Opinion: I'm a rabbi, and abortion is a religious right (Reposted)

The following op-ed was originally published in the Houston Chronicle on February 10, 2021

In 1952 my grandmother, Audrey, was 20 years old. She had recently married my grandfather and they were living in Connecticut while he finished school. A few weeks into her first pregnancy, she contracted German measles (rubella) — a condition that put her pregnancy at great risk for complications and severe birth defects. Far away from family and support, my grandparents struggled to determine the right thing to do.

Finally, a doctor looked her in the eyes and said, “If you were my daughter, I would not let you carry this pregnancy to term.”

Now 70 years later, Audrey can still remember the certainty and clarity the doctor gave her on that day. They were referred to a doctor in Boston who would perform the procedure. He admitted her to the hospital under the guise that she had already miscarried. Though she had fears, she tells me she never had any regret over the decision to terminate that first pregnancy. And she never hesitated to tell that story, in the hopes that it would make a difference.

As her grandson, I grew up hearing hear story. As a congregational rabbi, I feel a responsibility to tell this story from our pulpit. As a religious leader, I believe I have an obligation to speak truth in our sacred spaces that resonates with the stories of people’s lives.

One in four Americans who can become pregnant will have an abortion by age 45.

Audrey’s story still resonates for many in my congregation. Some people who have abortions tell family and friends. Others, like my grandmother, share the story even more broadly. But too many have been forced to feel a sense of shame over their decision to end a pregnancy and told almost no one.

On Friday night, I will participate in National Council of Jewish Women’s Repro Shabbat initiative by sharing my grandmother’s story, along with my own views on abortion in the Jewish tradition. It is my hope that this sermon will help to destigmatize this sacred and life-affirming decision and encourage others to share their stories as well.

Judaism not only permits abortion, but even requires it when life is at stake. As a rabbi in the Reform Jewish movement, I also preach that our power and responsibility to make ethical choices is a gift from God. Moreover, building a just society is ultimately a Jewish concern. We must not remain quiet while barriers to health care place any individual’s health, well-being, autonomy or economic security at risk.

As a participant in the Rabbis for Repro initiative and president of the Faith Leader’s Coalition of Greater Houston, I advocate for the protection of all people of faith in Houston to practice their religions freely. Any law that limits a person’s ability to access abortion or reproductive health services limits their ability to practice their faith, and thus violates the First Amendment’s protections of separation of church and state.

Leaders of all faiths have a powerful platform to use in speaking out in support of reproductive health, rights and justice. It is vital that our elected officials hear from people of all backgrounds and beliefs to show that people of faith are against the sustained and coordinated attack against these constitutional rights.

As we enter into this new legislative session, I call on our state elected officials to legislate in a way that protects the rights of all Texans to practice their faith and make decisions about their bodies without fear of government intrusion or coercion. And I call on all Texans to speak out in support of reproductive justice.

Through her openness, my grandmother modeled for me the divine power that comes when people share their truth. As a faith leader I will continue to find ways to empower others to share their own sacred stories of birth, loss, abortion and infertility. I truly believe that when we can affirm these stories as natural, human, love-filled experiences, we can begin to transform our lives as we work to build a city, state and country that demonstrates the values of liberty and justice for all.

Fixler is an associate rabbi at Congregation Emanu El in Houston, president of the Faith Leader’s Coalition of Greater Houston and a participant in National Council of Jewish Women’s Repro Shabbat initiative.

Do We Need a Golem? Rosh Hashanah Sermon 2019

Introduction: The Golem Obsession

20190613_102048.jpg

This summer, I traveled through Europe with Rabbi Hayon and sixteen congregants on a tremendous trip in celebration of Emanu El’s 75th anniversary. Some went because they like to travel. Others went to get in touch with their family’s roots or to learn from their Rabbis. But I went on sacred pilgrimage. I went to see the birthplace of the Golem.

The Golem is a creature from Jewish folklore, a silent, mighty figure formed from mud. Through mystical power it is brought to life to be a helper or protector. Legendary golems have been fashioned throughout Jewish history, appearing at moments of great creativity or need.

Picture1.jpg

My lifelong interest in Golem Legends has reached an extreme that can only be described as obsession. The Golem bookshelf in my house contains well more than 100 volumes. Not only do I have dozens of golem figurines, I have Golem playing cards, golem cookie cutters, golem Slurpee cups. When I started calling our New York apartment the “South Brooklyn Golem Museum,” my wife was none too pleased.

shutterstock_672848263.jpg

The Jewish mystics believe that God created the universe using the power of words. If one were to learn even a small portion of the mystical words with which God spoke the world into being, one could animate lifeless clay. This golem would not have a soul, for only God gives out souls. It would not be capable of speech or thought. It would only follow its master’s instructions. Long before there was Frankenstein, or robots, or Artificial Intelligence, Jews were conjuring up Golems.

IMG_20190613_105358.jpg

And the most famous Golem of all belonged to Rabbi Judah Loew, the chief Rabbi of Prague in the 16th century, who was known by the honorific, the Maharal. This past summer, I stood in the otherworldly, gothic synagogue known as Altneuschul where he once preached, and I told our group the tale of the Maharal’s Golem:

The Jewish community of Prague lived in a Ghetto. The low boil of ancient religious animosities bubbled over when Brother Thaddeus was appointed as Prague’s Cardinal. He stoked the dangerous myth of the blood libel - the scurrilous accusation that Jews use Christian blood to make matzah. Fearing for his community’s safety, Rabbi Loew took two of his students to a secluded spot on the banks of the Moldau river. They formed mud into the shape of a giant man, and the Maharal, using his prodigious mystical powers, brought the Golem to life. Each night, the Golem patrolled the boundary of the Ghetto, guarding the Jewish community from threats.

golem-of-prague-250x300.jpg

It took Rabbi Loew and his Golem five years to finally defeat Brother Thaddeus and reveal his lies and machinations. Seeing that his people were safe, Rabbi Loew brought the Golem up to the attic of the synagogue, and uttered the words that turned it back into mud once again. He covered its clay body with the fragments of torn prayerbook pages and old tallitot, and there, legend says, it rests to this day, waiting for such a time as the Jews might need it again. During my visit, a historian at the Prague Jewish Museum told me that the Jewish community is so afraid of the dark power of the golem’s lifeless form, that when a few years ago, they replaced the roof of the Altneushul, they didn’t touch a single thing in the attic, except to remove the bodies of dead birds.

20190613_161440.jpg

The legend of the Maharal’s golem is a story about power in the face of fear. There are forces at work that the community is powerless to address. The walls of the ghetto, erected to keep in the Jews, do little to keep out the dangers. But the great Rabbi Loew, using only the creative capacity of words, brings to life a powerful protector, the manifestation of his desire for defense. The Golem is a fantasy of the downtrodden -- a miraculous help when more earthly saviors cannot be found.

As I walked around what remains of Prague’s Jewish ghetto, I kept having two thoughts. The first was “oh, another Golem tchotchke. I must purchase it for the South Brooklyn Golem Museum, Currently in Residence in Houston.” But the second thought was darker. It had been only months since the shooting at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh that claimed the lives of eleven Jewish worshipers one shabbat morning. It was just weeks after the shooting at the Chabad in Poway that claimed the life of yet another. As I stood outside the Altneuschul and looked at the ladder that leads to the attic, I wondered if it was time to wake him up. Do Americas Jews in 2019 need a Golem?

 

Antisemitism in 2019

I remember my first interaction with antisemitism. I was walking home from elementary school with my mother. In a patch of new cement, someone had carved a swastika. I didn’t know what that symbol meant. But my mother was the daughter of a Holocaust survivor and I saw the look of shock and worry on her face.

Today, this story feels quaint. At the time there were not armed guards at my synagogue. At the time, if I turned on the TV and saw images of synagogues under siege, or of men marching through the streets chanting the Nazi slogan “Blood and Soil,” I knew I was tuned to the History Channel. Today we see this on CNN.

 I recently attended a program sponsored by the Anti-Defamation League, where Jewish teens from across Texas told stories about their experiences with antisemitism. They spoke of friends, and even some teachers, making comments about Jews being stingy. They spoke of bullies telling them to join their families in the gas chambers. And they spoke of administrators who failed to take seriously these acts of hate. For many of our teens, antisemitism is not written in history, or even etched in cement. It is hurled at them in the hallways of their schools. It’s alive and well.

In 2017 the ADL reported that antisemitic incidents were up nearly 60 percent from the year before[i] In 2018 assaults on Jews in the US nearly doubled.[ii] The FBI reports that Jews are subject to more hate crimes than any other religious group, despite making up less than 2% of the American public.[iii]

These are more than just alarming numbers. We live in a time when the church across the street does not need armed guards, but Emanu El does.[iv] Nothing brings me greater joy than seeing you here this Rosh Hashanah. But I am also heartsick knowing that perhaps you felt a pit in your stomach as you got dressed this morning -- an unspoken fear of being in such a large gathering of Jews. We are grateful to our security personnel for keeping us safe today. And it is also a seductive fantasy to imagine our gates guarded by an unstoppable golem.

Understanding Antisemitism as a Conspiracy Theory

Antisemitism is the world's oldest, most pernicious animosity. Deborah Lipstadt, renowned scholar of the Holocaust and antisemitism in her compelling and challenging new book, Antisemitism Here and Now emphasizes how persistent this hatred is. She says, “It doesn’t go away... Though its outer form may evolve over time, its essence remains the same.”[v]

Through every generation, antisemitism has been, at its core, a conspiracy theory that the Jews hold a power disproportionate to their numbers. Perhaps the most famous modern formulation of this conspiracy theory is the Protocols of the Elders of Zion -- the fabricated minutes of the secret Jewish cabal that supposedly controls the world’s banks and governments. First published at the end of the 19th century, today it finds ever wider audience online.[vi] But any reference in our public discourse to murky “Jewish money” or insidious “Jewish lobbies,” echoes these enduring myths.

Danielle Storey - The Sleepers.jpg

Antisemitism ascribes to Jews extreme qualities of greed, self-interest, and perversity in order to describe how influential we are imagined to be. This distinguishes it from most forms of racism which seek to maintain power over another group by emphasizing their inferior qualities. This may explain, though not excuse, why people who pride themselves on being the voice for the vulnerable sometimes unabashedly deploy antisemitic rhetoric. Precisely because of the antisemitic mythos, they do not view Jews as vulnerable. This is the great irony of the Golem myth, that a group who felt powerless, but was oppressed for being secretly powerful, might invent a manifestation of their own power. The golem protects the Jews while confirming the antisemite’s worst fears. Through the golem, the Jews could finally wield the strength that our enemies always suspected we had.

 

Antisemitism on the Left and the Right

How many of us are positive that antisemitism is coming from the extreme right? Who among us is certain it is coming from the far left? As hard as may be to believe, you are all right. While the structure and impact differ, there is rampant antisemitism to be found in both extreme camps. We must acknowledge this symmetry but avoid the trap of false equivalency.

The Left: Zionism

On the Left, the animus often starts with Israel. Rabbi Jill Jacobs is the Executive Director of T’ruah, a Jewish human rights organization. Writing in the Washington Post, she reminds us that, “not all criticism of Israel is anti-Semitic.”[vii] But she goes on to assert that too often, political criticism, especially from the left, crosses into conspiracy theory and Jew hatred implying that Jews use their money to have outsized influence on policy and institutions. In November 2015, a Palestinian solidarity group organized protests at the City University of New York around planned tuition increases, by what it referred to as a “Zionist administration… that support[s] the Israeli occupation… and reproduces settler-colonial ideology... through Zionist content of education.”[viii] When folks on the left use the words “Israelis,” “Jews,” and “Zionists,” interchangeably and conspiratorially, that is antisemitism.

A liberal ideology that usually seeks to identify with the victims of oppression, too often casts Jews solely as victimizers and ignores the real dangers that Jews face in Israel and around the world. Some leaders on the left fail to denounce the vile rhetoric of antisemites like Louis Farrakhan, even when they are quick to denounce other purveyors of hate speech. This belies a worldview where Jews are the oppressor, so they cannot be oppressed.

The Right – White Supremacy

1996 Hall of Heroes (Variant Cover) 3b Power of the Golem.jpg

When antisemitism burns on the far left, the kindling is Zionism. On the far right, the tinder is white supremacy. White Nationalism is on the rise in America, and antisemitism is its foundation.[ix] A few days after the 2016 Presidential election, at an alt-right conference in Washington, DC, neo-Nazi Richard Spencer, gave a speech where he decried liberals, saying, “One wonders if these people are people at all or instead soulless Golems.”[x] Spencer concluded his remarks by raising a strategically placed water glass and shouting, “Hail Trump! Hail Our People! Hail Victory!” Many in the cheering crowd returned his Nazi salute and some shouted “Sieg heil.” That these far right elements seem infatuated with historical fascists is unsurprising. That they seem to have such a strong affinity for those currently in power is a source of great concern, whether those in the administration share their beliefs or merely tolerate their extremist views. The words of these white nationalists have real impact. In 2018, of the 50 terrorist murders committed in the US, people with ties to right-wing extremists committed 49.[xi]

Naming Antisemitism In Our Camp

Our certainty that the source of antisemitism if found only in the opposite camp intensifies the problem. As Deborah Lipstadt points out, “Those on the left see Jew-hatred only on the right. Those on the right see it only on the left.... They are blind or rather,” she argues, “willfully blind themselves to the antisemitism in their midst.”[xii] If I am honest, I know that I have been guilty of excusing the antisemitism of my friends, even as I condemn it from those with whom I disagree. As difficult as this is, we must do better if we are to root out antisemitism. As Lipstadt warns, “As long as we are blind to [antisemitism] in our midst, our fight against it will be futile.”

This is made all the more challenging in an environment where the accusation of antisemitism is increasingly being used as a partisan tool. Our political leaders expose their disingenuousness when they cherry-pick the antisemitism they are willing to condemn. The accusation of antisemitism has become just another piece of mud to fling on one’s opponents and the Jews just a pawn in a political game. We must end use of antisemitism as a partisan cudgel. When we witness our allies employing antisemitic tropes, and we fail to speak out in good faith, we empower those who make their arguments in bad faith.

 

Acknowledging the Pain

Antisemitism is worse now than it has been in a long time. Maybe I was just very lucky to grow up in a time and place where I had the privilege of not thinking about it. But I think about it all the time now. Like Rabbi Loew, I am heartbroken and afraid for my community.

Not scared for my own physical safety, because I know how hard we work to keep you safe here. I am scared for America and for democracy. As Deborah Lipstadt explains, “the existence of Jew-hatred within a society is an indication that something about the entire society is amiss. No healthy society harbors extensive antisemitism—or any other form of hatred.”[xiii] I am scared about the celebration of violence in our society, about the way that hateful and hurtful speech is not denounced, but glorified. I am scared that those with long stewing hatreds feel they have allies or role models in the highest seats of civic life. The disease of unbridled hatred is spreading in America. We can spend our time arguing about who is Patient Zero, or we can work together for a cure.

 

Conclusions: Drive Out, Dive In, Speak Up

shutterstock_554707675.jpg

As I stood in the shadow of the Altneushul this past summer in Prague, and looked up at the resting place of the golem, I wondered if he might be that that cure. Might I feel less afraid if there had been a Golem to stand guard in Charlottesville? In Pittsburgh or Poway? Could a Golem stand between the Orthodox Jews in New York City and the people throwing rocks at them as they walk down the street? The image of a powerful Golem that could protect the Jews at this time of increased vulnerability is an alluring fantasy.

But it is just that. A fantasy. Our threats are real, and our responses must be based in facts not myths. And the truth is, though the threats to American Jews in 2019 may be uniquely concerning, we have never needed a golem less.

golem-latest.jpg

We don’t need a golem because in America we have a voice. Never in history have Jews had more power over their own destiny. Never in history have Jews been more integrated in society than we are in America today. If we made a golem, it would need a ghetto to patrol. A golem marches between us and the world. Making one would mean drawing in, and putting up walls. And if the golem story shows us anything, it’s that we are never safer inside a ghetto.

In the absence of a single fantastical solution to antisemitism, our responses to the problem must be varied and strategic. In her book, Antisemitism Here and Now, Deborah Lipstadt suggests some directions, which is why I’ll be leading a discussion of it on Sunday Morning, November 10. I invite you to join me then. But today, I want to share with you three approaches to the challenge we face. To respond to antisemitism, I believe we must Drive Out, Dive In, and Speak Up.

