god

God’s in Charge: Parashat Chayei Sarah, 5786

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Sermon Delivered at Greater Centennial A.M.E. Zion Church, Mount Vernon, New York

Sunday November 9th, 2025

The following joke was funny between 1976 and 1996 and only for a select audience, so you could say that this is very “inside baseball” but here goes.  

A man goes to his rabbi and says, “Rabbi, I don’t know what to do.  The first game of the World Series is next Tuesday and it’s the same night as Yom Kippur (the Jewish Day of Atonement).” 

The rabbi says, “Well, isn’t that why they invented the VCR?”

And the man says, “You can tape Yom Kippur??!”

Like I said – very inside baseball.  But, naturally, since the Dodgers’ big win last Sunday, baseball has been on my mind. Throughout the season and postseason, and even after the Series, I’ve heard a lot of talk about the so-called “inevitability” of the Dodgers winning.  Sportscasters and fans united around this theme of inevitability, which stems from the club’s star power (including Shohei Ohtani, Yoshinobu Yamamoto, Mookie Betts, and Freddie Freeman), its unmatched payroll (over $300 million!), and its back-to-back dominance after their 2024 title.  Despite a grueling back-and-forth seven-game tug of war, and a nailbiter finish, immediately the “i” word started coming up again.  A New York Post column by Joel Sherman cemented their status, opening with: “They were inevitable. Indomitable. And now indisputably historic” (November 2, 2025).

Inevitable comes from the Latin, meaning “unavoidable.”  Something is fated, predestined, meant to be.  In Yiddish we have a similar word, bashert — when an outcome is more than random chance but rather, inevitable.  Bashert is typically used to describe a person’s soulmate, life partner, the perfect match, the right one. You can refer to that special person as your bashert, your meant-to-be.  And the classic Bible story illustrating bashert is found in the reading from Genesis that Jewish communities all over the world are studying this week.  

In Genesis Chapter 24, Abraham sends his trusted household servant, Eliezer, in search of a wife for his son Isaac, who apparently cannot be trusted to find a wife on his own.  Abraham, like many an anxious Jewish parent, can’t stand thinking about his beloved son spending his poor life alone, so he needs to get him “all boo’d up” and commissions Eliezer to find Isaac’s bashert.  

But how to find just the right one?  The servant travels off to Abraham’s native land and pleads for God to get involved:  “O Lord,” he prays, “God of my master Abraham, grant me good fortune this day, and deal graciously with my master Abraham.  Here I stand by the well, as the daughters of the townspeople come out to draw water.  Let the maiden to whom I say, ‘Please, lower your jar that I may drink,’ and who replies, ‘Drink, and I will also water your camels’—let her be the one whom You have decreed for Your servant Isaac. Thereby shall I know that You have dealt graciously with my master” (Gen. 24:12-14).

Eliezer knows he has spotted the right one NOT when he meets the hottest girl in all the land, or the richest, but rather when Rebekah emerges at the well and sees a tired stranger and his thirsty flock, and stops to give them drink, camels and all.  Do you know how long it takes to water an entire flock of camels?  Did you know that a single camel can store enough water to survive for six or seven months in the Sahara desert without drinking?  But I digress.  

What identifies Rebekah as the right one for Isaac is her kindness, her generosity, her inner beauty: her compassion, patience, and strength of character.  Eliezer takes her back to Canaan to meet her groom.  When Isaac sees her, he is floored, because she is also hot.  But honestly, Rebekah’s qualities, inner and outer, matter less than the fact that God has preordained her to be Isaac’s bashert.  Even her father, Laban, sees it plain as day:  “The matter has been decreed by the Lord,” he admits; “we have nothing good or bad to say about it” (Gen. 24:50).  

When I studied this passage in seminary, our professor of classical Bible commentary, Rabbi Dr. Ed Goldman, would ask us rabbis-in-training:  “And what does this story show us?”  Like generations of rabbinical students before us, we had heard his answer so many times that we could respond in unison:  “The inevitable, inexorable, unfolding of the Divine Will.”  

