Seventh Day Passover 5785: Caught Between

 A version of this sermon was delivered at Temple B'nai Torah - A Reform Congregation, Wantagh, NY on Shabbat 7th-day of Passover 5785 (April 18, 2025)

Tonight on our calendar, we arrive at the last day of Passover.  Tonight, we also commemorate the crossing of the sea.  Tradition tells us it was on the night of the seventh day that God parted the waters to allow the Israelites to walk on dry land toward their freedom and the promised land.

Just before the Israelites leave Egypt, after the commandment about the pascal sacrifice and how it will be offered in the future and by whom, we read, and not for the only time: “תּוֹרָה אַחַת יִהְיֶה לָאֶזְרָח וְלַגֵּר הַגָּר בְּתוֹכְכֶם There shall be one law for the citizen and for the stranger who dwells among you.”[1]  We hear this idea over and over again in our Torah, that there is to be one law for the citizen and stranger alike.  We are not supposed to oppress the strangers for we know what it was like to be oppressed strangers in the land of Egypt.

The Haggadah reminds us that we are each supposed to see ourselves as if we were personally freed from Egypt, because of what God did for me, when God brought me out of Egypt.  So tonight, on this fateful anniversary, we put ourselves in the ragged sandals of the Israelites.  Let us imagine that we have witnessed the plagues, that we have put the blood on our doorposts, and that we hurriedly packed our dough and our timbrels in our sacks just a week ago.  We are amidst the mixed multitude that took their first free steps on the 14^th of Nissan and has been walking now toward an unknown destination, only remembered in dream and in song.

Imagine what it must have felt like to be in that crowd, on the shores of the sea, and to suddenly learn that Pharaoh has changed his mind.  To feel so trapped, surrounded, caught between the choices of a return to slavery and bondage or certain death in the waters of the sea.  How do we even decide in that moment what to do?  How do we decide when the answers on both sides are equally terrible?  How do we get out of the stuck?

In the Torah we know the answer.  God calls on Moses to raise his staff in his hand and for the waters to part.  We don’t have to choose between bondage and drowning because God gives us a third option.

This feeling of being stuck between two bad choices is made most real in our sacred and powerful story of redemption.  The Jewish people being caught between two bad options is not reserved for the Torah, or for our history.  Today, we are again caught between two bad options as American Jews.  On one side, we have the rising and ongoing antisemitism of our society and the world.  On the other side, the current government’s fight against antisemitism, which brings with it a disdain and a disregard for the rule of law and due process rights.

Like the commandment in the Torah, due process is granted, according to our constitution, to all people.  The language of the Constitution is clear in the Fifth Amendment: “No person…shall be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.”  The 14^th Amendment goes on to add that no state has the right to: “deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.”  The Constitution doesn’t say citizens.  The Constitution doesn’t say Americans.  The Constitution doesn’t say anything about race, national origin, or immigration status as a disqualifier for these rights.  Nor does it say that one’s faith or religious practices or beliefs disqualify someone from these legal protections.

As Jews we know personally what it means when rights are stripped from a group of people by a supremacist regime.  We know what it means when the protections of a state are capriciously taken away or denied, when those protections we believed would keep us safe are trampled on and forgotten.  A new pharaoh arose over Egypt who did not remember Joseph.  The unsaid ending of this verse of Torah is that the new Pharaoh went back on an agreement and undid the decree allowing Jacob and his family to dwell in Egypt in peace.  Throughout Medieval Europe, Jewish communities lived at the pleasure and under the protection of local lords and nobles, until those nobles tired of the Jews or owed them too much money, and so changed their minds, and terrorized them and kicked them out.  In the 20^th century, German Jewish citizens’ rights and protections were stripped from them by the Nuremberg Laws, solely because of their Judaism.  Jewish citizens of Arab nations were expatriated and deported from lands in which they’d lived for centuries and generations.  It is in part thanks to the due process rights guaranteed to all people that Jews have been able to thrive as we have in this nation.  It’s what has made this nation different.  No one can take anything away from us just because of who we are, where we come from, or what we believe.  At least, that’s how it’s supposed to work. 

Today, in this nation, students whose beliefs are unpopular with the regime have been denied and deprived their due process rights.  Other strangers who live among us have been snatched off the street without court or tribunal and sent to prison camps in another country to languish.  The reason behind much of this is allegedly to fight against antisemitism.  In order to keep the Jews safe, the reasoning seems to be, we need to take away the rights of a few, select others.  In order to keep the Jews safe, we have to do away with the rule of law.  This is a false choice that we have been asked to make. 

This false choice has been called out this week by a statement from the Reform, Conservative, and Reconstructionist movements in America as well as HIAS and the Jewish Council on Public Affairs.  This statement reads, in part:

“In recent weeks, escalating federal actions have used the guise of fighting antisemitism to justify stripping students of due process rights when they face arrest and/or deportation…Students have been arrested at home and on the street with no transparency as to why they are being held or deported, and in certain cases with the implication that they are being punished for their constitutionally-protected speech. Universities have an obligation to protect Jewish students, and the federal government has an important role to play in that effort; however, sweeping draconian funding cuts will weaken the free academic inquiry that strengthens democracy and society, rather than productively counter antisemitism on campus.

These actions do not make Jews—or any community—safer. Rather, they only make us less safe.

We reject any policies or actions that foment or take advantage of antisemitism and pit communities against one another; and we unequivocally condemn the exploitation of our community’s real concerns about antisemitism to undermine democratic norms and rights, including the rule of law, the right of due process, and/or the freedoms of speech, press, and peaceful protest.”

The pretexts being used against students to deny them their rights now extend to anyone suspected of being here illegally, anyone with the wrong-looking tattoo, or anyone born in another country, or with brown skin. 

