of the State of Israel, we have a responsibility to live up to our dreams and continue to work to make them real in this society, and in all societies in this world.

May this be God’s will, and especially, may it be ours.

What We’ve Learned Since October 7th

Israel Solidarity Shabbat Sermon, Shabbat Vayishlach 5784, Rabbi Sam Cohon

There is an ancient joke that seems applicable today, in this era of global warming.  Scientists have determined a huge flood will overtake the entire face of planet Earth in just three days.  Everything will be subsumed in a flood far more cataclysmic than that of Noah.  All will perish.

The religious responses come in immediately: The Pope issues a papal bull, saying “Catholics of the world, we have three days to repent and save our souls before Judgment Day.” 

The Chief Imam of Mecca tells all Muslims in the world, “We have three days to pray fervently to be accepted in paradise before our demise.” 

And the Chief Rabbi of Israel announces, “We have three days to learn to breathe under water.”

My friends, we have now been breathing under water for about eight weeks.  We are now in a new reality, ever since October 7th.  We have learned many things over the past two months, ever since that disastrous dark Shemini Atzeret/Simchat Torah/Shabbat day.  These have been painful, terrible, sad lessons, and some of them are going to be hard for many Jews to accept.  But if we have proven anything over the long course of Jewish history, it is this: we know how to adapt to new realities.  Here a few things we learned—many terribly negative, but some positive. 

We learned that the fabled Israeli intelligence agencies were fallible, and somehow did not accurately read what was happening just across the border in Gaza.  This was a disastrous failure, and the head of IDF military intelligence has already resigned and taken responsibility.

We learned that the long-term leadership of Bibi Netanyahu, based always on his avowed commitment to Bitachon, security, has not made Israel more secure; quite the contrary.  Israelis have quite likely never felt less secure since 1973, or perhaps 1967 or 1948.  Netanyahu’s political raison d’etre, his very reason for viability as a leader has been destroyed.

We learned that the IDF, the most powerful military in the Middle East, famed for the rapidity of its response time, was not so fast to respond to an epic disaster.

We learned that under the very eyes of Israeli, United States and Egyptian spies the evil terrorists of Hamas, believed to be vicious but incompetent, prepared a vastly sophisticated, complicated, coordinated and utterly horrifically evil plan to spread terror to all Israelis, and all Jews in the world, and succeeded in committing the worst atrocities since the Shoah.

We learned again just how little sympathy exists for the victims of brutality in this world if they are Jews. 

We learned the depth of the generation gap in America, Europe and around the world between those who support and respect Israel and those who believe it be evil.  It is older people, primarily, who understand the many outstanding qualities of Israel, its democratic institutions, its freedom of speech, press, religion and sexual orientation, the rule of law, the creativity and dynamic economy of a first-world nation created out of swamps and deserts.  But it is younger people, including many younger adults, who have learned instead to view Israel as an oppressive nation, and who idolize the Palestinian terrorists who seek to destroy Israel.  That generation gap has never been more evident, or more deeply disturbing than now.

We learned that the label of Progressive in American politics often includes not only anti-Israel attitudes, statements, and policies, but profoundly anti-Semitic attitudes, statements, policies and actions.  The rhyming cry of “From the river to the sea Palestine will be free” is a call for the destruction of the only Jewish state on earth, and it quickly transitioned into calls for the genocide of the Jews. 

We have learned that when Israel is at war, anti-Semitism will be unleashed all over the world.  That is true both when Israel shows vulnerability, as it did on October 7th, and when it shows great unity and military strength, as it has since then.  In other words: Antisemitism is catalyzed both when Israel loses and when it wins. 

We have learned that college campuses are no longer safe places to express your Judaism freely, and that while every other minority culture or identity is viewed as protected on US and Canadian campuses, Jewish students and their organizations are not.  Somehow, the most persecuted group of people in all human history, us, and one of the smaller ones in the world is now counted on the side of the majority population.

We learned that Israel’s true allies, especially the United States, do indeed stand with her, but even that support can be toyed with by the dysfunction of American governmental institutions today.

We learned yet again that the only time the world cares about any Arab life is when it is taken by a Jew.

We learned, yet again, that the UN never cares about the taking of Jewish lives.

We learned that international feminist organizations are powerfully responsive to every kind of sexual violence and exploitation in the world—except when the victims of that sexual violence are Jews.  Then, these same international and national feminist organizations become mute, or insist that the brutal, documented violence did not happen.  After all, only Jewish women were victimized.

We learned that in war, only Israel is required to live up to a much higher standard to protect civilians than that imposed on any other country—including not only Russia or Ukraine or Iran or Syria, but the United States.  This is apparently especially true of harm experienced by civilians whose own terrorist leaders virulently attack Israel and chose deliberately not to protect their own citizens, in fact hiding their weapons delivery systems and military command and control centers in hospitals, schools and mosques.  

We learned—again—that the mainstream media and its online and app-based replacements are incredibly irresponsible when it comes to reporting events in Israel and the Palestinian territories.  The coverage of October 7th shifted dramatically when the lie that Israel had bombed a hospital was blasted over all mainstream media and on the web just a few days after the worst attack on Jews since the Holocaust.  Suddenly, Israel was vividly portrayed as the irresponsible aggressor against innocents—when in fact it was an Islamic Jihad rocket that killed their own people.  As usual, the follow-up stories never caught up with the real narrative.  In current coverage, there is often not even an effort to be “balanced”—it is simply pro-Palestinian propaganda being passed off as news.

We learned that abducted, kidnapped Jewish hostages, women and children, can be kept in cages in tunnels under Gaza and only the Jewish world is outraged by it.  In fact, we learned that people would literally tear down the posters of hostages as some kind of sick solidarity gesture with the Palestinian terrorists who committed these crimes against humanity. 

We learned, in America and all over the world, that antisemites of all stripes were emboldened by Israel being at war.  The oldest form of racist hatred, Antisemitism, is alive and well and apparently can be publicly expressed, especially in America and on college campuses, at a level not seen in this nation in many decades.

We learned that Iran has proxy terrorist groups aiming at Israel not only from Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, and Syria but from Yemen… and that attacking US targets was part of the package, as long as the attacks weren’t actually effective.

And we learned that not having a plan for what happens after you destroy Hamas, or its military capacity in any case, is not a long-term solution that provides peace or r’guah or shalvah, peace or contentment for Israelis. 

OK.  That wasn’t much fun.  So, have we learned anything positive, rabbi?

Indeed we have.  We learned that an Israel apparently torn apart by massive protests against the government’s judicial coup could come together with lightning speed, unify, and fight the evil of Hamas’ Palestinian terrorism. 

We learned that Jewish communities all around the world would leap forward with support and solidarity for the only Jewish nation on earth.

We learned that the IDF, once set in motion, using all of its newest technology, was able to smash most of the Hamas forces and eliminate many of the Palestinian terrorists and their center of terror production.

We learned that we have many friends who do support Israel profoundly, and they come from all across the political and religious spectrum.  I have received wonderful support from Christian friends of various denominations, including especially our hosts here at Church of the Apostles.  It is heartwarming, and it helps.  I get stopped because I wear a kippah about twice a day; so far, everyone who has done so wants to tell me how much they support Israel and how much they care about it.

We learned that Jews all over the world, and all over America, care tremendously about Israel and are unified in our support for the Jewish State.  300,000 people came out for a rally in Washington, DC, even if the media kept artificially lowering it to “tens of thousands.”  Jews have been coming to services, wearing blue ribbons, writing op-eds, speaking on the news, making substantial donations to Israeli charities, attending rallies in cities that are more Jewishly active, like Los Angeles and New York and DC.   

We learned that the Arab states that have been working towards closer relations with Israel are continuing to do so, that October 7th failed if its goal was to torpedo the Saudi-Israeli relationship that has developed over the last several years, or that it would undermine Egyptian-Israeli relations or even Jordanian-Israeli relations, let alone the fledgling diplomatic normalcy with the Gulf States and Morocco. 

We learned that there can be consequences for supporting brutal terrorism and its advocacy on campus if you want to work for fancy law firms or hotshot business consulting groups when you graduate.  We learned that sometimes even academics can pay a price for their blind support of Palestinian murder, rape and torture of Jews.

We learned that Israel needs our help in getting its story out, and that it’s time for US Jews to use our media-savvy effectiveness to explain why Israel matters so much and just how much we all have at stake in this. 

We learned that some wise people—not everyone to be sure—understand that this was not just an attack on one Jewish nation, but an attack on all civilization, and that defeating it is essential for the future of the civilized world.

My friends, this is a special Shabbat.  It is the Shabbat when Jacob, the conniving heel of a brother, struggles his way into becoming Israel, the one who wrestles with God.  Vayishlach is here to remind us that we each personally have the opportunity to rise from our baser motives and more manipulative impulses to become something finer, higher, better.  But it is also a reminder of what we as a collective people, Am Yisrael, must seek to be.  It is what Israel means, and what being part of the nation of Israel means.

It is why the nation of Israel matters so much, too. 

If we are to be an Or LaGoyim, a light to the nations, we must survive as a nation.  If we are to be an Am Segulah, a special people, we must first be a people safe from the depredations of those motivated by profound and ancient evil who seek our destruction. 

But we must also strive, always, to find a way to shine a new light from Zion, an Or Chadah miTziyon, that can only then illuminate even this dark time. 

Hanukkah is coming up Thursday night for eight glorious nights.  We will add light to this time, and we will do so not only with candles but with the spirit with which we embrace our Jewish nation, and with the energy we put into our Jewish identities. 

We have learned many harsh lessons the last two months.  It is now up to us to use those lessons to motivate ourselves to greater energy, commitment and dedication to our people, our land, and our God.

Ken Yehi Ratson; may this be God’s will; but mostly, may it be ours.

Prayer for Democracy

Prayer for Democracy, Rabbi Samuel M. Cohon

Delivered at the Interfaith Prayer Service for Democracy at St. Philip’s in the Hills Church, Monday, November 20, 2023

When I think of democracy and Jews, I’m reminded of the old story of the rabbi who was ill and in the hospital and the president of the board of trustees visited him there and told him, “Rabbi, I’m sure you’ll be pleased to hear that the board has voted to wish you a speedy and complete recovery.  The vote was 9 to 8.”  Democracy in action.

If you had told me seven or eight years ago that we would need a prayer service tonight for democracy, I wouldn’t have believed you.  I don’t know how many of you would have believed it then either.

You know, as a boy I was fascinated by democracy.  The empowerment of people, the egalitarianism of knowing that every American adult had the opportunity to participate in choosing our own representatives.  It was nearly intoxicating.  What an amazing thing, that each of us could vote, could exercise our franchise, that every one of us counted, that together we chose who was going to lead us.  Choice. Free will.

Judaism is a religion of choice and free will.  We believe that no one is born good and no one is born evil, but that we personally choose our own course in life.  Nothing is predetermined about the kind of people we become.  If ever a religion and people existed to live in a democracy, it’s us Jews.  And don’t get me started on just how much we love the idea of freedom of speech… 

But I’d like to tell you a particular story about our democracy the reflects on that from a uniquely Jewish perspective.

It took place over 150 years ago.  On December 17, 1862, US Major General Ulysses S. Grant issued a most peculiar order.  Called General Order Number 11, it expelled all Jews from Grant’s military district, composed of parts of Tennessee, Kentucky, and Mississippi.  It read that “Jews as a class” had 24 hours to leave the district. Some had lived there for decades but they were all to be kicked out.

We aren’t sure why Grant made such an order.  It seems out of character.  Ulysses Grant did not demonstrate Anti-Semitic tendencies in other ways.  In fact, when the incredibly successful general later became President of the United States he appointed more Jews to high positions than any previous Chief Executive ever had, he protested anti-Jewish atrocities in Europe, and he and his entire cabinet attended the dedication of a synagogue in Washington, DC, the first president ever to attend a Jewish religious service. 

In any case this Order Number 11 was shocking and damaging. His ever-loyal chief of staff, John Rawlins, tried unsuccessfully to talk Grant out of it, but to no avail.

And so, the Jews who lived or did business near the army’s headquarters were expelled immediately.  One Jewish officer in Grant’s army resigned over the order.  30 Jewish families of Paducah, Kentucky, including pillars of that community, were roughly handled and forced out of their homes by Union soldiers and turned into refugees.  It was a bad scene, similar to the kind of thing that had happened to Jews all over Europe, indeed in many parts of the world, for many centuries. 

Only this time, some of the expelled Jews sent telegrams to Washington, DC.  When word reached the capital and made its way to Grant’s superior, President Abraham Lincoln, Lincoln directed that Grant’s Order Number 11 be immediately revoked.  The General in Chief of the Union Army, Henry Halleck, sent Grant a telegram that read, “A paper purporting to be General Orders, No. 11, issued by you December 17, has been presented here. By its terms, it expels all Jews from your department. If such an order has been issued, it will be immediately revoked.”

