Good Faith Judaism →

“Good faith partners don’t quote scripture at each other.”

Working with people from multiple faith backgrounds, I often say this and find general agreement among accomplices in justice work.

Jewish teachers regularly cite sacred sources, from the Five Books of Moses all the way through current writings. Many Jews quote texts all the time and do much more than say: “Look, I have a source to back up my argument.” We have thousands of years of established procedures for “d’rash-ing” or interpreting texts.

As a rabbinic colleague pointed out, we try not to do this “at” each other, so much as with one another. We aim to be guided by some agreed upon principles in the process. We don’t always get it right. We can be argumentative and hurtful and divisive as much as anyone else, but we do try to unite around some basic ideas, like these, which are only a sample:

- Respect and Dignity — as one family of humanity, hailing from the same universal source, we try to treat one another as mutual bearers of an infinite spark, a shard of divinity. When we teach, generally, and particularly when we use our sacred texts, we aim to uphold these principles, and our teachings ought not defy them.

- Compassion and Inclusion — kindness, soulfulness, a high regard for each other’s humanity and human needs. While there are many sources in our traditions that can be used to divide and exclude, we should aim higher.

- Learning and Tradition — while wisdom often starts in a source text, Jews have embraced an evolution and movement with the times that progresses our texts with us. We are people of many books, some of which have only been written yesterday.

Rabbi Amy Scheinerman teaches about these principles and and many others, calling them “meta-commandments”[1] — underlying guidelines for applying Jewish teachings in practice.

We try not to use our texts as a bludgeon against one another. Sharing wisdom from ancient sources fulfills another important Jewish principle — bringing us together in community. When we use our sacred texts to sow division and enmity, we fall into historical challenges that Jewish wisdom has cautioned us against for millennia. Jewish teachings often attribute the destruction of the Second Temple in Jerusalem, in 70 CE, to “baseless hatred” between Jews, taking responsibility, perhaps unreasonably, for something that was clearly done to our ancestors by the Roman Empire.

Nearly seventy rabbis and rabbinical students from different affiliations recently joined together in an organization called Beit Kaplan, which is “a forum for the cultivation of a flourishing, dynamic Jewish civilization…With deep ties to Reconstructionist Judaism”[2].

Beit Kaplan rallied in support of students who left the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College last year because of the hostility directed at them as supporters of the State of Israel, self-proclaimed “liberal Zionists”. Beit Kaplan sponsored a gathering to hear the testimony of these former students on Monday, September 9, 2024.

On Friday, September 6, 2024, a rabbi and faculty member at the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College (RRC) wrote a regular email to rabbinical students and advised them to not attend the Beit Kaplan gathering “both for the sake of your own well-being, and to not give the event undue attention”. The rabbi continued to provide “Torah framing” for help in dealing with “the problems that pain us” seemingly raised by the Beit Kaplan event.

The rabbi invoked that week’s Torah reading, called Shoftim, (Deuteronomy 16:18–21:9), declared that the students who left RRC were “those who provide false testimony” who spoke “unethically” and cited the verses that call for such people to be swept from your midst (Deut. 19:19) and killed for their crimes without pity (Deut. 19:21). While tempering this harsh decree from scripture with the Talmud’s qualifications that punishments should be the monetary payment for damages, the rabbi summed up with this interpretation: “There is still a consequence, and the consequence does not need to be identical to the initial action. There is mercy mixed in with justice.” The rabbi concluded with a nod to loving-kindness as a sign of power and rigor in pursuing communal justice.

This brazen use of sacred texts to condemn former community-members, disparage them as unethical liars, and then call for their punishment in vague terms shocked me. This was the kind of scriptural argument that justified American white supremacy, imposed patriarchy and misogyny onto generations of women, and argued for the subjugation of the Jewish people for nearly 2,000 years. That a rabbi made these claims, offered no evidence nor any judicial process by which those they accused could be condemned, and then alluded to punishments from Biblical and Talmudic times without any real qualifications, horrified and saddened me.

This rabbi used our shared sacred texts as a bludgeon against former students and potential colleagues as part of a message to prevent people from engaging with one another. In contrast, I propose an embrace of shared values as a necessary precursor to an argument from sacred sources. What we are arguing for is as important as which sources we use to support that argument. Quoting from the same passages in last week’s Torah reading (Deuteronomy 16:20), “Equity, equity you are to pursue”, or “Justice, justice shall you pursue”[3], we do so understanding that equity, and justice may be repeated in this verse to remind us to take others’ perspectives into account. Justice requires community and overcoming distances between one another — it is a collaborative project. In this way, I offer a Biblical interpretation that I believe asks us to participate in a system of community values that elevate all of us to behave better with one another.