Drive Out

We must Drive Out antisemitism in its most dangerous forms. The extremists hate us. The farthest left think the Jews are unforgivable oppressors. The neo-Nazis think we are the literal devil. Both share in the conspiracy theory that we pull the strings of world affairs. There is no Golem that can root out hate in people’s hearts, or conspiracy in their mind. These extremists must be called out for what they are and ostracized from the marketplace of ideas. We must demand that our leaders in both parties disassociate from these extremists. Violent hate has no place in civil society.

Dive In

But most Americans do not hate us. In fact, many of them love us. And yet, through ignorance or indifference, they are blind to the antisemitic tropes and conspiratorial beliefs that infect their own thinking. Where we have relationships with these individuals, we must Dive In, and point out when they misstep. In 2019 people are learning to call out racism, sexism, homophobia when they see it. We need to be just as brave in calling out the aggressions of antisemitism big and small -- the offhand comments about Jewish money or Jewish power. The assumption that all Jews are white, are wealthy, are Democrats. A golem would do us no good in reaching these people, as a golem is incapable of speaking for us. We must speak for ourselves. We must use the creative power of words with which God built the universe, not to build Golems but to build bridges. We won’t change our enemies, but we might move our friends. So that when the hateful few come to do us harm, we are not standing alone, or behind some imaginary golem, but shoulder to shoulder with allies who understand our struggles and our pain.

Speak Up

And if we have learned to speak against those who hate us, and speak to those who like us, then we must also speak up for those who need us. If history has taught us anything, it’s that antisemitism is never an isolated hatred. It is the canary in the coal mine of democracy. As Deborah Lipstadt says, “what starts with attacks on Jews rarely ends there.”[xiv]  The white supremacist terrorist who committed the massacre at Tree of Life didn’t do it just because he hated Jews. His online bile in the moments before the shooting was about the Jewish community’s work supporting immigrants. Jews are targets in our current climate. We may even be amongst the most reviled, but we are not the most vulnerable. Because unlike Rabbi Loew, we have power, and it isn’t supernatural. But the marginalized in our society cry out for a protector. The immigrant, the refugee, the undocumented, they are experiencing the fear that our people recognize too well. A monstrous, muddy golem cannot save them, so we must be their strength. Over and over the Torah commands us to welcome the stranger because we were strangers once. So let us not be far from the people who need love most. Let us be the voice for the voiceless, because we can. This is how we will truly address antisemitism, when the marginalized and the powerful alike can attest to our humanity.

 

A mindless clay mass cannot save us. We must be the power we need. Where there is hatred, we must be love. Where there is fear, we must be hope. Where there is darkness, we must be light. Let the Golem rest in his attic with his prayerbooks and tallitot. We have better uses for our words than bringing him back to life.

Shanah Tovah

 

NOTES

[i] https://www.adl.org/news/press-releases/anti-semitic-incidents-surged-nearly-60-in-2017-according-to-new-adl-report

[ii] https://www.adl.org/news/press-releases/anti-semitic-incidents-remained-at-near-historic-levels-in-2018-assaults

[iii] https://ucr.fbi.gov/hate-crime

[iv] Many Christian congregations, especially black churches, as well as many mosques and other places of worship do feel threatened in the current political climate and have increased their security as well.

[v] Lipstadt, Deborah E.. Antisemitism (p. 16). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

[vi] https://www.myjewishlearning.com/article/protocols-of-the-elders-of-zion/

[vii] https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/how-to-tell-when-criticism-of-israel-is-actually-anti-semitism/2018/05/17/cb58bf10-59eb-11e8-b656-a5f8c2a9295d_story.html

[viii] https://www.tabletmag.com/scroll/195048/students-for-justice-in-palestine-blame-high-cuny-tuition-on-zionist-administration

[ix] https://www.politicalresearch.org/2017/06/29/skin-in-the-game-how-antisemitism-animates-white-nationalism

[x] https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/davidmack/it-began-with-words

[xi] https://www.adl.org/murder-and-extremism-2018

[xii] Lipstadt, Deborah E.. Antisemitism (p. 211). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

[xiii] Lipstadt, Deborah E.. Antisemitism . Introduction Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

[xiv] Lipstadt, Deborah E.. Antisemitism (p. 164). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

Remembering Rabbi Aaron D. Panken, Ph.D., z"l

IMG_3691.JPG

Today, along with Jews all over the world, I mourn the loss of my teacher, Rabbi Aaron Panken, z”l. He was a hero among men – a scholar, an inspiration, and a real mensch. I have no words to sufficiently express my sadness at this tragic and sudden loss. The void he leaves in our lives, in our movement, and in our world will never be sufficiently filled. Every class, every interaction with Rabbi Panken was filled with kindness, wisdom, and spirit. We are all bereft.

One way we honor a teacher is to teach in their name. I had the joy to take a class with Rabbi Panken in 2015 where he shared with us his 12 favorite Talmudic texts. He taught with joy and passion, and he could make even the most perplexing and obscure texts leap off the page and into our hearts. One of the first texts he taught was from the Talmud Bavli, Chagigah 3a. In this text, the students of the Beit Midrash (the house of study) went to see their teacher, Rabbi Yehoshua, who had not been in class that day. He asked them what chiddush (a new, and novel idea) they had learned that day. They said to him, “We are YOUR students, we drink from YOUR water” (i.e. how could we teach YOU Torah, as you are the teacher and we are the students). He replied, “Even so, there can be no Beit Midrash without chiddush.”

With this text, Rabbi Panken taught us three lessons that seem particularly poignant today: He taught us that a true teacher learns from every student. He taught us that a true teacher never stops learning. And he taught us that we keep Torah alive when we bring new thoughts and new connections and our own spirit to Torah.

Aaron Panken lived these values every day. I was always awed by his interest in his students – in their lives and their ideas. I remember sitting in his office last year for my “exit interview.” He was so deeply invested in asking me about my life, about my upcoming move, and my growing family that we almost didn’t have time for anything else. But when the conversation turned to my reflections on my experience at the College-Institute (not all of them were laudatory), he was engaged, thoughtful, and respectful. He even asked me to type up my thoughts and send them to him to share with other administrators. In class and in private conversation, his boundless wisdom was balanced with his immeasurable humility, and he saw it as his religious obligation to learn from every student. He embodied a life of learning and respect.

IMG_0012.JPG

But mostly, I will remember my teacher for that third lesson – that there can be no house of study without chiddush. Our work as learners and teachers is not only to discover old truths, but to apply them in new ways to new problems. Not novel for its own sake but novel because our Torah grows with each new connection. Our work is the work of making something innovative – adding our own voice to the conversation. I never left a conversation with Rabbi Panken without a chiddush – without something new to think about, reflect upon, or struggle with. Rabbi Panken’s legacy is a more expansive Torah, enlightened by his chiddushim, enlivened by his joy, and enriched by his spirit. We, his students, will carry his chiddushim into the world always. And we will add our own, teaching in his name and building upon his wisdom.

I feel blessed for the six years in which I got to know Rabbi Panken. I am inspired by his life guided by values and kindness, learning, and loving. My heart breaks for his wife, children, and parents. I hope they will find some comfort in knowing that we, his students, will carry his Torah forward. May they find solace and hope in the love of family and community.

Rabbi Panken, may your memory always be for a blessing. As we remember you, we declare to the world that we are your students and we drink from your water. That water will forever nourish our lives.

Parashat Kidoshim - Emotional Imagination: Mr. Rogers and Neighborly Love

Craig Toocheck has a plan to transform the city of Pittsburgh, while at the same time honoring one of its most famous sons. For over a year, Craig has been conducting a campaign to make the official city song “Won’t You Be My Neighbor” – the theme song from Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood. Pittsburgh takes great pride in Fred Rogers’ connection to his hometown and Craig imagines a day when “It’s a beautiful day in the neighborhood” is sung at all city council meetings and professional sporting events.

Craig has explained his campaign, saying, "The lyrics are inspirational, and the song is an important part of Pittsburgh history and culture… The message that Mister Rogers tried to send is important and could hopefully foster some neighborliness in our city."[i]

Like Craig, I grew up on episodes of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood. I get teary listening to his kind, gentle voice, saying “would you be mine, could you be mine, won’t you be my neighbor.” And that anthem seems more important now than maybe ever before. We live in a time when it’s hard to be a neighbor. I, too, am nostalgic for those beautiful days of neighborliness, even if they were idealized even then.

Craig has been hanging posters around town to build support for his cause. One of them reads “Be the Neighbor Mr. Rogers Would Want You to Be.” It’s a message people need to see, in 2018 especially. And I think the message is the modern version of a commandment that appears in this week’s Torah portion, Achrei Mot/Kidoshim: “v’ahavtah le-rei’akha c’mocha – Love your neighbor as yourself.”[ii]  It is, perhaps, the most famous of all the commandments in the Torah. And maybe, when you think about it, also the most difficult. It seems so simple, on its face. Just three little words. And yet, the more we stare at them, the more questions they raise. Who is your neighbor? And, how much do you have to love them really? Do you really have to care for their wellbeing as much as you care for your own? And, perhaps most troubling of all, can we even be commanded to love? God can place obligations on our actions, but does God have any jurisdiction over our hearts and our minds?

This is not just a modern quandary. Jews throughout the generations have struggled to understand this commandment – its meaning and its boundaries. This tension is seen in statement of Rabbi Hillel, who lived nearly two thousand years ago, and restated this commandment as “what is hateful to you, do not do to another.” Here, he takes the commandment out of the realm of emotion and reframes it in terms of actions. You must treat others in the way you want to be treated. But to Hillel, how you feel about them is another story altogether.

The tradition acknowledges that your own life and needs will be more valuable to you than the needs of your neighbor. Rabbi Akiva, writing around the same time as Rabbi Hillel, reflects that your life would surely take precedence over your fellow. So how then are we to make sense of “love your neighbor as yourself?” Could it ever really be possible to live this maxim fully, to be as interested in the needs of the other as we are in our own?

There is another version of this commandments, just a few verses later that may shed some light on this challenge: “the stranger who resides with you in your land, you shall not wrong him. [he] shall be to you as one of your citizens you shall love him as yourself for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.”[iii] At first this seems even more challenging. Not only are we to love our neighbors, but also the stranger who is residing in our midst. And furthermore, we should see them as being the same as our own citizens. How would that even be possible? But then, we are reminded that we were strangers once too, in the land of Egypt. And suddenly, we are looking at the strangers in our midst differently. We are imagining ourselves in their shoes, and then it is harder to look away.  Bible scholar Jacqueline Lapsley explains, “Israel is to remember what being a stranger feels like and is then to ascribe those feelings imaginatively to the stranger. This act of emotional imagination will stir feelings of compassion. Out of this affective response will arise a love for the stranger, which takes form in practical action.”[iv]

I love this phrase “emotional imagination” because this process is rooted in story and creativity. We pass the homeless person on the street and we do not just think of their cardboard sign, or their tattered clothing. We try and imagine the story that lead them to this moment. Are the hardships they have faced anything like the hardships we have faced in our lives? Where do our stories diverge? Thinking this way might change how we see them. We don’t have to be right in our imagining, either, because there is power in the imaginative process. When we put their suffering in conversation with our own, we stretch our heart muscles a little bit. And when those muscles expand, there is a little more room in our heart. And when we are holding space for them in our hearts, we will treat this differently. Empathetic thinking leads to kinder, more loving actions. In this way we stop seeing the people around us as strangers, and start seeing them as rei’akha – as our neighbors. And when we can imagine them with empathy, we can start to love them.

Educational theorist Sir Ken Robinson says that imagination is one of the key elements of being human – the thing that separates us from the rest of the animal kingdom. The ability to creatively imagine someone else’s story is the defining characteristic of our humanity. Perhaps this is what Genesis means when it says that God created human beings “b’tzelem Elohim – in the divine image.”[v] God, the ultimate creator, endowed us with a portion of that creativity. And we can learn to recognize that spark in others, too.  When we think of the commandment “v’ahavtah le-rei’akha c’mocha – Love your neighbor as yourself” we tend to get hung up on the complexities of that first word – “v’ahavtah – love.”  But maybe we should shift our attention to the last word – c’mocha – as yourself. We know ourselves to be complex beings made up of a myriad of stories. Can we employ our imagination to extend that same honor to other people – to imagine them complexly? Can we picture pieces of our own stories in theirs?  And will doing this change how we feel about them? Can we really hate someone, after we have imagined them in this way? Literature scholar Elaine Scarry says that, “the human capacity to injure other people is very great precisely because our capacity to imagine other people is very small.”[vi] Our work, the work of faith, is to try and stretch that imaginative capacity.

This kind of imagining can help us to act with more kindness and more justice. Peter Solovy, a psychologist and president of Yale University has explained that “psychologists… have linked [empathy] to acting ethically and morally. We are more likely to treat other people well if we can find ways to empathize with them. Here, we are told how to act—how not to mistreat strangers—because we can understand their feelings, their hearts.”[vii] Rabbi Emanuel Rackman has called this “empathetic justice” – a moral posture to the world that is rooted in our emotional imagination.[viii]

And boy do we need empathetic justice today! We are living in a world where it is getting harder and harder to imagine our neighbors. Globalization has shattered the barriers between communities. Neighborhoods now transcend ethnic, religious, even national boundaries. Our challenges with what to do about civil discourse, immigration, and conflicts all over the world are rooted in the strength and openness of our heart muscles – in our ability to imagine strangers and our neighbors complexly.  Will emotional imagination instantly solve the Israeli/Palestinian conflict or the global refugee crisis? Absolutely not. But what I know is this – we cannot solve these crisis without it.

While it is true that imagination is a divine human gift, it is also true that human beings are not, by our nature great at expanding our definitions of neighbors. Science understands this. Our monkey brains want to be in tribes, want to preserve ourselves and extend our genetic line, but not much more. Jewish tradition understands this, too. Nachmanides writes in the 13th century that we will naturally wish for our neighbor a portion smaller than the one we wish for ourselves. Even our closes friends will come second to our own desires.[ix] But this is exactly why we need this commandment. We are told thirty-six times in the Torah to care for the stranger because we need the reminder. We have to train ourselves to think this way, to exercise our emotional imagination, lest it atrophy. The religious project is to transcend our monkey brains and live generously in complex society – to put our divine creativity to work for humanity.

So maybe Mr. Rogers’ vision of a neighborhood with only beautiful days seems particularly far off at this moment. Maybe the discord between political parties has made us distrustful of our neighbors. Maybe world events trouble us and make us fearful. And fear is the opposite of love. It hardens our hearts. But we know that we are commanded to try and transform that fear back into love. We are commanded to let our hearts open so that they can shape our actions. That poster that Craig Toocheck has been hanging around Pittsburgh, the one with the message “Be the Neighbor Mr. Rogers Would Want You to Be” has an image on it, of two men sitting with their pant legs rolled up and their feet in a kiddy pool. One is Mr Rogers. The other is Officer Clemmons – the black, gay police officer of Mr. Rogers’ neighborhood.

UjEucJ4.jpg

Francois Clemmons, who played the character 30 years, once recounted this experience of coming on this show. "When Fred asked me to play a police officer [I said] 'Fred, are you sure? Do you know what police officers represent in the community where I was raised? And then he started talking about children needing helpers and the positive influence I could have for young children. My heart opened as I listened to him."[x] Clemmons recounted that Rogers was on the front lines of integration. He was one of the first black recurring characters on a children’s television show, and that pool scene from 1969 made big waves in its day (if you will forgive the pun). As Officer Clemmons and Mr. Rogers sat in that integrated pool together, they sang “there are many ways to say I love you.” Today, that image is hanging in posters all over a town where racial tensions are once again on the rise. The goal is to open hearts and minds. The goal is to inspire people to see themselves in their neighbors. The goal is to encourage a new generation to imagine empathetically.  Mr. Rogers, in his theme song says, “I have always wanted to have a neighbor just like you, I’ve always wanted to live in a neighborhood with you.” This week’s Torah portion challenges us to look at each person we meet with that kind of radical love. If we did, it might transform the world.