Grant revoked the order, less than three weeks after it was issued.

What is remarkable about this story is not that it happened.  What is remarkable is that it is the only time in American history our national government or any of its representatives officially issued an Antisemitic order or law or regulation aimed solely at Jews.  And it was revoked and repudiated as instantly as it could have possibly been.  Grant even came perilously close to being censured in the House of Representatives.

That is, American democracy worked.  Because we live in a nation in which our leaders are elected by the people, and must be responsible to both those people and to the Constitution of our nation and the laws in effect.  And those laws affirm that all American citizens, regardless of religion or race or personal convictions are able to vote, are protected equally under those laws, and have the right to pray and live as they choose.

And the revocation of that order, and that it has never been repeated, makes the United States one of two countries on the entire globe never to have issued an Antisemitic statute or directive. 

Now that distinction about America is extremely important.  Because only in our American democracy, which separates church from state and which gives every citizen the right to vote, can this be guaranteed.  Only in a nation in which the fact that enough people truly care about ideas like respect, tolerance, diversity, and integrity can enough public sentiment be motivated—and feared by its politicians—to prevent such laws from being enacted.  There is a reason this kind of thing only ever happened once, and that it was almost instantly reversed.

There is something incredibly precious about American democracy, and we Jews, in particular, appreciate that.  We have long experience of autocracy, having lived under, and been brutalized by, so many autocracies in so many parts of the world over so many centuries.  We know that only under democracies can civil rights and true liberty be experienced, expected, and protected.

And so, tonight, we pray: Eloheinu vEilohei Avoteinu, our God and God of our ancestors, may we summon the strength to preserve this sacred trust we have been given, this American democracy.  May the rule of law and the honesty of open elections be respected, preserved, and maintained.  And may we come to live without hatred and bigotry in our democracy, with free elections and honest leaders who will fight to protect the rights of all Americans.  May this be Your will, God—and mostly, may it be ours.    

Thanksgiving and the Jews

Sermon, Shabbat Toldot 5784

It’s Thanksgiving this week, a holiday that used to be just about the least controversial one of the whole year, but has moved somewhat into the realm of the controversial recently.  Allow me to explain.

When I was growing up, the shared American holidays were New Year’s, Lincoln’s and Washington’s Birthdays, Memorial Day, the 4th of July, Labor Day, Thanksgiving and Christmas.  Almost all of those had some complications associated with them.  New Year’s Eve inevitably was filled with drunk-driving deaths and arrests and police checkpoints to prevent that.  Lincoln’s Birthday was not celebrated south of the Mason-Dixon line.  Washington’s Birthday was later combined with Lincoln’s to make it a “Presidents’ Day” three-day weekend—in fact, all the holidays were kind of manipulated to create three or four day weekends—while Memorial Day was a peculiar early beginning to the summer for most of us who didn’t have relatives who died in America’s wars—and growing up in California we then went back to school for three more weeks. 

During the Vietnam War and throughout the 1970s and into the 1980s the 4th of July became a flashpoint for dueling views of America among Americans.  Labor Day was a celebration of unionization, which was uncontroversial initially in my time but became hotly debated in the anti-union decades that followed.  Christmas was very nice for Christians, but the build-up in particular was challenging for non-Christians—you know, like Jews—who were forced to sing Christmas carols about the birth of a savior we don’t share if we wanted to be in chorus or madrigals; just saying.  Plus, months of ads for stuff and carols playing everywhere… 

Only Thanksgiving seemed to fly above controversy, unless you were a turkey. 

Incidentally, or not so incidentally, the inspiration for the original American Thanksgiving dinner was the Biblical festival of Sukkot, the feast of Booths or Tabernacles in the Tanakh, the Hebrew Bible.  Sukkot was also the source for the upcoming festival of Hanukkah, an eight-day and night celebration established by the Hasmonean Maccabees as a way to give thanks for their victory over the oppressor Syrians and the rededication of the Temple in Jerusalem.  The emotion of gratitude and thanksgiving plays a major role in so much of what we ought to experience about religion and our world.  So Thanksgiving should fit into our lives quite well, right?

Now other holidays in my lifetime appeared while some disappeared: Martin Luther King, Jr. Day was finally added in 1983 after 15 years of activism, including by singer Stevie Wonder, but it took an additional 17 years to be added in all states, including Arizona, which didn’t approve it until a public referendum in 1992.  Two states still don’t celebrate it fully; Alabama and Mississippi combine it with Robert E. Lee Day—now that’s cognitive dissonance—to have “King-Lee Day”. 

Veteran’s Day was a legal holiday for the government and for banks—of course—but not generally celebrated by most people if they weren’t military veterans or relatives.  While less controversial since it was essentially a celebration of the end of World War I, it never had the broad appeal of other holidays, and seemed to echo Memorial Day half a year later.

Columbus Day used to be a day off of school and sometimes from work while banks were closed—banks still are closed then; they take every chance they get, don’t they?—but Columbus’ very mixed personal record, and Columbus Day’s direct association with the annihilation of Native American populations and the usurpation of their lands has not endeared it to recent generations. 

But Thanksgiving seemed above all of that.  A day to show gratitude for the food we have to eat and enjoy, a day to spend with family and friends and to invite guests to share our table.  A day based, in theory, on the harvest festival of Sukkot in the Bible, the feast of Tabernacles and gratitude.  A day not tied to military triumph or a particular individual, not directly connected to any current religious practice when we can say thank you for whatever we do have. What could be controversial about that?   

I’ve always called Thanksgiving truly a Jewish holiday: what else can you call a holiday when you invite over all your relatives, including the ones you don’t like, and overeat?  Definitely a Jewish holiday!

Legally, Thanksgiving became an established national holiday consistently observed in America in 1863, in the midst of the brutal American Civil War, when Abraham Lincoln proclaimed it as such.  With a brief interruption during the late Depression it has remained the last Thursday of November ever since.  A great holiday to eat, drink, enjoy family and friends, watch football, and then go see a movie.

Yet when I sent out a typical Thanksgiving message to my congregation and community a couple of years ago, I discovered that some people with an indigenous heritage found Thanksgiving offensive; in fact, very offensive.  It harkened back to the white settlement of the Americas, the destruction of native peoples and cultures and the colonization of their lands by whites.

Now, the story we like to tell about the origins of Thanksgiving is, in fact, reflective of this.  Those Puritan pilgrims landing on Cape Cod and being saved from starvation by the local Native American Wampanoag tribe, and the white survivors celebrating their friendship with the tribe in October after the first semi-successful harvest in a giant feast—it sounds great, and as though they built bridges of lasting friendship across the racial, cultural and religious lines that could have divided them.  Swell.  But the darker truth is that half a century later, during King Philip’s War, the white settlers and the native tribes in New England fought a brutal war of extermination that ended with the near total destruction of the native Americans in the region, and their essential replacement by white European—primarily English, Scotch and Irish—settlers.  The Wampanoag tribe itself, the one that saved the settlers from dying that first winter and spring, was wiped out.

No less a figure than Mark Twain put it this way: 

Thanksgiving Day, a function which originated in New England two or three centuries ago when those people recognized that they really had something to be thankful for — annually, not oftener — if they had succeeded in exterminating their neighbors, the Indians, during the previous twelve months, instead of getting exterminated by their neighbors, the Indians. Thanksgiving Day became a habit, for the reason that in the course of time, as the years drifted on, it was perceived that the exterminating had ceased to be mutual and was all on the white man's side, consequently on the Lord's side; hence it was proper to thank the Lord for it and extend the usual compliments.

Whew.  I guess I understand the native problem with Thanksgiving. 

Now it is also worth mentioning that we Jews have experienced more persecution, over a longer period of time—millenia, in fact—than any other people in the history of humanity.  We know from persecution and communal suffering.  And we had nothing to do with the brutal conquest of the indigenous Native Americans either in South or North America.  In fact, while they were taking it on the chin from European settlers we were suffering in ghettos and Judenstrasse and from brutal pogroms all over Europe.  Or we were second-class citizens in the mellahs and Jewish quarters of North Africa and the Middle East.

So when we Jewish Americans celebrate a festival of gratitude in the autumn we aren’t actually rejoicing in the triumph over indigenous peoples; we are just enjoying a great meal with family and friends and being in a nation that, in general, has been an incredible haven of freedom of religion and identity. 

Now we can learn some valuable lessons from all of this.  In this week’s portion of Toldot, Isaac ends up in a series of disputes about water, as Sophie’s Drash said.  Water policy in arid lands has been a major issue for many centuries, and it remains so today right here in Arizona.  Back then, Isaac, in a series of conflicts that mirror some his father Abraham had in the previous generation, had a choice.  He could contest the issue, or he could move on, avoid the conflict and build a life and a future beyond the conflict.  He moves to a new location, digs more wells, and continues the growth of his family and destiny.  It is a positive response to a negative stimulus, and in the end, Isaac has much to be grateful for.

At a time of shocking Antisemitism right here in America, it’s extremely important to share not just the negative, but the positive that can emerge from such challenges.  It’s why we need, especially now, to reach out—as we will next week in two interfaith and multifaith services—to others who share the desire to build community and create good in our society.  It’s how we can create bonds of support and love that we canM feel especially grateful for.

Because, my friends, we need holidays of gratitude, times to give thanks.  It’s much too easy to take all that we have for granted, and to simply complain about what we do not possess and miss what we do.  Holidays often have murky origins, to be honest, and the way they come to be celebrated may not be closely tied to where they come from.  St. Valentine, namesake of Valentine’s Day, was a virulently anti-Semitic pope.  Christmas was originally a pagan winter solstice celebration.  Passover, while very ancient, is connected to much older spring celebrations held throughout the world.  How a holiday starts is not necessarily how it eventually turns out.

We need a time to offer gratitude for what we have.  We need a day to focus on family and friends.  We need to make the effort to bring guests to our tables to share in our bounty. 

So, in my view, enjoy your turkey, cranberry sauce, stuffing, sweet potatoes and pies, and particularly enjoy your family and friends this Thursday.  And come to these interfaith services that we are offering—free of charge—to demonstrate that we appreciate the friendship, love and support we are receiving. 

Then we can, in this time of challenge and threat, have a holiday of true thanksgiving.

Responsible Now, for the Jewish Future

Sermon Shabbat Chayei Sarah 5784

I have been trying to explain to people recently what it has been like to be a congregational rabbi active in the Jewish community the last five weeks.  The folks who have asked are religious community colleagues—including priests, ministers, Mormon stake bishops and presidents, and preachers—and it has been a fascinating challenge to successfully describe the experience. 

For one thing, this is the fifth weekly sermon I’ve given since October 7th—and these have been among the most difficult I’ve ever had to write in my entire career.  Tonight, I was not supposed to be delivering a sermon, but since our confirmed guest cancelled just yesterday, it became my responsibility one more time.  And I must admit, I take no pleasure in speaking about the events of this past week yet feel compelled to do so.

As someone who has firmly believed, and perhaps still does, that any permanent solution to the Palestinian problem requires that they end up with some kind of state, or more likely, two states—remember, the West Bank and Gaza are separate entities, non-contiguous, with very different geographic and population situations—the last five weeks have been extremely painful.  The horrific, evil murders, systematic torture and premeditated rape and arson perpetrated by Hamas’ Palestinian terrorists on October 7th and their glorification of this kind of brutal extreme violence against civilians, children, women, men, babies, and the elderly—marks it as one of the worst atrocities in the past 75 years.

While the initial public response was shock and sympathy for Israel and Israelis, the backlash, including a nearly worldwide celebration of sadistic violence against Jews going on now on American college campuses and in Europe and South America and Africa and, of course, throughout the Arab and Iranian world is horrifying.  Some people are now denying that the murder of 1400 people in Israel even took place—in spite of the fact Hamas posted its own sick brutality in videos online while they were committing these very crimes against humanity.  The inability to believe something vividly and arrogantly documented by the perpetrators is just another demonstration of the virulent antisemitism hiding just below the surface of what passes for civilization. 

Last week was the 85th anniversary of Krystallnacht, usually understood to be the beginning of the Holocaust.  Clearly, what is happening around the world now is not that.  But it isn’t so great, and the people involved in protesting for more of the same are certainly much like the early Nazis in their evident antisemitism.  

