Writing on the Wall

Tuesday, October 15, 2024

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

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

Tuesday, October 8, 2024

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.

^{^[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

Rosh HaShanah 5785/2024 - A Community of the Shofar

A version of this shofar was offered at Rosh HaShanah morning 5785 at Temple B'nai Torah - A Reform Congregation in Wantagh, NY.

The Community of the Shofar

As I began to speak about last night, and as you will hear more about over the course of these holidays and this year, this past summer, my sabbatical was, in part, a heritage tour. I went to go see where my family comes from, specifically Lithuania and Germany. During the month of making my way from Germany through Latvia and Lithuania, Finland, Estonia, and Poland, I saw powerful memorials to Jewish communities of the past. I stood in places of terrible atrocity, the kinds of actions that define the oft-repeated “man’s inhumanity to man.” I stood in places that my grandfather may have stood and looked upon vistas that would have been familiar to him. I walked through concentration camp gates, the same gates my grandparents would have walked through. I went to almost any Jewish museum I could find to try to see the faces of my ancestors. I prayed joyfully in synagogues with active, if small, communities, and pensively in synagogues without communities, the refurbished buildings monuments to a people present now only in memory. Each of these experiences stays with me and could, and probably will, open up to a sermon on its own.

Of all the places I went, of all the experiences I had, of all the beautiful and painful and surprising moments of this long tour, of the many miles I walked inhaling the breath of these places, if I had to say, probably the most powerful and spiritual experience for me was getting to see Taylor Swift in concert in Warsaw…

It was an impromptu opportunity that I hadn’t planned on. I landed in Warsaw, heard she was there, got on my phone, and bought a ticket for that night. And my goodness am I glad that I did! Because I’m not kidding you about the spiritual nature of the experience.

On my way in to the massive stadium, I stood in line next to a couple from DC, celebrating their first anniversary. We chatted as we waited to walk through security. And then on the way in, we were all handed a bracelet with light up LEDs. Just before the concert begins, we all activate the bracelet, and suddenly, we are no longer a disparate group of concertgoers from across the world. Everyone’s bracelet worked with everyone else’s to turn the crowd into a part of the show, a luminous backdrop all around. The lights changed color, sometimes in unison, sometimes choreographed or in undulating patterns, always tied to the beat, always setting a mood, from all of our wrists. I only made small talk with the two young women who sat next to me, this strange, American man by himself at the Taylor Swift Concert in Warsaw. And though no one gave me a friendship bracelet, I felt the power of being a part of something bigger. It was the power of community.

Maybe it was because I had just toured a series of communities that used to be, having already seen Vilnius and Kovno, that I needed a sense of belonging. Maybe it was touring the destroyed communities in Israel last winter, and then seeing the playbook for what was done on October 7 all across Europe, that demanded some kind of remedy to the isolation that comes form being the only one at the Vilnius Holocaust museum, or the only one at the Riga Jewish Museum, home to perhaps the most beautiful stained glass Shma I’ve ever seen. Maybe one other person saw it that day or that week.

For almost three weeks I had been traveling by myself surrounded by the memory of our people, and suddenly here I was surrounded by lots and lots of people, living people, singing people, dancing people, people of all ages excited to be there. The sense of joy was palpable from all directions and from all present. I was enthralled and transported, radically amazed, by the sense of togetherness, and how restorative that was for me. Taylor really can do everything.

My friends, we have been carrying so much this last year, as Jews and those who love us. We have been carrying a year’s worth of grief, a year’s worth of suspicion, a year’s worth of security bills, a year’s worth of division and fighting for our existence and right to self-determination, a year’s worth of images of suffering, a year’s worth of praying for a war to end that won’t and for people to come back home that don’t, a year’s worth of fighting, a year’s worth of mourning. 5784 will not be recalled as the best of times for the Jewish people. And we’ve just made it through.

This litany doesn’t of course factor in those many of us who lost someone close to us, or suffered illness, or disappointment, ruptures of relationships among families and friends. For many, grief is compounded. And while I cannot speak to whether 5785 will be the good year that we pray for on these holiest of days, I do know that at least for the short term, the images won’t be any easier to see and the news won’t be any easier to watch. I pray with complete faith that 5785 will be the year that our dreams and hopes for peace may be realized. And in the same way that I know that I won’t keep all my promises to God in the New Year, I know that not all my prayers will be answered, and I fear that this will be one of them. It can be overwhelming. Enough to give up.

What has given me, and I think many of us, strength over the last year is our community. In the midst of war and death and hatred and difficulty, in the midst of the isolation so many feel, we look around and see life, friendship, learning, and connection to traditions that have held us together for thousands of years. Community heals. Community supports. Community backs you up.

