exodus

How We Get Across: Pesach 5785

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Sermon for Shabbat / Chag Pesach (Day 7), 5785, Friday April 18, 2025

Delivered at Westchester Reform Temple, Scarsdale, New York

In life as in literature, crossing a body of water often heralds a moment of transformation.  

The Greeks whispered of the River Styx that formed the boundary between Earth and the Underworld, where the ghostly ferryman Charon would transport the souls of the dead on their voyage to the hereafter.  

In 49 BCE, Julius Caesar and his army crossed the Rubicon, a shallow river in Northeastern Italy that protected Rome from Civil War.  His crossing was considered an act of insurrection.  There he declared, alea iacta est:  “The die is cast.”

We remember George Washington crossing the frozen Delaware the night after Christmas, 1776, in his surprise attack on Hessian forces in Trenton, New Jersey.

The runaway slave Eliza crosses the frozen Ohio River at the heart of Uncle Tom’s Cabin.  In Harriet Beecher Stowe’s own verse:

So over the roaring rushing flood,

From block to block she sprang,

And ever her cry for God’s good help

Above the waters rang.

And God did hear that mother’s cry,

For never an ice-block sank;

While the cruel trader and his men

Stood wondering on the bank.

A good man saw on the further side,

And gave her his helping hand;

So poor Eliza, with her boy,

Stood safe upon the land.

All of us Jewish Americans find a water crossing at the heart of our family’s story, whether in persecuted flight across the Atlantic or as pioneers or entrepreneurs; the huddled and the hopeful.

And of course water crossings figure prominently in the Hebrew Bible:  Noah’s ark-bound journey from a world doomed to a world reborn; Jonah’s aborted flight across the Mediterranean to escape the prophet’s call; Joshua’s triumphal march across the Jordan River, carrying the Ark of the Covenant.  The Bible even tells us that before he started making house calls at Passover, Elijah’s final earthly act was to roll up his cloak and touch the waters of the Jordan River with it; the waters divide to the right and the left and Elijah crosses over on dry ground, together with his apprentice Elisha (cf. II Kings 2:11-15).

This last scene, of course, echoes the greatest water crossing of them all, in the Bible and indeed in all of literature: the Torah reading for this seventh day of Pesach, the crossing of the Red Sea.  A moment of transformation: entering the water as slaves, the people emerge free men and women on the other shore.  

Of course, they had no choice, no way to retreat.  With the Egyptian army in hot pursuit, the Israelites arrive at the water’s edge.  Then, the Torah tells us, the Divine pillar of cloud and fire positioned itself behind the Israelites, in front of the Egyptians, forming a barrier that prevented the Egyptians from moving forward.  But it also presumably prevented the Israelites from moving backward (Cf. Ex. 14:19-20).

Here, the famous midrash inserts brave Nachshon ben Amminadav, who entered the Sea unbidden (Mechilta d’Rabbi Yishmael, 14:22).  The waters reach his ankles; the Sea continues to rage.  He goes in up to his knees, his waist, his chest… the Sea closing in over him.  Only when the water reaches his nostrils does the Red Sea part and our people enter on dry land.  Presumably the Rabbis who wrote this legend wanted to instill a lesson of faith, faith in the face of an insuperable obstacle, but I say Nachshon had no choice:  with fire and cloud and an army behind him and nothing but open Sea ahead of him, where could he turn?  I am reminded in an uncomfortable way of those terrible images of the World Trade Center jumpers on 9/11, those helpless victims, with cloud and fire billowing behind them and nothing but the open blue of sky in front of them.

Life hands us experiences over which we have no choice.  Time moves in only one direction and we must walk forward, sometimes into a Sea of grief and sadness.  And I do not know why it is so, but there are years in our life that take more than they give, so that over time each of us becomes threaded into a common web of human experience, the kinship of bereavement, the universal society of every generation that must lay to rest the people we love.

I have walked alongside many—maybe even you and your family—in that Sea of grief and I always emerge with cause to marvel at the faith to keep moving forward, whether by choice or consequence.  And I do not know why it is so, but instead of drowning in tears I have always found that just the courage to enter the Sea causes the waters to part a little bit, that by going through the process of bereavement, an encounter with death becomes a little bit easier to bear.  

