An edited version of this sermon was delivered Rosh HaShanah Morning, 5776 at Temple Emanu-El of East Meadow.
I awoke early this morning to get a jump
start on this thing that I am supposed to do, before the heat of the day
takes over and makes the journey too difficult.
I brought my servants, a donkey, and my son, Isaac. Not my only son, but the one I have
left. Not that long ago, my other son,
Ishmael, had to go. His mother, Hagar,
and my wife Sarah didn’t get along so well.
Sarah’s a little territorial; but I can’t blame her. It took us so long to have this one
child. So many weeks, months, years of
waiting, praying to a God that we can’t see.
And finally a son, just as those visitors told us we would have. And now, this boy, this young lad, has to be
given to God. It’s what we do. It’s just the way of the world. I can’t explain it; it’s just the way things
are. Our neighbors send their sons to
their gods, so I get it; but I’m not so comfortable with it.
We trekked this morning, looking for
just the right place. Somewhere high up,
close to the heavens. Somewhere that
spoke to me. Somewhere that told me this
is the place that God wants. And I find
the perfect place. High up this dusty,
golden hill. Higher than any of the
hills around it. That feels right to
me. I can’t quite explain it, but I
sense that I’m in the right place. Have
you ever had that feeling of just knowing that something was right, like
everything was pointing you in that direction?
That’s how this hill feels, like it’s the center of all that has been
created. The hill feels right, and the
time of day feels right, and my belief in God feels right. But what I’m about to do, I still…
I brought everything I needed with me:
my knife, wood for the burning, and my son.
He’s so quiet this morning, but he does notice that something doesn’t
add up. “Dad,” he asks, “I see the
knife, and I see the wood, but what are we going to give to God?” He doesn’t really understand the way of the
world, yet. I would have taught him, but
it seemed cruel to tell him what was coming, and besides, I don’t want him to
be scared. “Come this way, Isaac,” I say
to him. “Take a moment to rest here on
these stones.” My voice shakes. Does he know how scared I am? My hands tremble holding that knife. How will I go through with this?
Doesn’t this seem wrong? That our young people should be killed off
like this? Why would God give me a son
only to ask for him back?! I’m no expert
on God, but I know when something doesn’t make sense to me. But so far, everything that I have been
asked, I have done and everything that I have been promised has come true. What am I supposed to do? I believe with complete faith that God has my
best interest in mind, is looking out for me, for us, for my family. God was with me in Egypt those many years
ago, when Sarah and I, in our youth, traveled there looking for food. God was with me before that too, on the long
journey to this land. That feeling I
first had when we arrived here, that’s the same feeling I have today on this mountaintop. God called then and I answered then; and
that’s all I’m doing now, right? This is
what a father does. It’s an ordeal we
all have to go through.
He’s resting there now, on the
stones. He’s got to know what’s going
on. He must have some idea. He’s not dumb, that son of mine. Maybe he doesn’t notice things as carefully
as his brother, but he’s not dumb.
It’s time now. I can’t delay any longer. The knife is sharpened. This is God’s design. I have to hold it strong now, and I need to
use, want to use all my strength. I
don’t want him to suffer. I lift my hand
as I look into his innocent eyes, which now belie his utter terror at what I’m
doing. His eyes ask me what I’m doing,
why I’m doing it. They scream out for
his mother, but the rest of him doesn’t move.
He has the same resolve as I do.
Or maybe he just doesn’t want to fight me. I have to do it now. I have to just plunge that knife and not look
back. I have to just let God’s will play
out, right? Don’t I? This is what we do?
But that fear in his eyes gives me
pause. In the tears quietly streaming
down his face I sense betrayal, not just of his body, but of our relationship,
our father-son bond. I can’t do it! I can’t make myself do it! What will Sarah say when I return? How will I ever look her in the face
again? I need to drop this knife now and
gather my living son into my arms. No
God that I believe in would ask this of me!
No God would want a family torn apart by violence, by bloodlust. No God would value the blood of our children
over their breath, their souls.
I look up and see a ram caught in the
thicket. Let that be for God, not my
son! That will serve as a symbol of my
trust in God, not my boy. If God is not
content with a man who values human life above all else, I cannot help that! I only know what is right and I know that
dropping this knife now is the right thing.
This I believe with complete faith.
* * *
Each year on Rosh HaShanah morning, we
hear this famous story. We heard it this
morning, so beautifully chanted, the story of Abraham who is called by God to
sacrifice his son Isaac as a test of fidelity.
The story is usually referred to as Akedat Yitzchak, the binding
of Isaac. The climactic moment of this
story is the moment when, as the knife is about to be plunged into the boy,
something stops Abraham in his tracks.