As a graduate of the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College and a proud student of the teachings of Rabbi Mordecai Kaplan that inspired the founding of RRC, I implore the faculty and leadership of RRC to reconsider the words of one of your own. Please join us in this season of return and reconciliation in shared work of repair. Please engage with us and those who have shared their difficulties with RRC in good faith.

Let us teach and learn our texts with one another, and not use them as weapons against each other.

[1] I have heard Rabbi Scheinerman teach this under the phrase “meta-mitzvah”, here is one place in print:
 Scheinerman, A. (2018, October). Hospice, Interfaith, and Halakha. https://collegecommons.huc.edu/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/BullyPulpit_Rabbi_Amy_Scheinerman_Transcript_FINAL.pdf, Pages 4–5

[2] Beit Kaplan. (n.d.). The Rabbinic Partnership for Jewish Peoplehood. Retrieved September 10, 2024, from https://www.beitkaplan.org/

[3] The first translation is from: Fox, E. (1997). The Five Books of Moses: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy. Schocken.

And the second is from: Jewish Publication Society Inc. (2009). JPS Hebrew-English Tanakh. Jewish Publication Society of America.

From the place where I am right

[Published in the Buffalo News, Viewpoints, Sunday, March 22, 2020 - behind their paywall]

“From the place where we are absolutely right, flowers will never grow in the spring,” and that place “is trampled, hardened”. The great Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai (1924-2000) depicted this place and then offered this poetic solution “doubts and loves make the world rise like dough”.

We are in the process of destroying one another with our insistence on being right.

We need “doubts and loves”.

Particularly in the wake of attacks against Jews and other minorities and other church-goers and people of every religion, ethnicity, and belief across the world, we need to doubt and to love. And we need to start with ourselves. Self-doubt leads to the reclamation of the destroyed home and the reseeding of the parched field that also appear as the results of “the place where we are right” in Amichai’s poem.

Just as all of us, every person and every people in our city of Buffalo and our country and our globe need to recognize that a threat to any of our safety is a threat against the safety of everyone.

We are all in this together and “none of us are getting out alive” as Nanea Hoffman quipped. We had better work together if the time frame for our lifespans will be measured in decades as opposed to single years or months.

We live in a world that is overcome with mentalities of “divide and conquer”, “you’re either with us or against us”. These are the places where we are all attached to being absolutely right.

When was the last time any of us was absolutely right?

I can tell you that I have attempted to assert being absolutely right with my children, at weak moments, and it may work, in the short term. Kids will figure out that there are holes in our arguments sooner or later - probably sooner than we hope. Bringing a child into a conversation about the complexities of things takes extra effort and it leads to long term results. The outcomes that we are looking for include: caring, compassionate, and thoughtful people with whom we have interesting and fulfilling relationships.

There is no long term rightness worth asserting that doesn’t sacrifice a relationship in the process. When I grow attached to my rightness I have abandoned the conversation and there will never be any more progress on that issue with that person.

Let’s understand this clearly. To insist that I am right begins to destroy my ability to have a relationship with another person.

When I insist that I am right, absolutely right, then I deny the other person’s ability to ever be right in any way. When I deny another person’s possibility for offering a good idea, I have begun to deny their personhood, their humanity, their value.

It’s not only that in the place where I am absolutely right nothing grows. The really terrible thing is that in the place where I am absolutely right I acknowledge no other real people. Everyone else’s humanity is demolished in the place where I am absolutely right.

We are our relationships. We are social beings and when we deny that by refusing to admit that we even could be wrong, we erase our own humanity, our very existence.

To insist that I am right denies another person’s opportunity to be right, denies that individual’s personhood, and thus destroys my own ability to be in relationships and be a person. We are participating in communal self-destruction.

And we are doing this over and over again, every minute of every day.

The results are devastating.

As I wipe out the presence of other people’s humanity I begin to see them as expendable, as exploitable, as obstacles that are in my way. When we do this, insist upon our rightness, we turn the world into a place filled with non-persons who only serve us for a purpose or prevent us from pursuing our purposes. This allows us to treat our neighbors badly, declare that people who don’t think like us or look like us are the cause of all of our problems, and then we get to dismiss their needs.

