East Meadow Interfaith Thanksgiving Homily: Make Every Day Thanksgiving

A version of this sermon was delivered at the 2017 East Meadow Interfaith Thanksgiving Service on November 19, 2017 at the East Meadow United Methodist Church.

Good evening friends.  The last time I was honored with this opportunity to preach to our community was in 2013 and I had just been installed as the Rabbi at Temple Emanu-El.  You may recall that was the year that Chanukah and Thanksgiving coincided.  Let me thank Pastor Johnson-Agu for allowing me the honor of speaking this evening, as well as Rabbi Cohen-Rosenberg for her work organizing this evening’s service and the work she does to coordinate our Interfaith Council all year.  And thank you all for being with us as well.  This is a service to which I know so many, including myself, look forward every year.

This year, I must admit, however, is more than a little bittersweet for me and my community.  As you may have read in the Herald or heard in the supermarket, this coming July, Temple Emanu-El is merging into Temple B’nai Torah in Wantagh.  We fully anticipate that we will continue to be a part of the East Meadow Interfaith Council, as so many of our members will still be residents of East Meadow, and we look forward to being with you for this service in years to come, but our congregation will no longer have an East Meadow address.  It is sad; but it is the right decision for our congregation.

And so, before I do anything else, I offer my sincerest thanks to the East Meadow Faith Community on behalf of our congregation and our congregants.  We have been a part of the fabric of this community for 68 years and it is truly sad that we must go.  For the last three generations, we have called East Meadow our home.  This coming July, we will move.  It is less than 5 miles away from our current address, but it is also a world away, even if it is just over the border into Wantagh.  The specific reasons for our decision are best left explained at another opportunity.  So in the spirit of Thanksgiving, I thank you and your communities for the many decades of support, community, and collegiality.

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Each year "we gather together to ask the Lord’s blessing" and to give thanks.  And Thanksgiving is an occasion on which we publicly dedicate ourselves to gratitude, both personally and communally.  But it sometimes seems like we have decided that Thanksgiving is the only day of the year that we offer our thanks in such a public manner.  Thanksgiving is a once a year event, like New Year’s or a Birthday.  But unlike those events, Thanksgiving ought not be the only time that we practice gratitude and thankfulness in this manner.  Thanksgiving should be the day on which we model all other days of the year: not an exception, but the rule.  

Jewish tradition has a lot to teach us about thankfulness and what it means to have gratitude.  How can we can begin to work toward a commitment to thankfulness?  By committing to make every day a day of Thanksgiving!

To start, the term for gratitude in Hebrew is Hakarat HaTov, which literally translates to “recognition of the good.”  Embedded in our understanding of being thankful is a sense that there is a lot of good in the world, but we have to do the work to recognize it.  We have to take the time to think about that which is good in our lives, especially all that we might take for granted.  This act of recognizing the good grants us an opportunity to mimic the divine.  We learn in the first chapter of Genesis that as God creates the world, God makes a point on each day to recognize the good.

Our nature as humans, however, means that it’s often easier to complain about the difficulties we face.  Some of this is because we can all relate.  We all know what it means to be stuck in traffic or delayed in an endless security line.  We get what it means to be disappointed.  Negative feelings come on fast and seek commonality with others.

When we experience something good, we may understand that feeling to be quite personal, requiring a deeper connection or relationship with another in order to share it.  Recognizing the bad is easy; and our modern lives have been built on valuing the easier, faster, and more convenient.  We commiserate easily with others about the bad.  How many times have you been in a line and someone shares their frustration with how long the line is or how slowly it’s moving? 

Recognizing the good, on the other hand, asks that we focus on how wonderful it is that we’re in line about to see a show, or get on a plane to travel to see a loved one or see a place we’ve always wanted to visit. Recognizing the good means that we ought to focus on the gifts we are given.  It is a matter of faith to recognize the good.  It requires that we pause to let in the good and let out the gratitude.  

Recognizing the good takes time.  At least we think it does.  But, truthfully, it takes no more time than focusing on the negative.  It’s about our mindset.  Are we programmed to seek out the good and give thanks or are we programmed to seek out and highlight the negative?  Have we programmed ourselves to do one over the other?  We can retrain our minds to recognize the good simply by doing so over and over again.  Gratitude begets happiness, which begets more gratitude.

Let us retrain ourselves to see the good, recognize it and be grateful for it.  Let us not allow Thanksgiving to be the once a year holiday where we force ourselves to see the good!  Let the good that we see in our lives every day be called out and heralded.  This is perhaps what Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, the former Chief Rabbi of the United Kingdom means when he describes thankfulness as "a transformative act of faith."[1]  We are transformed by seeking out the good!

And this is now where I’ll preach to the choir, because people of faith often have more ability to recognize the good and show gratitude because our faiths allow us a conduit through which we can channel our gratitude. Whatever concept of the divine we may hold in our hearts and souls, it is a shared trait that we show our thanks and offer prayers of thanksgiving to the Source of Creation.

Judaism, as all faiths, has many prayers of thanksgiving and though they are particular to our worship, they contain many universal truths about what it means to be thankful and show gratitude for the good we recognize in our lives.