The Torah tells us that it is an angel of God who stays Abraham’s hand
by calling out “Abraham, Abraham!” This
moment of divine intervention makes it clear to Abraham that what he is about
to do is not what God wants. Abraham
senses that what he is about to do is not the right thing. What he is about to do is actually abhorrent
to God. Abraham looked around him, at
what his neighbors were doing, and said enough is enough: I am not going to sacrifice my son because it’s the thing that’s done. That voice that called out to Abraham was
indeed divine, but it may have come not from the heavens, but from a place deep
in Abraham’s soul, in his conscience, that place that told him that this thing
which was asked of him was not right – that thing which was just happening all
around him was not the way the world should be.
Abraham understands at that moment, but
not until that moment, that God doesn’t want a child sacrifice. It’s not until he sees his son beneath him
and sees the life in Isaac that this epiphany comes to Abraham. Abraham has a moment where he senses that
just because the world works a certain way doesn’t mean it’s right, fair, or
ought to continue.
In his breathtaking and crushing book Between
the World and Me, Ta-Nahesi Coates describes the world as it is for black
men living in America in 2015. His book
is written as a letter to his son, Samori, who at age 15 comes to a realization
that the world is not as it should be.
Coates writes to his son:
That was the week you learned that the
killers of Michael Brown would go free…would
never be punished. It was not my expectation that anyone would
ever be punished. But you were young,
and you still believed. You stayed up
till 11pm that night, waiting for the announcement of an indictment, and when
instead it was announced that there was none you said: “I’ve got to go,” and
you went into your room and I heard you crying.[1]
Coates’
son has a difficult epiphany about our great nation, and Coates uses his
epistle to his son to explain that the reality of our nation is that racism is
real, it is powerful, and it is engrained.
Coates book focuses on the fear Black parents have for their children
and about their children. He focuses on
the origins of the racial issues in our nation, not to complain, but to
recognize the reality and share what he has learned with his son, the way that
his parents shared it with him. Coates
is, at this moment, a father who is desperately trying to save his son, though
he does not have the ability to do so.
He is not the one wielding the knife.
He is not the one who established the system as it is, though as any
father would, he sees it as unfair and not right. The way of the world is not right.
Coates goes on to describe a moment
when he came to realize and recognize the injustice which still plagues this
nation. In the second half of his book,
he recounts the story of another young Black man, gunned down in the prime of
his youth. A man named Prince Jones,
whom Coates’ knew from their time at Howard University. Prince Jones was killed yards from his
fiancée’s home by an undercover police officer outside of jurisdiction. He was shot eight times, five in the back, a
result of a barrage of 16 bullets. Coates
describes his reaction to hearing the news: “I cannot remember what happened
next. I think I stumbled back…What I
remember for sure is what I felt: rage and the old gravity of West
Baltimore.” Here, Coates is referring to
his upbringing in difficult and dangerous neighborhoods of Baltimore. The neighborhoods of Coates’ youth are the
result of years of discriminatory policies around mortgages, (add more here) The legacy, Coates realizes, of that
neighborhood, always seems to pull a person back. That gravitational pull… Even though Prince
Jones’ family did everything supposedly right – Jones’ mother is a self-made
physician, the family saved and moved to a safe neighborhood, and Prince was
sent to the best schools and brought up to achieve the American middle-class
dream – even this man, whose family did everything that they were told, hoping
to gain entrée into a different life, even this man was not immune from
overzealous and racially motivated policing.
What is truly heartbreaking when
reading Coates’ words is seeing that even with all the progress that has been
made, the lesson Coates had to learn about how his life is valued by our nation
is the same lesson he watches his son learn.
In the same way Coates came to understand in 2001 that the
institutionalized racism of the past continues to have ramifications today, his
son, in 2015, also learns. There may not
be Jim Crow any longer, but we are still a far distance away from true equality
and equal justice under the law. In some
ways, we can perhaps relate to the first time we each learn and understand that
anti-Semitism persists. For us, however,
anti-Semitism was never enshrined in the laws and customs of this
nation. Jews were never constitutionally
considered less than humans. Jews were
not bought and sold and treated as property for centuries.