Remember not to oppress the strangers for you were strangers in Egypt.  No person shall be deprived due process of law.

We are stuck, as Jews in America, today.  Between those purporting to be on our side and “fighting our enemies” with us or for us, and the laws of this land which have kept us safer than anywhere we’ve ever lived other than under our own sovereignty.  The rule of law has made it possible for us to call ourselves Jewish Americans rather than Jews in America.  The rule of law is why, when a synagogue is attacked or a Jewish Governor’s residence is firebombed, we can expect justice.  Due process is why our religion cannot be used as evidence against us.  We are being put into this position between the sea and the Pharaoh and what are we supposed to do?  Where is God to part the waters and lead us on dry land?

Whether or not any of these students have done things that put their immigration status in jeopardy is a legitimate question to be taken up by an immigration court and judge, with appropriate legal representation for the accused.  Whether or not we agree with these students and believe that some of them should be deported ought to be secondary to our belief in, advocacy for, and dedication to the rule of law and due process.  I don’t like what Mahmoud Khalil believes, what he says, or what he stands for.  And I believe that he deserves the same rights as anyone else and everyone else. 

There shall be one law for stranger and citizen alike.  No state shall deprive any person of due process of law. 

I am proud to be a member of the CCAR who joined in authoring and promoting this statement.  I am a believer in the promise of America and our rules and laws.  Or at least I have been.  We are in early dangerous stages of a shift in the very foundations of this nation, and it must be called out for what it is unkind, and ultimately un-American and unconstitutional.  These immigration raids and deportations in the name of Jewish safety have left us once again with no good options.  If we call out and fight for the rule of law, we are cozying up to antisemites and being a party to our own destruction, no better than kapos. 

If we allow for the degradation of the rule of law, we put ourselves and our families and communities at more risk and peril, perhaps not today, but certainly soon.  The point of the powerful and overused ‘first they came for” poem is not who they came for first.  The point is the last line.  “Then they came for me, and there was no one left to speak for me.”  Will you say something before it personally affects you?  That’s the question inherent in the poem.  When the laws stop applying to some, when the law is exercised with prejudice and based on whims of preference, ultimately no one is safe.  When legal residents are mistakenly sent to El Salvador and there’s no check and balance, no empathy, and no attempt to right a wrongful deportation, not one of us is safe.  When immigration agents are judge and jury, no one is safe.

A false choice is put before us.  We can and should fight antisemitism in all its forms, from left, right, and center with vigilance and determination.  As the CCAR statement makes clear: “It is both possible and necessary to fight antisemitism—on campus, in our communities, and across the country—without abandoning the democratic values that have allowed Jews, and so many other vulnerable minorities, to thrive.”

This is the path on dry ground.  This is our third option.  Not to allow for antisemitism nor to allow for the decay of our legal foundations.  The way through the waters to the promised land is paved with our voices and our belief that we can have and deserve both a nation and a society in which we are safe and in which our lives are protected under the shelter of due process. 

It was not Moses or his staff that parted the waters that day.   It was a man, Nachshon the son of Amminadab, who looked around and said that there must be another option.  Neither willing to die at the hands of the Egyptians nor willing to drown, Nachshon believes deeply that God will ultimately come to save.  So, he takes the first steps into the water, before anyone else, and he keeps going until the water is up to his nostrils.  Only when he is almost fully engulfed does God finally part the waters for all the people.  Nachshon had such deep faith to take those steps, and real courage.  To take the steps onto a third path is not easy.  It can be overwhelming and scary.  It requires a lot of courage and the expectation of discomfort.  But we have no choice; our other options are untenable. 

We all have to be Nachshons, declaring that there is a dry path before us, if only we take it.  We all have to be Nachshons believing in the promise of a better future and willing to do the work to get to it.  Willing to say that neither of the easy paths is safe for us, so we will forge a new path.  When we take those first steps, when we live by the rules of our tradition which work in tandem with the rules of our free society, we call upon God’s presence to be at our side and ultimately to redeem us. 

There shall be one law for stranger and citizen alike.  No state shall deprive any person of due process of law.  

We are at the border of the sea.  The Pharaoh is behind us and closing in.  Do we have the courage to take the first steps?

Shabbat Shalom and Chag Sameach

[1] Ex 12:49

Kol Nidre 5785: Less iPhone; More I-Thou

 A version of this sermon was delivered on Kol Nidre, Erev Yom Kippur 5785, at Temple B'nai Torah - A Reform Congregation in Wantagh, NY.

            I know it’s Yom Kippur, but the fast only just started, so I don’t feel so bad that my story tonight starts with dinner.  Picture it, Vilnius, this past summer.  There I was, getting off the train, worn down from a difficult day of sightseeing in Kaunas, and the mass murder site, the Ninth Fort, just outside that city.  I walked the 15 minutes from the train station thinking deeply about how those tracks which carried me between these cities were probably the same ones that carried my grandfather a century ago.  I got to the restaurant, asked for a table for one and was shown to a beautiful table outside under a tree.  The sun was low, the temperature was pleasant, if a little muggy, owing to the rain that day.  It was Friday, and my Shabbat plan was to enjoy a nice dinner to counteract the hard day.

I placed my order, poured my beer, and began to watch what was going on around me.  A family to one side.  A group of Russian tourists that look like an extended family at two tables pushed together, loudly interacting with each other, but more their devices.  A couple of friends waiting for another friend to join them and starting with some wine.  A couple on a date.  I take out my notebook and begin to journal a little bit about my experiences that day, to try to write my immediate reflections, and so that I don’t forget what I did and saw. 