Jewish tradition recognizes that human grieving passes through stages and therefore our reckoning with it must also take the form of a journey of stages.  Even before a person enters shiva, one is called Onen, a state in which one remains from the time of death until the time of burial when shiva properly begins.  

Rabbi Maurice Lamm whose book The Jewish Way in Death and Mourning provides the definitive writing on the subject, observes: 

“The onen is a person in deep distress, a person yanked out of normal life and abruptly catapulted into the midst of inexpressible grief. He is disoriented, his attitudes are disarranged, his emotions out of gear. The shock of death paralyzes his consciousness and blocks out all regular patterns of orderly thinking. ‘The deceased lies before him,’ as the sages said and, psychologically, he is reliving the moment of death every instant during this period.”

The Onen is like Nachshon before entering the Sea, trembling on the water’s edge.  

But then the ritual begins:  the family is gathered; a rabbi or cantor or caring officiant summoned; the funeral arranged, the loved one’s story told, the act of k’riah performed, tearing a black ribbon or piece of clothing so that grief finds its way from inside the heart to outside the breast, a badge of love and loss, of honor and hope.  

Sometimes when I walk with a bereaved family down the long aisle of our sanctuary, a sea of mourners and friends on either side, I think of the Israelites marching through the Red Sea and I feel comforted.  It happens again, when leaving the grave, custom invites those gathered there to form two rows in order to allow the mourning family to pass between them and feel their shelter and support.  How like the Israelites passing through the Sea, I sometimes think, and what a necessary miracle of faith to place one foot in front of the other, in that awful moment of leaving a loved one to rest.  

Oftentimes in the rituals of bereavement I share words of the 23rd Psalm, as we will in tomorrow morning’s Yizkor service.  Even before the famous line, “The Lord is my Shepherd,” we read a little epigram:  “Mizmor L’David:  A Psalm of David.”  According to Jewish tradition, the Psalm was written by King David.

My friend Rabbi Les Gutterman has observed that “kings, now as then, have many privileges and prerogatives.  One they have never enjoyed is exemption from sorrow.  Death has a passkey into every home in the community including the royal palace.”  King David buried his son Absalom.  “Thus he says, ‘Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death.’  One must walk through that valley.  We cannot run.  Bereavement sometimes comes quickly.  Healing is always a slow process.”  Shakespeare said it well:  “What wound did ever did heal but by degrees?” (Othello, II:iii).

Like the Nachshon and the Sea, the Psalmist cannot escape the Valley of the Shadow. It has an entrance no one can avoid.  The only way across the Valley, the only way across the Sea, is through.  And on the other side, we emerge transformed.  We discover that love does not die; people do; and that our loved ones may leave our world but in so many ways they never leave us, for we have been changed by them; and who we are—the way we think, the way we talk, the way we act, the way we move through the world—integrates the memories, the gifts, the holiness and the love that our dear ones gave to us.  And that is why we have Yizkor, not only to remind ourselves not only of how our loved ones lived, but also to acknowledge and even celebrate how we have been transformed by their lives.

When the Israelites came to the Sea, the guiding presence of God’s pillar of cloud and fire retreated from in front of them, to behind them, leaving nothing but the Sea before them.  

Rather than as an abandonment from on high, it is possible to understand this maneuver as a tender demonstration of God’s love.  I think the Torah wants us to know that God had their backs, as it were.  The only way across was through.  They walked into the Sea—a Promised Land before them, God’s gentle presence behind them.  

So May our Shepherd in dark valleys transform our cherished memories into sources of healing and lasting blessing.   Amen.

Shemini 5784: Reflections on 20+ Years at WRT

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I’m speechless!

…Not literally, of course.  I have a speech….

(Never trust a rabbi who claims to be speechless.)

You have blessed me tonight so generously, so now it’s my turn to bless you.

The model for blessing the congregation appears in this week’s portion, Shemini:

“Aaron lifted his hands toward the people and blessed them.”  He offered the requisite sacrifices, “and then Moses and Aaron went inside the Tent of Meeting.  When they came out, they blessed the people; and the Divine Presence appeared to all the people” (Leviticus 9:22-23).