If you recall, last year, I spoke about
race from this very same spot, and about how the shooting of Michael Brown was
a wake-up call for me and was indeed a wake-up call to all of us and this
entire nation. Baruch ata Adonai
Eloheinu Melech Ha’Olam pokeach ivrim, praised are You Eternal Our God for
giving sight to the blind. We have woken
up; but as our eyes opened, we wiped the sleep away only to see that the true
scope of the problem is much broader than most of us understood. The Black community has known what has been
happening. They have been telling us,
but we have not listened. They have been
telling us that their children are being killed, that their mothers and fathers
are being taken away and incarcerated at rates much higher than white
Americans, though statistically they don’t commit more crimes than white
Americans. They have told us that their
rights are being violated and that they are stuck in a system that neither
values their lives nor seeks to help undo the ramifications of generations of
discrimination. They have demanded fair
and unfettered access to the voting booth and have been told by the High Court
that the problems of the past are no longer problems.
I learned some of this from reading
Coates’ book, but I learned more in Columbia, South Carolina, where last month,
I participated in a Civil Rights March organized by the NAACP. This year marks the 50th
anniversary of the Voting Rights Act, which was brought to national attention
by a march on Selma, AL led by Martin Luther King. The march that I participated in began in
Selma on August 1 and this week – tomorrow, in fact – the march will end in
Washington, DC. This almost 1000-mile-long
march is the longest civil rights march in American History. Traversing Alabama, Georgia, South and North
Carolina, Virginia, and then Washington, DC, the march’s aim is to bring to
light the myriad issues that still surround race in this nation. If last summer’s violence and protests in
Ferguson, Missouri were a wake-up call that there are still problems in this
nation, this summer’s march seeks to make clear what the issues are, how
complicated they are, and how long the road toward justice actually is. It seeks people to proclaim that just because
the world is one way doesn’t mean that’s how it needs to stay.
America’s Journey for Justice, as the
march is called, aims to make the nation aware of the reality of being black in
America, and why it is a markedly different reality than being white in this
nation. As a part of their endeavor, the
NAACP reached out to the Reform Rabbis’ Association, the CCAR, hoping to find
40 rabbis to march alongside them, one a day, carrying a Torah the entire
way. As of last count, more than 174
rabbis, primarily but not exclusively from Reform congregations, will have
participated over the 40-plus-day journey.
It was a powerful experience to march
through South Carolina’s capitol: to know that the absence of a Confederate flag
was a new reality, to walk alongside so many who hope that the ideals of this
nation be met. And that’s what it was
really all about. We were required to
march two by two, in straight lines, to keep us safe and in one lane of
traffic. As we marched the 13.5 miles in
the heat of the South Carolina summer, I was struck by how varied the
experience was. There were moments of
meditative prayer. There were moments of
learning. And there were moments of
epiphany.
A moment of meditative prayer: At one
point during the day, all I could focus on was putting one foot in front of the
other and staying in line. It was all I
could do to keep going. Not from being
tired or from any pain, but from the heat and the redundancy of walking for
hour after hour. Sometimes, when our
bodies begin to move on autopilot, it frees up our minds. In my mind, at that moment, as my feet rose
and fell, the words of the prayer r’tzei came into my head: Retzei Adonai
Eloheinu, b’amcha Yisrael u’tfilatam b’ahavah t’kabel. Accept
our prayers with love, O God! Running through my head.
But I wasn’t praying, at least not in the
typical manner of prayer. I was praying
in an entirely different manner. I was
actually living the words of Abraham Joshua Heschel, who, after marching at
Selma, famously declared that he felt as if his feet were praying. Every footfall of each of the marchers was a
prayer. Every step toward our goal, for
that day, for the march, and for the future was a prayer. It was a step in the right direction. And from somewhere within my soul, I prayed
that my steps would be accepted lovingly by God as prayer and that those
prayers would one day be answered.
A moment of learning: At one point, I
was marching alongside my 13-year-old niece, Arbel. She and I struck up a conversation with one
of the march marshals, named Jemiah.
Jemiah asked Arbel if she understood why she was marching. Being 13, her answer was something like: “Well,
my uncle is a rabbi, and he wanted me to come.”
That wasn’t quite what Jemiah was asking, but ok. Jemiah went on to explain some of the
difficulties that black people in America have endured in the past and continue
to endure. I knew that under segregation,
black people were not allowed in hospitals, or were only allowed in black-run
hospitals.
I never really stopped to
think about all the ramifications of those policies and laws, which were in
existence as recently as 50 years ago, well within the lifetime of many here
today. So, I didn’t put together that not
being admitted to a hospital meant that women could not give birth in a
hospital. If you were not born in a
hospital, you did not get a birth certificate.
This means it is extremely difficult to obtain any kind of ID. I had known about the discrimination. I hadn’t stopped to consider its effects or what
segregated hospitals might have to do with voting. Voter ID laws, aside from policing a problem
that doesn’t really exist, disproportionately affect black Americans. I learned at that moment, how truly complex and
enduring the repercussions of racism really are in this nation. If we haven’t lived it, we can’t fully
understand it. And, just because there are laws against it, doesn’t mean that
it’s over.