Depressingly, a lot of this antisemitism is coming from the so-called Progressive Left, which has embraced the cause of Palestinian terrorism.  There is some effort being made to distinguish between supporting Hamas—a vicious Palestinian terrorist organization of Islamists who use civilians to protect their terrorists, hide all of their rocket factories and launchers in schools and under hospitals, and built exactly zero bombshelters for their civilians before attacking Israel—and supporting the cause of a Palestinian state. But then protestors chant “From the river to the sea, Palestine shall be free,” advocating the genocide of Israelis and the destruction of the only Jewish state in the world, that is not a political statement in favor of liberty.  It is a public endorsement of genocide of Jews.     

As a rabbi, I surely understand that logical arguments have limitations, and my own will likely fail to reach those who need persuading.  But there is nothing “progressive” about Hamas, which has controlled Gaza for 17 years.  Gaza has not been occupied by Israel since 2005, and in consequence of that Israeli unilateral withdrawal, and Hamas being elected by the people of Gaza—OK, in one vote 17 years ago, Hamas never held another election—an area, Gaa, that has excellent potential for economic success has been turned into a civilian human shield for an underground network of terrorist tunnels larger than the New York subway system.  For closing in on two decades Gaza has been a launching pad for rockets shot at Israeli civilians regularly, each rocket a war crime by the way. And as the Israeli military is discovering, the underground terrorist network is intimately linked to the civilian homes and population aboveground in a tight, symbiotic way. 

That means that more Gaza civilians will be killed as Hamas and Islamic Jihad terrorist pop out of tunnels in houses, apartments, schools, restaurants and hospitals to fire at Israeli troops.  And as one Israeli general puts it, every Palestinian who is killed is a public relations benefit to Hamas, and energizes those pro-Palestinian protestors. 

A rabbi I worked with long ago put it well, way back in the 1980s: why is it that Arab lives only matter when a Jew takes them?  How is it that the world did not protest Syrian dictator Asad’s genocidal murder of large parts of his own rebellious people?  Or ISIS’s actual genocide of the Yazidi people?

Israel has been forced to respond to the worst attack on its civilians in its entire history.  In doing so it asked the people in the northern half of Gaza to leave, since Hamas has concentrated its terrorists there.  Hamas told them to stay; that is, Israel sought to protect Gazan civilians.  Hamas wanted them to stay in place and die in the crossfire because it helped their own propaganda.  As a Hamas spokesman said, “We are not responsible for the Palestinian civilians.  That’s for the UN and the Israelis to worry about.”  Again, the IDF, the Israel Defense Forces, strives to protect Israel’s civilians.  Hamas uses civilians to protect its terrorists.

Now in these pro-Palestine rallies I have seen some startling signs; for example, Progressives for Gaza. Progressives for Gaza?  Well, Hamas-controlled Gaza guarantees exactly no civil rights to its inhabitants.  Being gay or lesbian is punishable by execution.  No one has the right to speak out against Hamas.  There are no elections of any kind—just that one, 17 years ago—and corruption is so rampant that it has been calculated that of every NGO and EU aid dollar sent to Gaza, Hamas steals about 80 cents to use in its terrorism and to line the pockets of its leaders, who live in luxury in Qatar and the Arab Emirates.  It thrives on extortion and brutality.  How is it possible that people who profess to believe in human rights can support such a regime?  Perhaps because it’s a regime that brutally attacks Jews, it must be OK, right?

Now, I don’t want to sound too negative or paranoid here.  Israel is not powerless—this is not 1942—and while I have seen awful things done and said all around the world against Jews the last month, I have also had unsolicited phone calls, emails and letters of support for Israel and Jews in the same period.  There are many people who understand just how cowardly and brutal the Palestinian terrorists are, how corrupt and evil their own regime is.  And who understand that Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East, and that this was an attack on all of western civilization, and that Israel must win this war.  In fact, US forces have been attacked throughout the region by Iranian proxies, and the US bombed Iranian bases in Syria this past week.  And the quite substantial American forces now deployed throughout the region send a clear message to Iran and Hezbollah and the Houthis and the other terrorists funded by those violent mullahs that Israel is not alone.

Still, it’s a rough time.  Much worse for those fighting the Palestinian terrorists of Hamas in Gaza, trying to control the Hamas terrorists in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, and all of those in Israel enduring air raid warnings, school closings, relatives and friends dying and hospitalized, as well as friends and relatives in the military engaged in fighting.

I believe that it will be particularly important for Israel to have more of an endgame in all of this than the destruction of Hamas.  Something more successful must be created out of this disaster, or it will only be a precursor to more of the same.  No sane person can desire that.  If there will be any silver lining in these dark clouds, it will prove to be a non-Islamist entity that actually cares about its own people’s wellbeing taking charge in Gaza. 

I think to some degree our challenge as Jewish leaders is to find a way to continue to celebrate the greatness of Judaism while showing solidarity and support for Israel in this time of profound challenge.  This year both Thanksgiving and Hanukkah will seem, well, different.  Undoubtedly, we will make both holidays meaningful in a different way during this time of war and antisemitism.

In our Torah portion of Chayei Sarah, our first ancestor, Abraham, does some remarkable things to assure the future of his vision of monotheism, of belief in one God and to assure that he will have progeny and truly become the father of a people.  In doing so, he establishes a pattern that has helped us, as Jews, survive in so many places that were actively hostile to us. 

In particular, Abraham makes certain that his perhaps estranged son Isaac will father children, and further the cause of God and ethics in the world.  He also makes certain that the land that, he, Abraham has purchased in the Promised Land—in Hevron, in fact—will be the first entry confirming our permanent presence in place that today we call Israel. 

Our responsibility to continue that work, to assure our Jewish future and our future in security in Israel remains.  We may do so by other means than our patriarch used, but it will continue to be a central part of our congregation’s commitment to our people and our land, to Am Yisrael and Erets Yisrael, in the face of war and falsehoods.  It must also frame our steady, engaged dedication that will ensure the success of these goals.

Abraham succeeded because he was, well, stubbornly committed to his goals.  Israel, too, will succeed because it, too, must remain committed to its goals.  And we must be committed to continuing to support the future of our people in our own land.

You Shall Be a Blessing

Sermon Shabbat Vayeira 5783

I thought of this ancient, painful joke this past week.  It goes like this: 

Two hundred years ago in Russia, a town’s Jews were in a panic: a Christian girl had been found murdered, and the Jews were worried they’d be blamed for the crime and a blood libel pogrom would take place.

The town’s rabbi called everyone to the shul to discuss the situation. Just as they all arrived and sat down, the shammes, the assistant at the temple, ran into the hall. “I have wonderful news!” he told the gathering. “The murdered girl was Jewish!”

As Anti-Semitism spiked all around the world, to a level we haven’t seen perhaps in my lifetime, it became clear that the gloves that some have been wearing for years were coming off.  You could say anything terrible about Jews the last few weeks without serious fear of repercussions, especially, perhaps on college campuses in the US and Canada.  And you could seek to perpetrate violent actions against Jews and synagogues in Europe or South America or Australia and the police would have to stop you from getting away with it.

I was also reminded of another antique joke, which ironically feels current again.  When God was creating the world, God told the angels God was going to create an extra-special place called Israel. God described the beautiful hills, the verdant fields, the wonderful springs and rivers God planned to create. Then God described how the people who lived there would be smart and resourceful, and would create great cities, wonderful art, and amazing scientific innovations.

“Won’t the rest of the world be jealous, God, putting so many wonderful things inside Israel?” the angels fretted.

“Don’t worry,” said God, “wait until the world sees the neighbors I’m giving them!”

Ah yes.  The neighbors.

Look, one brief word about current events in Israel tonight.  I wonder: if the Allies in World War II during the invasion of Nazi Germany had been told they needed to agree to a cease-fire, or a humanitarian pause in order to allow Germans to receive aid, would they have done so?  While the Nazis kept shooting exploding rockets at London?  I think not.

I’d like to go back to our first, indigenous connection to the land of Israel, and our deep relationship to it.

When we study the Torah, especially Genesis, Breisheet, earliest record of our first ancestors, we discover that God made a series of promises to Abraham.  In the early covenants established in last week’s Torah portion of Lech Lecha and this week’s portion of Veyeira, God pledges to bring Abraham to a land flowing with milk and honey, erets zavat chalav ud’vash, to give him and his descendants the place then known as Canaan as an eternal, everlasting inheritance for all time.  In subsequent Torah portions that covenant will be reaffirmed with each of the subsequent patriarchs, Isaac and especially Jacob, and in Exodus it will again be established as a berit, a covenantal promise to land and success with Moses and his generation of Israelites and their descendants. 

There is no word in these covenants of rockets fired from Gaza landing in this Promised Land, by the way, nor of sadistic terrorists massacring future Israelites or carrying them off into captivity. 

But then, neither are the borders of the future land to be known as Israel specified in the Torah precisely.  In fact, the Biblical description of the land and its boundaries ranges widely.  In one place, the Hebrews’ nation ranges from the Nile River to the Euphrates, which encompasses most of the modern Middle East; in another place, the land promised to Abraham’s descendants is not much more than a couple of hilltops near Jerusalem.  And for those literalists who believe that every inch of the Biblical Land of Israel should be modern Israel today because we have a God-given right to it, we must note that the would require that modern Israel trade nearly its entire coastal region for the barren hills of Judea and Samaria, exchanging Tel Aviv, Herzliyah, Caesarea and Haifa, where 70% of Israelis actually live, for a bunch of rocky, barren, wind-swept West Bank mountains and a whole lot of pretty hostile Arab inhabitants.   

In any case, whatever the exact, adjusted boundaries eventually prove to be, it’s in these Torah portions of Lech Lecha and Vayeira that the Jewish claim to Israel is established.  And it’s quite notable that there is no attempt in the Torah to say that the lands are uninhabited.  While the various Canaanite tribes that filled the territory of today’s State Israel in Abraham and Sarah’s days, the Girgashites, Perrizites, Hivites, Hittites, and Jebusites, are not in any way related to today’s Palestinians, they clearly pre-date the Hebrews in living in the Promised Land.  According to the tradition, it was God’s right to give us that land, but with the proviso that we must continue to fulfill our covenantal relationship responsibilities to God.

Which brings me to a lesser-known and rarely quoted phrase that is also central to these narratives in Genesis.  God tells Abraham this repeatedly, and reiterates it to Jacob: v’nivrchu v’cha uvizarecha kol mishpechot ha’adamah—through you and your descendants will all the families of the earth be blessed.  That is, a large part of the Divine promise given to us in the Torah is that we, as a people, will bring goodness and blessing to the whole world.  In a way, this may be the more important promise: lots of different peoples in this world have a homeland—pretty much all of them, in fact—but how many can say that they have the responsibility to bring blessing to the whole world?

What does this mean, exactly?  What precisely is the blessing that our people has conveyed to this entire planet?  Is it the belief in monotheism, the oneness of God, the concept that if you have only one deity you therefore can have only one source for morality, one locus for truth and meaning? Or is it something else?  Or a few something’s else?

About 25 years ago Tom Cahill wrote a book called, “The Gifts of the Jews: How a Tribe of Desert Nomads Changed the Way Everyone Thinks and Feels.”  Cahill, best known for his book about the Irish saving civilization, explored the sources of western civilization and its beginning in the story of Abraham and his embrace of the belief in one God, a truly radical concept that changed everything.  Well, it didn’t change it immediately, of course.  After all, when Abraham came along absolutely no one believed that there was only one God.  And today, if you survey the various beliefs of many religions and those who believe in none of them, you will find that the majority of the world still doesn’t believe in one and only one God.  But eventually, over time, the concept of one God began to transform the way many people thought about the world and our human place in it. 

As important as it is, is the greatest blessing of Judaism and Jews perhaps something beyond the Shema, the oneness of God?  Is it our deep commitment to constantly trying to learn more, to extend the boundaries of knowledge and education?  Is it our insistence on feeling a kinship with the downtrodden, the forgotten members of society, our ways of actualizing tikun olam?  Is it the Jewish commitment to trying to be a “kingdom of priests and a holy people,” the goal of living to a higher standard, as that old hot dog commercial asserted about Hebrew National?

Or is it some combination of all of these, plus much more?

It is my very sincere conviction that Judaism, properly experienced, is an incredible way to enhance life, that it adds deep meaning, spirituality, intellectual stimulation, ethics and great joy to each of our lives.  It is always fascinating to me how many of us American Jews don’t realize how great our own religious tradition is, how much beauty and excellence it adds to what can otherwise be our rather pedestrian existence.

Part of the pleasure of serving as a congregational rabbi is that I have the opportunity to explore pretty much anything and everything about our religion and culture in a sermon every seven days, and somehow, having done this for many years, there is always something new and fascinating to discover.  That’s partly because we Jews have been around for 3800 years or so and have lived and had active Jewish communities in essentially every country on the planet at one time or another.  That diversity is a wonderful strength expressed in Jewish prayer, thought, music, food, art, clothing, humor—even in temperament.  And I love exploring the incredible range of Jewish life across the world, visiting different Jewish communities, learning and sharing their music and customs.  In the incredible variety of experience is a great richness indeed.