_________________________________________________________________________________________________

[i] http://wesa.fm/post/posters-around-city-ask-mayor-make-wont-you-be-my-neighbor-pittsburghs-official-song#stream/0

[ii] Leviticus 19:18

[iii] Leviticus 19:33-34

[iv] Quoted in Held, The Heart of Torah, Vol. 2 (p. 63)

[v] Genesis 5:1

[vi] https://ajws.org/dvar-tzedek/mishpatim-5774/

[vii] https://www.sefaria.org/sheets/97900>

[viii] “Torah Concept of Empathic Justice Can Bring Peace,” The Jewish Week, April 3, 1977: 19

[ix] Quoted in Lebowitz, Studies in Vyikra, (p. 367)

[x] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ObHNWh3F5fQ, quoted here.

Parashat Bo: Loneliness - The Real Plague of Darkness

View a video of this sermon here.

landscape-1450116423-gettyimages-186756083-1.jpg

“The students came to their teacher with a quandary: What can be done about all the evil in the world. “There is so much darkness – what can we do to dispel it?” The wise Rabbi ruminated over the problem in silence for a moment. He then asked each of them to fetch a broom. He told them that his cellar was very dark and that they should go down to the cellar and sweep away the darkness. The students were confused, but they carried their brooms to the cellar. They soon returned and informed the Rabbi of their failure to clean out the darkness. The Rabbi then asked each of them to grab a stick and beat the darkness until it went away. So the students went away again. After a while they returned with abject faces, having failed once again to get rid of the darkness. The Rabbi then told them to go back to the cellar and shout at the darkness. The students tried this and returned even more confused and frustrated. Finally, the Rabbi gave each of them a candle and asked them one last time to return to the dark cellar. And so, they went down to the pitch black cellar and one by one they set their candles alight until the darkness disappeared.”[1]

I want to talk about the plague of darkness. After all the other plagues – after rivers flowing with blood, and cattle dying from disease, and locusts eating the last of the crops – the penultimate plague was darkness.  The Torah says (Exodus 10:20-22)

וַיֹּ֨אמֶר יְהוָ֜ה אֶל־מֹשֶׁ֗ה נְטֵ֤ה יָֽדְךָ֙ עַל־הַשָּׁמַ֔יִם וִ֥יהִי חֹ֖שֶׁךְ עַל־אֶ֣רֶץ מִצְרָ֑יִם וְיָמֵ֖שׁ חֹֽשֶׁךְ׃

21: The Eternal said to Moses, “Hold out your arm toward the sky that there may be darkness upon the land of Egypt, a darkness that can be touched.”

וַיֵּ֥ט מֹשֶׁ֛ה אֶת־יָד֖וֹ עַל־הַשָּׁמָ֑יִם וַיְהִ֧י חֹֽשֶׁךְ־אֲפֵלָ֛ה בְּכָל־אֶ֥רֶץ מִצְרַ֖יִם שְׁלֹ֥שֶׁת יָמִֽים׃

22: Moses held out his arm toward the sky and thick darkness descended upon all the land of Egypt for three days.

לֹֽא־רָא֞וּ אִ֣ישׁ אֶת־אָחִ֗יו וְלֹא־קָ֛מוּ אִ֥ישׁ מִתַּחְתָּ֖יו שְׁלֹ֣שֶׁת יָמִ֑ים וּֽלְכָל־בְּנֵ֧י יִשְׂרָאֵ֛ל הָ֥יָה א֖וֹר בְּמוֹשְׁבֹתָֽם׃

23: People could not see one another, and for three days no one could get up from where he was; but all the Israelites enjoyed light in their dwellings.

This was not the ordinary darkness of night. This was a darkness so thick it could be felt and touched. This is a darkness that kept you from seeing your neighbor, even when they were standing right next to you. It was a darkness that held you in your place. It was a darkness that enveloped and incapacitated.

The midrash refers to this darkness as a darkness that crept up from Gehinnom, from Hell.  It says it was the thick, goopy darkness that preceded creation, that existed before God said, “let there be light.” Harold Kushner writes that this hellish darkness is the darkness of “those who cannot truly see their neighbors, who cannot feel the pain and recognized the dignity of their afflicted neighbors.” This is the darkness that separates people from each other. This is the darkness of isolation.

Isolation is a tragic reality of our modern society. It’s ironic that in an age with more and more technology to stay connected, people are finding themselves increasingly isolated. It has led some to call this “the age of loneliness”[2] It is why this week, British Prime Minister Theresa May appointed an official “Minister for Loneliness” to coordinate her government’s response to this growing crisis.[3]

And it is a crisis. The UK is responding to a recent study that revealed that more than nine million people in the country report that they often or always feel lonely.[4] And the problem is just as bad on this side of the pond. While in the 1970’s and 80’s, 10 to 20 percent of the population reported frequently feeling lonely, some recent studies have found that today the number may be as high as 45 percent.[5] “The General Social Survey found that the number of Americans with no close friends has tripled since 1985.… The average number of people Americans feel they can talk to about ‘important matters’ has fallen from three to two.”[6] The AARP reports that “42.6 million adults over age 45 in the United States are estimated to be suffering from chronic loneliness”[7].

And the consequences of this epidemic are dire. People who experience chronic loneliness have significantly greater risk for physical and mental health problems, including heart disease and depression.[8] One study found that “social isolation and feelings of loneliness increase a person’s chance of premature death by 14 percent — nearly double the risk of early death from obesity.” [9] Another showed that chronic isolation is worse for your health than smoking 15 cigarettes a day.[10]

This is the 9th plague. The darkness of separation from other human beings. How apt is this description for this kind of depressive and oppressive loneliness the Torah provides: a darkness that was so thick people could not see their neighbors. People could not even move.

It is also the isolation we inflict upon ourselves. The Hassidic Rabbi Yitzchak Meir Alter has a different way of reading this verse. He flips the words around saying, “the worst darkness is the blindness in which one person will not ‘see another’ (Exodus 10:23) refusing to look upon his misery and help him. Such a person will be incapable of ‘rising from his place’ – of growth and development.”[11] How true it is that when we choose not to see one another, we are in darkness! It is like the Psalmist says, we have eyes, but we cannot see.[12]

So what do we do when we live in the “age of loneliness” – in a time of increasing isolation? What can we do to combat the forces of darkness that threaten to envelop us? That threaten to pull us apart from other people? Perhaps this is why we are here in synagogue this evening. Perhaps this is the work of sacred community. The Torah says:

“People could not see one another, and for three days no one could get up from where he was; but all the Israelites enjoyed light in their dwellings.”

Somehow, even in times of darkness, the Jews build sanctuaries of light. That’s why we’re here this evening. Not just to say kaddish, not just to hear the music or recite the prayers. We are here to be together, countercultural as it may be. We come here, on this Shabbat – a holiday that begins with the kindling of light, so that we can see each other. The ancient farmers who invented this holiday did not light candles on other nights. When the sun went down, they went to bed to rest up for another long day of work. But on Shabbat, they would kindle lights in their dwellings and feel the job of seeing their families faces illuminated in the candle’s warm glow.

This is why Jews must say kaddish in a minyan of ten people. Because our tradition knows that mourning can be isolating and lonely. Grief threatens to force us into darkness.  But ‘no,’ says our tradition. You cannot mourn alone in the dark. You must bring your sadness out into the light, where we can share it with you.

To bring light into a darkened world is sacred work. The prophet Isaiah quotes God, saying, “I have grasped you by the hand. I created you, and appointed you a covenant people, a light of nations — Opening eyes deprived of light.”[13] This is our sacred calling as a Jewish people, to bring light to dark places.

We know that we cannot combat the darkness by adding more friends on Facebook. It will take more than Tweets, more than Instagram photos and JDate profiles to open eyes deprived of light. It takes calling the elderly family member or friend who has been shut in during the cold this week, and seeing how they are holding up. It is asking your neighbor “how are you doing” and then not taking “fine” for an answer.  It is writing a thank you note to a person who touched your day.

If the darkness is the inability to see our neighbor, then we must choose ways to open our eyes. We must focus on people and not policies. We cannot let the complexities of our nation’s biggest decisions blind us to the realities of the lives of the people they affect.  We cannot choose to be blind to the needs of our neighbors, for that is how the darkness gets in. When we avert our eyes from their pain, we court darkness. Rather, we must seek them out, we must hear their stories, for that is the pathway to light.

We can train our brains to do this, and resist the trend towards darkness. We can call the grocery store clerk by the name on their ID badge, so that we can start to see them as a person and not just a checkout machine. We can make conversation with the other people in line. We can look a panhandler in the eyes, instead of glancing away.  And if fighting back the darkness isn’t a good enough reason, then chew on this: Research from Julianne Holt-Lunstad at Brigham Young University has found that the greatest predictor of longevity was social integration. More than weight or exercise, the amount of connections you have to other people make you more likely to live a longer life. It’s the strong and the weak connections, it’s friends and family, but it’s also your bridge club, and the people you see at services, and the people you smile at in the store. If you want to live a long life, Julianne Holt-Lunstad finds, interact with people. Fight back the darkness with light.

The Egyptians sat, stuck in their darkness while the Israelites moved around freely in light. They may choose to sit in the dark – they may chose not to see their neighbors. But we can choose light for ourselves. We can choose to see other people as people, and not things. We can choose to try and see their pain, and see their struggle, and in so doing, we bring light and freedom to this world. And then, we can try and offer that light to others.

Think of the rabbi, who taught his pupils that you cannot sweep the darkness under the rug, any more than you can swipe it away on Tinder. You cannot beat the darkness back by force. And you certainly cannot shout it away. All you can do is be a light, and add your light to the light of others around you, until the darkness disappears.

 

I’m going to ask you to do something now, that may feel scary because it’s counter cultural. In a minute, I’m going to ask you to turn to your neighbor, and ask them a question. Try and ask someone you didn’t come here with. You may even have to get up and move. And as you listen to their answer, try to look them in the eye. Try and see the light that is hidden there. The question I’d like each of you to ask each other is “what was a source of light for you this past week”.  Let’s take a few minutes and ask each other.

Time for people to talk

Shabbatones sing Or Zarua.

The Psalmist declares – light is sown for the righteous and joy for the upright of heart. May this room and this community of light continue to be a sanctuary from the darkness.

 

[1] Adaped slightly from https://mustafahameed.blog/2011/12/30/candles-in-the-dark/

[2] https://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/03/21/science-loneliness_n_6864066.html

[3] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/17/world/europe/uk-britain-loneliness.html

[4] ibid

[5] http://fortune.com/2016/06/22/loneliness-is-a-modern-day-epidemic/

[6] https://www.forbes.com/sites/carolinebeaton/2017/02/09/why-millennials-are-lonely/#5c9073a17c35

[7] https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/08/170805165319.htm

[8] http://healthland.time.com/2013/03/26/social-isolation-not-just-feeling-lonely-may-shorten-lives/

[9] https://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/03/21/science-loneliness_n_6864066.html

[10] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/17/world/europe/uk-britain-loneliness.html

[11] Torah Gems: Shemot, p 74

[12] Psalm 115:5

[13] Isaiah 42:6-7

Bracing for Impact: Cultivating Resilience in These High Holy Days

5778 Rosh Hashanah Serermon, Congregation Emanu El, Houston, Texas. September 21, 2017

Yaron makes Roses. He doesn’t grow roses -- he forges them.

bobatwork.jpg

Yaron lives in a tiny community in Israel called Yated (יָתֵד). The town is only about four-and-a-half miles from the border with Gaza. People who live in that part of Israel are under the constant threat of rockets fired from the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip. Thankfully, rocket attacks in the last two years have dropped off precipitously, but at their height, there was a near constant barrage. A few times a day, residents in these border villages would hear the sirens telling them they had just 15 seconds to find shelter.

Yaron has had two close calls. Twice he’s found himself without shelter. Twice he has felt the ground shake and the dust cover him.

The second time that it happened, the rocket fell fifty feet from him. When the dust cleared, he could see the mangled metal body of the rocket sticking out of the ground.

Yaron is a blacksmith and a metal artist, and looking at that smoldering shell, he was overcome with an urge to make something beautiful. So he began taking the fallen rocket shells, melting them down, and hammering them into beautiful roses. He sells these roses and donates a portion of the proceeds to help build bomb shelters to protect his neighbors. To him these metal roses are sign that something both strong and beautiful can grow out of adversity, that violence cannot quench hope. Isaiah says we should beat swords into plowshares; Yaron hammers rockets into roses. It’s not always easy, but he is trying to turn terror into something more triumphant.

standard_rose1.jpg

How do we hammer the hard parts of our lives into something beautiful? Or if not beautiful, maybe functional. Or if not functional, maybe we can at least soften the sharp edges. It is an art to move forward after tragedy or trauma. The field of positive psychology calls it “Resilience.” This past month, we’ve all been getting a crash course in the kinds of tragedies that require the art of resilience -- and it is an art we can learn through these High Holy Days.

Facebook executive Sheryl Sandberg and her friend, psychologist Adam Grant, write about resilience in their provocative new book Option B: Facing Adversity, Building Resilience, and Finding Joy. Sandberg learned about resilience firsthand when her husband, David Goldberg, died suddenly of a cardiac arrhythmia at the age of 47. In the book, she writes about her own descent into grief and despair, and how Adam’s research about resilience helped her and her children find their way out. For all of us struggling to make sense of tragedy, or supporting people who are, this book can be a powerful read.

Sandberg and Grant define resilience as “the strength and speed of our response to adversity.”[i] They see it, not as an innate ability, but as a skillset. And they conclude that after a trauma, or even before, it is possible to develop this skillset. We can learn to be more resilient.

Before we go any further, it is important to acknowledge[ii] that pain is a part of loss, and resilience does not diminish it. Resilience does not erase all suffering. All of us who have experienced loss, whether in recent days or years past, know this. Building resilience is not about denying pain. It’s about what we do with that pain, how we hold space for it, and how we eventually learn to live with it.

We must also recognize that growth does not give meaning to our pain. Sandberg experienced what psychologists call “post-traumatic growth” by developing more self-awareness and strength. But she says she would happily trade her new self-knowledge for a little more time with Dave. It’s a sentiment all of us who have suffered a loss know well. Finding strength in the face of hardship does not mean we should stop trying to diminish hardship in the world.[iii]

And finally, resilience in the face of tragedy is not simple. There are people in this room who are at this very moment experiencing great upheaval. Some of you have been displaced by the storm. Others of you are facing an illness in your life or the life of a loved one. Some of you have lost jobs, ended relationships, experienced violence, or seen abilities decline. For me to stand here and tell you to look for the silver lining would be cruel. All I, or anyone else can do is reach out our hand, and say “I’m here for a hug, or to help you pull yourself out. Whichever you most need.” This morning, as I speak about the possibility of resilience, I do so knowing that this may seem distant for some of you. But I hope today we might plant a seed that will sprout when it’s ready.

So, if resilience is the strength and speed of our response to adversity, how do we teach ourselves to be stronger and faster? Psychologists like Martin Seligman say we do this by learning to understand our natural responses to hardship. Seligman teaches that when tragedy strikes, we are susceptible to three myths. They try to take up residence in our brains like uninvited houseguests. Our resilience is found in our ability to recognize these uninvited visitors and help them find the door. The houseguests are:” Permanence, Pervasiveness, and Personalization.[iv]

Permanence is the belief that I will always feel the way I do right now. It is not just saying “life will never be the same” – for that is surely true. It is saying, “I’ll never be happy again.” Yes, our world will be irrevocably changed, but psychologically speaking we are actually pretty bad at predicting how we will feel in the future. Psychologists have studied this. They call it affective forecasting. When people are asked to predict how sad they will feel before an event occurs, they tend to overestimate relative to how they actually report feeling months after the event. Essentially, when things are going wrong, we are predisposed to think we will continue to suffer[v]. When we are stuck in the myth of Permanence it is harder to notice our progress.

The second houseguest is Pervasiveness, which says that all aspects of our life will be affected by the trauma. Pervasiveness is the thought that “I can’t find anything funny anymore.” It is the myth that says you’ve lost all havens in your life that could feel normal or even good. Pervasiveness includes the guilt we feel when we do start to feel happy. It is the way we convince ourselves that if we laugh, we are moving on too quickly and doing a disservice to the memory or the event. When we are stuck in the myth of pervasiveness, we expect our pain will permeate into all aspects of our lives.