As I’m writing, I overhear a discussion at the entrance.  Another gentleman, by himself, has asked for a table for one, in a German-accented English.  Alas, the restaurant only has tables inside, they tell him.  His response sounds disappointed as he tries to get a sense of how long the wait might be.  I have only just placed my order, and I’ve got a table to myself, I realize.  I get the host’s attention and offer to share my table with this stranger and fellow single traveler, if he is willing.

I motion to him and he sits down.  As he does, I introduce myself and I guess, because his voice reminds me a little bit of Arnold Schwarzenegger, that he is Austrian.  And I’m right, so I have impressed him, and we get to talking.  He tells me about his Belarussian wife and how he’s alone because you can only get to Belarus on land, and Vilnius is the closest major city, so she went to see her family and he stayed behind because his Russian can only last him about two days, so he’s let his wife go on ahead.  We chat.  We toast to traveling.  We share about what we’ve seen.  When the inevitable question of what we do comes up, I decide that I will tell him—because I don’t tell everyone—that I am a rabbi. 

He is flabbergasted.  “I’ve never had dinner with a rabbi before!”  He tells me he lives in Vienna not far from the Jewish Museum that some of us here visited together a few years ago.  I know that this means he lives in the old Jewish quarter, and I also know that the questions I want to ask about who the building he lives in used to belong to are probably not ideal for our cordial Shabbat dinner. 

My food arrives and we continue to chat.  We each order another beer and I share with him about my life and he shares with me about his life.  His food arrives just as it begins to gently rain again.  As I’m under the tree, and about done with my meal, I decide to rough it out for a few minutes, but he chooses to go eat indoors.  We shake hands, wish each other well, and part ways.

This is one powerful interaction that I had, and I could tell you about the gentleman from South Carolina I met on my tour of the Alpine castles who was traveling with his two daughters who were always on their phones.  I could tell you about the German family from Hamburg I met in Munich on their way to New York for their very first family trip here.  The excited daughters spent a lot of time on their phones and asked me about things in New York that are TikTok famous and which, therefore, I have never heard of.  They’re staying in Queens, and I don’t have the heart to tell them how long their subway ride will be into the city.  I could tell you about the French couple or the Portuguese man who I met on a van tour of the Lithuanian and Latvian countryside, or the Turkish woman who I toured part of Dachau with.

All of these encounters, fleeting yes, but deep and meaningful moments of connection, happened not just because of my sparkling personality.  These interactions, these powerful moments of connection and encounter happened, I firmly believe, because I took social media off of my phone and because I made a point this past summer to not experience life through a screen. 

Yes, I took pictures; and I’ve shared some of those with you.  And I kept my phone away, as much as possible.  This helped me to recognize and to understand that while our smartphones are powerful, important devices that do much good, they are also a tool whose effects we are only just learning. 

The combination of smartphones and social media that hit our pockets a little over a decade ago has changed the world and the way we interact with it.  They can, if we are not careful, prevent us from fully encountering the world, IRL, in real life, as God created it.  They can, if we are not careful, prevent us from the deep interactions that are required for society to survive and to which Judaism calls us.  They can, if we are not careful, cause us to separate into bitterly divided factions, capable of believing the worst about our neighbors.  They can and they do lead to mental health crises. 

In his book, The Anxious Generation, Jonathan Haidt describes what he calls “the great rewiring of American childhood.”[1]  These devices and the social media platforms that they connect us and our children to are detrimental to development, learning, and functioning in society.  In a great irony, Haidt assesses that many parents today spend too much time protecting their children from possible discomfort and difficulty in the real world and not enough time protecting them from the many harms in the virtual world. 

Haidt describes the effects of this rewiring.  While his research focuses on children who are most affected as their brains continue to develop, the effects on adults are similar.  If we do the work this day asks of us and consider our relationships over the last year, many of us would recognize these effects in some ways. 

Smartphones connected to social media cause social deprivation.  Since 2009, there has been a precipitous decline in the amount of time people of all ages spend with their friends in face-to-face interactions.[2]  Facetime is not the same as time actually looking into another person’s face while in conversation, which humanity has evolved to need.  

Smartphones also cause what Haidt calls attention fragmentation.  This has affected me, and I have seen how it affects my family, our students, my friends, and colleagues.  You probably know it from those times you’re in the middle of something and you hear that ding or feel that vibration, and suddenly your mind is pulled away from whatever it is you were doing.  Or maybe you even feel a phantom vibration.  And then, somehow, you’ve spent an hour scrolling.  Haidt cites one study from 2023 that shows that at the high end, a phone pings an alert up to 192 times a day, up to 11 a waking hour.[3]  I won’t ask you to raise your hands, but I assume that at least some of us here in this room right now are doing everything we can not to take out our phones, not to look at the score, not to see what text or email or like just came through. 

It’s more than just the notifications that cause distraction and pull us away from each other.  Studies also show that even having the phone nearby damages our ability to think at our highest level.  In one experiment, students were best able to remember and recall, and better able to complete math problems, when their phones were in the other room compared to the phones being in a pocket or on a desk next to them.  Our brains work differently when these devices are nearby.[4]  All of this is why our school here at TBT has banned phones during religious school.  And let me just commend our Religious Education committee and our parents for understanding why we made this decision and agreeing to it.  More and more school districts are banning phones, and they are seeing reversals of some of the trends, particularly around attention fragmentation, relatively quickly.

On the first day without their phones during their 15-minute break, our High Schoolers almost didn’t know what to do.  By the second week, they were talking to one another, interacting with each other, and planning to bring in some games and cards to have something to do together.  A year ago, high school break was a bunch of teens in our beautifully renovated youth lounge, all sitting near each other, but all on their phones.  Some with earbuds in.  None of them interacting with each other.  None of them learning about their classmates or sharing about themselves.  None of them navigating the social-emotional growth that is so necessary at their age.  Now, they look each other in the face.  They engage with each other and encounter each other.  This is not just a choice for their physical and mental health, it’s also in keeping with what Judaism values.