There are also many fascinating and not so well-known aspects of Judaism to investigate, many different areas of spiritual and intellectual excellence to explore.  Our Zohar Study Groups—two of them, in different books of the Zohar provide the opportunity to explore Kabbalah, Jewish mysticism in a meaningful way weekly.  Even covering familiar ground in a new way, such as our Deuteronomy Project course is doing weekly now, is surprisingly inspiring and exciting.  The highly intelligent and sophisticated class members take us in unexpected and valuable directions with their curiosity, broad knowledge and sharp observations. 

I must also note that the remarkable range of experience that the huge storehouse of Jewish life makes available to us is balanced by powerful, shared common elements of identity and character.  For we Jews, no matter how divergent our backgrounds, share many values: a deep dedication to family, reverence for the importance of education and learning, a profound connection to the Land of Israel, a vital commitment to the greater notion of klal Yisrael, the great, shared peoplehood of all Jews everywhere.  We are deeply committed to the greatest of Jewish ideals, the concept of justice, preserving it, seeking to see it in action in our world; we give tzedakah, the charity that goes towards righting the wrongs we see, and we work to help the downtrodden and the needy in our civilization.  Nearly all of us relate in very special ways to the wonderful, varied and fabulous Jewish holidays, and almost all of us celebrate a Seder or light Hanukkah menorahs or come to hear the shofar on Rosh HaShanah. 

And even when we celebrate the Sabbath to different degrees and in different ways, we retain an understanding of the meaning, beauty and purpose of this extraordinary Jewish invention, the day of rest and sanctity, of family, food and song.   

I am often asked to describe just what Judaism is.  You know, it’s not simple to explain what Judaism is, or why it unifies us through all of our amazing diversity.  But it is a combination of these things, really, that connect us and help us fulfill that great Jewish goal of seeking to perfect the world under God’s rule—and this is a world that clearly needs some fixing, no?  

It is perhaps not a surprise that I cannot truly imagine Jews choosing to live life outside the realm of a supremely accessible religious tradition that inspires us to seek so many great ideals, and does so by insisting that we create practical means to make those ideals real in our own lives every day.

Now, of course, I am a rabbi and therefore somewhat biased towards appreciating the wonders of Judaism, and living out those ideals in my own life, and encouraging everyone to do so in his or her own life as well.  But in an America in which there are so many incredible ways to experience high-quality Jewish prayer, study, social action, music, food and humor, among many other possibilities, I would say that it’s incumbent upon every American Jew to take advantage of the amazing things that are offered—at our own synagogue, Congregation Beit Simcha, of course, but also throughout our community, and in every active Jewish community we visit. 

In 2023, Judaism offers hope, energy, beauty and meaning, as well as creativity, idealism and joy.  Isn’t that a great blessing, for us and the world? 

The Jewish Indigenous Homeland

Sermon Shabbat Lech Lecha 5784 Downtown Shabbat

Rabbi Sam Cohon, Congregation Beit Simcha

Do you know what the oldest claim on any land in the world is?  That is, the longest-lasting deed of promise to the ownership of land in the entirety of history is?  Well, we will read it tomorrow morning in Torah Study at Beit Simcha, and chant it during services.  It is the promise given in the Torah to a wanderer from Ur of the Chaldees named Avram.  It is, according to the ancient text we possess, the divine commitment given by God to Abram that his descendants will inherit the land of Canaan, later, of course, to be called Israel.

I’ve often thought about and preached about Lech Lecha, this amazing call that comes to a man who has not made much of an impression prior to this in the Torah.  Lech lecha meiartzecha umimoladeticha umibeit avicha, go, leave everything you have ever known and go to the land I’ll show you.  When the portion begins all we really know about Avram is that he was born in the Babylonian city-state of Ur, and moved with his father, brother, nephew and wife to Haran.  Haran is still there, a very old city, located in southeastern Turkey about 20 kilometers from the Syrian border.  I’ve personally been in Haran, which is located between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, in the cradle of civilization, near Sanliurfa, Turkey.  It is on a crossroads of highways going both east and west and north and south.  When I was there, there were many refugees from ISIS, Islamists much like Hamas.  I hope they have been able to return safely to their homes in Syria by now.

I’ve often wondered about the human experience of this call that Avram hears.  God tells him to leave his homeland, his birthplace, his father’s house, and go the land that God will show him, asher areka.  It’s certainly life-changing, but also super-ambiguous.  I can just visualize him going home to Sarai, his wife, and telling her the plan.  That conversation could not have gone well.

Avram tells Sarai: “God told us to leave here, right now, pack up and take everything.”

Sarai asks, “God told you?  Which God?”  

And Avram says “A God you have never heard of and can’t see.” 

So, Sarai answers, “Uh huh.  And where are we going?”

And Avram says, “I don’t know.”

Fortunately for all of us, they do leave Haran and head for Canaan.  Once they arrive, God tells Avram, “I promise this land to you and your descendants.”     

Now, I don’t care how literally or metaphorically you take this tale, or how you evaluate the later promises to the land of Canaan that God makes to Isaac and Jacob.  But there is no doubt that whenever the Torah was created, and it is not less than 2500 years old in written form and parts of it are surely 3000 years old, we descendants of Avraham and Yitzhak and Ya’akov believed that the land of Israel was our homeland. 

And there is also no doubt that from about 1200 BCE, 3200 years ago, we had a nation-state—and much of that time two nation-states—in the land of Israel.  That is, we had a Jewish nation from about 1200 BCE to about 70 CE, roughly 1300 years, with only one interruption of about 50 years.  And while we were forced into exile twice, by the Babylonians in 586 BCE and by the Romans in 70 CE and again in 135 CE, we retained not only a powerful, permanent connection to that land of Israel but always had a Jewish community living, working, studying, and praying there. 

This phenomenal Torah portion includes the first promise God gives our people to eretz Yisrael, the land of Israel. Our land.  Our only homeland on the planet.  The only country where Jews are actually in control, no matter what the crazed conspiracy theorists say.

Let’s be clear: Israel is not some western nation’s colony planted in the Middle East.  It is, and has been for thousands of years, our Jewish indigenous homeland.  Israel is not just an insignificant part of the quite large Arab world, but the place that has been our Jewish ancestral country for over three thousand years.  A place of return.  The one tiny part of the planet that we Jews have for our own.

It is stunningly anti-historical to say that we Jews somehow are colonizing our own land, that territory purchased at a high price, legally and in cash payments, was somehow stolen; to say that land that earlier Arab terrorists sought to steal from its rightful Jewish owners by brutality and military conquest, land that was fought for and died for and protected from destruction somehow should belong to those who desire it simply because they say so and have the capacity to murder some of its citizens.  This is not historically true or in any other way honest.  It is not the way the world does things anywhere else on the globe.  Only Jews are told that we must disappear from our own homeland, that it is moral to destroy a modern, vibrant, vital, democratic nation so that vicious Palestinian terrorists can be accommodated and establish a brutal Islamist theocracy, as they have in Gaza.

You know, my favorite banners in the last two weeks were “Gays for Gaza” and “Lesbians for Palestinian liberation”.  Do you know where the largest Gay Pride events in the entire Middle East take place?  Israel.  I’ve been in Tel Aviv for two Gay Pride parades, totally by coincidence.  They were spectacular.  People from all over Europe, from all over the world come to Israel because it is a free society where people can own their own identities openly. 

Now, do you know how gays, lesbians, queer and transgender people are treated in Hamas-controlled Gaza, and in the Fatah-controlled West Bank?  They are harassed, attacked, tortured, and murdered.  They are brutalized for being who they are.  Yet people in America and Europe marched last week, just ten days after the horrific murders of children, women, and men all across Southern Israel, carrying signs that said, “Queers in solidarity with Palestine.”

I want to stress again: Israel is our indigenous Jewish homeland.  It is where our ancestors lived and died and our Jewish relatives created an extraordinary, amazing country.  There was no “Palestine” as a nation, or even a nationality, before Yasser Arafat invented that identity in blood in the early 1960s.  The true Palestinian desire is not for a two-state solution; it is “River to the Sea,” which is not very different from the old Arab vow to drive all the Jews into the Sea.  It is, simply put, genocidal. 

Make no mistake: those who march on college campuses in support of “Free Palestine” are marching in support of the genocide of Jews.  They are rallying to seek to destroy the only true democracy in the Middle East.  They are chanting in favor of Islamist murderers who would kill every Jew in Israel if they could, who shoot rockets regularly at civilian populations to kill and terrorize.  They are supporting vile terrorists who kidnapped 230 civilians to use them as hostages, who murdered families and recorded their crimes on video and posted them on the web.  These young people who rally for Palestine are thrilled that young people exactly like them at an all-night concert for peace were brutally gunned down and shot with rpgs and hand grenades.  That some of the murdered young people’s bodies still cannot be identified because of the brutal way they were slaughtered.

I’d like to talk about Israel’s response to October 7th, and the difficulty we should have in believing anything that Hamas and its spokesmen say.

There are certainly civilians in Gaza who are suffering, and more will suffer. This is deeply sad and a terrible and unavoidable outcome of war.  Now, we also know from the four hostages who were released that in the spiderweb of tunnels built by Hamas underneath the Gaza Strip that their terrorists are unaffected by the bombardment above, and that they seem to have plenty of food, water, and fuel.  Mind you, they do not share any of it with their Palestinian brothers and sisters in the terrorized population aboveground.  And if humanitarian aid is allowed to pour in, expect Hamas to commandeer most or all of it.  Three weeks ago, when Hamas began this long-planned and horrifically brutal pogrom, that same Gazan population was fine, had food and fuel and water and working sewer lines, all provided by Israel—that is, by the Jews.  The reason Gaza is in distress now is that its leadership determined that, once again, murdering, raping, wounding, and torturing Jews was more important that helping its own people.

I feel for the victims of all wars.  We must also realize that among the terrorists who poured into Southern Israel on that black October 7th were ordinary people, civilians who were not officially part of the Hamas terrorist army.  They came to murder babies and the elderly with axes and hoes, to burn the homes of families.  They were ordinary Gazans; civilians.  Some of them carried back Jewish hostages into Gaza.  Not all of these civilians are so innocent.

We also now know that a fairly high percentage of the rockets that Hamas and Islamic Jihad fire at Israel misfire, and hit Gazans.  The big lie that Israel bombed a hospital damaged diplomacy badly, and intentionally, when President Biden was in the Middle East.  It was later demonstrated, indeed proven, that the rocket that hit the parking structure next to the hospital was aimed at Israel’s civilians, and that it failed and killed Gazans.  It must be fairly terrible to be stuck in Gaza now.  That is deeply sad.  But to call a cease fire and allow the Hamas terrorists to survive is impossible.  Their sole goal is genocide of the Jews.  They cannot remain in power.

Just as clearly, there must be a plan for what happens after Hamas.  You cannot simply destroy the enemy; if you must live with them, and Israel must, based on geography, you must also have a way to eventually work out a solution that is more than “mowing the grass.”  I believe that ultimately there will be a two-state, or even three state solution: Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza.  But the time to determine that is not now.

I don’t know where this war will go.  Frankly, I’m surprised that it has taken the Israeli military this long to enter Gaza.  I believe they know far more than I or anyone here in America knows about the true situation of the hostages, the pressure they are receiving diplomatically, and the real dangers of attacking such a vicious enemy which is so well-supplied with armaments by Iran and trained by them as well.

But I do know one important fact: Israel is the Jewish homeland.  We are not surrendering it, ever again.  She needs our support and help now as much as she ever has.   

Let’s return to Avram, now in the later sections of Lech Lecha changed into Avraham, the father of nations.  That promise of a land also is the promise that we will be a blessing to all the peoples of the world.  In fact, we have been exactly that in the manifold contributions that Jewish people have made in every area of human endeavor. That, of course, is not the perception of Anti-Semites.  But that doesn’t change the fact that it is true.

This land of Israel is our homeland.  It belongs to all Jews.  It must be defended against enemies, and it must succeed.  The promise to Avraham remains, the indigenous connection to the land of Israel remains, the need to create security and safety for its people is acute.

And our duty as Jews is, in this time of crisis and pain, to provide support and to advocate for our only homeland on earth.  May we follow, ultimately, in Avraham’s footsteps… Ken Yehi Ratson

Basic Decency - the First Covenant

Shabbat No’ach, Rabbi Sam Cohon, Congregation Beit Simcha, Tucson, AZ

This week we chant No’ach, of course, one of the most famous of all Torah portions and the original great sea story of a truly ancient mariner.  At the end of the mabul, the flood, when Noah gets to leave the ark and go out on dry land, God gives a promise, the very first berit, the first covenant or contract that in Jewish tradition God makes with humanity.  The Creator vows never again to destroy the earth by water—we are able to do so, by the way, through, say, global warming, but not God—and we human beings are entered into a compact with seven specific rules. 