The third houseguest is Personalization, the sense of guilt or responsibility we feel for tragedy that is not our fault. It is the “I could have’s.” The “if I’d only’s.” Learning from your mistakes is one thing, but blaming yourself for events outside of your control is another thing entirely.

After her husband's death, Sheryl Sandberg blamed herself for not finding him sooner. She later wondered if she should have pushed him to eat better when he was alive. But even when she could no longer think of any specific way to blame herself, she noticed that she was apologizing. She writes, “[I apologized] to my mom, who put her life on hold to stay with me for the first month. To my friends who dropped everything to travel to the funeral…. To my colleagues for losing focus when emotion overwhelmed me.”[vi] Apologizing had become a smokescreen for her feeling of personal responsibility for her husband’s death. When we are stuck in the myth of personalization, we make ourselves into the enemy.

When tragedy strikes, these three unwanted house guests invite themselves into our brains.  Permanence says, “you’ll always feel this bad”; Pervasiveness says, “every part of your life will feel this bad”’ and Personalization says, “you are to blame.” We cannot stop these guests from coming to visit. They are pain’s natural companions. But we can learn to recognize them for what they are and to know when to ask them to leave.

The themes of the High Holy Days can help us learn to recognize these three houseguests. Take for example the difficult and heart-wrenching words of Untaneh Tokef. Cantor Simmons so beautifully showed us this morning how the separate components of the Untaneh Tokef fit together into a unified whole. And each piece of this prayer contributes in its own way to the larger message of resilience. As we listen to these themes in this prayer, it can teach us how to find resilience in our own lives.

The first paragraph of the prayer speaks to Permanence and Pervasiveness. “Untaneh Tokef k’dushat hayom — ki hu nora v’ayom.” “Let us proclaim the holiness of this day, it is full of fright and dread.” These days are set apart. We feel as if the passage of time has stopped -- that is Permanence. We feel as if everything hangs in the balance -- that’s pervasiveness.  But these days will end. The book will close. The shofar will sound, the fast will get broken and life will go on. We will get back to normal. The Days of Awe are structured as if to say, “you cannot live in this kind of intensity of purpose every day, so live it fully for 10 days, and then move on.” When we pray these words, we say, “I know these feelings are intense, but I also know they have an expiration date.”

The next section of Untaneh Tokef teaches us to confront Personalization. We read the words, “B’Rosh HaShanah yikateivun; uvYom Tzom Kippur yeichateimun.” “On Rosh HaShanah it is written; on Yom Kippur it is sealed: who will live and who will die…” It reminds us that there are many things beyond our control. The disaster can strike at any time, for no reason at all. We storm-tossed Houstonians know this all too well. But, the prayer declares, “repentance, prayer and charity, these help us transcend the harshness of the decree.” Notice that they do not change the decree; rather, they help us to deal with it. When we pray these words, we say, “I know what I cannot control, so I will behave with intention in the places where I do have control – my actions towards myself, God, and others.”

We, who have seen the water rise, know from tragedy. We, who have had to tear out sheetrock, know from pain. Some among us have lost everything. Many among us have comforted friends who saw their lives washed away. There are those who know other traumas. We know the tragedy of a job lost, or a loved one’s illness. We know the pain of a marriage ending or an unexpected death. Tragedy is a tear in our lives, like the mourner who rends his clothes as a sign of his torn heart. There is an old story about a king who finds a scratch on his most prized ruby, and is distraught until someone comes and etches the ruby further, turning that scratch into the stem of a rose. Just as Yaron turns his rockets into Roses, this person knew that we cannot erase the crack. But over time we can learn to transform it.

Theologian and Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankel wrote, “When we are no longer able to change a situation... we are challenged to change ourselves.”[vii] Untaneh Tokef has taught us taught us hard truths about the world. It can also teach us how to change ourselves in response. It has shown us how to recognize three houseguests. It can also teach us how to evict them.

Sheryl Sandberg describes one of her lowest moments, when the pain of her loss was unbearable. She turned once again to her friend Adam Grant for help. She thought he would say to think positive -- to look on the bright side. In fact, he told her the opposite. He asked her to imagine a way her situation could be even worse. “Are you kidding?” She asked him. “How could this be worse?” He answered: “Dave could have had that same cardiac arrhythmia driving your children.”[viii] Sandberg was instantly thrown into an unfamiliar feeling. She was sad for her loss, but she was suddenly so grateful for her two children and that sense of gratitude softened her pain.

Maybe this is how we make sense of the terror of the words of Untaneh Tokef. Who by fire? So far, not me. Who by water -- Thank God, my family survived. There is so much to fear in these dire words if we use it to look forward. But looking back at the past year, the words seem more like Adam Grant’s question of “how could it be worse?”

Every night at dinner, Annie and I start our meal by saying a thing we are grateful for. Some days it is big things, like when our daughter Ella does something for the first time. Most days it is something small, like finishing a project at work or getting a text message from a distant friend. There are days when thinking of something to be grateful for is incredibly easy. There are days when it’s incredibly hard. The days when it’s hardest are the days we push ourselves to think of two things, or three of five. Because those are the days when it’s most important, where it would be easiest to forget that we are blessed. People who keep a daily gratitude journal report both improved attitudes towards difficult events and improved health outcomes and wellbeing.[ix],[x] The practice of gratitude does not remove our burdens, but it does refocus our energy on our blessings. If, as I speak, resilience feels out of reach to you, then don’t worry about being resilient. Be the kind of person who writes down five things they are grateful for before bed. On the days where it’s especially hard, read back through the last week. I promise it will help.

In the final verses of Untaneh Tokef we declare that we are “broken vessels.” It is a declaration of immense vulnerability. After all the lofty talk of books of life, we stand before God in all our brokenness, asking for God to accept us. In the last month we have been learning how a community holds each other in our brokenness. Together, we are learning how to say more than “how are you doing?” even as we are learning how to respond with more than “fine.” We are learning to push past platitudes like “everything happens for a reason” and “what doesn't kill us makes us stronger” and “when life gives you lemons...”. These phrases do not hold someone in their brokenness; they just minimize their pain. Instead of offering advice, we can emulate God, and offer consolation. The Catholic priest Henri Nouwen teaches, “To console does not mean to take away the pain but rather to be there and say, ‘You are not alone, I am with you. Together we can carry the burden.’”

We will strive for this congregation to be a community of gratitude and consolation. This is the message of Untaneh Tokef for us, this year. In the face of the difficult realities of “who by fire and who by water” we can only offer words of consolation to each other and gratitude for blessings, even when they are hard to find. The final words of Untaneh Tokef praise God’s Holy Name, as if to say when life feels fragile, let it be a reminder of God’s abiding presence. When life feels dreadful, let it be a reminder of God’s glorious mystery. When our lives are like shattered vessels, let words of blessing never be far from our lips...

O Source of life and blessing,
We come to you on these High Holy Days
these days of fear and dread
these days of return and renewal.
We stand before you with all our burdens
with hearts as heavy as rockets rammed into the earth.
We come to you with hearts as hopeful
as shiny metal roses --
the promise of a new blossoming
after the dust has settled.

In the face of all that is temporary
and all that is terrifying,
we come to you in gratitude
for the blessings in our lives,
both the blessings we see
and the blessings that are hiding in plain sight.
We come with gratitude
for the many incredible ways
the members of this community
have offered strength and comfort to each other
in recent weeks.
We pray that you will remind us
that we are not alone,
that we are not to blame,
that we will not always feel
the way we feel now.
That pain,
and joy,
like life itself
are like grass that will fade,
a leaf that will wither.
We pray that these High Holy Days will be a reminder
that even though our fate is sealed
we can choose who we will be in the face of our fate.

God, whose name is holy,
help us through these Days of Awe
to live more gratefully,
to live more resiliently.
Help us to be your eyes
taking notice of the many blessings in your world,
and the suffering and injustice, too.
Help us to be your ears,
hearing and acknowledging the pain of our neighbors.
Help us to be your arms
reaching out to offer consolation
to all those who struggle and stumble.
Help us to be your partner
in the sacred work
of rebuilding this city and this world
as a more perfect expression
of your holy name.

L’shanah tovah

 

[i] Sandberg and Grant, p. 10

[ii] Many of these caveats were developed from this helpful article: https://ptgi.uncc.edu/what-is-ptg/

[iii] Sandberg and Grant, p. 11

[iv] http://www.businessinsider.com/sheryl-sandberg-martin-seligmans-3-ps-helped-me-cope-with-my-husbands-death-2016-5

[v] Sandberg and Grant, p. 21

[vi] Sandberg and Grant, p. 17

[vii] Frankl, Viktor E.. Man's Search for Meaning

[viii] Sandberg and Grant, p. 25

[ix] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2755263/

[x] http://www.spring.org.uk/2007/09/practicing-gratitude-can-increase.php

Sermon: The Power of Prayer in Trying Times

Sermon after Hurricane Harvey -- Congregation Emanu El, Houston Texas. September 8, 2017

We need to talk about the High Holy Days. Normally, what moves me about the Days of Awe is that they contain the breadth of the human experience. On Rosh Hashanah, we celebrate the beginning of everything – the birthday of the world. On Yom Kippur, we wear white and refrain from earthly joys, as if we are rehearsing our own deaths.  Between these two days we move from birth to death. From great sorrow and pain to great joy and hope. From sin and shame to return and renewal. It is a journey that contains all our hopes and aspirations for the year to come. It’s a lot to take in.

I don’t think I’m ready for the High Holy Days this year. I don’t mean that I am behind on my sermon writing. Though, there is that. I mean, I don’t feel spiritually ready. Not after the month we’ve had. 

I had a feeling last week that maybe we don’t need the High Holy Days this year. Maybe they would be redundant. The High Holy Days are a reenactment of the fullness of life, a sacred drama. Have we not had enough actual drama? We, who are drying out, who are ripping up carpet and tearing out sheetrock, what space can we make to clear out the depth of our souls?  We who have seen on TV and in our neighborhoods such acts of generosity and of human connection, do we really need a day to remind us what the human experience is all about?

And how can I say the words of Un’taneh Tokef this year? How can I say “who by fire and who by water”?  And don’t even get me started on Sukkot. What I don’t need is a holiday about temporary and fragile housing. I get it.

I empathize with the Psalmist, who, exiled from his home, writes, “How can I sing the Eternal’s song on foreign soil?” I want to be like a student who goes to the teacher and says that I should get to be exempt from the lesson because I’ve already mastered the material.

And there is so much work to do. There is so much to rebuild, so many families to take care of. And with Irma having wrecked the Caribbean and bearing down on Florida this week, there will be even more people who could use our help.  How can we sit in services, working on renewing ourselves, when we could be out rebuilding houses?

Maybe we should just call the whole thing off. Everybody gets a “Get Out of Shul Free” card this year.

But no. We are not going to cancel. We need the High Holy Days this year, maybe more than ever. So, we will be here.

We will be here because life continues. We will come, as we have tonight, as a testament to the Jewish spirit, which thrives in the face of adversity.  We will show up to these High Holy Days as a sign of our resilience and a celebration of our grit.

We will be here because we need each other. We have seen the power of community these past few weeks. We have seen neighbors show up with gloves on, or cookies in hand. We have seen congregants open their homes to strangers who have been displaced. We have seen the outpouring of support from Jews all over the country as gift cards for affected families continue to arrive in our mailbox daily. These High Holy Days we will celebrate the power of community and the ways we hold each other in times of tragedy as well as triumph.

And we will be here because the message of the High Holy Days are particularly important, perhaps now more than ever.

The image of the High Holy Days is literally life and death. God opens the Book of Life but waits to inscribe our names, hoping we will return. Then God decides who to write down for fire, and who for water. And we are told, over and over, that t’shuvah (repentance), tefillah (prayer), and tzedakah (charity) can temper this decree.

This is a metaphor.  The people who lost their homes or their lives as Harvey unleashed his torrents did not pray any less hard than those who were spared. They were not any less charitable. But the metaphor is real. Life is short and it is unpredictable. The flood waters could come any day. The fires rage. And all we can control is how we behave in the face of this fact. All we can control is our own t’shuvah – acts of self-examination and return, tefillah – acts of faith and hope, and tzedakah – acts of justice and love.

These trying times may make us question these truths. It is not just Harvey and Irma. It’s the earthquake in Mexico. It’s the fires in the Pacific Northwest. It’s the 270,000 Rohingya (ro-hin-JA) Muslims fleeing religious persecution in Myanmar. It’s Charlottesville. We have always lived in a world of Un’taneh Tokef, but somehow the images of who by fire and who by water, who by famine and who by thirst, might feel even more present today. And it is hard, in the face of these overwhelming tragedies, to feel like our t’shuvah, tefillah, and tzedakah will make a difference.

This week, Rabbi David Seidenberg published an article on what it means to pray in these difficult times. He says that there is a risk in believing in theurgic prayer – prayer that can change God’s mind. We might pray and then think, “OK, I’ve done my part. God has heard my case. Now it’s in God’s hands.” This theology of prayer can actually discourage us from acting. It limits our sense of our own power. 

But this is not the prayer of the High Holy Days.  Like the image of Book of Life, it maybe what the literal words mean, but it is not what the metaphor is good for. Rabbi Seidenberg proposes three other ways we might think of prayer. First, prayer can be an expression of hope when issues seem too far away or too removed from us. I want the people in South Florida to be OK, but there is nothing I can do to stop the storm, so I express that hope in the form of a prayer. I do not believe my prayer will change the track of the storm – rather, my prayer serves as a vessel for my hopes. Rabbi Seidenberg believes this kind of prayer helps us to “stay engaged with whatever crisis is unfolding, instead of shutting it out or becoming resigned to what it happening.”

The second kind of prayer is an expression of justice. We pray for the world, not as it is, but how we want it to be. The hope is that, in articulating this, we will inspire ourselves and our neighbors to build this better world. We pray tonight that all people affected by these terrible storms will be taken care of and held in their pain and their misfortune. But we know that some communities are more pervasively affected by these tragedies than others. The poor and the vulnerable are less able to access the resources to get back on their feet.  They are more likely to live in areas that were hit hardest by flood waters and near petrochemical plants that are now leaking dangerous compounds.  Our prayer that God protect the people affected by these storms calls us to action. How will we ensure that God’s protection can be felt by everyone — not just the wealthy of Houston and Miami— but all those who saw their last hopes washed away, too?

This brings me to the third and most powerful form of prayer: prayer as exercise for our hearts. The heart, like every muscle, needs to stretch and strengthen.  The world’s attention and love poured into Houston, even before the waters receded. Can such attention be sustained for St. Martin and Miami, for Puerto Rico and Palm Beach? And if we can muster that concern this year, what about next year? And the year after? As Seidenberg says:

We will face storm exhaustion, storm fatigue... And more and more often, we will face not just storm fatigue, but wildfire fatigue intensified by drought, famine fatigue intensified by crop loss, refugee fatigue intensified by floods and resource wars… all of which are consequences of climate disruption.

Prayer can help us fight fatigue and recharge our compassion. The High Holy Days, with their imagery of the birthday of the world, remind us that we are all co-travelers on this blue-green rock, hurtling through space. They remind us that all humanity shares the same fate. They ask us to reach out with acts of t’shuvah, tefillah, and tzedakah, because these are what temper the severity of that fate. The shelves at the grocery store may still be picked over, but that is not how our hearts work. Our compassion is a renewable resource. Prayer helps us fill the tank. And Prayer helps us stretch the tank’s capacity, so that in the face of global challenges, we can learn to be more human, more loving, more visionary. The power of prayer is that it stretches the heartstrings and tunes them, so that in the moments where the words on the page are reflected in the realities we see on the news or in our streets, the images will pluck those strings. Then, with this song of hope in our heart, we are ready to respond with courage and with compassion. To the Psalmist we say, how can you not sing God’s song, having seen?

So I’m glad you’re here. I know you have a lot you could be doing. But being here is important work to. And we will be here in two short weeks for Rosh Hashanah, as ready as we can be. We hope you’ll join us. Join us to show that life continues, even in the face of hardship. Join us to be a part of this amazing community. And join us to practice living a life of meaning and purpose – a life of hope, justice and compassion. The world needs those skills, now more than ever.