Put another way:  we human beings like to think we’re in charge, but make no mistake: God’s in charge.  “The inevitable, inexorable unfolding of the Divine Will.”  Inevitable — it’s unavoidable.  And “inexorable” — also from the Latin, meaning, “it can’t be prayed or swayed away.”  “Thy will be done.”  If God wants something done, it’s gonna get done.  God’s in charge.

Dr. Goldman saw this theme all over the Book of Genesis and in fact called it the theme of the Bible itself.  The creation of the world?  The inevitable, inexorable unfolding of the Divine Will.  Adam and Eve eating the fruit, getting kicked out of the Garden, and starting the journey of humanity on the wrong side of Eden?  The inevitable, inexorable unfolding of the Divine Will.  Jacob dreaming a ladder connecting Earth and Heaven?  The inevitable, inexorable unfolding of the Divine Will.  Joseph interpreting Pharaoh’s dreams and freeing himself from the prison-house?  The inevitable, inexorable unfolding of the Divine Will.  A band of Israelite slaves escaping Pharaoh’s tyranny?  Not prayer, not good planning, not even Moses’s clarion leadership but–say it with me–The inevitable, inexorable unfolding of the Divine Will.  

I have to admit that the older I get, the more I find affirming that, despite all our human toil and travail, at the end of the day, God’s in charge, and what God has in store for us, no human being can hinder.  The great masters all arrived at this same conclusion:

  • Isaiah 14:27: “For the LORD Almighty has purposed, and who can thwart God? God’s hand is stretched out, and who can turn it back?”
  • Proverbs 19:21: “Many are the plans in a person’s heart, but it is the Lord’s purpose that prevails.”
  • Job 42:2: “I know that You can do all things; no purpose of Yours can be thwarted.”

God’s in charge! 

Many years ago I was summoned to the hospital bed of a beloved member of my congregation for the recitation of Vidui, the traditional deathbed confessional, the Jewish version of “last rites.”  I took Don’s hand and we prayed:

“I acknowledge before You, Lord my God and God of my ancestors, that my recovery and my death are in Your hands. May it be Your will that You heal me with total recovery, but, if I die, may my death be an atonement for all the errors, iniquities, and willful sins that I have committed…”

And so on like that, until Don shut his eyes and his breathing became very slow.  I embraced his grieving family and said, “I’m going to part company now, but you can call me when he passes and we’ll prepare for what comes next.”  

The next morning the phone rang.  It was Don.  “Still here, Rabbi,” he said.  He would go on to enjoy another five good years.  The inevitable, inexorable, unfolding of the Divine Will.  God’s in charge.  

It’s useful wisdom to keep handy these days after Election Day, through all the storm and stress we have made of our current political situation, and the seemingly endless array of flawed leaders we have entrusted with tremendous authority.  It’s useful, when voters elect the person we fear or detest, to remind ourselves: Elected officials come and go; even kings and queens are made of flesh and blood; but God’s in charge.

It’s especially useful wisdom to keep handy when things don’t go our way.  Rabbi Jonathan Slater, a great teacher of Jewish wisdom and spirituality who lives here in Westchester, taught me that when things don’t go our way, the best we can do is say: “That was unexpected! I wonder what will happen next?”  And get ready to move forward on whatever path God has set for us.

Now I could end here and you would say:  “That was unexpected!  I wonder what will happen next?”  But bear with me.  There’s one more thought coming.  Because even in a world where God’s in charge, we human beings still have a lot of work to do, and our actions really do matter.  

Almost two thousand years ago, the earliest Rabbis recognized this paradox of our existence.  They put it this way:   

Everything is foreseen, yet freedom of choice is granted.  

And they added:  The world is judged with goodness.  And everything is in accordance with the bulk of [one’s] deeds (Pirkei Avot, 3:15).

In other words, God’s in charge… but God needs us to take charge, too.  Human beings were brought into this world not randomly, not to suffer the “slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,” as Shakespeare’s Hamlet put it (Hamlet, III:1), but rather, to make a difference.  

Given that so much of life attests to the “inevitable, inexorable unfolding of the Divine Will,” we still have choices about how to respond, and our choices matter.  