This Noahide covenant, the prime rainbow connection, has seven specific rules in it.  Mind you, these are not rules for Jews, or in the formal sense of the term mitzvot: they are the basic rules for civilized societies of any kind, of any religion or nation or peoplehood, the foundational laws that define whether a system, a culture, is good or evil.

While it can be a bit complex looking just at the literal text to discern where there seven rules are commanded, there is general agreement among rabbis and scholars that these are what God has Noah, on behalf of all humanity—after all, we may all be descended from Adam but we are also, according to the Tanakh, the Bible, also all descended from Noah—there is general agreement on the seven.  They are:

1.   Do not murder.

2.   Do not steal.

3.   Do not commit acts of forcible sexual violation.

4.   Do not cut the limbs off of a living animal, let alone a living human.

5.   Do not blaspheme.

6.   No idolatry.

7.   Have courts of justice.

These, it seems to me, are pretty basic rules that define whether people are ethical or unethical, moral or amoral, good or bad.  Please note, again, this has nothing to do with whether people are worshipping the right god, or keeping a Sabbath, or even whether they are giving enough to charity.  They simply are there to teach us how to know who is good and who just flat out is not.

Because in the Torah there is never an assumption that we will live in some bland, universally observant society or civilization.  There is always provision made for interacting with people and groups and nations and civilizations that think differently than we do.  And some of those will be good and deserving of respect and understanding.  Unfortunately, some will not.

Most of these rules seem so basic and essential, and we can scarcely argue about them: don’t murder, steal, rape, abuse animals; some are perhaps less obvious—do not attack the foundations of this code by claiming it has no moral source, that would be blasphemy; do not worship idolatrous gods that undercut the basic morality of this code.  And one, establish courts of justice, is there to make certain that the other six are maintained.

It is this B’nai No’ach covenant, this contract with God that we are glad to observe in the larger world, and that we should expect of any society or group with which we interact.

And yet—and yet, some societies fail to manage even this basic code.  We know that the Palestinian terrorists of Hamas intentionally, repeatedly and viciously violated the first four of these commandments two weeks ago and continues to do so.  We know that there has not been a judicial system worthy of the name in the 18 years Hamas has controlled Gaza, nor in the 27 years that the Palestinian Authority has controlled the West Bank.

It is in this context that I want to share with you part of a letter I received today from Rabbi Naamah Kelman, who heads Hebrew Union College’s Israel Rabbinic Program.  She writes, from Jerusalem,

The civilian mobilization has been extraordinary — I dare say, a Jewish miracle. Within hours, many key partners of the protest movement morphed to create city-wide situation rooms, local centers for relief, rescue, and recovery that are providing missing military equipment, accessories, food, clothing, and more for the reserves. These centers are working to support the tens of thousands of evacuees from the South and the North who are being sheltered in hotels and private homes. You will find Israelis of every stripe showing up at these centers. The sense of unity of purpose is inspiring, particularly after close to nine months of tension and conflict among us. We are called an am k'shai oref, a “stiff-necked people,” but oref is the modern Hebrew for homefront. We have proved again what it means to be a stubborn homefront while keeping our humanity in the face of this chaos. Something new is being born here, with all of you. I pray we can maintain this sense of shared purpose and hope so that we can write a new social contract that includes all Israelis: ultra-Orthodox, Israeli Arabs, Bedouins, and Druze alike — and we must find Palestinian partners to live with us in peace.

I have received many emails and texts like Naamah’s affirming examples of this all across Israeli society.  Secular, chilonim of course, which is most of Israel, and Modern Orthodox Jews, which is most of the Orthodox Jews in Israel, but also chareidim—who, like Chabad people, refuse to serve in the Israeli military—nonetheless coming forward to help care for the wounded, to prepare food and clothing items for those whose homes were destroyed by the Palestinian terrorists or who have been forced to evacuate by the rockets of Hamas and Islamic Jihad and Hezbollah.  Israeli society is a polyglot mix of a vast array of Jews who have different cultural and personal observances and even beliefs, and of Druze and Arabs and people from many nations who live in modern, civilized country.  And who have come together, when attacked, as we could only have dreamed would happen.

And perhaps that’s because of a shared understanding of what it means to be a basically good person, as defined here in No’ach.   

The goal of these Noahide laws has always been to allow people of different belief systems, different ethnicities and cultures, different backgrounds and hopes and dreams to live together in peace.  It allows diverse societies to reach across the boundaries of their differences to work towards a common goal.  It is that these real and even meaningful differentiations do not prevent us from achieving good in our civilization when called upon to do so.

It is perhaps something that our US House of Representatives needs to learn…

On this Shabbat No’ach, may we reinforce the lessons we have learned from this dramatic portion, and from our traumatic present, and grow to accept and understand others for their underlying goodness.  May we celebrate these differences, but base our larger actions on our foundational, covenantal similarity.

We are all human.  We all can seek to create goodness in our society and in our world.

Justice, then Peace in Israel

Sermon on Solidarity Shabbat with Israel, Shabbat Breisheet 5784

Rabbi Samuel M. Cohon, Congregation Beit Simcha, Tucson, AZ

This is a tough time for Jews everywhere, as it is a brutal time for Israel and Israelis, and for all who care about Israel and Jews, and, frankly, for all civilization. The horrific war crimes perpetrated last week by Hamas, the evil terrorist group that brings shame to the world, shocked and horrified everyone on this earth who has a conscience and the ability to tell right from wrong.  You have likely seen images, stories and videos documenting the brutality and evil of the civilian slaughter perpetrated by Hamas, and the Palestinian terrorist-posted social media showing their terrorists murdering children and the elderly, killing children in front of their parents and then murdering the parents, then using the parents’ cellphones to send videos of the atrocity to their family.  I’m sorry to speak about this at shul, but it happened less than a week ago to Jews: beheadings, children slaughtered, people burned alive.  This is pure evil.

There is no conceivable moral justification for these actions.  This is not warfare: it is war crimes, literally crimes against humanity, an attack on all civilization.  The people—and I use that word with regret—who did this are beyond redemption.  They must be brought to justice. 

The deliberate targeting of civilians to abduct—kidnap—them and take them into a chaotic captivity in the hellholes of Gaza, to rape and torture and commit murder are beyond anything related to any conceivable effort to quote-unquote-liberate anything.  These Palestinian terrorists took 3- and 5-year-old children, Holocaust survivors, and of course young women deliberately in order to threaten to do unspeakable things to them, to use them as human shields—isn’t that a horrible phrase—and of course to try to protect themselves from justice for their war crimes.  And some they murdered, and then dragged their naked bodies through the streets of Gaza as crowds shouted “Allahu Akhbar, God is great” and recorded and posted the atrocities on social media.

This was the worst pogrom since the Nazis, and as details of the heartrending slaughter continue to emerge, it is inevitable that Hamas will reap the whirlwind that it so thoroughly deserves.  Our prayers and thoughts are with the families of the murdered Israelis, Americans and other nation’s children who were brutally massacred, with the more than three thousand wounded in hospitals now in Israel, with the desperate families and friends of the 150 or more people stolen from their lives by these evil terrorists.

Let’s talk politics for a moment: My friends, Gaza has not been “occupied territory” for 18 years.  Israel pulled out under then Prime Minister Ariel Sharon in 2005—2005!—and has provided electricity and water and sewage control and what little productive economic activity exists in that strip of land with 2 million people for nearly two decades.  In exchange, the evil—and that word has never been more applicable than it is today—dictators of Hamas, who mostly live in rich settings in Arab capitals far from Gaza, have focused all that Iranian money and Qatarian money on murdering Jews.  And those innocent people of Gaza?  Hamas was elected to lead them by the people of Gaza in 2006, before making itself the religious Islamist dictators of the place and never again holding elections.  Perhaps these are the same innocent people that show up on the Hamas videos cheering while bloody, naked corpses of women are dragged through their streets? 

Remember, too, that Hamas would be elected to power in the West Bank if the Palestinian Authority’s Fatah faction had not suspended all elections since 2005. The Hamas charter calls for the total destruction of the State of Israel, and for killing Jews everywhere in the world; that is, this is not only a terrorist organization, but a profoundly anti-Semitic one dedicated to perpetrating genocide.

There is no proper response to this but unqualified condemnation of Hamas, and of any leaders in the world, including our own leaders, who do not join in that condemnation.  While much of the shocked world mourned with Israel, it’s notable who did not: the monster, Vladimir Putin; the mullahs of Iran, who paid for this brutality, provided the weapons that perpetrated it, and likely trained and organized the mass murderers; some Arab dictators—their leaders are pretty much all dictators, aren’t they?—including those working to improve relations with Israel; and of course, here at home, the morally empty Rashida Tlaib, until threatened with censure, and Harvard University’s president, who apparently can’t tell right from wrong; neither can the college student organizations around the US who “justify” Hamas atrocities.  There is never a justification for murdering babies and burning their bodies.  Never.  Never.  How dare they pretend that there can be?

My friends, we pray for peace in every Jewish religious service, multiple times.  But in order for there to be peace, there must first be justice.  Hamas and its terrorist sponsors and organizers must be brought to justice for their horrific, abominable crimes.  Only then can there be peace. 

This will be a very difficult war, and there is no other way it can be.  Israeli troops will have a hard fight, and there will be more casualties as they seek to remove Hamas from its nests and burrows and booby-trapped hideaways.  There will be no way to shield the civilians of Gaza from it.  Indeed, Hamas is using them to hide behind, as they will use the captive hostages to hide behind. 

Our role will be to continue to support Israel and to be vocal about it, as the enemies of civilization will be vocal in attacking Israel for the humanitarian destruction that Hamas has brought on.  It is important that we remember this and maintain our focus on restoring justice, and ending the possibility that such evil can again run free in a civilized nation.

I have long noted that the people who end up suffering the worst from the Palestinian people’s obsession with terrorism are the Palestinians themselves.  This week that wasn’t true; but I’m quite sure that it will soon again be.  Israel has been left with no choice but to destroy this evil that pretends to represent religion.  It is a great tragedy; a great tragedy.  And it must be done.

There are some stories that are hopeful, and it is these that we must remember.  Israelis have come together as one with astonishing speed.  And they are a unique people.

I read a report from a journalist who was trapped by Hamas in a safe room on a kibbutz near Gaza with his wife and two young daughters, 1 and 2 years old they had no water or food or electricity, but before the battery on his cellphone ran out he managed to call his father, a 62 year old retired general of the IDF.  His father and mother drove down in their ordinary car.  At one point his father, with nothing but a pistol, joined a fire fight assisting soldiers fighting terrorists who had ambushed them.  After killing the terrorists, his father and mother separated, and his mother drove two Israeli soldiers wounded in that fight to hospital, while his father found a 73 year- old retired officer who had a car, and the two of them drove to the kibbutz, now armed with the weapons given them by the wounded soldiers.  There they joined a special forces unit clearing terrorists out of the Kibbutz and saving those residents who were still alive and trapped.

At the end of the day they reached the journalist and his wife and children, and liberated them.

That’s a 62 year-old retired officer and a 73 year-old retired officer fighting gunbattles and saving Israelis from terrorists.

Hamas will never defeat or destroy this Jewish State.  It is unified by these horrors as it has not been unified in quite a while.  There will be a time, after the war, to assess what went so terribly wrong and why.  But now is the time to unite, to support Israel, to help others understand its centrality in our world, and to pray for its success.  For it must triumph now, for the good of the entire world.

It was in this week’s Torah portion of Breisheet, Genesis, that we human beings first learned to differentiate good from evil.  It is a shame that the world needs to relearn this so often, in every generation.   

A Multi-Faith Prayer for Israel Under Attack

by Rabbi Samuel Cohon, Congregation Beit Simcha

In this moment of heartbreak, all people of every truly religious conviction stand in full solidarity with Israelis. We remember the pain of being attacked by terrorists at home, and believe that all Americans across our country must stand united against these evil acts that have claimed so many innocent lives. 

We call on all civilized people to support Israel and its people in this traumatic time, and to defend the values of decency and human respect that are integral to human life on our shared planet.  This is a time to come together.  A carefully planned, massive assault on the innocent civilians of a civilized nation is an attack on all civilization, a crime against humanity.  Our religious values insist that we respect the integrity of human life and assert that those who attack it must be prevented from ever repeating this atrocity.