Shabbat Shalom

 

Parashat Balak: Three Things I Learned About Being a Rabbi from Becoming a Parent

July 07, 2017 -- First Sermon at Congregation Emanu El

I think the first inklings that I wanted to be a rabbi came around the time of my bar mitzvah. Jewish life lit a fire inside of me, and I wanted to follow that flame to its source, and share that light with others.  I discovered a Judaism that was the connective tissue that linked the story of my life to something greater and gave my story meaning and purpose. I wanted to help other people find these connections, too, and the rabbinate seemed the logical place to do it. So, for the two decades since my bar mitzvah, I’ve been studying and preparing.

Now I’ve wanted to be a rabbi for as long as I can remember, but I’ve been a rabbi for sixty-four days. Two months ago, I went from being “Josh, the guy who wants to be a rabbi” to being “Rabbi Josh Fixler.” It’s a very strange thing in your life to reach the horizon -- a strange but wonderful feeling to reach and then sail past it. Now, my real rabbinic education begins. Here, with you, I will learn what kind of rabbi I will be.

In the sixty-four days of my rabbinate, it feels like everything in my life has changed. We moved from New York. We bought a car. We found a house. And then, twenty-two days ago, everything changed again. On June 14, a bundle of wonderful named Ella Fixler joined our family.  The blessings in the days that followed have been innumerable.

So, I have been a rabbi for sixty-four days, and a father for twenty-two. Both necessitate a lot of “on the job” training.  I’m getting a crash course in diapers and bottles, and then I turn around I’m standing here on the bimah, addressing you for the first time. Both at home and here, I’m trying to find my feet – to understand what kind of rabbi I will be and at the same time understand what kind of father I will be. One flows into the other. Daily, I learn new things about myself that inform both my rabbinate any my parenthood.

With that in mind, tonight I thought I’d draw on my vast experience and share with you some of what I have learned in these past three weeks. So here are three lessons I have learned about being a rabbi from becoming a father.

Lesson 1: I don’t know what to call you.

It’s a very strange thing that one of your first tasks as a parent is to pick the kid’s name. That’s a lot of pressure. You must pick the thing that this person is going to be called for their whole life. I have a friend who says she has this special skill. If you tell her the name you are thinking of for your baby, she will think of all the ways it can be twisted into taunts by kids on the playground. I was just picking pretty names, now I have to think about that, too?!

But I also felt a lot of pressure because I didn’t know her yet. We chose the name Eleanor Judith, but I didn’t know if she was an Eleanor, or an Ella, or E.J. or something totally different. We had not even met when Annie and I picked that name. We had to hope she’d grow into it.

There is a midrash[i] that teaches:

There are three names by which a person is called: one which their parents call them, one which people call them, and one which they earn for themselves. The last is the best one of all.

I think that this midrash relieves me of some of the pressure I felt in picking a name. Annie and I get some early say over the name people will call her, but we will have to wait and see what name she earns for herself. We don’t get to weigh in on that one, but we get to watch as she grows up into it.

I know almost none of your names either.  And I want to. But even more than that, I want to know your stories. I want to know the name your parents gave you, what people call you and also the name you are earning for yourself in this world. Now there are a lot of you, and the Talmud says that each of have three names, so this is going to take some time. I’m going to need you to be patient with me, especially since my retention of new information has dropped precipitously, perhaps its correlated to the number of hours I’m sleeping these days. But I want to know you, and I want to know you by your names. So please, keep sticking your hand out and sharing your name with me. I’m excited to know it.

 

Lesson 2: I don't know what you need because we haven't learned to communicate yet.

I’m sitting in the nursery, rocking a crying baby late at night. I’m shifting Ella from one shoulder to the other, and bouncing her, and singing to her, and nothing is relieving whatever tiny agony she is feeling. Then, she looks at me, here eyes widen, she burps loudly and immediately falls asleep in my arms. I think to myself, the hardest thing about babies is that they cannot talk. What’s nerve-wracking is that I can see that something is bothering her but she cannot tell me what it is. And sometimes it’s nothing at all. Sometimes she just needs to cry to stretch her lungs out. But all the while, I am doing an elaborate dance, trying this solution and that, to comfort her mysterious wails.

Sometimes, I have done something to upset her. Despite my best intentions, I have placed her in such a way that her arm is at an uncomfortable angle. Sometimes she just does not want to be on her belly and she does not have the ability yet to roll herself over. But she cannot tell me these things, and I am left to guess why she has started to cry all of a sudden.

In this week’s Torah portion, Balaam beats his donkey because the donkey refuses to go forward. Balaam cannot see what the donkey sees, that there is an angel in the road, blocking the way. The donkey pulls to the side of the lane, scraping Balaam’s foot on a fence, and Balaam lashes out in his frustration. Finally, the angel grants the donkey the ability to speak, just so the donkey can say “hey, dude, there’s an angel right there. Stop hitting me.” Their failure of communication leaves both parties bruised and it is only when they finally talk to each other that they can move forward.

There will be times that you and I will rub each other the wrong way. I am not so naive to think it will always be a smooth ride. I will miss the mark. I will not know things that my predecessor knew. I will still be learning. And we will have to learn how to talk to each other. We do not know yet how to say “ouch” or “hey, I can see something you cannot see.” But we will learn. And I will need your faith and your patience as we do.  When I am in my patient moments with Ella, I can see that she too is teaching me her language. She cannot speak but I am learning what she likes and what she does not like, why she cries and how she wants to be laid down to sleep. More than I am teaching her to be my child, she is teaching me to be her parent. And I am learning to listen. I will need you to teach me to be your rabbi.

 

Lesson 3: It is never enough… and it’s enough.

This week I had to say goodbye to Ella as I got ready for my first day in the office. I didn’t cry when I left, but I did cry when I came home and saw her beautiful little face. I swear she got bigger in the few hours I was gone. My heart cracked open with the thought of the number of moments I will miss, the number of days I will not be home with her. As incredibly happy as I was to start my work here at Emanu El, I also felt like I could never do enough for her.

But it is enough, and I must keep reminding myself of that. I will read to her, I will care for her, I will try to keep her safe -- and she will have this community to grow up in. A community that is warm and compassionate, that will care for her and accept her. A community that will give her strong roots so that she might learn to stretch her branches towards the sky. I will teach her that she is loved and it will, of course, be enough.

In this Shabbat’s haftarah, the Prophet Micah comforts people who are feeling a similar kind of inadequacy. They feared their sacrifices were not enough. An Israelite cries “would the Eternal be pleased with thousands of rams and myriads of streams of oil? Shall I give my first-born for my transgression, the fruit of my body for my sins?”[ii] Would that be enough?  “No” Micah says, “all you need is to do justice, love goodness and walk humbly with your God.”[iii]  That is enough for God. It is not about the sacrifices you bring. You, yourself, are enough for God.

Micah reminds us that it is what we all need to learn. We all sometimes feel like it is never enough, like WE are never enough. But I look at Ella and I think that I will love her through all her challenges and her frustrating moments, and we will remind each other -- she and I -- that we are each enough.

That’s the kind of rabbi that I want to be. The kind that reminds you that you are enough. The kind that reminds you that when you bring your gifts to this place, the sacrifices you bring of you time and your talent, that they are enough. The kind of rabbi who reminds you that this synagogue appreciates you for the fullness of who you are, and not just for your shiniest, most instagramable moments. And I hope that sometimes, when I am feeling like I am not enough, like I could stay for one more meeting or plan one more program, that you will remind me that I am enough, too.

So that’s it. I don’t know much about being a parent. I’m twenty-two days in and I’m no expert. I’m sure many of you have lots to teach me. And I don’t know much about being your rabbi yet either. I know lots of the stuff that you learn in classes over five years of rabbinical school, but they cannot teach you how to be a rabbi at Congregation Emanu El, any more than the book What to Expect When You Are Expecting could teach me how to be Ella’s daddy. But I know that this is the kind of rabbi I want to be. The kind of rabbi who helps us find the connections between the stories of our lives and the stories of our people. And the rest we will learn. I will offer my hand and ask for your name, even if we have already met, because I’d rather know your name than pretend to. And when we misstep, we will approach each other with kindness and curiosity as we seek to learn to do better next time. And we will remind each other that we are enough.

When the sorcerer Balaam blesses the Israelite people, he says, “How beautiful are your tents, O Jacob, your dwellings, O Israel.” That’s what I’ve come to Houston for -- to be a builder of beautiful tents. Just as I want to make a home for Ella that is beautiful and loving and warm, I want to work with Rabbis Hayon and Silk and Cantor Simmons and the rest of the amazing staff to continue to make this community dwelling place for the Divine. In the last two months, I have embarked on two incredible journeys. I know that along the way, one story will continue to inform the other. Oh Source of Life, bless all these dwellings that we will build together. May they always be reflections of your divine light.

Shabbat shalom

 

[i] Midrash Tanhuma, Parshat Vayakhel 1

[ii] Micah 6:7

[iii] Micah 6:8

The Magic Words of Prayer

This sermon began with a magic trick in which I had someone pick a card, which then appeared up on the screen on the wall. The trick did not work the first time, but then I remembered to ask everyone to say "Abracadabra" and it worked. As I came back to the amud, I said:

Let’s talk about magic words. Did you know that the word Abracadabra is Jewish? Some say it comes from the Aramaic, [SLIDE] Abara C’davra, which means something like, “I create as I speak.” What a Jewish concept! Our tradition teaches that God used words to create the universe. Psalm 33:9 says, “For God spoke, and [the universe] came into existence.” God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light.[i] According to our tradition, words can change the very nature of existence. They can create life. Abara C’davra, “I create as I speak.” Speak the words, and the magic happens. Just like the magic trick. Abracadabra, and poof.

Except, that’s not what happened. I don’t want to ruin anything for you, but I kinda knew you were going to pick the King of Diamonds. And I kinda made sure the trick didn’t work the first time. Until we all said Abracadabra together. The magic word didn’t make the card appear on the wall. PowerPoint did.

There are no magic words. There are no words that change the nature of the universe. If wishing made it so, then we would speak and the universe would respond. And you know this. You know that magic words don’t make magic happen. You knew I was doing something to manipulate the cards. And yet, for some reason, you all still said “Abracadabra” with me. Maybe you were humoring me. But maybe you were also suspending your disbelief. Maybe, just maybe, we like to convince ourselves that magic words work.

To be fair, I set you up. I did a magic trick in the middle of services. And Jewish prayer is all about magical words. At least, that’s how it seems at first glance. [LOUDLY AND DECLARITIVLY] “May the one who makes peace in the high heavens make peace for us, for all Israel and for the world.” Come on. I’m waiting. Damn.

It’s easy, in services, to get caught up in magical thinking. To think that our words will shape the world, that if we pray hard enough, the blessings we seek will just appear. If we take our prayers literally, that’s the impression we might get. But that’s a tricky way to live. If we believed that God bestowed blessing based on the power or persuasiveness of our prayer, we might never leave the sanctuary. So when we say words like those of Oseh Shalom, we must mean something else. But what?

There is a Hassidic teaching from Rabbi Menachem Mendel of Kotzk which seems pertinent.[ii] He says that when the weather gets cold, one has two options. One can build a fire or wrap oneself in a big fur pelt. In both cases, you get warm. But in the coat, you only warm yourself, whereas with a fire, you warm yourself and those around you. The Kotzker Rebbe sometimes used to disparagingly call people “a tzaddik in peltz” – implying, how righteous can you be when you’ve chosen to go the “coat route”? Jonathan Slater explains this phrase, saying, “Constricted hearts limit our capacity to see beyond ourselves and diminish our ability to honor the full human dignity of others.”[iii] How do we unbind our hearts, and open our coats, and learn to build fires?

Perhaps the magic words of prayer do not transform the world. Perhaps they transform us. Perhaps the words of the prayers open our hearts and teach us to be tzaddikim who build fires, instead of turning our collars up to the cold… and to our neighbors.

The prayer book gives us a thousand opportunities for transformation. Let me offer two this evening, in the form of two questions: What can you stand up for? and, What can you bow to?

What can you stand up for?

The Amidah is the central prayer of our service. In it, we address God directly. Having talked about God – reflecting on God’s power to shape and reshape the universe through the Shema and its blessings – we now talk to God. But before we do so, we stand up. Amidah literally means standing prayer. We are asked to rise to our feet. Like a minister addressing a king or president, we do not lounge around. We do not slack, rather we lift ourselves up. We straighten our backs and hold our heads up, as if we are looking God in the face.

And then we recite these words: “Adonai s'fatai tiftach ufiyagid t’hilatecha” – “Adonai, open my lips, that my mouth may declare your praise.” These strange words are the first words of our Standing Prayer. We say, “God, force my mouth to speak your praise.” It is as if we stand up, look God in the face, and suddenly feel as if our words are not worthy. So we ask God to bless our words. We ask God to allow us to speak holy words. Struck by the awe of the moment of standing in God’s presence, we ask God to make our words worthy. When we complete the Amidah we say, “Yih’-yu l’-ra-tzon im-rei fi V’-heg-yon li-bi l’-fa-ne-cha Adonai…” – “May the words of my mouth and the meditations of my heart be acceptable to you, Adonai.” We say, “I hope my words have honored you, God. Know that I am imperfect, but receive them in the spirit in which they were offered.”

So here is the tension of the first question -- What can you stand up for? The Amidah demands that we stand up, but the Amidah also recognizes that once we stand, we must seek to say something transcendent and truthful. Every time we say the Amidah, we are called to ask, “What is the truth that I must stand up for? What is the thing I believe so deeply that I would say it, even to God. When I stand up, and open my lips, what are the words I hope God will be saying through me?”

This world needs us to stand up. It needs us to declare truth and speak out against injustice. But that is scary and hard. How will we know what to say? How will we know the right moment to stand up? And more importantly, how will we learn to stand? It is not our nature to stand in the face of the powerful and declare our truth. It is easier to sit back passively, to let others stand up for us. But the magic words of the Amidah call us to stand up and declare truth. And through them we learn how it feels to stand.

Question two: What can you bow to?

We do not just stand in the Amidah. We also bow. Bowing is somewhat foreign to us moderns. We do not have a king or queen or a master that we might bow to. Those of us who do not practice yoga may find the physical sensation strange. We are not used to bending this way. It is not how we hold ourselves in the world.

In his book, After the Ecstasy, the Laundry, Jack Kornfield tells the story of learning to bow when he was becoming a Buddhist monk in a forest monastery in Thailand. He writes:

After I had been in the monastery for a week or two, one of the senior monks pulled me aside for further instruction. "In this monastery you must not only bow when entering the meditation hall and receiving teachings from the master, but also when you meet your elders." As the only Westerner, and wanting to act correctly, I asked who my elders were. "It is traditional that all who are older in ordination time, who've been monks longer than you, are your elders," I was told. It took only a moment to realize that meant everybody.

So I began to bow to them. Sometimes it was just fine—there were quite a few wise and worthy elders in the community. But sometimes it felt ridiculous. I would encounter some twenty-one-year-old monk, full of hubris, who as there only to please his parents or to eat better food than he could at home, and I had to bow because he had been ordained the week before me. Or had to bow to a sloppy old rice farmer who had come to the monastery the season before on the farmers' retirement plan, who chewed betel nut constantly and had never meditated a day in his life. It was hard to pay reverence to these fellow forest dwellers as if they were great masters.

Yet there I was bowing, and because I was in conflict, I sought a way to make it work. Finally, as I prepared yet again for a day of bowing to my "elders," I began to look for some worthy aspect of each person I bowed to. I bowed to the wrinkles around the retired farmer's eyes, for all the difficulties he had seen and suffered through and triumphed over. I bowed to the vitality and playfulness in the young monks, the incredible possibilities each of their lives held yet ahead of them.

I began to enjoy bowing. I bowed to my elders, I bowed before I entered the dining hall and as I left. I bowed as I entered my forest hut, and bowed at the well before taking a bath. After some time bowing became my way—it was just what I did. If it moved, I bowed to it.[iv]

Just as we must learn to stand up, we must also learn humility. We must learn to lessen ourselves in front that which is greater. And we must learn to see greatness in everything around us. In this way, we begin to see ourselves as a part of a system. The universe does not exist to serve or needs. Rather, we exist to serve the universe. In Jewish prayer, we do not just learn to rise up. We also learn to bow. Jewish prayer is the practice of both Audacity and Humility. We rise to address our Creator, and then we humble ourselves before that Creative Force. And through the magic process of saying the words and of enacting them in our bodies, we learn a way of living that opens us up to others and to the world.