When bad things happen in our lives, we often ask, “Why?” “Why is this happening to me?” when instead we could ask, “Now what?  Now what must I do?  Who  must I become?” “How would God wish for me to show up, given what has happened?” 

It is true: much of life is inevitable–unavoidable; inexorable–cannot be prayed away.  But life is about more than just what happens to us; it is also about what we choose to make happen in our lives and in a world that desperately needs more good deeds, more love, more compassion and more justice.

So back to the Dodgers.  Was their big win inevitable?  Listen to what sports writer Hannah Keyser had to say:

“Ultimately, the series crowned a credible champ not just because the Dodgers were favored for months, but because, in the end, they had to scratch and claw their way to the top. Just because their victory was projected doesn’t mean it was easy or predictable (The Guardian, November 2nd, 2025, emphasis added).”

The last word goes to an old saying.  No one knows who first said it; it may have been a Catholic Saint because it ended up in the Catechism; but you can also find it in the Reform Jewish prayer book. 

Remember these words well, and may God bless us as we strive to join righteously and joyfully in the inevitable, inexorable unfolding the Divine Will:

Pray as though everything depended on God.

Act as though everything depended on you.

Amen.

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.

CALVES TO THE LEFT OF ME, HEIFERS TO THE RIGHT

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Sermon for SHABBAT KI TISA / SHUSHAN PURIM 5785 – Friday, March 14, 2025

Westchester Reform Temple, Scarsdale, New York

The old Purim custom of drowning out the name of Haman comes to mind as I speak to you this evening about Mahmoud Khalil, the recent Columbia University graduate and protest-movement leader whose name has dominated the press, especially the Jewish press, over the last week.  

As with Haman, I wish I could have stamped out the name Mahmoud Khalil, denied him media attention, prevented him from becoming a cause celebre, deprived his admirers a martyr to lionize, but rabbis do not get to choose the headlines any more than we get to choose parashat ha-shavua, the Torah portion of the week, so let’s consider ours for a moment and then return to the curious case of Mr. Khallil.

The portion Ki Tisa frames the most ignominious episode in the story of the Israelite people:  their dalliance with idolatry in the form of a golden calf.  Moses has disappeared up Mount Sinai while God inscribes for him the Law on two tablets of stone.  As days wear on into weeks, the people at the foot of the mountain grow anxious and restless and press Moses’s surrogate, his brother Aaron, saying:

ק֣וּם ׀ עֲשֵׂה־לָ֣נוּ אֱלֹהִ֗ים אֲשֶׁ֤ר יֵֽלְכוּ֙ לְפָנֵ֔ינוּ כִּי־זֶ֣ה ׀ מֹשֶׁ֣ה הָאִ֗ישׁ אֲשֶׁ֤ר הֶֽעֱלָ֙נוּ֙ מֵאֶ֣רֶץ מִצְרַ֔יִם לֹ֥א יָדַ֖עְנוּ מֶה־הָ֥יָה לֽוֹ׃

“Get up and make us a god who will go before us, for this man, Moses, who brought us out of Egypt—we do not know what has happened to him” (Ex. 32:1).

Aaron—disturbingly, without hesitation—complies.  The men cast off their gold and Aaron casts it into an icon well known in both Egyptian and Canaanite society—the bull or calf associated with power and fertility.  The people cavort around their sacred cow, offering sacrifices, feasting and dancing, and even exclaiming, 

… אֵ֤לֶּה אֱלֹהֶ֙יךָ֙ יִשְׂרָאֵ֔ל אֲשֶׁ֥ר הֶעֱל֖וּךָ מֵאֶ֥רֶץ מִצְרָֽיִם׃

“This is your god, O Israel, who brought you out of the land of Egypt!” (Ex. 32:4, cf. also 32:8).

Needless to say, things do not go well for these Israelites, and to this day the phrase “golden calf” can refer to any form of idolatry, overt or covert.  On this matter, I found the Encyclopedia Britannica’s entry on idolatry illuminating: “Gross, or overt, idolatry consists of explicit acts of reverence addressed to a person or an object—the sun, the king, an animal, a statue…. A person becomes guilty of a more subtle idolatry, however, when, although overt acts of adoration are avoided, he attaches to a creature [or any thing, or even an idea] the confidence, loyalty, and devotion that properly belong only to the Creator.”