We religious leaders join together, in full unity across any perceived boundary lines of faith and religious tradition.  And so we pray:

We pray for the souls of more than 900 Israelis, Americans, Brazilians, Argentinians, and other nation’s citizens of all ages, from the very young to the elderly, brutally murdered by terrorists.  May their families find comfort in God, and may their hearts heal with time and with the help of the God who can bring consolation, from this awful destruction and heartbreaking loss.  Our prayers tonight are for them.

We pray for the thousands of wounded Israelis of all ages injured by the rockets, bullets, and grenades of terrorists.  May God help them heal completely, give their doctors and nurses skill and perseverance, and bring them to a complete healing of body, heart, and soul after this terrible trauma.  May they be comforted in their ordeal by the God who helps bring healing.  Our prayers tonight are for them.

We pray for the safe recovery of over 100 kidnapped hostages taken by these terrorists into Gaza, cruelly abducted to be used for evil purposes.  In their captivity and fear may they retain hope, and may their lives be spared by those who criminally forced them from their lives into this dark night of oppression.  We pray to God that they will be liberated speedily and soon, returned to safety and to their loved ones.  Our prayers tonight are for them.

We pray for the safety of those who are engaged in battling against the terrorists, who risk their lives to rescue those in danger and to prevent such atrocities from being perpetrated again.  We pray that they accomplish their objectives successfully as quickly as humanly possible and deny those who perpetrate evil any gains from their carefully planned actions against the innocent.  Our prayers tonight are for them.

And we pray for the Jewish people, and for all good people of every religion and culture who support Israel and its right to exist in security and safety.  May they remain strong and steadfast in their convictions and dedicated to the freedom of the only Jewish state in the world, and may their actions and words help it through this time of great trauma and tragedy.  Our prayers tonight are for them.

Finally, may we come again, ultimately, to a time when in the words of the great prophet Isaiah, all shall “sit under their vine and fig tree and none shall make them afraid.”  So may it be.

Flying Cars and Ne’ilah

Flying Cars and Ne’ilah

Rabbi Sam Cohon, Congregation Beit Simcha, Tucson, Yom Kippur 5784

And now, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang is on the way.  I don’t know how many of you saw the news article this past summer.  It said that the Alef Flying Car has received pre-approval from the FAA, the Federal Aviation Administration.  It is now possible to preorder the Alef Flying Car on their website for delivery in… 2025? 2026? 2030, perhaps?  Who knows, exactly?

Apparently, this car can be driven on streets like a regular car, but if you encounter serious traffic, you can literally take off straight up and fly over it.  No one online seems to know why it is called the Alef car—well, we can guess; there aren’t a lot of Bet or Gimmel flying cars out there yet, now are there?—but if you wish to put in a pre-order for this fabulous new vehicle, you can do so and be part of what the website says is the “general queue” for only $150; if you insist on being in the “priority queue” it will set you back $1500.

Oh, Brave New World that has such inventions in it…  It’s almost as though there is something divine in the technology.  Soon, perhaps, or maybe not so soon, we will all be able to soar high in the sky in our very own Alef cars, rise above our congested city streets and be pilots of our own destiny.

I’m not convinced that this will occur as soon as the investors in the Alef Aeronautics company are, but I do hope to see it.  It sounds fantastic, at least right up until the first time two people in their Jetsons-style flying cars turn into each other and crash down to earth…

But as we approach Ne’ilah that vision of being able to fly upwards in our very own cars is quite attractive.  I mean, we have been praying and fasting and singing and beating our breasts for 23 hours or so now, seeking forgiveness for all we have done wrong and hoping to be better people going forward.  Our stomachs are empty, but if we have managed to do this well then perhaps our hearts are full, and we are achieving a level of spiritual elevation, reaching up towards the Shechinah, the divine presence, in the quest of a full teshuvah gemurah, a true repentance.  It’s a little like having our own personal vehicles to rise above our normal state and accomplish all that we have sought throughout these yamim nora’im, these High Holy Days.   

I have sometimes thought about Ne’ilah as a kind of flying experience, when you let all you have left in you out to God.  I always imagined Ne’ilah as a bird, a tzipor, rising in this late hour of the day towards the heavens, as we wish our prayers and our repentance to elevate our own souls towards God.  But why not a flying car?  Because God knows we need all the elevation we can get at this final hour of the Day of Atonement.

There is a famous story about the Ba’al Shem Tov, the founder of Chasidism.  One Yom Kippur, the Baal Shem Tov was praying together with his students, and he had a worrying sense that the prayers were not getting through, and the harsh Heavenly Decree against the Jewish people was not being overturned.  He felt as though the synagogue building itself was becoming crowded with the unanswered prayers of the congregation.  As Ne’ilah approached, and with it the final opportunity for the Jewish people to avert this harsh judgement, he and his students increased their fervor and passion in their prayers, but to no avail.

As the chazzan began the Ne’ilah service a simple shepherd boy wandered into shul to pray. But he could barely read the letters of the Aleph-Beit, let alone say all the words in the machzor. Feeling helpless, he opened the first page of his siddur and recited: aleph, beit, veit, gimmel, daled. He said to God in his heart: “This is all I can do. God, You know how the prayers should be pronounced. Please, arrange the letters in the proper way.”

Louder and louder, with more and more intensity he recited the letters. Hey, vav, zayin, chet… the people around him began to mutter, complaining he was disturbing their prayers. But the Baal Shem Tov immediately silenced them, and declared for everyone to hear that “because of this boy’s prayers the gates to heaven are wedged open for the last few minutes of Yom Kippur, allowing our prayers in.” So it was on that Yom Kippur, that the simple, genuine prayers of a young shepherd boy who couldn’t read, resounded powerfully within the Heavenly court, and saved the Jewish people. 

My friends, if you can or can’t read the Hebrew perfectly, whether or not you know the nigun, the nusach for Ne’ilah, if have the strength and health to stand or must sit, if you cannot fast or fasted completely, you can still receive the magical elevation intrinsic to Ne’ilah.  Put your minds and hearts and grumbling stomachs to one final task, now: to allow your souls to take flight in this beautiful service of Ne’ilah, the last effort before the Gates of Repentance metaphoric close for this Yom Kippur.

May your own prayers help you to fly high in this coming hour; and may you be sealed in the Book of Life, blessing and peace.

King David and a Good Death

Yizkor 5784, Rabbi Sam Cohon, Congregation Beit Simcha, Tucson, AZ 

I’ve been thinking lately about King David, a remarkable figure in the Tanakh, the Hebrew Bible, and an even more potent person in Jewish rabbinic lore and legend.  David began life as a shepherd and the youngest son of a huge family of mostly older brothers—he was either the 7th or 8th boy, and he had two sisters—and of course rose to prominence after boldly and shockingly killing the giant Philistine, Goliath in the Vale of Elah.  He soon became the court musician to King Saul.  A good-looking guy—maybe very good-looking; red hair and perhaps blue eyes works well in this regard—he was a rock-star in Israel.  His songs, the Psalms, became wildly popular, sung throughout the land and used to this day.  After great success as a warrior, too, he ended up on the outs with the temperamental, jealous, and slightly insane King Saul.  Fleeing Saul, David turned into an outlaw, leading a mercenary band of outcasts as a kind of Iron Age Butch Cassidy or Jesse James.  Through chance, skill, chutzpah, and a remarkable gift for good luck, he ended up rising to become King of Israel, Saul’s replacement after the battlefield deaths of the old king and his sons. 

That meteoric rise alone would have been remarkable but David’s story was far from done.  As king he led the Israelites to greater power and military success than they had ever enjoyed, including the conquest of Jerusalem, David’s new capital.  He built a great royal palace there and planned to build the First Temple, only to be told by God that he had a little too much blood on his hands to do so.  David transformed Israel from a minor, tribally fractious region into a true nation with a powerful army.  And at every point in his life David was deeply committed to his belief in God, and demonstrated that monotheism throughout all 70 years of his life.

David’s private life was more complicated than a Kardashian’s: he had 7 or 8 wives—accounts differ—and at least 18 children, and his sons caused him a great deal of tzoris, either through their personal misconduct or by rebelling against David as they tried to depose him and make themselves king.  

One of David’s most famous acts was an adulterous one, in which he seduced—or perhaps, was seduced by—Batsheva, and when he learned she was pregnant he deviously sent her husband to certain death in battle so he, himself could marry her.  His life should have made a great biopic, but sadly the movies based on David’s life do not do it justice.  He was charisma and color personified, for better and worse.

In later Jewish lore David is treated as the ideal warrior-king, and the royal line he established considered to be the source of the only true kings of Israel.  In Midrash David’s manipulative and immoral acts are reinterpreted to show amazing virtue instead, and he is white-washed into a great noble figure.  Tradition even moves him into the role of the ancestor of the Messiah, mashiach ben David, and places the return to prominence and success for the people of Israel as his ultimate legacy.  David’s influence continues to be demonstrated by the fact that David is far and away the most popular Jewish boys’ name today, 3,000 years after his death.

Christianity takes David even further, seeing him as foreshadowing Jesus’s life.  I’ve always found this a curious connection.  While David was born in Bethlehem, almost literally a stone’s throw from Jerusalem, by all logic Jesus must have been from the Galilee, and the unlikely story of his birth in a stable far from his parents’ home only makes sense when you see the later literary need for a Davidic connection for the “King of the Jews.”  It’s also rather hard to see much of David’s persona in Jesus: Jesus composes no music and plays no instruments, nor does he pick up sword and spear, don armor and charge out to battle—let alone marry 8 different women, father a brood of children, or build and rule a nation.

In any case, I come today, on Yom Kippur, not to praise David, but to bury him.  Or, to put it more directly, I want to talk about David’s death. 

For all of his incredible talent, charisma, looks, and accomplishments, David has a rough going-away party in the Bible.  As he ages he declines—we all do, don’t we?—and his sons see him as weakened from the great warrior he was and ripe for replacement.  First his beloved, spoiled oldest son Absalom rebels, initially leaves David in distress but is ultimately defeated and killed; then another favorite son, Adonijah does the same with the same result.  Some of his most faithful warriors desert him to support various rebels.  It’s not pretty. 

As David, this great paragon king of Israel, is drawing near to death, he gives a last statement to his courtiers and aids, and especially to his youngest son Solomon, who will now succeed him.  We would like to report that David dies with grace and ease, with tranquility at the end of an impressive life. 

But he does not.

As David approaches death, weakened by illness and age and unable even to connect with Avishag, the last of his women, he instructs Solomon this way:

“I am about to go the way of all the earth. Be strong, be manly, and keep the charge of the Lord your God, walking in God’s ways and keeping God’s statutes, commandments, ordinances, and testimonies, as written in the Torah of Moses, so that you may prosper in all you do and wherever you turn. Then the Lord will establish his word that God spoke concerning me: ‘If your descendants take heed to their way, to walk before me in truth with all their heart and with all their soul, your line on the throne of Israel will never end.”

So far, so good.  If David stopped his final statement there we’d have nothing but praise for a good end to a complicated but heroic figure.  But he didn’t.  David kept going:

“Further, you know what Joab son of Zeruiah did to me, what he did to the two commanders of Israel’s forces, Abner son of Ner and Amasa son of Jether: he killed them, shedding blood of war in peacetime, staining the cloak of his loins and the sandals on his feet with blood of war.  So, act in accordance with your wisdom, and see that his white hair does not go down to the grave in peace.”    And now, on his deathbed, he makes Solomon swear to execute him.

But wait, there’s more:

“You must also deal with Shimei son of Gera... He insulted me outrageously when I was on my way to Mahanaim; but he came down to meet me at the Jordan, and I swore to him by GOD: ‘I will not put you to the sword.’  So do not let him go unpunished; for you are a shrewd man and you will know how to deal with him and send his gray hair down to Sheol in blood.” 

It's rough.  This great paragon, David, ends his days by dumping on his son Solomon the responsibility to take revenge on two of David’s old enemies—one of whom was actually David’s close friend and battlefield commander for much of his career, responsible for many of his victories, including capturing Jerusalem.  His very last words are commands to enact brutal revenge, executions that David swore not to perform in his own lifetime—"But now that I’m going to die,” he appears to say, “let’s see if I can get them eliminated by my successor without violating that oath.”

It's an ugly ending, isn’t it?  Talk about visiting the sins of the parents on the children for the third and fourth generations…  Or at least the second and third generations.  It’s disappointing that after apparently having finally ended all the feuding in his family, reaching the end of his long life and reign, David returns to the theme of vengeance and brutal punishment.  It’s just another reason I can’t quite wrap my head around the extreme idolization of David in Midrashim and in Zohar, where he mostly appears as an ideal king, warrior, poet, and unsullied hero.  David was great at a lot of things, but that’s not enough reason to forgive him his egregious acts.