Face-to-face interaction is at the heart of how Judaism has always understood the deepest of relationships.  God tells Aaron and Miriam that only Moses gets to speak to God face to face, owing to the depth of their relationship.  Classical Talmud study is done in what is called chavruta, where you sit across from your study partner and you engage with each other and with the arguments, fully immersed in the text.  The Talmud even says that when two are engaged in the study of Torah, the divine presence rests between them.  Two people studying together are, indeed, able to accomplish and learn more than if they each worked independently.

The most powerful of blessings, the Priestly Benediction, taken from the Torah, is centered around God’s face shining God’s light toward us.  Face-to-face encounters lead to blessing.  And face-to-face encounters lead us to feel God’s presence.  Martin Buber, one of the great Jewish thinkers of the 20^th century, describes God as present in relationships.  In his famous work, I and Thou, he defines the world of relationships in two ways.  We have experiences with others, I-it interactions, and we have encounters with others, I-Thou interactions.  Experiences are low-level interactions and are not necessarily bad.  These involve some kind of judgment or use.  In these interactions, we are observers, objective, analytical.  We catalogue and categorize the other.  We describe and define.  And if these are the only kinds of relationships we have, our lives are incomplete.  In order to actually live, we have to find deeper connections. 

“All actual life is encounter,”[5] Buber writes.  To have an encounter is to move from I-it to I-Thou in part through God’s grace.  But it involves being fully present with the other, seeing the depth of the other person, giving from our fullest selves, and striking the balance between maintaining our identities and fusing them.  It is in these moments of mutuality, in these moments of full mutual encounter with the other that we feel God’s presence—because God is the eternal Thou.  We seek to encounter God as we work to encounter others. 

Unfortunately, these I-Thou moments are fleeting and hard to come by.  They are made all but impossible if there is a screen between us or when a phone distracts us.  How can we be mutually engaged with another person if, while we are talking, we take out our phones to check who just pinged us?  How can we be fully present if our minds are wondering how many hearts we will see the next time we use our faces as a password rather than as a conduit to the divine?  We need to look each other in the face.  We need to encounter the world, not just experience it.  We need to spend time with each other without the whole world beckoning us from our pockets.  We need to put down our iPhones and focus on I-Thou!

For sins between a person and God, Yom Kippur atones.  For sins between a person and their fellow, Yom Kippur does not atone.  Our smartphone-addicted lives lead us to sin against each other and to sin against God.  We sin against each other when we fail to look in another’s face and fully encounter them. We sin against each other when we live a life of experience and never seek encounter.  We sin against each other when we’d rather reach one more level on the game.  And when we sin against each other by treating each other as expendable and not seeking encounter, we sin against God because we prevent God from coming into our lives.

When Moses comes down from the mountain after his encounter with God, the Torah tells us that his face is radiant with a glow of light.  Everyone can tell that it is the glow of the divine which emanates from his face.  It is so powerful and overwhelming that he must cover his face from the community.  Each of us has a small part of that divine glow in our faces.  Each of us is capable of seeing that divine light.  We have to want to see it.  It takes work to see it.  We have to seek out encounter.

We have just under 24 hours ahead of us to consider every action, reaction, and interaction from this last year.  Look back.  What did you experience?  What did you encounter?  We have just under 24 hours to consider how we will choose to live in this year ahead.  Will it be a year of experience or a year of encounter?  Will we seek to share our tables and truly meet others, or will we ignore those alongside us for the pings of our apps?  On this night, let us commit to seeking to meet others face to face rather than face to phone.  Instead of the glow of our phones, let us seek out the divine glow in faces of those around us.  And in so doing, may we summon the divine to dwell amongst us, to rain blessings upon us, and to seal us in the book of life.

Amen.

G’mar Chatimah Tovah

 

---

[1] Haidt, Jonathan.  The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness.  2024.  Penguin Press; USA.  See pages 3-4, 7.

[2] Ibid, see chart on page 121

[3] Ibid, see page 126

[4] Ibid, see page 128

[5] Buber, Martin, I and Thou. 1970 Translation, Touchstone Press 1996 printing, p 62.

Yom Kippur Morning: Judaism in Context

 A version of this sermon was delivered Yom Kippur Morning, 5785/2025 at Temple B'nai Torah - A Reform Congregation, Wantagh, NY

Sitting before a committee in the House of Representatives last December, the now former President of Harvard University, Claudine Gay, was asked by New York Rep Elise Stefanik: “At Harvard, does calling for the genocide of Jews violate Harvard’s rules of bullying and harassment?”[1] 

Her now infamous answer: “It can be, depending on the context.”  Rep Stefanik pressed Dr. Gay who added: “Antisemitic speech when it crosses into conduct that amounts to bullying, harassment, intimidation — that is actionable conduct and we do take action.” 

But Rep. Stefanik was not satisfied: “So the answer is yes, that calling for the genocide of Jews violates Harvard code of conduct, correct?” she asked. 

“Again, it depends on the context,” Gay said, doubling down on her equivocation.

What a disappointing answer, of course.  What a frustrating place to be in this nation, that the president of Harvard, the now #3 university in this country, can’t seem to find the moral backbone to say that antisemitism and calling for the death of Jews is unequivocally against their code of conduct.  You’ll remember that this testimony came after weeks of protests and encampments at universities across this nation.  These encampments purported to be protesting Israel’s actions in the war, but they soon devolved into protesting against Israel’s right to exist and ultimately against Jews in general.  Anti-Zionism is not always antisemitism, but it almost always devolves into it because anti-Zionism is predicated on singling out Jews and the Jewish state.  Jewish students were harassed, prevented from getting to classes and activities, and ostracized from their peers.  Protestors chanted slogans, knowingly or unknowingly, advocating the destruction of Israel and violence against Jews.  Protestors vandalized public property, cosplaying revolutionaries, puppets of a Messianist Islamic regime.