Because we are human, we are all susceptible to these “more subtle” idolatries.  And in this era of bitter partisanship, I worry that we are especially susceptible to the fetishes of our respective political camps.  

On the left we have an idolatry that worships powerlessness and victimhood as virtues, that, in its most extreme expressions, justifies and even glorifies any act of terror, any rhetoric of violence, no matter how depraved, making the condemnable commendable—so long as it is espoused or perpetrated in the name of a group perceived to be “oppressed.”  

In this form of idolatry, recent headliners like Luigi Mangione, who stands accused of murdering a healthcare executive in cold blood, and Mahmoud Khalil, the protestor at the center of this week’s news, become golden calves—icons worshipped as gods, paragons of the right and the good.

Lest we pile on the left to the exclusion of other idolatries, let it be known that the right has its fair share of golden calves as well, including the fetishization of order and authority, of traditional notions of masculinity and strength, of so-called “traditional family values,” of racial purity and historical narratives that play fast and loose with the truth.  Take, for instance, the myth of the “Southern Gentleman” as a model of chivalry which of course obfuscates the brutal truth of slavery and the aims of the Confederacy, for starters.

It seems to me that the idolatries of both the left and the right have collided in the curious case of Mahmoud Khalil, leading me to conclude that both are wrong.  I have found company in an article by Yale Law professor Jed Rubenfeld, published this Wednesday by The Free Press.  It is called “Both Right and Left Are Wrong About Mahmoud Khalil,” followed by the subtitle, “Anyone who says the law is obvious here is not telling the truth.”

To recap the facts of the case as we know them:  Khalil, having recently graduated from Columbia University, played a leading role in the virulent anti-Israel protests there, acting as spokesperson and negotiator for a group called CUAD—Columbia University Apartheid Divest—which describes itself as “fighting for the total eradication of Western civilization,” and which, since October 7th, has mobilized the erection of the encampments and the takeover of several buildings on campus.  “Khalil was suspended from Columbia last April for his participation in the protests, but the school reversed his suspension the next day. Arrested on March 8, Khalil is currently being detained in Louisiana. On March 10, a federal judge in New York stayed his deportation pending a hearing.”

Rubenfeld continues:

The administration has not yet definitively stated its legal grounds for deporting Khalil, but a federal statute, the Immigration and Nationality Act, says that aliens—even those who, like Khalil, have green cards—can be deported if they “espouse or endorse terrorist activity.” It also permits deportation on the basis of an alien’s beliefs or statements if the Secretary of State determines that the alien’s continued presence here “would compromise a compelling United States foreign policy interest.”

The rest of the article is a difficult but rewarding read, and I commend it to you.  The thrust of the piece is that if Khalil were a US citizen, the matter would be more or less straightforward, as Rubenfeld makes clear:  “Political opinion, no matter how abhorrent, is protected speech in America.  Expressing support for even the sickest terrorist butchers, like Hamas, is protected speech.”  

“But,”—and this is critical—“he’s not a citizen. His green card makes him a lawful permanent resident, but he’s still an alien. Thus the real question is whether, or when, or to what extent aliens have the same constitutional rights as citizens. Unfortunately for both left and right,” Rubenfeld advises, “the answer is complicated.”

I’ve made the whole article available as a handout which you can take as you leave the sanctuary this evening.  The point I wish to emphasize is how our golden calves, our idolatries—our ideological sacred cows and shibboleths, amplified by the most extreme voices in our respective echo chambers—blind us from seeing “the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.”  

In the case of Khalil, loud voices on both the left and the right have adopted predictable positions in line with their ideological fixations.  The right, enamored with the perceived strength of the current administration in its standing up to antisemitic bullying, sees in Khalil a Jew-hating provocateur and terrorist sympathizer who is simply getting what he had coming to him.  

The left—not only reflexively sympathetic to the Palestinian cause, but also reflexively antagonistic to anything the current administration says or does—sees in Khalil an avatar of resistance to an administration that overreaches in silencing its opponents.  