Prayer is a series of magic words. But perhaps those magic words do not act on the universe in the way that Abracadabra does in a magic trick. Rather, the words act on us. Rabbi Jonathan Slater says, “All prayer—when we pay attention, whether personal or liturgical—is ultimately a form of speaking the truth. It makes us aware of what is going on in our lives in this moment—so that we can see clearly and respond appropriately.”[v] Prayer calls us to rise towards our best selves. The words of our prayers serve not so much as a request to God for blessings as they do a promise to God that we will live in a way that makes God’s blessings manifest in the world. Through the words of our prayers, we learn life lessions about how to live gratefully, humbly, and generously. Yih’-yu l’-ra-tzon im-rei – may the words of my mouth change me, oh God. May they make me into the kind of person who can make your world into the kind of world that both You and I dream it will be. Let that be my prayer to you. Amen.

[i] http://www.reformjudaism.org/creative-power-words

[ii] http://www.chabad.org/library/article_cdo/aid/258534/jewish/A-Tzaddik-in-a-Fur-Coat.htm

[iii] Slater, Jonathan, Mindful Jewish Living, page xx

[iv] Kornfield, Jack, After the Ecstasy, the Laundry: How the Heart Grows Wise on the Spiritual Path, page ix-x

[v] . Rabbi Jonathan P. Slater, quoted in Comins, Mike, Making Prayer Real: Leading Jewish Spiritual Voices on Why Prayer is Difficult and What to Do about it, page 41

Jews Choose Hope (Sermon after the 2016 Presidential Election) November 11, 2016



I didn’t want to get out of bed on Wednesday morning. I pulled the covers up over my head so that the world would be as dark as I felt. I wanted to be alone, like the words of Rabbi Hillel, in Pirke Avot:[i]בִמְקוֹם שֶׁאֵין אֲנָשִׁים, הִשְׁתַּדֵּל לִהְיוֹת אִישׁ – in a place where there are no people, you must strive to be a person. That’s how I felt, like I had to be a person all by myself.
And I want to acknowledge again all the different emotions that people are bringing into this room. Some of us are excited or surprised. Others are fearful, and heartbroken. There is anger, and confusion. This room is a churning sea of feelings. And all of them are true and real and honest. And all of it is who we are as a community of blessed diversity. 

But I think all of us can agree there is an overwhelming feeling of uncertainty. Whether you voted for the president-elect or for someone else, there is a sense that we have gone off script, that we are starting a new book, with characters and plot twists that we cannot yet imagine. For many of us, even those of us who have voted in the past for candidates who did not win, this moment does not seem normal. And for some of us, this moment does not seem safe.

And so we enter into this Shabbat holding up the candles like a torch, hoping they will shed some light on where we are going. We used to know the path ahead, whether we liked the direction or not. Now, we are struggling to find the trail, and we don’t know where we are headed.
I can only imagine how you feel. So, I’ll speak for myself. I feel numb. And I feel busted open. And I feel heartbroken. I feel like things I thought I could trust, like data and journalism, have revealed themselves to be less reliable than I thought. As if the curtain were pulled back, revealing that the Great Oz was just an old man, frantically working the controls, trying to keep the illusion going. But more painfully, I feel distant from my fellow Americans. Like many of us during this election season, I could not fathom the other side, especially its most ardent voices. But I felt comfort in the conviction that they were a small minority. Then, on Election Day, no matter who we voted for, we all found out that more than 50 million Americans voted for the other side. I felt shocked by how distant my life experience is from some of my fellow Americans. I feel like Abraham in the Torah this week, instructed by God to go out “to a land you do not know.”[ii] I feel like I am already living in a land I do not know. I want to be the kind of person who can imagine other people complexly. I’m not there yet.

But I will try. We must try. To meet the other. To know each other better. Our country cannot be like oil and water, struggling to separate themselves and to put one on top of the other. The Torah teaches that I should love my neighbor as myself. Jewish history is the story of expanding our definition of “neighbor.” So is modern civilization. But how can I love someone who I cannot even imagine. We can love people when we know them. I don’t think we have done enough loving our neighbors in recent years. I pray, and I hope that this election will lead to a greater coming together, not a greater splitting apart.

I’m thinking that Rabbi Hillel was wrong when he said, “In a place where there are no people, you must strive to be a person,” because there are other people here. And that’s how we got in this mess in the first place – our inability to see the other side as human: to understand THEIR needs and THEIR fears and THEIR dreams? Hillel’s presupposition is false. There are humans here. We are all struggling. We are all striving. We are all searching. I want to amend Rabbi Hillel, to say, “In a place full of a diversity of humans, we must strive to be humans.” Our humanity is not defined in the face of opposition, it’s defined in the embrace of it.

I don’t know yet what we will do next. But I want to say some things about what we will not do. We will not abide intolerance in any form. Certainly not within these walls. We will not let this election be a referendum on hatred. We will not abide bullies here. The Zionist pioneer, Yehiel Weingarten, writes “I won’t teach our children to hate.”[iii] And we will not give up. I’ll be honest. I think we will see some increases in anti-Semitism in the coming years, but I don’t think it will present a physical danger. I pray I’m right. But I will say that if we see our Muslim neighbors – our law-abiding Muslim neighbors – facing the same kind of intimidation and discrimination and threat of violence that we experienced in the early 1930s in Germany, we will not remain silent. And we will speak up to protect the rights people of color. We will speak up to protect immigrants and refugees. Our loved ones who are undocumented, or who have undocumented family members. Those who are gay, and those who are transgender. We will speak up in our synagogue, in our community, and in our country. Wednesday was a day of broken glass. Not the glass of a glass ceiling, as some of us had hoped. It was the 78th anniversary of the Kristalnacht Pogrom in Germany. And as we continue to pick up the pieces, we will be reminded. We will not be silent.

Which brings me to the prevailing emotion of this election season – fear. Fear on both sides. Fear of each other. Fear of the other. It started to feel like fear was the central emotion of our modern age. But it is not a default position. Fear is a choice. Fear is a monster knocking on the door of the house, hoping to be invited in. But we need not let it live in here.

And there is an opposite choice. The opposite choice is hope. Fear may be the easier choice. But hope is the more transformative one. Hope is not a thing that happens to you. It is not only a noun. It is a verb. It is a thing you choose every day. It is not a coincidence that the national anthem of the Jewish state is called Hatikvah, “The Hope.” It is not a coincidence that it contains the words עוֹד לֹא אָבְדָה תִּקְוָתֵנו – Our hope, a hope of two thousand years, is not yet lost. Because Jews choose hope.

Hope is an audacious choice. It is a countercultural choice. It is a revolutionary choice. Think of the story of Hanukah. It is an inherently hopeful story. When the days are shortest and the darkness creeps in, when the winter winds blow, Jews choose to light candles. We choose to bring light to the darkness. And we celebrate a miracle of light. But not only a miracle. A choice. The Maccabees found oil to last a single day, and they needed eight days to purify a new batch… And they lit the lamp anyway. That is the audacious choice of hope. To know that the oil cannot last and to light the lamp anyway. To choose to hope. Jews choose hope.

When Abraham heard the call of Lech L’cha, to leave his father’s house and his homeland and head out to a land he did not know, he didn’t argue. He just went. Because Jews choose hope.

When the Egyptian pharaoh commanded Israelite mothers to cast their baby boys into the Nile, one woman chose to weave her son a basket instead. Because Jews choose hope.

When the sea would not part, one Israelite walked into the waters until they lapped at his lips, because Jews choose hope.

When the Israelites were parched in the desert and thought they would die, Miriam prayed and a miraculous well sprung up for her out of nowhere. Because Jews choose hope.

When the Temple was destroyed and we could no longer sacrifice, the rabbis created the siddur, a new way to worship God that they could take with them wherever they went. Because Jews choose hope.

During the Spanish Inquisition, Jews found ways to practice their faith in secret, at risk of death – choosing to maintain their relationship with their God even if it cost them their lives, because Jews choose hope.

Our ancestors left behind their homes and their families and sailed across the sea to this country because they wanted to build a better life for themselves and their children. Because Jews choose hope.

We will not let the temptation to choose fear rule our lives, because we will make the bolder and more powerful choice. Because Jews choose hope.

I will not teach our children to hate. I will not let them learn the wrong lessons from this election. I will not let them learn that bullies win in the long run. I will not let them learn that some people are worth less than others. I will not let them let them learn that strength is a more virtuous than kindness. I will not let them learn that hate is a more powerful than love. Because Jews choose hope.

The prophet Isaiah says that God’s house will be a house of prayer for all people.[iv] And that will be true of this house, no mater who is president. This will be a house of prayer for all people. Gay and straight. Black and white and brown. Native American and Latino. Cisgender and transgender. Documented and undocumented. This will be a house of prayer for all people. A house of prayer for Jews and Christians and Muslims. And this will be not just a house of prayer, but a house of hope. Because Jews choose hope.

Psalm 89 contains the words עוֹלָם חֶסֶד יִבָּנֶה – A world of love will be built.[v] I will build a world from love. And we will build a world from love. And if we build this world from love, then God too will build this world from love. עוֹלָם חֶסֶד יִבָּנֶה Because if our thousands-year story has taught us anything, it is that love is stronger than hate. And hope is stronger than fear. And so, in spite of losses in the short term that want us to choose otherwise, Jews choose hope.

עוֹלָם חֶסֶד יִבָּנֶה the glue with which we will repair this broken world isn’t hate, or fear. It’s Chesed. It’s love. I might not see it yet. I’m not even sure I can believe it yet. But I will choose it. Every day. Because I’m a Jew. And Jews choose hope.



[i] Pirke Avot 2:5
[ii] This is not actually a line from the Torah, but from Debbie Friedman’s midrash on it for her son Lechi Lach
[iv] Isaiah 56:7
[v] Psalm 89:3

The Calf and the Chapel - What We Build With Our Gifts (Rosh Hashanah 5777)

Flickr: Jennifer C.

Shortly after we graduated from college, Annie and I joined a synagogue. The membership packet included a form for volunteer opportunities, with spaces for us each to write our skills and interests. Perhaps you've filled out something similar. My column contained skills like “great with kids” and “loves arts and crafts.” Annie was volunteering for Habitat for Humanity at the time, so her column said, “great with power tools” and “loves to hang cabinets.”

Clearly, building projects are not my area of expertise. So it’s a great irony that I’m going to speak this evening about not one but two building projects. Tonight I want to tell you two stories. A story about building a calf, and a story about building a chapel.

If this sounds familiar to some of you, it means you were kind enough to live-stream my senior sermon last year. I am thrilled to share a new version with our community tonight. I hope it’s even better the second time.

Let's begin with the building of the calf. Our ancestors trembled in terror at the foot of Mount Sinai. Moses had ascended the mountain 40 days before, and they started to worry that he would not come down. Panic reverberated across the community. “Moses has abandoned us. He took us out of Egypt. He showed us miracles. He led us here. And now he’s gone... and he’s taken God with him. Who are we without him?” In fear, they approach Aaron and demand, “Make a god for us, for Moses, our leader, has vanished.” [i]

Aaron, fearing for his life, tells the people to bring him gold, so the men and the women pile their golden earrings in front of him. Then they go back to their tents, proud of themselves for “doing something” and eager for Aaron to solve their problems. What Aaron builds is the infamous Golden Calf. When Moses returns the next day, he and God are furious. They burn the idol down and they punish the people for their faltering faith. The calf is the spiritual low point of our journey in the desert.

Now for the second building story: The chapel. At the exact moment that Aaron is forging the calf at the foot of the mountain, Moses is high above, talking with God and receiving the instructions for the Mishkahn – the portable sanctuary where the Israelites will worship in the desert. It was an elaborate tent, at the center of which was the Ark, the ornate golden box that housed the tablets of the commandments. The mishkahn will serve as the Israelites’ chapel – their spiritual center during their time in the wilderness. And building it will require the people to bring gifts. At first glance, these gifts are a strange echo of the golden calf. But unlike with the idol, when they complete the Mishkahn, God’s presence will come and fill it. [ii] It will be a dwelling place for God.

There’s a striking contrast between the mishkahn and the golden calf. At the top of the mountain the people are commanded to build a sanctuary. At the bottom, the people demand an idol. A chapel and a calf. One is sacred, the other is sacrilegious. One building project is a dwelling place for God, the other God finds detestable. So we are left to wonder, whenever we are building, how do we ensure that we build a chapel, and not a calf?

The story of the golden calf is just 35 verses, while the Torah spends whole chapters explaining the precise blueprints for building the sacred structure of the Mishkahn. “This wall should be this many cubits. That curtain should be that many cubits.” Like I said, I’m not a construction expert. That’s really Annie’s department. I can see her reaching for her phone to google the conversion of cubits to feet. But I read the blueprints as a metaphor – they are instructions for building sacred community.

God commands: 

וְעָ֥שׂוּ לִ֖י מִקְדָּ֑שׁ וְשָׁכַנְתִּ֖י בְּתוֹכָֽם: [iii]

Build me a sanctuary and I will dwell among them. But even before that, Six verses before God tells us what to build, God tells us the spirit in which we should build:

דַּבֵּר֙ אֶל־בְּנֵ֣י יִשְׂרָאֵ֔ל וְיִקְחוּ־לִ֖י תְּרוּמָ֑ה מֵאֵ֤ת כָּל־אִישׁ֙ אֲשֶׁ֣ר יִדְּבֶ֣נּוּ לִבּ֔וֹ...׃ [iv]

“Tell the children of Israel to bring me gifts from every person whose heart is so moved.” The Hebrew word for “gifts” is Trumot, or Trumah in the sigular. Before we can even imagine building the mishkahn, God inspires us to bring our trumot – our gifts. The difference between the calf and the chapel lies in how we build them. When we want to build the chapel, we bring the fullness of our gifts.

When we think of trumot, we tend to think of material gifts, of gold and silver, gemstones, and acacia wood. But the text implies that equally important are the offerings of people’s hearts. God calls for the participation of: “everyone who is wise of heart, whose spirit I have filled with wisdom.” [v] And later, God commands: “Let all among you who are skilled come and make all that I have commanded.” [vi] The gifts that the Israelites use to build the mishkahn are not just their gold and precious gems. It is their sacred skills and the wisdom of the hearts. Only with these trumot can they build a dwelling place for God.

This is the difference between the calf and the chapel. When the Israelites start to build an idol, they bring their gold. But when they start by thinking of the gifts each of them can offer, what they build is a sanctuary. 

And this is not just a story about an ancient construction project. Rashi, the 11th Century commentator, says that every generation has to build a mishkahn. [vii] In preparation for this sermon, I asked, but the board insisted that there is no line item in the budget for acacia wood. So we have to find another way to answer Rashi’s call: how will our community fulfill the commandment to build a dwelling place for God?

The answer is the trumot. Every person has a gift, a sacred talent to share.

Like Moses, Jewish leaders must ask people to bring their gifts, knowing that each is sacred material in the construction of a dwelling place for God. Our community is a vessel overflowing with abundant talent.

In his book, 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, Steven Covey describes dichotomous worldviews: a scarcity mentality and an abundance mentality. A person or organization with a scarcity mentality looks at the world and says, “I don’t have enough. How can I get more?” An abundance mentality says, “I have everything I need. How blessed am I?” Both mindsets look at the same data, but draw different conclusions. Covey challenges us to move from a mentality that sees only scarcity to one that appreciates abundance.

The golden calf is the kind of building project that comes out of scarcity – built out of the fear that Moses had left. Aaron tells the frightened people to drop off their gold and he builds the calf for them. They pay their dues and say, “Do this for us.” What Aaron builds is an empty vessel, instead of an invitation to holiness. The move from the calf to the chapel is a transition from a mindset of scarcity to a mindset of abundance. It’s the abundance that comes when we ask for people’s gifts, not simply their gold.

It is easy fall into the trap of scarcity, and see only what we do not have. But Jewish tradition reminds us that there is another, more abundant way of seeing the same circumstances. There is a midrash that even Moses up on the mountain had a moment of scarcity thinking. When God tells him about all the gifts that the Israelites are going to bring, Moses asks how these former slaves who escaped with only what they could carry, could possibly have all the precious items needed to complete the project. But before he can even finish the question, God interrupts and says, “Not only do the children of Israel collectively possess the necessary materials to build the mishkahn, but in fact, every Jew could do so singlehandedly.”[viii] If the Israelites only bring their gold, they can only build a single calf. But if they are willing to bring their gifts, their sacred wisdoms, then there’s no limit to what they can build.