One blessing of thanksgiving is found in all three of the Jewish daily prayer services, just before a blessing for peace.[2]  Traditionally, this blessing is first said independently as a part of a litany of many blessings. These blessings are then repeated by a prayer leader when one is present.  The prayer leader has the authority to recite all the blessings of this litany on behalf of the community, and all we have to do is agree with an Amen.  There is one exception.  When the repetition of the blessing of thanksgiving is offered by the leader, each member of the congregation recites it on their own as well.  Tradition explains that this is because no one may offer thanks on our behalf.[3] 

The universal truth of this tradition is that we have to do it ourselves.  We are not supposed to send anyone to be thankful on our behalf.  True thankfulness cannot be outsourced, not even to a prayer leader.  We have to recognize the good in our own lives and show our own gratitude and our own appreciation.  No one can do it for us.

This blessing of Thanksgiving begins in scripture.  In the Torah, the Books of Moses, God commands a series of sacrifices, among them, the Thanksgiving offering.  For the last 2000 or so years, prayers have taken the place of sacrifices in Jewish worship, which is why we have that blessing of Thanksgiving.  The ancient rabbis[4] teach us that in the messianic age, all the sacrifices and prayers will be cancelled, with one exception: the Thanksgiving.  Jewish belief is that the messianic age will be a time when no one will have any needs and the universe will be complete and at peace.  We won’t need to ask for anything.  We won’t need to recognize God’s greatness.  The only thing that we will need to do is give thanks.  The messianic age will be an age of pure thankfulness. 

The universal lesson here is that thankfulness never goes out of style and will never not be necessary.  If we will have all our needs met in the messianic age, and yet we will still need to offer thanks, how much more important is our gratitude now for the good things we do have in our lives? 

Gratitude, thankfulness, recognizing the good.  These are eternal requirements.  Not even the messiah undoes their necessity in the world!  Our gratitude is always necessary.  And it is essential that it always be personally given.  If we remember these lessons, we can begin to work to make every day a day of Thanksgiving, rather than just the 4^th Thursday in November.

Rav Kook, the first chief rabbi of Israel once taught[5], and I’m paraphrasing here, that without gratitude and recognizing the good, our spirits lose their sparkle and their shine.  By recognizing the good, we keep that sparkle in our soul, we keep the light of God in our beings, and we remain able to be bearers of that light.  Our souls shine brightly when we are grateful.  Our spirits dazzle as they emit the divine light.

May we all work to let our spirits shine in this next year and in the days ahead.  May we learn to recognize the good, and through that good offer our gratitude to God.  In doing so we allow God’s light to break forth like the dawn.  In doing so we taste the messianic age in our own day.  In doing so we can make every day a day of Thanksgiving.

May we all have a blessed and safe holiday.

Thank you.

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[1] Note on Modeh Ani, Sacks Koren Siddur, p. 5

[2] Referring to Modim

[3] Rabbi Doug Zelden

[4] Vayikra Rabbah 9:7

[5] For the Perplexed of the Generation 4:9

Why I'm OK with Larry David’s Jokes

“Explaining a joke is like dissecting a frog. You understand it better but the frog dies in the process.”  E. B. White

Seinfeld and Curb Your Enthusiasm creator and writer Larry David is getting a lot of flak for his monologue on last week’s Saturday Night Live.  The monologue was indeed edgy and boundary pushing, touching on topics from sexual harassment in Hollywood to the Holocaust.  Many people who saw and heard these jokes were instantly outraged.  The ADL, which I support, denounced it.  Rabbis are calling for apologies.  Many people who didn’t see or hear the monologue are angry as well.  How dare he make fun of either of these topics!  The issues are personal, sensitive, and not appropriate for the subject of jokes! 

Part of me believes this was David's intended purpose, because he is a master at the comedy of making people uncomfortable.  Another part remembers that, as the converted dentist Tim Whatley teaches us, “It’s our sense of humor that sustained us as a people for 3000 years!”

I’m not shocked by the jokes; I actually found them quite funny because they pushed the envelope.  Nor was I shocked by the outcry afterwards.  In fact, as I was watching, I knew that many people wouldn’t find the jokes funny, and some would probably make that sentiment public.  That’s OK.  Humor is a matter of taste, and taste is subjective.  

Here’s what’s not subjective, though: the jokes did not make fun of the victims of sexual assaults and abuse or the abuse itself; the jokes did not make fun of Jews other than David himself; the jokes did not make fun of Holocaust survivors or their memory; and they did not make fun of disabled people.  If David had done any of this, I agree, we should be critical.  But the response shows a lack of understanding what David was doing in his monologue and what the messages of his jokes actually were.

Was it the greatest set of stand up ever?  No. Was it powerful?  Absolutely.

Let’s take a look at what Larry David said so that we can try to understand what he was saying.