This is not a right or left, conservative or liberal position - this is the attitude of all of us on all sides who have at some point or another written off another person as beyond our ability to talk to or reason with. We cannot afford to write people off. Every time we do so we diminish that other person, we diminish our own selves, and we create a world where nothing will every grow again, and all people will be objects to be used or discarded or moved out of the way, ourselves included.

Instead, we must drastically challenge our selves to do better. To extend sympathy and understanding. To listen. To be proven wrong. I admit, this is difficult to do.

Let’s start with doubts and loves. “I accept that I might not be right” is the doubt that allows me to accept that you might be right, which allows me to see you as a real person, with whom I might have a real relationship, so that there can be love between us. The “love your neighbor as yourself” (Leviticus 19:18) kind of love that we talk so much about and have so much trouble following through on.

When confronted by an argument we must sympathize first. Instead of getting our hackles up, let’s try: “You have a point.”

Think about it. The last time we braved a conversation about a topic of substance, something that really mattered, meaning something that we would argue tooth and nail about, with someone with whom we don’t agree, what happened? What might have happened had we conceded from the very beginning that our fellow human, the one arguing with us, had a valid perspective?

This is a simple thing to do, and like all simple ideas requires a lot of effort and attention to keep on going in the face of greater and greater difficulty because it is not going to work right away, and it may take a lot of practice to make it work at all.

“You have a point.”

This is the start of doubt and it springs from the belief and hope that there might be neighborly love down the line.

“You have a point.”

I ask us all to embrace this response when confronted with an argument. We need to start here. There are so many other places that our argumentative selves will take us. There are so many other paths that lead to the place where “flowers will never grow”.

Let us step onto a new path paved with doubts and love.

Let’s do it together. Please. Our future depends on us now.

Torah Thought for This Week

“You shall be holy, for I, Adonai your God, am holy” (Leviticus 19:2)

So begins this week’s Torah reading, and then the text goes on to detail the behaviors that are “holy” and thus also, most like God.

Revering parents, keeping the Sabbath, not turning to idols - these set us apart, help us distinguish ourselves, they and the others elaborated in this week’s reading, make up the “holiness code” at the heart of the Five Books of Moses.

We are practical theologians. We imagine good behaviors, exemplary behaviors, as God-like, even when the universe often doesn’t seem to behave this way. After all, the universe seems not to distinguish between worthy and unworthy people when disease and difficulty rains down upon us.

And so we must take up the cause of finding the holy in all things, of trying to make distinctions that help us to behave better and cultivate good behaviors in those around us.

Whether it is getting vaccinated, sharing one’s plenty with those in need, finding ways to be kinder and better one moment at a time - let us all distinguish ourselves a little more and bring some extra holiness into the world.

Wishing everyone a good week.

Finding Meaning is Up to Us

As Jews the world over begin the Book of Leviticus this week we move from the story of our liberation to the details of worship and becoming a community focused on holiness.

What does all of that mean to us?

Jews today follow in the traditions of the last two thousand years that take the offering system of the priesthood and turn it into an all-access system of prayer. Before, we approached the divine through offerings, which in Hebrew share the root for “coming near to”, and now we do that through prayer. Before we needed an official worship class, the priesthood, now all of us can do it individually and communally.

The progress of Judaism is from greater hierarchy to less, from an ambassador to the divine in the form of the priest, to our own individual agency - we are responsible each and every one of us for our own connections to mystery and the infinite.

Today I will aim to meditate and go for a run and in those ways find my deepening experience of and connection to greater meaning.

Shabbat Shalom everyone!

Chanukah IS a Major Jewish Holiday

Whichever way we spell it, Chanukah is a major Jewish holiday for American Jews.

We do not need to apologize for this.

Many of us know that it isn’t a biblical holiday, that it’s not mentioned in the Five Books of Moses, and that the rabbis of the Talmud weren’t thrilled about it and minimized it, and that the real reason behind its prominence for American Jews is that it is next to another big holiday. We also know that it has only included gifts in recent decades.

So what?

We declare our Jewishness in the United States, we proclaim our difference from everyone else, by taking on the cultural giant of the year and saying, proudly, that we do something else.

This is so very Jewish.