Not least of them is this failure to let go of all those resentments at the end.

Sometimes great examples from our tradition teach us to do what they did not.

My friends, unlike King David we don’t always know how or when we are going to die.  We can’t always know the time or place.  But there are certainly different ways to act as we prepare to die, and we each make choices as we near the end. 

There are people who, like David, never really let go of the tzoris they experienced in their lives.  They may not call for the murder of their enemies when they pass away—God forbid—but they remain embittered by their frustrations and even defeats, unable to release that bile from their bodies and souls.  They do not die well.

Because there are those people who choose to end their lives in a state of tranquility, who seek to resolve old grudges or resentments before they go.  These people die in a state of calm and harmony, and the way they handle themselves before they go is a gift to their surviving family and friends. 

I have had the privilege this year of officiating at the funerals of people who made their peace with the world and its inhabitants before they died.  These funerals and shivas are indeed sometimes sad, but they also have the feeling of a gentle release.  That makes for, I would suggest, a truly good death.

When we remember the people who died at peace with their family and friends, but also at peace with the world, there is always a sense of peace, of shalom, of shleimut, wholeness in those memories.  There is a quality of sanctity to remembering those we loved who died in this way.

In the Tractate Shabbat in the Babylonian Talmud there is a particularly relevant passage.  Rabbi Eliezer says: "Repent one day before your death."

His disciples ask him, "Do a person know on what day he will die?"

"All the more reason he should repent today, lest he die tomorrow."

That idea should also be applied to forgiveness as well.  For if we are to make peace, to prepare to die well, we must forgive those who have wronged us.  And if we are to live well, the examples of those who have died well, at peace with the world, should remind us of this essential act.

Yizkor is a time not only of remembering, of memorializing those we love who are gone.  It is also a time to forgive any resentments or bitterness we have retained about them—and perhaps about anyone in our lives now.  It is a service with the capacity to bring us back to shleimut, to wholeness.

May your Yizkor prayers and thoughts help you to achieve this state of blessing and peace.

Finding God Today

Yom Kippur Morning Sermon 5784

There I was, dressed in all pink, wondering why the other theatergoers seemed to be avoiding me… when I realized that I misread the Facebook posts and Tweets directing me how to prepare to attend the biggest summer blockbusters.  I thought that was the proper attire for watching Oppenheimer.  Oops.

So there were two huge movie releases this summer, and they couldn’t have been more different. The Barbie Movie drew enormous crowds dressed in pink to cheer on their imaginary heroine as she went on an adventure of growth, a plastic protagonist’s journey of discovery.  The second film, Oppenheimer, drew huge—not quite as enormous—crowds to watch a three-hour IMAX biopic about the father of the atomic bomb. I must admit to not having seen the Barbie movie yet, but I’ve been exposed to its previews, music, merchandising and social media, as has every human being in America and on most of the planet.  I did, however, go to see the Oppenheimer film, although not really dressed in pink.   

First, I must make my chronic complaint about how Jews in films and TV series these days are typically portrayed by non-Jewish actors.  Look, if you are making a film about brilliant 20th century physicists, you are essentially making a movie about Jews, right?  And in this excellent film Robert Oppenheimer, Albert Einstein, Oppenheimer’s adversary, Louis Strauss, and Oppenheimer’s brother and lover, who were all Jews, are played by non-Jewish actors.  There are two token Jews in the lead cast, David Krumholtz who plays Isaac Rabi, and Benny Safdie who plays Edward Teller, both Jewish and playing Jews.  Otherwise, it’s non-Jews pretending to be Jews.  If Jews control Hollywood, we are doing a pretty poor job of promoting our own kind…

This is a minor quibble; I mean if Mrs. Maisel and both of her parents can be played brilliantly by non-Jewish actors, I suppose that it’s all fair game.

In any case, the film presents Robert Oppenheimer as a brilliant physicist given the most important, most expensive, and most preposterously difficult development and production task of the entire 2nd World War in spite of never having run anything more complicated than a graduate seminar.  And he succeeded.  Oppenheimer is presented, warts and all, as a hero—arrogant, impatient, imperious, unfaithful, but still, in what he accomplished for our nation, a hero.

And then his heroism is challenged on two fronts.  First, he realizes from the beginning that he is creating a weapon and giving human beings a power that can destroy the whole world.  His challenge is that he simply must create it before the Nazis do.  But after successfully shepherding the Manhattan Project to its goal, he is tormented by his own responsibility for the mass deaths that result from using the bomb.  And second, now of only academic interest, Oppenheimer’s early political involvement with the Communist Party comes back to derail his career at its very apex. 

When the atomic bomb exploded at the first test, Oppenheimer famously thought of the quotation from the Bhagavad Gita, the Hindu scriptures, “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.”  In a way, he had.  And anyone with access to that button, or later that nuclear football, also became a potential destroyer of this world.

The Oppenheimer movie gives us a foretaste of the human potential to destroy the world.  What is fascinating is that unlocking the mystery of one of the smallest building blocks of the universe, the atom, that unleashed this powerful potential to annihilate.  What is even more fascinating is that since that time, scientific exploration of the tiniest aspects of our physical world has revealed creative truths more meaningful than the mere capacity for destruction.  In fact, it was a scientific accomplishment in physics that has given us the greatest glimpse into the origin of everything, and let us have perhaps the closest view of God we have ever had.  Allow me to explain.

We have known for a while that there are smaller elements in the universe than the atom, what are referred to as subatomic particles.  Theoretical and then experimental physics has been exploring these particles for quite some time, and they work in weird and wonderful ways.

That is why there was a great deal of publicity a few years back about the discovery in physics labs and supercolliders of a new result, called in the media the discovery of “The God Particle.”  For a few days this God Particle story was trending at number one on Yahoo and Google search engines, and even had its own Twitter handle--@Godparticle, hashtag #Genesis, believe it or not.  It was particularly surprising to see the story of a physics discovery with exactly no practical applications penetrate the consciousness of our over-stimulated, information-addicted society, albeit briefly.  It even excited physicists, quite possibly the least excitable of all human beings. 

The God Particle story described the confirmation of something with the unappetizing name of the Higgs-Boson particle.  So what exactly is a Higgs Boson, or God Particle?  And what does it have to do with God, or us?

It turns out that the name “The God Particle” comes from a 1993 book by Nobel Prize-winning physicist Leon Lederman—he is, of course, Jewish; he’ll probably be played by a non-Jewish actor if they ever make the movie, though—called, The God Particle: If the Universe Is the Answer, What Is the Question?  The idea is that through over 40 years of experimental tests what is called the Standard Model of particle physics has been proven to correctly explain the elementary particles and forces of nature.  It explains nearly everything about how the universe works, and even how it came into being and thus far has all been proven to be true by experimental physics—with one exception.  It cannot explain how most of these particles acquire their mass, a key ingredient in the formation of our universe.  Without mass there is no universe.  So what gives these fundamental building blocks of creation their mass?

That’s where the God Particle comes in. 

Back in 1964 scientists proposed the existence of this new particle, now known as the Higgs Boson, whose coupling with other particles would determine their mass.  In other words, every particle would have to interact with this “God Particle” to give it mass.  It’s a bit like the story of Noah naming the animals, but it all happened 14 billion years ago: each particle would couple with the God particle which gave it its mass, and then expansion explosively began.

If this God Particle really exists, it is the one element in the universe that determines what all other elements become. 

It’s a kind of wild idea, but people much brighter than I am believe it describes just how our universe came to be.  The only problem was actually proving it’s true, which required finding this Higgs Boson, this God Particle.  That quest became the Moby Dick of contemporary physics: deeply desired but very hard to capture.

Experiments at the two most important and expensive supercolliders in the world, the one in Switzerland and the Tevatron collider at the Department of Energy's Fermilab outside Chicago both looked for the Higgs boson for years, but it eluded discovery.  To search for this God particle the Europeans just took apart their giant supercollider and rebuilt it much bigger and better, creating the Large Hadron Collider, which came on-line about 15 years ago.  Finally, after decades of developments in accelerator and detector technology and computing, scientists reached the moment of knowing whether the Higgs Boson, the God Particle, was the right solution to this problem.  And it was!

That is, most physicists now are convinced that the Higgs boson, the God Particle, explains how we, and the rest of the universe, exist. It explains why all matter created in the Big Bang has mass, and is able to coalesce. Without that, as a background paper to the experiment explains, "the universe would be a very different place… no ordinary matter as we know it, no chemistry, no biology, and no people." All energy, all everything, was present in that initial creation, and the God particle shaped every part of it.

Does that mean that seeing this boson, or scientific evidence of it, is like seeing panim-el-panim, the face of God?  I mean if this is the God Particle, is its confirmation scientific proof of the existence of God?

Well, that kind of depends on what you mean by God. 

If by God you mean the classic idea of a super-human being who looks like us, or speaks in audible words, and sits on a white cloud up above Mt. Everest, maybe not.  But perhaps that’s not really what God is at all.

So I ask you to sit back now, and listen in a state of relaxed attention, truly listening.  And allow me to describe creation in somewhat different terms.

Breisheet Barah Elohim… In the beginning there was the belief that God was an Old Man with a long white beard seated upon a cloud, hovering over the face of the universe that He—for God was male—had created.  And the Lord God was all-powerful and all knowing, transcendent, very, very big and very, very old, and he spoke in Elizabethan English with many Thous and Thines, and was called the Lord of Hosts and the Holy King and the Lord God. And this paternal Lord was the font of all truth and right. 

And this God created the whole world, and the universe, and knew everything that happened before it occurred.  And human beings, man and woman, God’s greatest and most challenging creations, filled the world God created and were supposed to carry out God’s will.  And when they didn’t they were punished.  And this conception of God worked for many people for quite a long time. 

Then things began to change.  New ideas popped up: emancipation; rationalism; science; atheism; psychology; sociology; the transitory isms of communism, fascism, and socialism.  World War shattered the idealistic rationalism of progress, and another World War and a Holocaust annihilated the shards.  Slowly and then suddenly, that all-powerful, all-knowing, all-good God with the white beard on the high cloud seemed more fantasy than reality.

In fact, in the face of this unending assault of ideas and circumstances, God the Old Man was in danger of just fading away.  He seemed not even to be He anymore, and perhaps just flat out irrelevant.  At least not relevant in the way so many people had thought about Him—Her? It?—for so very long.

But it turned out that just as God was disappearing from the world that God created, new ways of understanding God, and the universe God set in motion, were developing.  And those new ideas ranged over the broad span of collective human creativity, the magnificent ways in which human minds could act b’tzelem Elohim, in the image of God. 

Sometimes those new ideas coincided in surprising ways with the discoveries of science, and the realities of the world that we know from our own observation.   And then, even more surprisingly, those ideas about belief and God and science and creation all came together.

That is what’s happening today.  We are seeing a kind of harmonic convergence, a new and deeper understanding of God in the universe around us.

The Jewish way of thinking about God has always included a subtle, subversive understanding that is quite different from the transcendent concept of an old man with a white beard on a cloud.  That is the 2500 year-old mystical conception of God.  And that view of God, and our place in the universe, harmonizes beautifully with the scientific understanding of the universe that continues to develop.  Right now, in the year 5784, we have reached a kind of nexus between scientific discovery and mystical belief that is both intellectually convincing and extraordinarily beautiful.

It is the Kabbalistic conception of the world that most closely aligns with our scientific understanding of the universe today.  It is that mystical approach, long considered esoteric, elitist, and, well, flaky, that offers us the best ability to accept the presence of the divine in ways that have contemporary meaning.  Specifically, it is viewing God as the Shekhinah, the divine presence in Jewish mysticism, that allows us to understand God and the universe with intellectual integrity and spiritual meaning.

The very word Kabbalah has become both popular and controversial, of course.  Kabbalah literally means receiving, and it is a more contemplative, accepting, subtler way of finding God than many of us are used to.  I am not talking here about the kind of Kabbalah practiced by Madonna, or Ariana Grande, but the rich tradition found in the deep discipline and profound texts of the Zohar, masterpiece of Jewish mysticism.  In the Zohar, Shekhinah is simply the name given to the indwelling presence of the divine in this world, the essential holiness that can be sought and that seeks us, if we only become aware of it in our lives.

In essence, Shechinah is God in the natural forces of the universe, in the laws that govern our world and its processes, and in every creature in this world of ours whose creation we celebrate today.  The mystical God is both creator of the natural laws that govern our universe and the paradoxical, quantum presence that provides creative energy and animating life to all beings in that universe. The Shechinah is everywhere at once, and our ability to sense that presence, and to cultivate that sensitivity, is what is required to actually find God today.