First, he awkwardly transitioned to the subject of there being a lot of sexual harassment in the news of late, and he commented on the fact that “many…not all…but many” of the accused happen to be Jews.  His hesitation and discomfort in saying these phrases is important and the crux of the joke. He doesn’t like that it’s the case that there’s a lot of prominent Jews on the list of the accused.  He doesn’t even want to bring it up.  But his humor has always been about talking openly about those things we’re not supposed to talk about openly.

He goes on to say that he would prefer to see headlines about Einstein and Salk’s achievements rather than Weinstein’s bad behavior (which he referenced using a call back to an episode of Seinfeld).  He then discussed how he tries to always be a good representative of the Jewish people, such that when people see him, they’d not only recognize it, but announce him as a "Fine Jew" as he walks by.

As Jews, many of us know what it means to be seen as a token, or representative of the whole group.  We know how it feels to see a Jewish name in the paper, like Madoff, and cringe that “it’s not good for the Jews.”  Naming this anxiety and this quirk of being a minority is not about minimizing Weinstein’s behavior or making fun of his victims, nor is it about diminishing Jews.  It’s about recognizing that for some people one Jew is connected to every other Jew, and Jews have to live with those consequences.  The joke is not about sexual assault at all.

David lampoons this ridiculous notion that one member of a minority and their behavior represents the collective will and behavior of the entire group.  It’s an important statement about actual anti-Semitism, and one which can only be made after a prominent Jew does something really, really bad.  The main question of the joke remains unspoken.  Do we all now have to be on our best behavior because one of us committed some truly terrible acts?  There is a certain neurosis that might make Jewish people think so, and naming it calls it out as ridiculous.  David's monologue, which he knows is boundary crossing, is also an answer to this question: a resounding no!

David then moved on to a bit about how ridiculous men’s expectations of women are, using the fictional character of Quasimodo, a French hunchback, who only wanted to date the prettiest woman.  David did an impression of Quasimodo which some felt crossed the line into making fun of the physically disabled.  But David’s critique of Quasimodo had nothing to do with him being disabled.  Rather, it was about his being a ridiculous man, whose standards were too high and whose expectation of women is unrealistic.  It was not a joke about the disabled; and in fact, is a joke at the expense of men and the culture of masculinity which says that men deserve a certain kind of woman. No man is free from this, no matter their background.  And, it's ingrained even in our best works of literature. 

Finally, David moved into his most controversial jokes.  Watching him, it appeared that he was reconsidering the jokes even as he began.  He knew he was playing with fire.  David set up a premise, wondering aloud what he would have done had he been alive in Poland during WWII, when Hitler comes to power.  He shifted to imagining himself as an inmate in a concentration camp.

Here’s where an important distinction needs to be made.  He made a joke which takes place during the Holocaust, but is not a joke about the Holocaust.  Some may disagree with this distinction, saying that the Holocaust is never to be joked about.  That’s a valid opinion; but it’s an opinion, not a fact.  If that’s not your kind of humor, turn off the TV.  Perhaps The Producers is on another channel.

David wonders: if he were an inmate, how would he pick up a woman.  He bemoans the fact that there are no good pick-up lines in a concentration camp.  He plays a scene out for us.  Again, the joke here is not at the expense of a survivor, or the Jews who perished.  It's not even at the expense of the Nazis.  It’s at his own expense, at his ridiculous male instinct to think only about women and sex, even at the least appropriate times.  Just as in the Quasimodo joke, David makes fun of men in general.  His joke says that even in the camps, men would be figuring out how to pick up women, because that’s what men do, because that's what he would do.  If anything, the joke humanizes the victims, reminding us that they were people who had impulses, feelings, and emotions.

David knows that simply by setting the joke at a concentration camp, rather than, for example, at a modern day prison, it raises the stakes.  He could have made the exact same joke and set it during the Roman destruction, the Crusades, or the Inquisition (what a show!).  In these other settings of Jewish calamity, would we be so sensitive about a joke that at its elemental level treads the old premise made famous by Roseanne, that “men are pigs” and only have one thing on their mind?  Maybe those Jewish tragedies are far enough in the past.

Those raised stakes are, for me, one of the reasons that David’s jokes are even funnier. 

I understand and don't deny that the Holocaust and sexual assault are touchy subjects which should not be the butt of jokes.  In this case, they were not.  But there is a school of comedy which believes that nothing is off limits.  Just because he said the words concentration camp doesn't mean he was being anti-Semitic (though, self-hating would be more apt a description, maybe).  His jokes about Weinstein don't mean he condones the behavior.  Larry David is not the bad guy.

There’s a lot of real and painful anti-Semitism and misogyny in the world right now.  Larry David’s monologue is responding to that.  If we listen carefully to his words, we see that he actually tries calling a lot of it out.  I think he was successful in this endeavor.  You may not.

We are better served by listening to the actual words and messages of these jokes.  They're not about nothing.  If we lead with our outrage and neglect the message, we miss the entire point of a lot of stand up comedy today, which strives to do more than set up a joke and deliver a punchline.  It strives to make sense of the difficulties of the world around us through humor and personal anecdote, pointing out just how ridiculous human behavior and the world often are.

We can't fix our ridiculousness and foibles if we don't name them first.