Trumot can transform our community by enabling us to peer past perceived scarcity and see an abundance of talent dwelling here.

I learned to look for abundance, not from Covey, or the Torah, but from my mother. She was a non-profit consultant who specialized in volunteerism. But more importantly, my mother was a guru of gifts. If she were here, she would look out on this sanctuary and see an ocean of trumot. She believed that each of us has unique gifts to share, and that organizations need to be better at helping us share them. This was more than her vocation, it was her conviction. When she looked at people, she saw wellsprings of talent. When she met someone, on a plane or in line at the grocery store, it took barely a second before she got them talking about their passions. This was her gift: she was a diviner of talent. When I read the Torah’s description of the building of the mishkahn, it is her voice I hear whispering, “Imagine if each of us could develop skills to find and bring out the gifts in one another.”

My question for you is this: what gift could you can share with this sacred community? Maybe it’s a professional skill. Perhaps you are a marketing expert, or a teacher, or a finance person. Or maybe it’s a passion. Perhaps you love to write, or weave, or paint. Maybe your gift is that you have a big idea or time to spare on a day we need it. Maybe you are great with kids. Maybe you are great at baking. Whatever it is, that’s your trumah. It’s not just a donation, it’s not just a volunteer hour – it’s a gift you give in the construction of this sacred dwelling place for God. For the many, many of you who share your gifts here, we are grateful. Your gifts of time and talent not only make this place run, they make this place a sacred community.

And maybe others of you don’t even know what your gift is yet. And then it’s our job, as a community, to help you figure that out. Two weeks ago, I was sitting in my office before Kadimah, our Monday-night educational program, when a 10th grader named Julia walked in and asked me if I had minute. She said she didn’t understand why more of her classmates didn’t bring tzedakah to class, and she wanted me to make an announcement that everyone should bring more. As far as “things rabbis like to hear” go, this is pretty much as good as it gets. When I recovered from the realization that I’d peaked so early in my career, I realized I had a choice. There were two ways I could respond to Julia’s wonderful request. I could thank her for her passion and assure her that I’d say something to the students about bringing tzedakah. But that’s the calf model – a scarcity response – thanks for your gold. The second option was to see that something sacred was being offered. A trumah. She was offering a gift she didn’t even know she had. “You have a gift,” I told her. She looked at me skeptically, but I continued. “Not everyone has this passion, this commitment to tzedakah.” Then we talked about why she cared so much, and about all the strategies we could use to help other people learn to care, too. I told her I could not do it for her, that it would not have as much impact coming from me. But if she were willing to share that gift, I bet we could make a real difference. I suggested she come back the next week and to bring two friends who would offer their own, different gifts. I wasn’t sure she’d do it. I feared my rabbinic excitement had gotten away from me. But the very next week, three passionate teens showed up in my office. And now we are well on our way to building something truly sacred, something impactful. Not a calf, but a chapel.

We at Beth Haverim Shir Shalom want to know what your gifts are. And if you don’t know yet, we want to help you find out. In this year of building and rebuilding, we want to create new avenues for you to offer your gifts. We grateful to all those who already share their gifts, and we want to find new ways to sanctify your offerings. And, if you have not had a chance to share your gifts here before, or if you have not done so in a while, and you are willing to take a step, we want to take a step to meet you in return. We’ve put together a group of board members and committee chairs who want to meet you for coffee and learn about your life. We are not asking for a commitment. We are not even asking for you to know what your gift is yet. We are asking a cup of coffee and a conversation to get to know you better. As you leave tonight, the ushers will have blue cards. Fill out your name and phone number and return it to me, so that we can set up a one-on-one conversation to get to know you and your gifts in a new way. These blue post-cards are a request for your partnership in the work of building sacred community.

Now, since we are asking, we are going to do our best put your gifts to use. That’s on us. Some of us have been hurt before when we have offered gifts to organizations which were not ready to receive them. I won’t promise we will use every offered gift right away, and I won’t be so hubristic to say that we will be instantly good at this. But if you meet with one of us, we are going to do our best to find places where your gifts can be used in ways that are meaningful to you and the congregation. We know how difficult it can be when a congregation does not live up to this promise. As we navigate these years of transition in this congregation, we want to learn to be better stewards of each other’s gifts.

But you are busy people. And perhaps you already volunteer somewhere else. So what makes sharing your gifts here different? According to the Torah, when we build with our gifts, it’s not just our communities that we make into a sanctuary; it’s our own lives. The verse I read earlier hints at this sacred transformation:

וְעָ֥שׂוּ לִ֖י מִקְדָּ֑שׁ,

וְשָׁכַנְתִּ֖י בְּתוֹכָֽם

“Build me a sanctuary that I may dwell in them.” [ix]

That last word is not what you would expect. You’d think it should say “v’shachanti b’tocho” –so that I can dwell in it  in the sanctuary. But it says B’tocham – So I can dwell in THEM. The Divine presence came to rest in the hearts of the Israelites, and “not in the wood and metal of the mishkahn.”[x]

If we bring our gifts, if we put them to sacred use, God will dwell in us. Offering your gifts is not just a way you serve your community – it is part of a spiritual life, a way we seek the One who gave us gifts in the first place.

I think there are a lot of you here who, like me, are searching for meaning. We are eager to find purpose and encounter the mystery that we call God. We feel scarcity and crave abundance. Know then, that God has placed in us something special. A gift that only we can offer. If we let it, it can be an expression of the divine within us – a higher purpose to which we can aspire. Think of Julia, who came in with a question, and found that she had gift – a spark of the divine that had been hiding in her all along.

Rashi says we have a sacred obligation: To help each other find our trumot. And to build sanctuaries where those gifts can be shared. Let us build. Let us build out of abundance. Let us build a mishkahn that can stand the test of time. Let us build with our gifts of artistry and wisdom, which are the pathways for God to be present in our lives. Let us build for our community, places for God to dwell in our sanctuary and social hall - and in our homes and hearts. This is not a means to an end, but the essence of the call. Let us build together. Because when we do, we will discover God dwelling among us.

[i] Exodus 32:1

[ii] Exodus 40:34

[iii] Exodus 25:8

[iv] Exodus 25:2

[v] Exodus 28:3

[vi] Exodus 35:10

[vii] Rashi, commenting on the seemingly superfluous phrase in Exodus 25:9, "וְכֵ֖ן תַּעֲשֽׂו"comments: "This is an additional commandment, extending the obligation of building the Tabernacle to future generations.”

[viii] Shemot Rabbah, as quoted in The Midrash Says (Exodus), p. 239

[ix] Exodus 25:8

[x] Language from Meam Loez on Exodus 25:8

Think Cosmically and Act Locally (Yom Kippur 5777)

Imagine going to the mailbox tomorrow and mixed in with all the junk mail and political leaflets you find a strange letter. It’s an invitation to help design a message that will be read by people ten thousand years from now. You would probably think it was a prank or an investment scheme, but this is exactly the invitation that was sent out in 1990 to a unique group of geologists, linguists, astrophysicists, and artists. An arm of the US Department of Energy was putting together an exclusive committee to accomplish one seemingly simple task: deliver a warning message to people ten thousand years in the future. The Department of Energy would place these warnings around the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, a facility they were building deep in the earth under New Mexico to safely and permanently store leftover radioactive material. Such waste remains incredibly dangerous to humans for hundreds of millennia.

The fear was that someone thousands of years from now, who had never heard of the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant would decide to go digging and unearth something radioactive. We saw in Raiders of the Lost Ark how digging up mysterious ancient materials can be deadly. It can melt your face. This risk is fairly easy to communicate to our children and grandchildren. A sign that says “Danger!” with the skull and crossbones and the radioactive symbol should do the trick. With that, we could be confident that people 100 years from now would get the message that this site is not a playground.

But the assembled team of artists and scientists was not tasked with building a warning marker that would last a hundred years. They had to think on an entirely different scale. They needed to find a way to get this message out to people ten thousand years in the future. Think about that for a minute. Could our ancestors ten thousand years ago have written a message that we would understand? Ten thousand years ago, they had just invented a revolutionary new technology called farming. They had just figured out how to cultivate barley and wheat. Saber-tooth cats and woolly mammoths roamed the earth.[i] Writing wasn’t invented until five thousand years ago. And we barely understand some of the earliest written languages. If people ten thousand years ago had painted a warning sign on a cave wall, there’s a good chance we wouldn’t understand it today. Languages change. Beowulf was written a thousand years ago in English and despite what my English teacher told me, it’s nearly incomprehensible to the modern reader. How can we write a message and even begin to hope that it will be understood thousands of years from now?

Some of the team members suggested using symbols. Everybody knows the skull and crossbones is the symbol of poison. That is until you learn that it originated in the Middle Ages when it was associated with the crucifixion of Jesus[ii] and was a symbol of both death and resurrection. It was only in the 1850s that it came into use as the symbol for poison.[iii] Even the language of symbols change. The committee had to consider this question: Given these limitations, how could they communicate a message to the future? They recognized that our descendants of ten thousand years will be as foreign to us as the early farmers of wheat and barley seem now.

I love thinking about this project.[iv] It pushes me to think on a scale so far beyond where I normally reside. It’s hard to picture one hundred years in the past or the future, let alone ten thousand. But I think even the experience of trying to think this way is a valuable human endeavor. It’s an attempt to understand our existence on the most global scale.

Why are we here? Not here on earth, but why are we here today? Why do modern Jews continue to gather to partake in this ancient ritual of Yom Kippur? What brought you here? What do you hope to get out of this? Perhaps part of the point of the High Holy Days is that they expose us to big ideas and big questions that we normally avoid. They help us stretch and shape our brains to the ultimate questions of life and meaning. Maybe, one reason you are here today is to practice a new way of thinking.

The High Holy Days ask us to think on a global scale. They scoop us out of the everyday and plunge us into the big mindedness of the infinite and the eternal. We, who are used to dividing our days into working hours and mealtimes, into classes and alarm clocks, are suddenly shaken by the unsettling sound of the shofar into concerns that are more cosmic. The Rosh Hashanah liturgy declares, “Today is the birthday of the world” and calls our minds to the beginning of everything. And on Yom Kippur we imagine God enacting a rehearsal of a messianic judgment of the world. So on Rosh Hashanah we imagine the world’s beginning, and on Yom Kippur we imagine its end. And suddenly we are thinking on an unfamiliar scale. Like the members of the Department of Energy committee, who had to force themselves to stop thinking in decades or centuries and teach themselves to think in millennia, the High Holy Days are a lesson in thinking on the grandest of scales.

We see this kind of thinking play out in one of the most memorable and challenging prayers of the High Holy Days -- Un’taneh Tokef. Over and over again on these High Holy Days we will read these words:

On Rosh Hashanah it is written down, and on Yom Kippur it is sealed:How many will pass on and how many will be created,Who will live and who will die.

We have come here to consider our actions, to think back over this past year and to imagine how we might be better in the next. And yet, we are constantly reminded by the Un’taneh Tokef prayer that we are mortal creatures -- that our lives will end. If not this year, then at some point. I came here to think about how I can be a better student or spouse or friend, but this prayer keeps distracting me with the troublesome reality that “nobody lives forever.”

And then the prayer makes it even more specific. We don’t just wonder who will live and who will die. We know that some will die by fire and others by water. Some will die by hunger and others by thirst. No longer are we thinking about the abstract reality of our own death, but the dark, intimate details of it. It’s difficult to read these words this week, to hear “who by water” and not think of the countless lives washed away by Hurricane Matthew. We know that this is a reality in our world, even if it is one we spend most of our time trying to avoid thinking about. Does the hurricane make these words more real? More terrifying? More incomprehensible? More true?

This Yom Kippur, my heart goes out to a family who belongs to a synagogue where I previously worked and who, about a month ago, lost their house in a devastating fire. Thank God, nobody was hurt, though they lost nearly all of their possessions. I cannot stop wondering, how will their community read the words “who by fire” knowing that it was almost them? For them, for all of us, the words of Un’taneh Tokef call us to think on a scale we would rather not explore.

And one might get lost in that kind of thinking. The fire or the flood could come at any time, so what is the point in changing how I act? So if the message we have been told is that Yom Kippur is about changing our daily behavior, why is Un’taneh Tokef constantly reminding us that we’re going to die? On the cosmic scale of Un’taneh tokef, it’s hard to see life’s meaning.

And yet, we do feel that life has meaning. We cannot think only on a global scale because we see the person sitting next to us who narrowly avoided the fire. And we can comfort them. And we can rally around them, as my former congregation did, by raising money to help them rebuild. Our lives seem short when we look at them from the cosmic throne, but from where we sit now, they seem long and full of purpose. And, when read closely, Un’taneh Tokef reflects this reality too. In order to fully appreciate this subtler message, let’s take a moment to delve into the prayer’s history.

It’s hard to trace the origin of Un’taneh Tokef. Its history is shrouded in a medieval legend, according to which, this prayer was written at a time of Jewish persecution and distrust between Christians and Jews. But the prayer was actually written much earlier, in the 7th century, probably by a liturgical poet named Yannai. Yannai’s story is the opposite of the medieval legend. He lived under Byzantine rule of the Promised Land, at a time of great religious creativity and cross-pollination between Jews and their Christian neighbors. We find, in fact that Un’taneh Tokef is very similar to a Christian prayer, composed around the same time. Perhaps Yannai heard one of his Christian compatriots reciting this beautiful poem, and he thought that he would compose a uniquely Jewish version. But he had some work to do to translate the Christian theology. You see, their version deals with the end of days -- the Final Judgment. There is no way out for the reader; no exit hatch when judgment comes. But this seemed absurd to Yannai. He believed in daily repentance, and a yearly Yom Kippur -- a time for both judgment by and also return to God. Thus, the last line of the Hebrew prayer was added to the Christian version. For Jews, the prayer would be incomplete without “u’tshuvah, u’t’fillah, u’tzdakah ma-avirin et roah hagezeirah -- but through repentance, prayer, and acts of justice, we can transcend the harshness of the decree.” The Jewish message is that human beings are capable of t’shuvah, t’fillah, and t’zdakah. Despite the fact that our lives are short, despite the fact that we know we will die, we still repent, we still pray to God, and we still engage in acts of goodness and justice in the world. We can see the cosmic scale and still we choose a different path -- a path of upright action and care and compassion.[v]

The story of Un’taneh Tokef, and of the High Holy Days is summed up best by the musical Hamilton. And if you thought I was going to go this whole week without talking about Hamilton, you don’t know me that well. In the final act of the show, the cast sings this stunningly simple distillation of Un’taneh Tokef: “Who lives, who dies, who tells your story?” We cannot get too caught up on the “who lives and who dies” part of the prayer without also asking ourselves, “What stories will they tell of us when we are gone?” Will they speak of the ways we cared for others. Will they speak of the ways we fought for justice? Will they speak of the way we looked after this earth? Who lives? Who dies? Who tells that story? Rabbi Noa Kusher, in interpreting Un’taneh Tokef, writes, “‘Given that I am going to die, given that my death is a fact, what will I make of my life.’ [this is the] question… at the very heart of the prayer.”[vi]

In a few minutes, we will pray the words of Un’taneh Tokef together. What would it mean to pray it with these thoughts in mind? To know that it is reminding you that you will die someday. But also to know that it is asking you how you will live. It is asking you to stand up in face of cosmic truths and declare that you have an important story to tell.

After we pray these challenging words together, we will read from the Torah. We will read that all the Jews stood gathered to affirm the covenant. The text says that the covenant was made not just with the Jews who were there that day, but even the ones who weren't, with every generation that would follow. And so the Torah reading calls us to think again on a gigantic scale. Now, rabbis like to look for a keyword in a text, a word that is repeated in a passage and hints at its meaning. There is one word that is repeated over and over and over in the Yom Kippur Torah reading -- Hayom -- today. It appears 12 times. This is a covenant for all time -- a cosmic event -- but it is also for us, today. Jewish scholar Deborah Lipstadt explains, “We do not control life and death, but we can control the kind of life we lead. The choice is up to you -- HaYom -- this day.”[vii] She encourages us not to get lost in “who by fire and who by water” and forget that what matters is what you do with today. While we can think about the biggest time scales, all we can really shape is haYom. Or, as America’s favorite astrophysicist, Neil deGrasse Tyson, says “While you are invited to reflect on the past, and imagine a future, do not lose sight of the fact that we are prisoners in the present, forever transitioning from our past to our future.” What he is saying, what the High Holy Days are saying, is to think cosmically, but act locally. With all of the past and future to get lost in, we can only shape today. What story will they tell of today?