A moment of epiphany: Early in the day, shortly before I carried
the Torah for the first time that morning, I looked up from my position in the phalanx
and before me were people marching behind an American flag and the Torah. Both of these objects are symbols which hold
important meanings for me. I never
considered what they have in common. I
am a firm believer in the separation of synagogue and state, but I could not
help but begin to realize what these two have in common. They are twins, I realized. They may be fraternal twins, but they are
twins. They both represent aspirations
of freedom. They both represent
aspirations of justice.
Freedom and justice are important
concepts in our Torah. We began the
morning of the march by reading from the Torah a brief excerpt from Shirat
HaYam, the song of the sea, which the Israelites sing with Moses and Miriam
after their liberation from slavery, a freedom song. This idea of freedom is so important to us as
Jews that we sing the most famous line from that song each day, the Mi
Chamocha, so that we never forget that freedom is a precious and divine
gift.
The Torah also commands us to pursue
justice, as it proclaims Tzedek Tzedek Tirdof: Justice, Justice shall you pursue![2] Why is the word justice repeated? Because we
are to seek justice for ourselves, and justice for others.[3] We are to look at our sacred words and aspire
to reach the goals they set out for us.
Likewise for the American flag.
It is a symbol of liberty and equal justice under the rule of law. Though much of our nation’s history has seen
us fall short of that goal, it is an aspiration toward which we must all work. That aspirational nature of both our Torah
and of our nation is why I love both – because they both call us to be better. They both demand that we work to make the
world what we want it to be, what it ought to be, when we look around and see
the world not as it should be. Like
Abraham, we have to hear that divine within us and answer the call to look
around and say that the way things have been done is not ok, that the status
quo is no longer acceptable, and that as Jews who live in America, we take all
minority rights seriously and that we believe that black lives matter in the
same way we believe that all lives matter because we are a religion who
believes in the sanctity of living beings.
God gives us the choice. God sets
before us life and death, good and evil, and God commands us to choose the side
of life. Be a people who values life,
like the Eternal values life.
Marching in South Carolina was a way to
live the values of freedom, justice, and life which are required of both our
Torah and our citizenship. Learning from
those marching the entire 1000 miles was even more important because we all
must start to learn about what’s really happening in our nation if we want to
be able to fix it. We have made
tremendous progress in this nation. Fifty
years ago, it was state troopers who attacked the marchers in Selma. This year, the NAACP march is escorted by
state troopers in each state, clearing the way, stopping the traffic, ensuring
safety and order. That progress is
important and it is critical to recognize and be thankful for it, but we cannot
become complacent. We must keep working,
there are more steps ahead.
I have been invited to participate in
the formation of a Black Jewish Coalition for Justice on Long Island, and while
I don’t yet have much information, I will keep you informed about other ways to
be involved. If you are interested in
racial justice, please be in touch with me.
We must work to meet with those whose lives and experiences are
different from ours. It is my hope that
this coalition will serve exactly that purpose.
Beyond grassroots local meetings, we can
also advocate for change nationally. Last
year’s Supreme Court Decision, Shelby v. Holder, which undid a critical
piece of the Voting Rights Act, may have been appropriate according to certain
principles of law. The day after the
decision, many states introduced legislation to test just how far they could
push the law. The suggestion is not to
flout the decision; that is not how this country works. We must speak out against it by supporting
new legislation to replace the overwhelmingly bi-partisan supported Voting
Rights Act. To that end, this past June,
the Voting Rights Advancement Act was introduced in both the House and the
Senate. This new law would serve to
reestablish, following the Supreme Court’s guidelines, certain provisions of
that landmark legislation. This new act,
among other aims, seeks to ensure that last-minute voting changes won’t
adversely affect voters, particularly people of color and language minorities.[4] This is an important piece of legislation
that we should favor vocally by contacting our representatives and letting them
know that as Jewish Americans, voting rights and minority rights are important
to us.
In a few moments, we will hear the calls
of the Shofar, the ram’s horn. These
calls are to be reminders of the willingness Abraham had to sacrifice his son
to God. These calls are supposed to
awaken our souls to turn toward the good in the new year. This Rosh HaShanah, as we hear the calls echo
around us, let the sound arouse in us the voice of the divine which commands us
to work to make the world as it should be and not settle for the world as it
is. Let the calls pierce our souls and bring each of us to work toward the
cause of Freedom, Justice, and Life, the cause of this nation, the cause of our
Torah.
Shanah Tovah!