The Rabbis, always attuned to the nuances of the text, observed a few peculiarities in the space of these two verses:  the repetition of the blessing; the fact that Aaron blesses alone at the outset and then is joined by Moses; the brief and unexplained interlude when Moses and Aaron walk into the Tent; their immediate re-emergence to bless the people a second time.

I have thought a lot about this passage in the days and weeks leading up to this celebration.  

Specifically, three thoughts come to mind, each evident from this passage, and each increasingly evident over my years at WRT. 

  • First, that it is not good to go it alone.      
  • Second, that something important happens inside the Tent of Meeting.
  • Third, that we’re supposed to be doing here is taking the blessing out of the Tent and into the world.

People often ask me, “Do you ever get nervous up there on the bimah?”

And I say, “No, not really.” 

And that’s because I never have to do this alone.  

I get to do this with the best people in the world.  From the minute I arrived at WRT I have gotten to do this alongside the greatest cantors and rabbis, with world-class musicians and teachers of Torah, and each of us has each other’s back.  From the original “Dream Team” of Rick Jacobs, Angela Buchdahl, and Stephen Merkel of blessed memory, to the Dream Team of 2024, I have always felt so lucky to lead with a team.

The Torah comments twice on the subject of “going it alone,” and both times it uses the phrase “Lo Tov,” “not good.”  First, in the Garden of Eden, of the first human being, Adam, about whom it is written, Lo Tov heyot adam l’vado, “It is not good for a person to be alone” (Genesis 2:18).  And so the human is given a partner, an equal, a complement: Chava, meaning life.

Later the Torah presents us with a young Moses, a Moses still finding his way in the wilderness, leading a community out of bondage, when his father-in-law Jethro observes him managing all matters for the congregation, big and small, and warns that if he keeps it up, Moses is going to burn out fast.  Jethro says:  “Lo Tov ha-davar asher ata oseh, The thing you are doing is not good.  Get yourself some help” (Exodus 18:17-23). 

It is not good to go it alone.

Which makes me wonder about Aaron, at the top of the verse, standing up there in front of the people, all alone, administering the rituals—alone; blessing the people—alone; and I like to think that this lonely Aaron suddenly remembered that it is not good to go it alone, which explains what happens next:  he and Moses walk into the Tent of Meeting together, and then re-emerge together in front of the people.

I am blessed that I have never had to go it alone at WRT.  Clergy, professional, and lay partners have provided boundless support, insight, wisdom, leadership, caring: sometimes taking the melody line and sometimes the harmony, all contributing to the symphony of WRT.  

My heart swells with gratitude for all who have shared the mantle of leadership—and especially to my clergy partner, Amanda Kleinman, whose cantorate encompasses the totality of congregational service, from strategic planning to the cultivation of the next generation of leaders, from preaching and teaching to carrying our people in times of celebration and sorrow, and whose friendship, and patience (especially with me!) have sustained my spirit on hard days, and who exemplifies the perfect mix of taking the work seriously without taking ourselves too seriously.  

And who, by the way, planned this whole shebango—not single-handedly, of course, but whose vision, teamwork, and attention to detail are finely engraved in this beautiful Shabbat.  Amanda, it is a pleasure and an honor to lead with you, and to learn leadership with you and from you.

Amy Rossberg, who oversees congregant relations and pastoral care, holds our community with love and deep Jewish spirituality.  Hers is often the first voice offering mazal tov or sympathy.  I really don’t know where I’d be without her—probably lost on my way to a cemetery in Queens.  I am so grateful. 

Without Eli Kornreich at the helm of all of our operations—logistical, financial, and physical—the house of WRT could not stand.  And without our volunteer leaders, the house of WRT would be hollow.  Warren Haber, you exemplify dedication not only to WRT but to the Jewish people and the Jewish tradition, inspiring our entire community.  With you as Temple President, we should all feel blessed to know that we never have to go it alone.

I come from a family that centered joyful, Jewish living in our home and our hearts.  I have been blessed to be part of a family that includes my parents, my sister, and her family, including her husband Jonas and his family, my nephew Samson (who chanted Torah like a boss tonight!) and twin niece and nephew Shirah and Jakey, and their father Dean, and many others who are with me tonight, either in the sanctuary, or online, or in spirit, or in memory.   