Both camps are participating in the shared preoccupation du jour, what my friend Rabbi Jeff Salkin calls “aerobic offense” — working ourselves up into a frenzy over the latest outrage, day after day. Both have fallen into a seductive, whirling dance around their own camp’s ideological golden calf: the core beliefs that dominate each one’s echo chamber and which keep each camp from apprehending the whole truth.  

One of my favorite Jewish authors and public intellectuals, Jay Michaelson, responding to the fracas over Khalil, has this to add:

“On the Left, rushing to pull the fascist fire alarm every single time will lead to a boy-who-cried-wolf exhaustion on the one hand, and a flattening of anti-democratic offenses on the other.  On the Right, supporting the deportation of an unpopular (to the Right) individual is, to me self-evidently, extremely unwise and imprudent, not to mention anti-democratic and illiberal.”

Seeking truth, in all its messiness and complexity, is, I suppose, perennially unpopular, especially compared to the cheap satisfactions of “being right” or sticking it to one’s ideological opponents.  

Were either camp to distance themselves from the golden calves of their own dogmas, the left might take a moment to reflect that making a hero of a virulent antisemite who harassed and intimidated Jews on their own campus is bad, not just for the Jews but for all people; and the right would be wise to recognize that depriving anyone of due process—even a green-card holder—is bad news for every American, not only their ideological opponents.  Capital-T Truth encompasses both of these small-t truths.

And so, the Talmud affirms:  חוֹתָמוֹ שֶׁל הַקָּדוֹשׁ בָּרוּךְ הוּא ״אֱמֶת״ — “The seal of the Holy One is Truth” (Shabbat 55a). God’s essence, God’s name—so to speak—is Truth:  the ultimate and all-encompassing reality, which necessarily embraces ideological complexity and even contradiction.  

It may be easier to stay within our camps and dance around our golden calves.  We did it back then and do it today.  But the One whose seal is Truth summons us back to the mountain where true Torah is found.

Shabbat Shalom!

THE YIZKOR WE NEED THIS PESACH

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7th Day Pesach 5784

An article by Rabbi Shlomo Brody published last week in Tablet magazine reviews the historical development of the Yizkor memorial service.  As I read it, I remembered, vaguely, that I had written a term paper on this very subject for a liturgy course in rabbinical school.  My area of academic concentration was Medieval Jewish literature which, despite every reasonable conjecture to the contrary, has proved relevant to my work as a congregational rabbi on more than one occasion.  

I spent my HUC days poring over martyrdom texts written by Ashkenazi Jews between the 11th and 15th centuries.  As a tradition that values human life above nearly all else, Judaism generally frowns on martyrdom, with a few notable exceptions.  

The first arises after the failed Bar Kochba rebellion in the 2nd Century, when a self-styled Messiah (Shimon Bar Koziba, a.k.a. “Bar Kochba,” meaning “son of a star”) leads a doomed rebellion of Jews against the Roman Empire—the second failed revolt against Rome in 60 years—and a group of prominent leaders and teachers of Torah, most famously Rabbi Akiva, is rounded up by the Romans and executed to public spectacle.  These martyrs are recalled in the Yom Kippur afternoon service, in a liturgy known as “Eleh Ezkra,” “These do I remember,” or as it’s called in English, “the Martyrology.”  Judaism praises these martyrs for accepting death rather than desecrating the name of God, or so the reasoning goes.  

The other exception arises starting in 1096, when Ashkenazi Jews (that is, Jews of the Rhineland, straddling modern-day France and Germany) were brutally attacked by Christian Crusaders on their way to “liberate” the Holy Land from Muslim “infidels.”  In response to this trauma, Jewish writers wrote commemorative verses for martyrs who took their own lives rather than submit to the Christian marauders who inflicted physical, sexual, and emotional torment on their victims the likes of which none of us had seen in our lifetimes before October 7th, 2023.  