How did it get to this point, Congress wanted to know, that Jewish students have had to sue their universities for violating their title VI protections?  How did it get to this point, indeed. 

Dr. Gay’s remarks in front of Congress faced so much backlash from students, clergy, and even the White House, that she was forced to offer an apology and ultimately resign from that position.  It’s Yom Kippur, so I’ll accept that Dr. Gay’s apology was sincere, and I’ll give her the benefit of the doubt that the forum and setting maybe got to her, and that her lawyers maybe overly coached her to prevent her from saying something damaging to the university.  I don’t believe that she is an antisemite.  I believe that to understand her answer requires context.

This last year we have learned that context.  Harvard and other universities have an allowance for antisemitism in their professors, in their student groups, and in their curricula.  Their ivory towers gleam flawed intersectional theories of oppressed and oppressor to the point that they are blinded into believing that Hamas terrorists, who raped and desecrated women and men, who murdered babies, who murdered whole families hiding in safe rooms, and who use their own women and children as human shields, that this group is the just and righteous party in this conflict.  The Israelis, the one Jewish state in the world, the one democracy in the Middle East, are monsters and must be stopped, according to this twisted world view.

While Dr. Gay was wrong in that moment to declare that antisemitism and calling for genocide require context, she is not wrong about the importance of context in general.  Context is necessary to understand the world around us.  When we don’t understand a word, we use context clues to figure it out.  Context means we factor in more than just what’s in front of us to help us make sense of conflict.  Context in this case also means that there are no easy answers and many conclusions that can be drawn.  Seeing ourselves in a broader context is also what this day, HaYom, the Day, as the Mishnah calls it, asks us to consider, in many ways.  Context can give us comfort; it helps us to see a bigger story and understand patterns in the life of Jews and Judaism.

Understanding the context is why October 7 was for me, and I think for many of us, so confusing and yet made so much sense.  It left us shaken but not necessarily surprised.  It was both unprecedented as well as steeped in precedent.  Let me explain what I mean.  This is not Israel’s first war.  This is not Israel’s first war with Hamas in Gaza.  This story has been told before.  Every few years since Israel’s disengagement from Gaza in 2005 there has been a flare up.  More rockets, more airstrikes, not always ground troops, but sometimes.  A few months of discomfort for Israelis, a few months of airstrikes degrading Hamas abilities, a few more batteries of Iron Dome, a few months of Israel being harangued in the press for the tragic death of Palestinian civilians.  We grew accustomed to the pattern.  Al chet that we did.  We expected that the IDF would prevent anything worse from happening.  Al chet that they did not.

And yet, this attack was different.  This attack was not the random rocket fire which accompanied the beginning of previous attacks.  This attack was well-organized and multi-faceted, coordinated with help and information from workers that had been welcomed to Israel by peace-loving kibbutzniks, who tried to love their neighbors, and who built their homes with shelters.  This felt like an attack on the good will of the Israelis who live near Gaza.  And it felt like it was intended to cause as much pain and death to civilians as possible.  I saw what was done to the homes on the kibbutzim and heard firsthand about the sense of betrayal.  I heard from the rabbis who processed the bodies of the victims about what they saw.  Black Saturday, October 7, was more expansive, more sadistic, and more death-centered than anything that had happened before in this conflict between Israel and the Palestinians.  It undermined our sense of safety and plunged us into seeing ourselves in the context of being Jews under attack.  This is a new experience for most of us.  October 7 set off a wave of antisemitism that seemed almost too easy for society to slip into.  We have no context for this and feel unmoored.

The Palestinians have a context for the conflict as well.  Unfortunately, too many in their community see these patterns violence and death and the destruction of Israel as the only recourse.  Too many in their leadership fail to see that these patterns, and opting for death instead of life, will not yield any progress. 

The October 7 attack was more brutal and savage than anything that had ever happened in the state of Israel, but it is not without precedent in Jewish history.  My travels in Europe this summer reminded me of that context.  The maps of the many cities and shtetels that used to be, where Jews were shot, or burned, or otherwise massacred in their homes, in their synagogues, with their families.  The sites of mass murder.  The rounding up of children.  The attacks that require that Jews are seen as less than human.  These kinds of attacks are, sadly, part of our history.  That probably doesn’t do a lot to bring us comfort, but I do think it provides us some solace, because it puts us in a place where our ancestors and relatives have been.  And through it all, we are still here.  Celebrating Yom Kippur, on the same day as outlined in the Torah, as we have been doing for thousands of years.  Enemies rise and enemies fall. 

From Pharaoh, to Amalek, to Haman, to the Greeks, to the punishments and tortures at the hands of the Romans, to the Muslim conquests, to the Crusades, to the Inquisition in Spain, to the Czar, to the Nazis, to Nasser, to the Iranians and their proxies, we know the history of being in the crosshairs, of being subject to the whims of politicians and Popes, of being subject to the whims of the economy and charismatic leaders who seek a scapegoat.  But we’ve mostly known it as history.  Now it is our present.

Our year is peppered with holidays that remind us of our complicated history.  Passover begins with a decree to kill all the Jewish children.  Purim is a story of a thwarted genocide of our people.  Chanukah’s enemy sought to take away our identity and Torah.  Many of our holidays, we often joke, fall into the category of: they tried to kill us, we survived, let’s eat.  On October 7, we were moved from a time of, “we survived, let’s eat,” to a time of “they tried to kill us.”  We’re in a time of war.  They’re still trying to kill us.  The rockets are still falling.  The hostages are still in captivity.  It’s a scary place to be.  We feel out of context even though we are deeply within it.  We’re in a different part of the pattern now.  And recognizing that is at the heart of what this day can do for us: give us strength from history and the reminder that we will make it to “we survived.”  And, ultimately, to “let’s eat.”