Friends of the highest human caliber have given so much happiness and meaning to my life.  What a thrill to have some of my closest childhood friends here, and four of my five college roommates who have been making one another laugh until it hurts for almost 33 years, usually at James’s expense (he’s the roommate who correctly surmised that a ski trip would be better than a Shabbat service).  You all mean the world to me.  And I have been blessed by the immense caring and wisdom of my chavruta, my rabbinic study-partner, teacher, and friend Rabbi Jan Katzew.

At the heart of it all is Kelly, whose dedication to WRT deserves a celebration all her own.  Kelly has shared the leadership of this congregation in ways both overt—co-chairing WRT’s efforts to resettle refugees from Africa, preparing yontif meals for staff, lending her glorious voice to concerts and special services, co-leading congregational trips to Israel, basically, just being the “very model of the modern major rebbetzin”—and, covert: as teammate, truth-teller, logician, strategic adviser, sermon-editor, spiritual guide, cat mom, and above all, best friend.  You have sacrificed long days and sleepless nights for this congregation with the same integrity, love, and devotion that you give to the performing arts, including your present work in the national tour of Girl from the North Country, the extraordinary musical featuring the music of Bob Dylan that experienced a critically acclaimed Broadway run before it was cut short by Covid.  You can visit northcountrytour.com to follow her ongoing journey, resuming in Dallas next week.  

(And yes, the irony of Kelly singing 20 Dylan songs every day, eight shows a week, is not lost on us, given the fact that, of the handful of things about which we do not agree, the appeal of Bob Dylan’s voice is foremost among them.)

Kelly, thank you for being the first half of “Team McBlake”; thank you for all you give to this community; thank you for loving me, of all people; I love you.

So Aaron walks into the Tent of Meeting, not alone this time, but with his partner by his side, and then they re-emerge.  The text doesn’t tell us what happened inside that Tent but clearly, something has changed, because as soon as they step outside, they bless the community, and, for the first time in the Book of Leviticus, the Divine Presence makes itself known to all the people.

This, I think, is the magic of the synagogue.  You go in one way and you come out different.  Something transformative happens inside this Tent, something marvelous.  

You go in thinking, “my children will get a Jewish education,” or “my kids will get a Bar or Bat Mitzvah,” or, “I need someone to conduct my loved one’s funeral,” and what you discover is that inside the Tent, the world makes a little more sense.  The ancient Sages conveyed wisdom that still matters in our lives.  There is more to life than I realized.  There exists a place where I am less lonely.  My simchas and my sorrows have a place where I can hold them, honor them, and re-enter the community, transformed.  A place exists where—I can’t exactly put my finger on it, and I may not use this language for it, but for lack of a better way of putting it, inside the Tent, I felt as if I were in the presence of God.  Did my beliefs change?  Maybe; maybe not.  But I definitely changed.  My sense of priorities, my sense of purpose–they changed.  My life changed.

Besides. The point of Judaism never was to inculcate belief in God, anyway.  The point of Judaism is to make God’s presence known in the world, which is why Moses and Aaron have to come out of the Tent in order to bring the blessing and the Divine Presence to the world. 

The point of Judaism is to live in such a way that gives hope and testimony to the possibility that in a world of dross, beauty is possible. That in a world of hurt, love is possible. That in a world of randomness and disorder, reason and order are possible. 

So as I mark this milestone, I celebrate the way in which we, right here at WRT, have brought the blessing out from the Tent and into the world.  

I rejoice when I hear that other congregations are singing a melody that was first sung here.  

I rejoice when other congregations follow our lead and transform their environmental impact through the Zero Waste initiative that we developed, in this Tent.  

I rejoice when WRT’s engagement strategies, adult education initiatives, and creative holiday observances are emulated across the Reform Movement. 

I rejoice when we travel to Israel and are greeted not as tourists but as “B’nei Bayit” — members of one’s home and family.  

I rejoice when a guest at Shabbat or the Holidays comes up to the bimah afterwards and says, “I’ve never been to a prayer experience like this before.”

I rejoice when I see people walk out of the sanctuary and remember that the parking lot is holy ground, too, and remember that they learned derekh eretz, common courtesy, dignified decency, menschlichkeit, here in the Tent.