During this period, numerous piyyutim, or devotional poems, were composed, lauding the martyrs, castigating the assailants, and testifying to the sanctification of God’s name for which these pious Jews had died. (To this day, the traditional term for martyrdom is Kiddush Ha-Shem, which means “sanctification of the Name.”) Similar poems proliferate after Jews are put to death (often by burning at the stake, sometimes whole communities at a time) for alleged crimes like murdering Christian children to use their blood for making matzo (the notorious “blood libel”).  

A paucity of reliable eyewitness testimony or other contemporaneous artifacts suggests that the proportion of Jews who chose martyrdom over forced conversion or worse was actually very small; but in literature, if not in life, their numbers are exaggerated to match their esteem.  

In Germany, a controversial custom arose in the wake of the attacks:  writing down the names of the dead in a Memorbücher, or “Memory Book,” called Sefer Zikaron in Hebrew.  As Brody points out, “The list of names was introduced with the prayerful wish: ‘May God remember [Yizkor Elohim].’ Alongside the martyrs, communal leaders or benefactors were listed. These names would then be read aloud in the community. Reading the book turned into a communal ritual.” 

Several prominent rabbis initially opposed this practice, questioning its theological efficacy (could a prayer really effect divine mercy for the soul of the dead?) and even likening the practice to a kind of idolatry:  worship of the dead.  As often happens to rabbis in congregational life (I told you this stuff was relevant), the traumatized community’s need for a collective memorial practice overrode the rabbis’ theological objections, and became a cherished part of Jewish life, with names of the dead often inscribed on the walls of synagogues and in books of remembrance, and read aloud before Kaddish (all customs practiced at WRT).  

In times of collective grief, new prayers were composed to commemorate the slain. One, called Av Ha-Rachamim (“Father of Mercy”), “beseeches God to remember ‘the pious, upright, and blameless, the holy communities, who laid down their lives for the sanctification of [the] Name.’  It further calls on God to take revenge for their spilled blood” (Ibid) and exact vengeance on their enemies. The prayer gained further traction when, in the middle of the fourteenth century, pogroms broke out against Jewish communities in the wake of the Black Plague.  

When, in the middle of the 17th Century, the Cossack warlord Bogdan Chmielnizki led a massacre of tens of thousands of Polish Jews, another new martyrdom prayer entered the liturgy:  El Malei Rachamim, “The God of Abundant Compassion,” a prayer asking God to shelter the souls of the righteous beneath the wings of the Divine Presence (Shekhinah) and to bind up their souls in the bonds of life everlasting”—words that are recited today at every Jewish funeral, but which began as a response to communal trauma.

Taken together, these prayers and poems and lists of the dead gradually coalesce into the Jewish practice of Yizkor, the memorial service that will eventually be adopted into the liturgy for Yom Kippur and the Shalosh Regalim, the three pilgrimage Festivals of Pesach, Shavuot, and Sukkot.  So we offer Yizkor prayers four times a year.  (By “we,” I mean Ashkenazi Jews; to this day, Sepharadim do not have a communal Yizkor, because the precipitating catastrophes for this liturgy did not happen in Sephardic lands.)  

And, for the most part, our Yizkor, though a communal experience, is centered around the emotional and spiritual needs of the individual mourner.  You will find in our Siddur a wide array of poems, both traditional and modern, and formulas for saying Yizkor, with the emphasis on personal bereavement.

And yet, today is also the first Yizkor since the last Yizkor, which was recited collectively throughout the Jewish world on October 7th and 8th, 2023—on the Festivals of Shemini Atzeret and Simchat Torah—the conclusion of Sukkot.  

One of the great ironies of human life is that we experience mourning as the loneliest of ordeals when in fact it is the most universal.  It is a cruel trick of Nature that the human psyche has evolved to respond to the death of a loved one as uniquely shattering.  “No one can know my pain,” we think; “no one understands what this feels like.”  This was not just someone’s husband, wife, parent, child, or friend:  this one was mine, and now, I am utterly alone.  Such is the force of death and such the devastation of loss.  And still, the force of death is a mirror image of the force of life even as grief is reflected love. 