Think back to that eclectic committee trying to design a message to last ten thousand years. They came up with wild proposals. They talked about reshaping the landscape to look threatening. They talked about genetically engineering cats to change colors near nuclear material. But the plan that the Department of Energy ultimately decided to go with was simply to erect large granite monuments with warnings in seven languages. And why? Well, partially, how can we possibly know the future? After all, Nils Bohr once said, “Prediction is very difficult, especially if it's about the future.” But also because of Hayom -- because of today. Building a warning sign that can last ten thousand years is expensive, and there are people alive today who are at risk of exposure to our country's nuclear waste. Towns like Apollo, PA, where cleanup of the discarded nuclear material could cost as much as $500 million dollars.[viii] We don’t have to look ten thousand years into the future to find people affected by our actions. All we have to do is look around. Hayom -- today. Wanting to protect our grand children’s great, great, great grandchildren is a noble and worthy effort. But we cannot let it distract us from the work we have to do today to care for those less fortunate and those who feel the immediate impact of our choices. The High Holy Days call us to think on two scales simultaneously - We must think on the grandest, cosmic scale, while at the same time not losing sight of today.

Rabbi Danny Zemel reinterprets the last line from Un’taneh Tokef.[ix] He reads it as “but repentance, prayer, and charity, help the hardship of the decree to pass.” Our actions are not a cure, a salvific way to change the decree. They are a comfort in the face of what we know is true. We know our lives our short. Some tragically so. But the comfort, the strength, the purpose, comes from knowing that in the meantime, what we do today matters. Hayom -- today. What story will you tell?

[i] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_human_prehistory

[ii] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crucifix

[iii] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skull_and_crossbones_(symbol)

[iv] I first learned about this project from my favorite podcast, 99 Percent Invisible: http://99percentinvisible.org/episode/ten-thousand-years/

[v] I am grateful to my teacher, Larry Hoffman, who shared this teaching with our Tisch Fellowship cohort. A version of this material is expanded upon in his book on Un’taneh Tokef, Who by Fire and Who by Water from Jewish Lights Publishing.

[vi] Who by Fire, Who by Water, ed. By Rabbi Lawrence A. Hoffman. Page 66.

[vii] Learn Torah with 5756 Torah Annual: A Collection of the Year’s Best Torah, ed. By By Joel Lurie Grishaver, Stuart Kelman. Page 372

[viii] http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052702304868404579194231922830904

[ix] Who by Fire, Who by Water, ed. By Rabbi Lawrence A. Hoffman. Page 79.

Building With Our Gifts: Senior Sermon on Parashat Trumah, February 11, 2016

The following is the Senior Sermon delivered at the Hebrew Union College - Jewish Institute of Religion in New York by Josh Fixler, 4th year rabbinical student.

Shortly after we graduated from college, Annie and I decided to join the synagogue where I had been teaching. The membership packet included a form for volunteer opportunities, with spaces for family members to write their skills and interests. My column contained skills like “great with kids” and “loves arts and crafts.” Annie was volunteering for Habitat for Humanity at the time, so her column said, “great with power tools” and “loves to hang cabinets.”

Clearly, building projects were not my area of expertise. So it’s ironic that I’m here to talk to you about a Torah portion that is mostly blueprints.

The blueprints are for a sacred structure – the mishkahn – our portable sanctuary in the wilderness. These instructions are thorough and practical. There are a lot of cubits involved. I’m sure if we put Annie in charge, we could build the thing today.

But, the blueprints in Parashat Trumah are ALSO instructions for building sacred community. God commands:

וְעָ֥שׂוּ לִ֖י מִקְדָּ֑שׁ וְשָׁכַנְתִּ֖י בְּתוֹכָֽם׃

“Build me a sanctuary and I will dwell among them.”i This is not just a town center. It’s a dwelling place for God.

Rashi puzzles over a seemingly superfluous phrase in the next verse, וְכֵ֖ן תַּעֲשֽׂוּ, “and so shall you do.”ii He interprets it to mean that building a mishkahn was not just a commandment for our ancestors, but an obligation for all time. We are all called to be mishkahn builders. Now since I assume we’re not going to get contractors in here to install a new mishkahn, reading Rashi raises the question, how will we fulfill the commandment to build dwelling places for God?

So much of our time at the College-Institute is devoted to asking how we will build sacred communities, where people come joyfully to pray and learn and act. This is a theme that speaks loudly in the parasha, but it also whispers another, subtler message. The commandment does not start with schematics. Six verses before God tells us what we are building -- v’asu li mikdash -- God explains the spirit in which we should build:

דַּבֵּר֙ אֶל־בְּנֵ֣י יִשְׂרָאֵ֔ל וְיִקְחוּ־לִ֖י תְּרוּמָ֑ה מֵאֵ֤ת כָּל־אִישׁ֙ אֲשֶׁ֣ר יִדְּבֶ֣נּוּ לִבּ֔וֹ...

“Tell the children of Israel to bring me gifts from every person whose heart is so moved.”iii Trumot – Gifts. Before we can even imagine building the mishkan, we must inspire people to bring their gifts.
When we think of trumot, we tend to think of material gifts, of gold and silver, dolphin skins, and acacia wood. But the text implies that equally important are the offerings of people’s hearts. God calls for:

כָּל־חַכְמֵי־לֵ֔ב

“everyone who is wise of heart”

אֲשֶׁ֥ר מִלֵּאתִ֖יו ר֣וּחַ חָכְמָ֑ה

“whose spirit I have filled with wisdom.”iv

Nachmanides argues that the material goods are also a metaphor for the wisdom and skill that the people brought to the project.v The people are the gold and the acacia wood.vi The expression of each spirit is a vital element in the construction of the mishkan. Each person shared her gift, and the result was an abundance of talent so great that God and Moses were overwhelmed.

Every person has a gift, a sacred talent to share. This is their trumah. Like Moses, Jewish leaders must ask people to bring their gifts, knowing that each is a sacred material in the construction of a dwelling place for God. Our communities are vessels overflowing with talent.

In his book 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, Stephen Covey describes dichotomous worldviews: a scarcity mentality and an abundance mentality. A person or organization with a scarcity mentality looks at the world and says, “I don’t have enough. How can I get more?” An abundance mentality says, “I have everything I need. How blessed am I?” Both mindsets look at the same data, but draw different conclusions. Covey challenges us to move from a mentality that sees only scarcity to one that appreciates abundance.

So many Jewish organizations operate from a place of scarcity – there is never enough time, never enough people, never enough money to do the work we want to do. Our synagogues are so desperate for more dues paying members that the dream of gifts overflowing feels like a fantasy. But Trumot transform our communities by enabling us to peer past perceived scarcity and see an abundance of talent living in our communities.

I learned to look for abundance, not from Covey, or the Torah, but from my mother. She was a non-profit consultant who specialized in volunteerism. But more importantly, my mother was a gratitude guru. She made a daily practice of listing out loud the many gifts for which she was grateful. She often shared that this practice of gratitude had been transformative, helping her to navigate even her darkest days because she never lost sight of her abundant blessings.

If she were here, she would look out on this sanctuary and see an ocean of Trumot. She believed that each of us has a unique gift to share, and that organizations need to be better at helping us to share them. This was more than her vocation, it was her conviction. When she looked at people, she saw wellsprings of talent. When she met someone, on a plane or in line at the grocery store, it took barely a second before she learned what they were excited about. This was her gift: she was a diviner of talent. When I read this Torah portion, it is her voice I hear whispering, “Imagine if each of us could develop skills to find gifts in every person we encounter.”

During my internship last summer, I met Barbara. She and some friends had approached their Rabbi, Danny Zemel, with the idea to start Wise Aging groupsvii at the synagogue. Rabbi Zemel, who has a natural abundance mindset, saw in Barbara and her team gifts of passion, organizing skill, and vision. With his blessing, they started 3 Wise Aging groups, which have already engaged more than 40 people.

Evelyn participated in one of these groups. She had been a member of the synagogue for years, but had not been particularly active. This program offered an exciting opportunity to explore her Jewish identity. At one meeting, she shared that in her professional life she runs a program connecting dance and spirituality. At the next meeting, she led her group in a spiritual movement exercise, which everyone found powerfully meaningful. Weeks later, she was in Rabbi Zemel’s office, discussing how she could share this gift with even more congregants. Now, she is building a new place for God to dwell in her community. My mother used to say, “Every person in your community has gifts they would be eager to share, but most have never been asked.”

The Torah portion teaches us to ask for gifts. As a non-profit consultant and a believer in abundance, my mother’s language for this was volunteer engagement. She wanted Jewish leaders to become volunteer engagement experts – masters at identifying Trumot and builders of opportunities for the sharing of gifts. Often, these gifts will match projects we are already doing, but sometimes, like with Barbara and Evelyn, new ideas will emerge from the unique talents within our community. We can’t say yes to every program idea, but we must learn to say yes to every talent -- to match people’s talents to our mission. What if we planned our program calendar in dialogue with people’s gifts? We see this in the Parasha. God does not start with program – “make me a sanctuary” -- God starts by asking for gifts. God knows people aren’t motivated by building funds; they are motivated when we connect to their hearts and their wisdom.

In two weeks, we will read about a very different building project: the Golden Calf. Aaron tells the frightened people to drop off their gold, and he builds the calf for them. They pay their membership dues and say, “Do this for us.” What Aaron builds is not a dwelling place but an idol. The Golden Calf is the kind of building project that comes out of scarcity – built out of the fear that Moses had disappeared. The move from the calf to the tabernacle is a transition from a mindset of scarcity to a mindset of abundance. It’s the abundance that comes when we ask for people’s gifts, not their gold.

If we want to build our modern mishkanot out of abundance, we need volunteer engagement that permeates every aspect of our institutions. And as leaders, we must model this engagement to our staff and lay leaders. A few weeks ago, I met with a congregant who works as a corporate consultant. We discussed his worry about declining engagement in Jewish life, and he shared ideas for how we might create a unified message of engagement around the High Holy Days. I said, “It sounds like your gift is messaging. You could help us to articulate our vision more clearly.” As we moved from talking about his idea to talking about his gift, I could see his eyes brighten, his demeanor change. Something holy happened in that moment. What if Rabbis, Cantors, Educators, professors, and administrators made a spiritual practice out of sitting with people and helping them to name their gifts?

But it is not enough just to identify the gifts. We have to create opportunities to share them with the community. It’s not enough for me to say, “Your gift is messaging.” We must figure out how he can put that gift to use. Perhaps over the summer he will work with the rabbis and lay leaders to envision a unified message for the High Holy Days. When I started this sermon, I told you a story about filling out a synagogue volunteer form. The sad but unsurprising ending is that nobody ever called us about anything written on that form. They asked us to identify our gifts but never gave us a place in which to share them. From the Golden Calf to our own organizations, we’ve seen what happens when we fail to engage our members around their gifts. Parashat Trumah is about asking for our gifts and putting them to use.

Let us imagine for a moment, a synagogue that pursues volunteer engagement at every level. Picture meeting the congregants and staff of Temple Ohev Mitnadev.viii

Shira is a market researcher who volunteers while her kids are at the preschool, helping the office to interpret data from a recent parent survey. She loves it because she can use her professional skills at a time that works in her schedule.

Adam’s Bar Mitzvah is in May. For his mitzvah project, he planned a workshop for older adults to learn computer skills so that they can FaceTime with their grandkids.

Miriam has been exploring her love of prayer in an advanced liturgy class with the cantor. Soon she and the other participants will be ready to put together meaningful shiva minyanim.

When new members join the congregation, they meet a retiree named Edith, one of the synagogue’s “trumah coaches,” who helps them identify their gifts and connect them to synagogue activities they might find meaningful.

Rebecca, the Director of Volunteer Engagement, works with every staff member to tap into this expanding pool of talent.

Congregants here don’t just serve on committees. I’ve never met anybody whose sacred gift is the ability to sit on committees. Rather congregants share their time and talents, in ways that enrich their lives and the life of the congregation. Some are eager to share their professional skills, while others offer surprising, hidden talents. Some people’s sacred gift is as simple as a free hour and an eagerness to help. The work of the synagogue is not simply programs. It’s finding and sharing gifts.

In the Torah, the Israelites eventually come back to Moses and say, “The people have brought more Trumot than we know what to do with!” When we ask for gifts, abundance overflows. When we engage people around their sacred talents, together we build a sanctuary.


When we build with our gifts, it’s not just our communities that we make into a sanctuary; it’s our lives.

וְעָ֥שׂוּ לִ֖י מִקְדָּ֑שׁ

“Build me a sanctuary,”

וְשָׁכַנְתִּ֖י בְּתוֹכָֽם

“that I may dwell in them.”ix

Not b’tocho -- so that I can dwell in IT -- the sanctuary. B’tocham -- So I can dwell in THEM. The Divine presence came to rest in the hearts of the Israelites, and “not in the wood and metal of the mishkahn.”x If we bring our gifts, if we put them to sacred use, God will dwell in us.

The people we serve are searching for meaning. They aspire to understand their place in a confusing world. They are eager to find purpose and encounter God. They feel scarcity and crave abundance. When we walk with them on a journey of discerning their trumot, we give them a path to find what they are looking for. When we help people to identify their gifts and offer them to their community, we invite them to experience the unique wisdom God has placed inside them, and see their sacred purpose. Think of Evelyn, who discovered that her dance could speak to her Judaism, and that her gift could move her community to a higher place.

This is different from other volunteerism. Jews already volunteer in incredibly high numbers, coaching youth soccer or delivering meals on wheels. But serving in or with a Jewish organization feels different. This is the core of trumah. The root of the Hebrew word is unclear. Some scholars trace it to an Acadian word meaning, “lift up.” Jewish leaders help people to lift up their talents by reminding them that those talents are gifts they receive from God. At the PTA bake sale, saying thanks to God for your brownie prowess would be cause for concern. But in sacred community, this is our goal. My mother showed me that gratitude is a deeply religious conviction. When we say thanks for our blessings in a Jewish context, we have a language and a community in which to acknowledge their source. Whether people use their talents to transform our community or turn them outward to change the world, we help them to lift their gifts from the secular to the sacred in the service of the One who gave them. This is not a tool for us to do more work. This is a means for us to change more lives. We can move people from the scarcity of “Who am I?” to the abundance of “I have purpose.”

As Jewish leaders, we have a sacred obligation: To help people find their sacred trumot. and to build sanctuaries where those gifts can be shared. Let us build. Let us build out of abundance. Let us build mishkahnot that can stand the test of time. Let us build with people, with their gifts of artistry and wisdom, which are the pathways for God to be present in their lives. Let us build for our community, places for God to dwell in our sanctuaries and social halls. This is not a means to an end, but the essence of the call. Let us build together. When we do, we discover God dwelling among us.

Footnotes:
i. Exodus 25:8 
ii. Exodus 25:9 
iii. Exodus 25:2 
iv. Exodus 28:3 
v. From Mikraot G’dolot, Nahmanides on 25:3 These are the gifts. Literally, "this is the offering" (OJPS). According to the True interpretation, "this" refers to the Shekhinah and the wisdom provided by it, as when God said to Solomon in 2 Chron. 1:11, "Because you want this, and have not asked for wealth, property, and glory ... but you have asked for the wisdom and the knowledge to be able to govern My people...." The word is used the same way in Gen. 49:28, Deut. 33:1, and Ps. 118:23. Genesis Rabbah alludes to this interpretation as well. 
vi. Exodus 25:3-7 
vii. Based on the book Wise Aging by Rabbi Rachel Cowan and Dr. Linda Thal 
viii. Hebrew for “Lovers of Volunteerism” I want to express deep credit to Beth Steinhorn, my mother’s thought partner and President of the JFFixler Group, for helping me to develop these examples. 
ix. Exodus 25:8 
x. Language from Meam Loez on Exodus 25:8