I rejoice when the Tikkun Olam values we teach in the Tent–the dignity of every human being, the need to cultivate multi-faith allies and friendships in a world that has no trouble generating enemies of the Jewish People, the centrality of Israel to us–are all made real in our work outside the Tent.

I rejoice when our congregants embrace, outside this Tent, the notion that standing up for Israel is not at odds with supporting the dignity of Palestinian people; that Jewish strength is not to be achieved through isolationism or extremism.

I rejoice when I learn, as I did just this week, that a young woman who grew up here at WRT was accepted to HUC and will be entering rabbinical school in Jerusalem this summer; that the leaders who began their journeys here at WRT are now serving as great leaders of Jewish people across the country and across the world.    

So this is my blessing to you, WRT:  

Please continue to bless one another as you have blessed me.  Please show one another the kindness, understanding, compassion and forgiveness that you have shown me.  And please be as good and generous to this synagogue as you have been to me.     

Please don’t leave the magic inside the Tent.  

The world needs you to bring the blessing out from here, to reveal the Divine Presence to all of God’s children.

Shabat Shalom 

Shabbat Va’era 5784: “Ordinary Egyptians”

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Sermon delivered at Westchester Reform Temple, Friday, January 12, 2024

In late February 2020, Kelly and I joined ten other couples, all rabbis and their spouses or partners, on a nine-day trip to Egypt.  It seems hard to fathom even now.  We visited just days before pandemic lockdown, openly as a Jewish group, with an Israeli travel company, meeting with most of the remaining Jews left in Cairo and learning about Egypt’s efforts to cultivate Jewish and, specifically, Israeli tourism, by pouring millions of dollars into the restoration of historic synagogues. 

At the time of our visit, there were eight officially recorded Jewish residents of Cairo.  In 1948, upon the establishment of the State of Israel, Egypt had between 75,000 and 80,000 Jews, most of whom were expelled beginning in the 1950’s after the establishment of the State of Israel, a fate similar to that of most Jews from Arab lands.  

For these reasons—to say nothing of blood and frogs and lice, oh my!—I approached the trip with hesitation bordering on trepidation.  Little did we know we had more to fear from an invisible virus than from other threats either real or imagined, like terrorism, or mummies’ tombs.  Still, for this rabbi, the very mention of “Egypt” called up all sorts of associations, most of them bad.  Is any other place on earth called “the house of bondage?”  I recalled the Torah’s admonitions never to go back to Egypt (see, for instance, Deuteronomy 28:68), where our people were ruthlessly enslaved at mortar and brick.  But, I figured, a chance like this doesn’t come around every day, so Kelly and I boarded a plane and we were off.

What we discovered in Egypt dispelled my anxieties and opened my eyes.  We encountered a complex, vibrant, and wounded society, still reeling from the failed Arab Spring of a decade prior, which precipitated the overthrow of the despot Hosni Mubarak, and the subsequent coup d’etat that ousted his successor Mohammed Morsi, who had violently suppressed the protest movement, followed by the rise to power of his rival, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi.  

Even now, under el-Sisi, Egypt remains a repressive autocracy: a military dictatorship with a third of its people living in crushing poverty.  We also experienced a society of generous hospitality, kindness, an openness to tourists—yes, Jewish tourists—and, at least where it counts, between government officials, a longstanding partnership between Egyptians and Israelis, particularly where security matters are concerned.  Egypt has remained Israel’s most steadfast and important regional partner, with whom a stable peace has been preserved for forty-five years.

My time in Egypt certainly informed how I think about Egyptians, who feature at the center of this week’s Torah reading, Parashat Va’era (the second portion in the Book of Exodus), and who, at the same time, are de-centered from that narrative, in that the story is told from the Israelites’ perspective.  

This parasha depicts the first seven plagues against Egypt, a contest of escalating violence between the God of the Hebrews and the Pharaoh, his court, and all the gods of Egypt, with the objective of freeing the captive Israelites from Pharaoh’s ruthless terror regime.  Unmentioned but surely present were the countless Egyptians enduring a horrific bombardment which brings to their territory widespread destruction of property, the death of cattle and livestock, a shortage of food and potable water, outbreaks of vermin and disease; a terrifying rain of fiery hail; and that’s just this week’s parasha.  Next week will come the locusts and the darkness and the death of the firstborn.   