Judaism, in its compassionate wisdom, saw fit to merge the intensely personal experience of grief with the intensely Jewish need to be in community, and vice versa.  Yizkor: what began as collective remembrance in the face of unfathomable communal trauma also became the sacred container for every individual bereavement.  In so doing, Yizkor makes plain its meaning:  you are not alone.

We need Yizkor this year, more than ever.  We need to be together in our grief and heartbreak, for the trauma of October 7th and the trauma of every day since.  By way of giving us some space for memory—alone and together—I will share this poem by the Adi Keissar, an acclaimed Israeli poet whose family arrived as refugees from Yemen beginning in 1882 on her father’s side, and, on her mother’s side, in the wake of the expulsion of Yemen’s Jews in the 1950’s.

I’m not sure

if I could go back to life this time

A morning run, bike trip, party

without the face of the dead

haunting me

I’m not sure

if I could come back alive this time

An empty baby bed, a blanket

coloured red.

What I’m sure of

Automatic weapons, fire and smoke

shattered windows and a broken door

sirens going up and down

ashes and wreckage

The world is burning

and I am the flames

The hours blended

also, the days

At night came the dreams

and the mosquitos

to suck my skin

As from a hidden signal

swirled around me

all night

buzzed in the darkness

asked for my blood.

All through the night

the air stood still

between me and the world

not going in and not coming out

In the morning I opened a window

the sun was shining in the sky

the silence filled the empty streets

I’m not sure

if I could ever hear silence

that doesn’t hide a disaster within.

אוקטובר\ עדי קיסר

אֲנִי לֹא בְּטוּחָהּ

שֶׁאַצְלִיחַ הַפַּעַם לַחְזֹר לַחַיִּים

רִיצַת בֹּקֶר, טִיּוּל אוֹפַנַּיִם, מְסִבָּה

מִבְּלִי שֶׁיָּבוֹאוּ אֵלַי פְּנֵי הַמֵּתִים

אֲנִי לֹא בְּטוּחָה

שֶׁאַצְלִיחַ הַפַּעַם לַחְזֹר בַּחַיִּים

מִטַּת תִּינוֹק רֵיקָה, שְׂמִיכָה,

בְּצֶבַע אָדֹם.

בְּמָה אֲנִי בְּטוּחָה:

בַּיְּרִיּוֹת עַל אוֹטוֹמָט, בְּאֵשׁ וּבֶעָשָׁן

בְּחַלּוֹנוֹת מְנֻפָּצִים וּבְדֶלֶת שְׁבוּרָה

בְּאַזְעָקוֹת עוֹלוֹת וְיוֹרְדוֹת

בְּאֵפֶר וּבַהֲרִיסוֹת

הָעוֹלָם בּוֹעֵר

וַאֲנִי הַלֶּהָבוֹת.

הַשָּׁעוֹת נִדְבְּקוּ זוֹ בָּזוּ

גַּם הַיָּמִים

וּבַלַּיְלָה הִגִּיעוּ הַחֲלוֹמוֹת

וְהַיַּתּוּשִׁים

לִמְצֹץ אֶת עוֹרִי

כְּמוֹ מִתּוֹךְ אוֹת סָמוּי

כָּל הַלַּיְלָה

זִמְזְמוּ בַּחֹשֶׁךְ

בִּקְּשׁוּ אֶת דָּמִי.

כָּל הַלַּיְלָה עָמַד הָאֲוִיר

תָּלוּי בֵּינִי וּבֵין הָעוֹלָם

לֹא נִכְנַס וְלֹא יוֹצֵא.

בַּבֹּקֶר פָּתַחְתִּי חַלּוֹן

הַשֶּׁמֶשׁ זָרְחָה בַּשָּׁמַיִם

הַשֶּׁקֶט עָמַד בָּרְחוֹבוֹת הָרֵיקִים

אֲנִי לֹא בְּטוּחָה

שֶׁאַצְלִיחַ פַּעַם לִשְׁמֹעַ שֶׁקֶט

שֶׁלֹּא מַחְבִּיא בְּתוֹכוֹ אָסוֹן.

Shabbat Va’era 5784: “Ordinary Egyptians”

~ rabbiblake ~ Leave a comment

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.