And with some confidence we can now say that our scientific understanding of the world not only allows for such a creative essence, a Shechinah that motivates and forms all existence, but nearly requires it.

In the Zohar, a text written 700 years ago, creation, and the essential divine quality, are described this way: "A spark of impenetrable darkness flashed within the concealed of the concealed, from the head of Infinity—a cluster of vapor forming in formlessness, thrust in a ring, not white, not black, not red, not green, no color at all. As a cord surveyed, it yielded radiant colors. Deep within the spark gushed a flow, splaying colors below, concealed within the concealed of the mystery of Ein Sof."

In trying to comprehend what is meant by “The God Particle,” I came across this passage: “In the Standard Model of physics, the Higgs boson is a type of particle that allows multiple identical particles to exist in the same place in the same quantum state. It has no spin, no electric charge, no color charge. It is also very unstable, decaying into other particles almost immediately.”  And from that decay, that differentiation of the essential unity, comes all creation.

I would never contend that that Moses de Leon, writing the Zohar in Spain in the 13th century, understood contemporary particle physics as of September 2023.  But I can say that the parallels are often eerily fascinating.  And that the Kabbalistic approach to understanding God is both spiritually fulfilling and has intellectual integrity.  For when we become aware of the extraordinary beauty and elegance of that initial creation and understand the presence from that moment of a divine guiding element, we can and will find holiness, resonance, harmony, and energy in every element of this beautiful, sacred universe.

[Physical science researchers have reminded us that that we were each present at that initial creation, as energy shaped and formed by a greater power—just as today we are partners, with God, in the process of creation.  Junior partners, perhaps, but partners nonetheless.]

According to physicists, that moment of creation was an instant of unparalleled, unrepeatable release of energy.  It was that enormously creative expansion that began everything knowable in the universe.  From the birth moments of creation came everything that matters, including matter itself.  Fascinatingly, our own energy was present at that creation, and remains present.  Everything began in the same way, at nearly the same time.  And everything in this universe is therefore connected.

The interrelatedness of all being is a fact of life: a mystical insight, but also good common sense, and pure science besides.  We can trust that we are part of a vast web of existence constantly expanding and evolving.

As Zohar scholar Danny Matt puts it, “By attuning ourselves to the divine pulse animating all life, we can overcome our estrangement from nature. By exploring and contemplating the origin of the universe, we discover that our evolution is a step in a cosmic dance. Engaging the world spiritually, we realize there is no sharp line between the here and now and the ultimate. Looking for the spark, we find that what is ordinary is spectacular.”

As Matt concludes, “God is not somewhere else, hidden from us. God is right here, hidden from us. We’ve lost our sense of wonder in the fast pace of life. God is right here, in this very moment, fresh and unexpected, taking you by surprise.”

Our task in this new 5784 year is to become aware that God’s presence, the divine spark, really is everywhere.  And to relearn a sense of wonder at that amazing reality.

Which Way Are You Going?

Rabbi Sam Cohon, Congregation Beit Simcha, Tucson, AZ

Kol Nidrei Eve Yom Kippur 5784

 I have a t-shirt that was given to me by someone with a fine sense of humor, my wife.  It reads “You can’t scare me; I have two daughters.”

I like wearing it for the great responses it elicits, the knowing comments from other parents of daughters.  And while I can’t be scared—the shirt says so—I can be educated.  This year, I have learned two great lessons from my daughters.

The first comes, perhaps improbably, from Ayelet Claire Cohon, the gift Sophie and I received from God in February, now seven and a half months old and the person everyone always wants to talk to right after services every Shabbat, and on festivals, too. 

As a new father, doing this again after a little break, this year I’ve had the privilege of watching our daughter begin life and start learning how to do everything.  As a Jewish child she is, of course, incredibly brilliant and precocious, naturally, but in one area she is still a little challenged.  She is learning to crawl and working extremely hard at it.  She tries desperately to reach objects in front of her. 

But so far, the only thing that she has managed to do is to crawl backwards.  That is, she lifts herself up on her hands, and then onto her knees or feet, rocks vigorously back and forth, but she can’t quite coordinate the effort, and as she struggles mightily she moves steadily backwards.  No matter how hard she tries to go forward, she always ends up backing up.  And then our little baby gets frustrated as the object or person she is trying to reach moves steadily away from her.  Distressed at this turn of events, eventually she flops down and simply cries until we scooch her forward.

That is, she tries extremely hard to go forward but ends up, inevitably, going backwards.

I wonder if we are all just a little bit like Ayelet.  We try very hard all year to become better people, to achieve improvement, but usually discover that our goal somehow keeps moving away from us, receding into the distance. And while we may not lie on the bed or floor and cry, we do, on Yom Kippur, come to shul and kvetch.  For the sins we have committed by failing yet again to achieve our objectives…

I mean, the whole point of Teshuvah is that we are trying hard to get back to being the best person we can.  And we know that we have spent at least some of the last 12 months—perhaps most of them—backsliding, going in reverse.  Just when you think you are making progress you realize… not so much.  Objects in your rear-view mirror may be closer than they appear… because you are actually backing up.

And that experience leads to the second piece of parentally-learned pedagogy this past period.

The second lesson comes from Ayelet’s older sister, my daughter Cipora, who is in her twenties now.  She spent the summer traveling around Europe with a couple of friends, moving between and working on organic farms.  The acronym is “WWOOF”ing, that is, “World Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms”, or perhaps more simply, working on organic farms.  Early in her summer peregrinations she was working on a farm in Norway and had an instructive experience. 

As you may know I am a confirmed cycling addict, but much to my embarassment, I never taught Cece how to ride a bike; al cheit shechatati lifanecha shelo limaditi otah lirchov al ofanayim, for the sin I have committed by failing to properly educate my daughter… in bike riding.  In any case, while working on this lovely organic farm, Cece became friendly with the farmers’ 8 year old daughter, Vilje, who took it upon herself to finally teach Cece how to ride a bicycle.  Vilje was very serious about this instruction, and Cece began to make progress; soon Cipora would get a good start on the bicycle, but… then struggle and fall off.  And so the 8 year old looked at her gravely, and gave her this advice: “You just have to act as though you are going to keep moving forward.”

Now that is great advice, not just for riding a bike but for life.  “You just have to act as though you are going to keep moving forward.”  That is, no matter what bumps there are in the road ahead—and there will be some—you adhere to your original plan, and act as though you are going to keep moving forward.  And if you can do that you will keep on keeping on, and stay on the bike and ride!

I’ve thought a lot about those two quite different lessons.  Now, these may seem to be diametrically opposed pieces of wisdom.  Yet I believe they are actually complimentary.  First, it’s simply true that no matter how hard we try in our own lives to go in a set direction we often find ourselves headed away from our objectives.  In spite of that, our goals should remain firm, our resolution to continue towards what we know to be the right destination undiminished by challenges.  Act as though you are going to keep moving forward, not backwards, and sooner or later you will indeed be able to ride that bike—or crawl forwards, or even walk forwards—and so reach your objective.

This is a lovely metaphor, or double metaphor, for this Day of Atonement.  On Yom Kippur we first acknowledge the ways we have gone in reverse, and seek to return to the better course.  And we do so knowing that if we simply direct our own hearts and minds towards living a better, more valuable life we will be able to do so.  Start by admitting failures, be candid, but don’t give up or give in to distress or frustration; turn towards the right objective again, and go.  It’s simple, but true.

Now both of these pieces of daughterly wisdom certainly apply to each of us individually, but they also apply to our remarkable congregation.  This past year at Beit Simcha was, um, complicated.  Just before the 5783 High Holy Days last year we were told we needed to move from our home of nearly three years on Ina Road, and that we had just thirty days to do it; we requested and received an additional 30 days, but that was it.  After an urgent and exhaustive search, we discovered that there weren’t a lot of locations in the Northwest or the Foothills either available or appropriate to relocate a growing synagogue, and we managed to set up classrooms and offices on Oracle Road near River and, through the gracious hospitality of our friends at Church of the Apostles, we began holding services here last November.  And of course, we also had to arrange storage in three different locations for our bimah, ark, Torah table, chairs, tables, library, bookcases, appliances, kitchen materials, holiday items, art, and so much more.  Only through the extraordinary voluntarism of Beit Simcha’s members and leadership could so much have been accomplished so quickly, under Carol Schiffman-Durham’s organizing expertise and supervision.  It was amazing.

We continued to conduct services, classes, and events all while preparing for this challenging move.  And when we landed in our various locations, it turned out that we were OK, still upright, as it were.  You just have to act as though you are going to keep moving forward, and forward you go.  

And of course, we found what we thought was an excellent new home in the perfect location that was put up for sale the same day we received our eviction notice.  We began serious negotiations on the property in October of 2023, nearly a year ago, and endured a complex process that appeared to be working its way towards a very positive conclusion. We agreed on a sales price in March and were told the owners wanted to turn over the building and property to us by June 30.  At least, that was what they said.  We worked hard to secure the material donations that would make it possible for us to have permanent home after four moves in less than five years, and received incredible support from you, our congregation and community.  It was truly amazing and incredibly gratifying, and we assembled a significant and impressive building fund that allowed us to fund the remainder of the purchase while we continued to develop our resources.

We were so excited to be able to create the synagogue temple center that the Northwest of Tucson needs, to share the joy of Judaism from our new location.  All by July 1st, right?

Unfortunately, after a huge effort by our side to complete the transaction, including agreements and inspections and financial and legal work and real estate efforts, the large out-of-state corporation that owned it simply changed its mind and decided not to sell the property, informing us of that dismal fact at the start of August, nearly a year after they listed it and four months after we had what we believed to be a solid agreement.

Sometimes, no matter how hard you try to reach your objective it seems to be getting farther away from you…

Now we here at Beit Simcha are a resilient congregation.  We have been called “scrappy”, as a compliment, by a past landlord, and it applies.  We have survived all those multiple moves, the COVID years, controversies over shutdowns and re-openings, conducting virtual services and blended ones, and, like our ancestors, being Wandering Jews in a very real sense. These beautiful services are our fourth High Holy Days together, now in our third location, not counting the Drive-In 2nd Night Rosh HaShanah Celebration we did outdoors on the Gaslight Theater Northwest’s stage a couple of years ago.  Somehow, we have grown, both in membership and depth of programming and leadership and caring, through it all.  Now that’s resilience.

How have we done that?  Perhaps it’s as simple as my older daughter Cipora’s eight-year-old cycling instructor told her, “You just have to act as though you are going to keep moving forward.”

Or it might be that victory lies, for us, in refusing to admit defeat and succeeding in spite of it.  Or, better, that we know that we can overcome obstacles so long as we continue to work together, remain focused on our goals, demonstrate the caring, respect and kindness that is essential for any real synagogue community, and dedicate ourselves to creating and participating in beautiful services, real Jewish learning for children and adults, and sharing the true joy and depth of Judaism.  Our congregation is a true labor of love, and it must remain so to succeed.  I promise that it will.

We are now working on purchasing land to build our own, new building, and have completed a comprehensive survey of what’s available in the Northwest.  We expect to have some decisions soon and, as always, we will let you know exactly what we are doing. 

On Yom Kippur we think and speak and sing about the Gates of Repentance, the sha’arei teshuvah, being opened for us to return to goodness and to God.  In fact, the last Reform Movement Machzor before this prayer book was called Gates of Repentance.  It’s true that we say that those gates are locked at the end of Ne’ilah tomorrow night, which literally means the locking of the gates.  But the truth is that immediately after that happens, we have a prayer for repentance in all three weekday services.  That is, the gates may close on last year—but they are wide open for us again in the new year.

Well, just as those gates of repentance are open now for us individually after the, um, lockdown, so the gates of opportunity are open, again, for Beit Simcha.  We will walk through them—or crawl, or bicycle perhaps—this coming year of 5784.

Perhaps the best way of connecting these two disparate lessons is by remembering the middle lesson not incorporated in them.  That lesson is described in words sent to me by Lee Kane, our wonderful Beit Simcha congregant from Cape Cod, and an indefatigable member of our fabulous Fundraising Committee.  It comes from the greatest sports coach in history, the late UCLA basketball wizard John Wooden.  He might have written this with us in mind: “Do not let what you cannot do interfere with what you can do.”  

Do not let what you cannot do interfere with what you can do.  I promise that will be true for our congregation.  And, more directly, may this prove to be true for each of us personally over this Yom Kippur.

My friends, on this Kol Nidrei Eve, we each can do a great deal to improve our own lives and our relationships with others.  We each have the capacity to move forward, and to do so in the spirit of Teshuvah, of return to the best that is within us.  May you be blessed on this Day of Atonement with the strength and courage to move truly forward in your teshuvah, and in your life. Gmar Chatimah Tovah.