Yom Kippur can give us strength because this day asks us to see ourselves in a series of broader contexts, to remind us of larger eternal truths and of the patterns of Jewish existence.  At the same time Yom Kippur helps us to acknowledge that, often, what is going on around us is hard, and violent, and sad, and maddening.  Yom Kippur offers us the opportunity to rededicate ourselves to our relationships with God and with each other.  When we do this, the madness may abate, the difficulties may stop.  As we acknowledge our failings, our prayers also acknowledge the failings of the world, the unfinishedness of creation, the broken vessels waiting to be repaired to gather God’s light.  We are imperfect beings. The world is imperfect, and yet we choose life, our Torah portion reminds us.  We have a choice before us.  Life or death.  Our enemies choose death.  We choose life.  We choose shelters and missile defense.  We choose life and we choose blessing.  When we make it to the end of this day, if we hold out to that last shofar blast, then God will have pardoned and overlooked our imperfections, and perhaps as we repair ourselves, we believe that the world can be on the way to tikkun, to repair, as well.   

On Yom Kippur, we spend time living in our history.  We follow the path of the High Priest in the Temple in Jerusalem in our Avodah Service.  As a part of our afternoon on our holiest of days we are tasked with reenacting in word and story the ancient ritual of atonement that would begin by the High Priest entering the Holy of Holies and atoning for his sins.  Then, we read, he would atone for his family’s sins.  He moves from himself alone, to his family.  He broadens his context.  Finally, his context expands again as he atones for the entire people.  Each time, he’d go in, face to face with God, and he’d represent a broader group.  He would see himself as a part of something bigger.  And only then would God grant atonement.  It required the High Priest to see himself as more than just himself, but as a part of a bigger society.

Like the High Priest of old, we each go through a similar process.  We focus on our own sins and we atone.  In order to do that, we have to first consider ourselves in the context of other people.  We have to consider our relationships and the ways we missed the mark in word, in deed, and in thought.  We focus on committing to be better individuals in the year ahead. 

We also expand our context and focus on our families and our personal histories.  We include a Yizkor service to remember where we come from, to recall those who have a lasting influence on us.  We expand the way we think about ourselves on this day as we open up to the immediate and recent past.  We see ourselves in the context of our families.  The context transports us to times of love and joy and difficulty, stories of laughter and ache.  Yizkor is powerful as a way to remember values we learned from our loved ones of blessed memory, to remember the life that they gave us and the life that they taught us.  For some of us, it’s those values we learned despite them, too.  Either way, Yizkor challenges us on this day to focus on remembering that we come from somewhere and that we are a part of a bigger story.  Yizkor gives us the chance to expand our frame of reference for a part of the day, to broaden the context in which we come seeking atonement.

Yom Kippur also asks us to see ourselves in the broader, difficult context of Jewish history.  There is an entire section of the service dedicated to remembering the 10 martyrs.  These were 10 rabbis whose stories of martyrdom form the basis of a midrash and ultimately a liturgical poetic setting known as the Eleh Ezkarah, these I will remember.  It has not been our custom here to read this poem, but the stories of how the rabbis were killed are not pleasant.  They are stories of torture, of sadism, and of deep faith.  They are stories that demand on this day that we look at what can happen to our people.  They demand that we consider the tenuous place of being a Jew in the world.  This is not the context in which we have lived, but it is the context we feel right now.  It’s hard to be a Jew.  We know it.  God knows it.  Yom Kippur knows it.  Yom Kippur reminds us of this difficulty.  And ultimately, Yom Kippur says that our people make it through, the same way we make it through this day. 

Today, we won’t hear the stories of the 10 martyrs.  But our Yizkor service does have a powerful section of tribute and prayer for those who died on October 7 and since.  We will hear some stories of those who died only because they were Jews.  We will offer prayers for them, and we will grieve alongside Jews everywhere.  I encourage everyone to stay for Yizkor this year, even if it is not your custom, and, yes, even if your parents are still alive.  Be with us in community as we mourn and remember together.  It is a beautiful and powerful service, and it’s not that long. 

There is one more piece of context that I think is important before we make our way toward our Yizkor, and that is that our prayers, and the way that Yom Kippur works liturgically is predicated on there not being an Israel, predicated on there not being a state where Jews can go, where we have self-determination, and where we are the majority.  In the context of the broader Jewish history, our ancestors could have never dreamed and imagined the way that Israel has flowered and grown and progressed, how a new Jewish culture emerged from the ashes of Europe and the rubble of the Arab world.  It’s not a perfect nation, to be sure, but it is here. 

Historically speaking, this might be the best time to be Jewish in history.  I know it doesn’t feel like that right now as we are mired in war and heartache.  Yom Kippur asks us to remember that where we are now is a point in history.  We have much that brought us to this point, and context matters.  Yom Kippur asks us to see ourselves in the patterns and contexts of Jewish history, to remember that it is sometimes hard, but always beautiful, to be Jewish.  We will not come out of history or this war unscathed.  But through our prayers and our repentance and our charity, we will come out of Yom Kippur cleansed of sin, purified of soul, rededicated to each other and God, and always choosing life and blessing.

G’mar Chatimah Tovah

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[1] All quotes in this section taken from the Harvard Crimson: https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2023/12/8/gay-apology-congressional-remarks/

Erev Rosh Hashanah 5785/2024: Jews in America: What's Your Noun?

 Jews in America: What's Your Noun?

