moses

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.