As we make our way into the new year, with blessings of goodness and sweetness, let us feel the comfort in the community that is around us. May the sense of goodness and togetherness we feel right now call us all to deeper engagement with our Judaism and our Synagogue community in the coming year, no matter what it brings.

The Hebrew word for community is kahal, related to kehillah. This root appears many times in the Torah. The root itself is related to other ancient roots meaning assembly. The origins of the word, however, are up for scholarly debate. Some say that it’s related to a word for reproof, or rebuke. Others however see in kahal the weak middle hey, which historically was often interchangeable with the vav. When replaced, we get kol, the word for voice or sound. These scholars believe that the word for community derives from a word for the sound that would have been made to call the community to assembly. In ancient days it would have required a loud instrument to call folks together from distant places. What was the instrument of choice? A shofar.

The shofar is commanded in the Torah as this day is defined with the words yom teruah. Usually translated this means a day of blasting the horn. Most of us know this word teruah as the third of the shofar blasts, the nine short blasts. Yet, as much as this word can be translated that way, it can also mean joyous celebration. The shofar calls us to celebrate our new year, and the way that comes about is through the assembling of the community.

The shofar was a call to community in our past. Today, hear its voice and let it call us to community again! Let it call us to the healing that comes from togetherness and commonality. In a few moments, and I promise, just a few, Cantor Timman will chant for us all the beautiful blessing for the sounding of the shofar. The blessing is not on blowing the shofar, but on hearing it. In order to hear the shofar, you have to be present. Officially, you can’t hear it through a speaker or hear its echo and consider your obligation fulfilled. You have to come to the place where the shofar is being blown and hear the actual sound. The central commandment of Rosh HaShanah is to come together to listen to an instrument that tells us to come together. I don’t know if God could be more obvious!

Because the sounding of the horn is a commandment from the Torah, we have the blessing formula: Asher kidshanu bemitzvotav, vetzivanu lishmo’a kol shofar. We bless God who commands us to hear the voice of the shofar. Kol shofar. Let the voice of the shofar also inspire us to be a kahal shofar, a community of the shofar. A community called by the shofar to be together. A community called by the shofar to experience all the ways that community can be a salve to the many hurts we carry with us into this new year.

In her beautiful book The Amen Effect, Rabbi Sharon Brous, explaining the role of showing up, notes: “We experience, innately, joy at another’s joy, wonder at another’s wonder. We have the natural capacity to be energized and inspired by someone else’s dream fulfilled, even when our own hearts are broken.”[1] As evidence of this, she cites studies from the 1990s that resulted in the discover of mirror neurons. As Rabbi Brous tells it:

[R]esearchers in a neurophysiology lab in Italy were studying neuron activity in monkeys. At some point, one of the researchers took a break to grab a gelato, as one does in Italy. As he began to eat, sitting across from his monkey subjects, he was stunned to see that the neurons in the pleasure center of the monkeys’ brains were firing…not because they were eating something delicious, but because they were watching him eat something delicious.[2]

We are a synagogue filled with joys, as young people are called to Torah, as they are named on our bima, as our students share their learning. We are a community filled with joy as we celebrate our festivals and honor our members. Being a member of a shofar community means you can come and experience that joy, too!

The shofar represents hopes for moving past violence, for putting down the weapons we wield. In the Akeidah story we heard chanted so beautifully earlier, it ends with Isaac being saved from death by his father, and in his place the two sacrifice a ram. The shofar, often a ram’s horn, reminds us of this story. The ram steps in, as Amichai calls him, as the hero of the story, preventing the death of Isaac, an innocent child who didn’t even know what was going on. I pray that these calls of the shofar may elicit the same in the new year. May weapons be put down, may the instinct toward violence be abated. May the innocents be spared.

The calls of the shofar move from the tekiah to the shevarim and teruah, and always back to the tekiah, from a whole note, through a series of broken notes back to a whole note. No matter how broken things may feel, there is hope for wholeness, for shleimut, for shalom.

Sadly, I can’t afford to take us all to hear Taylor swift’s voice, and to feel the energy of that communal experience. But man, do we have awesome shofar blowers here, ready to help you fulfill your obligation to hear the voice of the shofar. And man, do we have an awesome community here, worthy of sharing joys and leaning on each other when times are tough. The blasts of the shofar are next. Our sacred duty to proclaim the new year will be fulfilled, that’s to be sure. The sounds of the shofar will resonate through our ears and into our souls. May the calls bring us only goodness and sweetness in the new year. May the calls inspire us all to seek out the blessings of being a community of the shofar, called to goodness and justice and togetherness. May the calls bring us all back to wholeness such that when we blow these horns one year from now, we may look back and revel in a year of togetherness and a year of peace.

Amen.

Shanah Tovah!

[1] Brous, Sharon. The Amen Effect. Averly Publishing, 2024. p. 11

[2] Ibid. p 12