             My tour guide in Vilnius is named Daniel.  Easy enough to remember.  We meet just after a heavy downpour on the outskirts of what was the Jewish quarter of Vilnius, Vilna in Yiddish, in Lithuania, and also the ghetto.  This is the place around which my Sabbatical travels centered, and Daniel was going to teach me about it.  I’m here particularly to learn a little bit more about where my grandparents, Leo and Sheva, their names listed in our Book of Remembrance, had come from, and the world that they had grown up in.  That world is disappeared.  Daniel teaches me a lot about Vilnius before the war as we walk the narrow alleys of the old town.  There were times where half of the city’s population was Jewish, he said.  Imagine, every other person on the street speaking Yiddish. 

We pass by the building that used to house the Ramm Printing Press, one of the largest Jewish presses in the world, famous for typesetting the Talmud in the way we’ve been studying it ever since.  From this building, Jewish thought and religious texts were spread like never before.  In this building were also printed Yiddish literature, Chassidic teachings, and an occasional Socialist pamphlet.  What a world that must have been, the world that brought my grandparents to life.  A world where Jews mixed and mingled with the society around them, and lived as Jews outwardly.  A world in which they were the society at large, and maintained connection to their identity, though not all in the same way.  Only remnants can now be seen, echoes of a distant past.   A street named for the Jews.  Faded shop names in a Yiddish that now almost no one on the street speaks or understands.

            Though I am certain I mentioned it, and it’s clear in my email signature, I learn at the end of my tour that Daniel didn’t know that I was a rabbi.  Which helps explain why he was somewhat taken aback at some of my questions as we meandered the cobblestoned streets and passed where the great Synagogue had stood, now a construction site awaiting possible rebuilding.

He seems a bit flummoxed when I ask him, because I am a rabbi after all, to define his Jewish identity for me.  He doesn’t seem to understand the question.  So, I elaborate.  “How do your Jewishness and your Lithuanianness work together?”  He shares with me that it’s complicated and that for him, they are two separate parts of who he is.  In fact, he moved to Israel when he was in his 20s, and gave up his Lithuanian citizenship, and now if he wants it back, he has to forfeit his Israeli citizenship.  The two cannot coexist, he seems to say.  And, he doesn’t have a problem with that, because in many ways that’s how it has always been: The Jews of Europe, no matter how integrated, no matter what percentage of the population, no matter how many shop windows were in Yiddish, were almost always other.

I don’t know why I asked Daniel that question right there, but I’m grateful he answered me and took me seriously, because I think that this personal heritage and history tour gave me an opportunity to reflect on my own identity in the face of my personal history.  Jewish Identity and what it means has been an interest since before I was even considering the rabbinate.  My Master’s Thesis was predicated on interviews of eighth-graders asking them about their Jewish identity.  Among the questions I asked my eighth-grade subjects was a question that I had been grappling with myself at the time, and which I imagine is also on many of our minds as well, as we navigate the interesting times we’re living through.

So, I’d like to ask all of us tonight to think about and answer for ourselves the following.  If you had to define yourself, would you say that you are a Jewish American or an American Jew?  Would you say that you are first and foremost an American or first and foremost a Jew?  I do recognize that among us are family and loved ones who are not Jewish, and so I ask for you to think about this question and how you would define someone in your life.  American Jew, or Jewish American?  What’s the difference?  As I see it, following standard grammar, it’s a question of which is your noun and which is the modifier?

Perhaps for you there is no distinction between the two.  The way I understand it, it’s the question of whether we feel that we are Americans who happen to be Jewish, the same way that our neighbors are Americans who happen to be Catholic.  Or are we Jews who happen to live in America the way we’ve lived in other places before?  Where does one part of our identity begin and the other end?  Can we, and do we, find balance between the two?  Has that balance changed in the last number of years?  Has that balance shifted for us since October 7?

Some of us had maybe thought for some time that we were Jewish Americans.  The last number of years, with the Tree of Life shooting, the Charlottesville rally, and the ugly antisemitic responses to the ongoing wars in Israel maybe made us feel more like Jew was our noun. We sense the increased antisemitism, and we feel it.  I’ve spoken from this bima before about the rising antisemitism coming at us from all sides.  This past year especially has forced us to ask whether this is the new normal: additional security assessments and hired guards just to send our kids to school.  We’re right to be skittish.  We’re right to be vigilant.  We’re not right to give up on Judaism in America.  And we’re not right to give up on fighting for the kind of America that made this nation a haven and a home for Jews unlike any history has ever seen.

This past year has seen much handwringing about the state of American Judaism.  In The Atlantic, Franklin Foer describes it as the end of the Golden Age of Jews in America. 

“America’s ascendant political movements—MAGA on one side, the illiberal left on the other—would demolish the last pillars of the consensus that Jews helped establish. They regard concepts such as tolerance, fairness, meritocracy, and cosmopolitanism as pernicious shams. The Golden Age of American Jewry has given way to a golden age of conspiracy, reckless hyperbole, and political violence, all tendencies inimical to the democratic temperament. Extremist thought and mob behavior have never been good for Jews. And what’s bad for Jews, it can be argued, is bad for America.”^[1]

Joshua Liefer’s hot off the press book Tablets Shattered describes what he calls the end of An American Jewish Century.  “It is…no surprise that the prevailing emotions of contemporary American Jewish life are anxiety and division.  American Jewish life is marked more by conflict than consensus than at any point since the first half of the twentieth century because the foundations of American Jewish life that were built in the last century have begun to crumble.”^[2]

Liefer here, and Foer in his article, look to the declining role of major Jewish institutions in America, like Federations and Jewish denominations, including the Reform movement, which have sizable endowments, and declining influence and membership.  On a smaller scale is the synagogue, with overall declining numbers of members and more mergers and dissolutions.  Foer and Liefer also put much emphasis on shifting and diminishing connections to Israel and Zionism.  They see it as on par with a crumbling institution in terms of the influence on the Jewish American community.  The rocky foundations were made evident on October 8.