In any case, I have thought a lot, in recent days, about these ordinary Egyptians, and have taken a liberty Rabbis tend to take:  to read the Torah not only at the level of p’shat, the plain sense of the text, but also at the level of d’rash, or, midrash, imagining the story in between the lines of the text.  

I wondered what the Egyptian masses in between the lines of our story felt about the unrelenting assault on home and property and health and life.  Terror, certainly.  But what else?  Bewilderment?  Impotence?  Rage?  

And if rage, at whom?  Did they blame Pharaoh and his courtiers for getting them into this mess in the first place?  Did they blame Pharaoh for his stated aim to commit genocide against the Hebrews, issuing a policy of drowning their children in the Nile?  

Did they blame their own taskmasters for brutalizing the Hebrew slaves? Or did they believe they were just following orders?  I imagine that the vast majority of Egyptians lived far from Israelite settlements, and did not see themselves as complicit in any way with their suffering, any more than the average Israelite saw him or herself as complicit in the hell of plagues inflicted on their enemy.  And yet the average Egyptian surely suffered inordinately while Pharaoh and his company enjoyed the luxury of palace life.  

Did the Egyptians blame the Hebrews for settling in their land under Joseph, generations earlier?

When Moses demands, again and again, “Let my people go,” and Pharaoh refuses, again and again, his heart hardening to the plight of the captives, how did that play on the “Egyptian street?”  From what I saw of Egyptian archaeology in February of 2020 I can confidently say that ancient Egypt was not an open society; the Pharaoh ruled supreme as a living god among the people.  I’m sure public protest was not tolerated in Egypt, so it’s hard to know how ordinary Egyptians felt about Hebrew slavery at all, given that they were no less subjects to Pharaoh’s iron-fisted rule, whose lives mattered little to their autocratic tyrant.

I imagine that these ordinary Egyptians, embittered by life and indoctrinated by their state-sponsored belief system to worship death, probably carried a deep and pervasive sense of victimhood.  

I wonder all this about the Egyptians, and my questions continue to go unanswered.  The text gives us only what it gives: the words on the page, and the blank spaces in between to ask questions and imagine the untold stories.  We call this midrash.

But there are other Jewish texts—important texts—both within Torah and beyond it, that invite us to recognize that—despite the fact that the Egyptians were our enemies, and despite the fact that for us to demand freedom from captivity and terror was just both in cause and in means—even the use of force—the Egyptians, nevertheless, were human beings, and suffering human beings at that.  

Even in the hell of war, Judaism does not give us license to dehumanize the enemy.  Even one’s enemy is a human being made in the image of God.

When the Ten Plagues are recounted at the Pesach Seder, we spill a drop of wine in acknowledgment that the fruit of our joy, the cup of our liberation, is diminished by the suffering of the Egyptians.

The Talmud affirms that God does not rejoice in the defeat of the enemy and even portrays God as chastising the angels for wanting to sing while the Egyptians were drowning in the Sea (Talmud Bavli, Megillah 10b).

And the Torah’s own directive:  

לֹא־תְתַעֵ֣ב מִצְרִ֔י כִּי־גֵ֖ר הָיִ֥יתָ בְאַרְצֽוֹ׃…

…You shall not abhor an Egyptian, for you were a stranger in his land (Deut. 23:7b).

I would be remiss not to conclude, on this holiday weekend Shabbat, with words by Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King.  On the subject of loving our enemies, a notion deeply embedded in Christian thought but not emphasized in Judaism (and in some ways at odds with it), King delivered a sermon at the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama on November 17th, 1957, that offers food for thought for this Jewish setting at this Jewish moment.  

“In the final analysis,” King said, “love is not this sentimental something that we talk about. It’s not merely an emotional something. Love is creative, understanding goodwill for all men. It is the refusal to defeat any individual. When you rise to the level of love, of its great beauty and power, you seek only to defeat evil systems.”

“Oh God,” he prayed, “help us in our lives and in all of our attitudes, to work out this controlling force of love, this controlling power that can solve every problem that we confront in all areas.”

Amen.