I’m curious if Liefer considered subtitling his book “The End of a Jewish American Century.”  Either way, both of these works see the changes in American Judaism as indicators that we cannot trust that the life we have lived as Jews in America will continue in the same way.  On this I agree.  And, I believe that it will be the Jewish community’s ability to recreate itself which will hopefully give rise to a new Jewish American Century.

Nowhere in history, until the establishment of Israel, have Jews been able to even ponder that question that I asked us all to consider.  When Napoleon emancipates the Jews they must declare on oath that they are French first.  When Germany emancipates the Jews, many find that the only way to true equality is through conversion to Christianity.  My tour guide Daniel certainly couldn’t conceive of being a combination of Jew and Lithuanian.  And yet here, though imperfect, Jews have been able to ascend the social ladder in business, politics, and media in unprecedented ways.

We are a people of hope and a people that no matter the circumstances have always been able to adapt.  Though my trust in this nation has been shaken over the last years, I have come to disagree with my friends who say America and the West are completely lost and the only future for Jews is Israel.  I still believe in America, a nation as hopeful as our people.  A nation, like Judaism, which asks us to live up to high ideals.  It is these democratic ideals of this great nation, the norms established through fight and protest, and the expanding of rights to broader and broader groups of citizens which are the bedrock of why America has been different. 

We ought to pay attention when those norms are challenged.  We ought to pay attention when the liberal “small-d” democratic order is strained by those who would not agree to play by the rules, or who believe the rules don’t apply to them, or who fix the rules or the referees in their favor.  This is a danger to Jews in America because it is a danger to America.  We ought to pay attention and speak out when politicians use antisemitic images in mailers or mainstream antisemitic ideas.  We also ought to pay attention and call out when tactics that have been used against Jews in the past are used on other groups, accusing them of spreading disease, stealing jobs, or being responsible for missing pets or people. 

Things are also not always as bleak as they may seem, and it would be a disservice to our history to not acknowledge that though there are many, many faults and much work to do, America has made significant progress.  Earlier this year, Rabbi David Wolpe offered the following anecdote, imagining a conversation with his great-great-grandfather. “Great-great-grandfather,” he says, “There are antisemites at Harvard!”  The reply: “There are Jews at Harvard?”  “Yes, but some of them hate Israel.”  “There’s an Israel!”

Living outside the Land and now the State of Israel, there are what my friend Rabbi Josh Franklin describes as two reactions, each based in the Babylonian Exile.  When in the 6^th century BCE, some 2600 years ago, our ancestors were sent away from their home by force, the Psalmist, as one reaction to the new reality, records that they offered a song of lament:

“By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat, sat and wept, as we remembered Zion.  There on the poplars we hung up our lyres, for our captors asked us there for songs, our tormentors, for amusement: “Sing us one of the songs of Zion.” How can we sing a song of Adonai on alien soil?  If I forget you, O Jerusalem, let my right hand wither…”^[3]

The attitude expressed here in Psalm 137 is one of defeat, destruction, and exile.  One of being forced to give up traditions and worrying that a connection to the past, to that which provided a sense of identity and place would be lost.  In the aftermath of these last years, we can mourn, we can bemoan our lot, we can hang up our instruments and await redemption.

The second is a reaction like the prophet Jeremiah who, witnessing and living through the exile, offers the people the following advice from God:

Build houses and live in them, plant gardens and eat their fruit. You should take wives and give birth to sons and daughters; and you should take wives for your sons, and give your daughters to husbands, that they may bear sons and daughters. Multiply there, do not decrease. And seek the welfare of the city to which I have exiled you and pray to Adonai in its behalf; for in its prosperity you shall prosper.”^[4]

We have experience living a Jeremian lifestyle.  In America’s prosperity, the Jewish community has prospered.  In America’s freedom, Jewish communities have been free to evolve, develop, improvise and experiment, to become less insular, or more. 

Additionally, Jeremiah teaches us that we are supposed to do two things, seek the welfare of the place and pray to God on its behalf.  We are accustomed, at least on the High Holy Days, to offering a prayer for our nation, though our Siddur does include it in its Shabbat section, and most siddurim around the world include a prayer for the government.

Prayer without action, we know, is in vain, which is perhaps why God first says to seek the welfare of the city: Doresh et Shlom ha’ir.  Seek the peace of the city.  Work toward peace, do what it takes to make the nation in which you live the best it can be, the most open to difference, the most tolerant, the most fair, the most merit-based, the most open to creativity, the most open to dissent, and the safest for all its inhabitants.  In this nation, we don’t just work toward it, we get a say, we get a vote.  We can use what we know is good for the Jews to make decisions about who will lead this great nation that allows us to hold on to both our Jewishness and our Americanness with pride and with a sense that they belong together, not bifurcated, not split from each other, not in opposition to each other.

It’s the end of my tour with my guide Daniel, and we are back in the center of old Vilnius, just a block from my hotel.  The skies have cleared.  The restaurants dry off their chairs and tables out in the plazas, awaiting the tourists for dinner.  I thanked Daniel for the wonderful tour and the good conversation.  I wish him well and take a moment to reflect on the history I have seen.  And as I look around, I imagine what it might have been like  for my grandparents, and their families and friends to have lived in this place.  And I wonder how they would have defined themselves as they walked these very streets.

Shanah Tovah.

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^[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2024/04/us-anti-semitism-jewish-american-safety/677469/

^[2] Liefer, Joshua. Tablets Shattered. Dutton, USA p 17.

^[3] Psalm 137

^[4] Jeremian 29:5-7