Let’s take a stand this year and embrace Chanukah as the major Jewish holiday that it already is for many of us. Let’s make Chanukah into a “dedication celebration” for all eight nights (many of us already do these things) and have fun:

-       Decorate our homes with signs of Chanukah and lights and announce who we are and the miracles of the Jewish season and Jewish contributions America’s diverse culture.

-       Arrange nights of remote connections with family and friends. Distance and quarantine can be overcome by FaceTime, Skype, Zoom, and Google Hangout.

-       Join TBZ for a remote community Second Night of Chanukah Shabbat on Friday, December 11, at a special time of 6:00 PM with Cantor Rosalie Will as we all light candles from our homes. Here’s the Zoom link.

-       Help our students bring good Chanukah stories to school with them. One of my favorites is Lemony Snicket’s: The Latke Who Couldn’t Stop Screaming

We could all use excuse for good and safe celebrations done from our homes which allow us to share warmth and light and joy in the world.

Let’s remember that being Jewish is about finding miracles all around us and that miracles should be a source of joy.

When we remember, in the words of the Chanukah blessing, “Praised are You, Adonai our God, Ruler of the Universe, who did miracles for our ancestors, in those days at this time,” we remind ourselves to connect with the sources of joy that Jews have found in the dark time of year, no matter what darkness we confronted.

When we say blessings and prayers we open our eyes to the miraculous surrounding us, raising the sparks of God that we can see in all things, and kindling them into the candlelight that helps warm our homes with welcome, cheer, and joy, in Chanukah’s month of Kislev/December, and all year long.

Happy Chanukah!

Judaism is "Do it ourselves"

Yom Kippur Morning 5781
Monday, September 28, 2020
Temple Beth Zion, Buffalo, New York
by Rabbi Jonathan Freirich

What a year.

2020, 5780 the year just past going into 5781.

It doesn’t look like it will let up any time soon.

Look at our world, our country, our city, our community, our Temple family.

You have risen to the occasion. You called everyone in our community multiple times when we first started this shut down journey on Friday, March 13. Do you remember? You organized yourselves in making sure that every TBZ member heard from someone more than once.

Knowing that we entered uncharted territory the people of our Temple Beth Zion family have over and over again come together to support the synagogue and each other. Just listen to a few of the amazing volunteer-initiated efforts that have started during this time, and this list is in no way exhaustive:

• Chiavetta’s chicken fundraisers; a new initiative this year.

• The innovation of lending out prayer books for the High Holy Days.

• Special gifts for every member in honor of the High Holy Days.

• The whole Sunday Palooza, including food drive and recycling drive.

• Distributing individual Religious School packages to each and every religious school student and family.

• Feast Before the Fast just yesterday.

• A High Holy Days brought to you through an amazing production team led by our volunteers, and coordinated by the Ritual Committee of volunteers who manage every aspect of honors and service lay out and came here in advance to record Torah and Haftarah readings and blessings and English readings and the Kol Nidrei message and announcements.

• Creating and participating in a whole new way of worshiping and connecting, many of us are now more connected than ever before because we have overcome mobility obstacles and figured out how to Zoom across generations and distances.

• Broadcasting Jewish music today on WNED Classical - again led by the efforts of volunteers.

• Joyful occasions and commemorations, B’nei Mitzvah and celebrations of life, ways to build community and family that we had never explored before, all while navigating the challenges facing all of us as individuals and a world, supported by all of you who continue to show up with kindness and compassion and support TBZ more enthusiastically than ever. This past Shabbat was our first Saturday morning since August 1 without a Bat or Bar Mitzvah or Rosh Hashanah - all of you have been participating to support all of these celebrations.

• Sisterhood, Brotherhood, Gift Shop, Sukkah, Task Forces and our constantly devoted Board of Trustees, committees overseeing our finances, and always innovating on how we will enter a new future as an organization in our Jewish community, preserving and improving our wonderful buildings, seeking new models of collaboration, and so much more - most of you have no idea how many hours our volunteer leaders devote to TBZ and there’s no way to list all of them or all that they do.

• Generosity in these difficult times - all of you continue to figure out ways to give of your time, talent, and treasure to make TBZ into the warm, welcoming, and hamishe place that so many depend upon.

• Patience and enthusiasm with our team as we figure out technology and remote gathering and innovate and improvise, building the plane as we fly it - thank you all so much for sticking with us. You have comforted each other and found new ways of “being there” for each other even when we can’t actually share space and time and hugs.

In all these ways and so many more, you have shown every member of Temple Beth Zion that we are first and foremost a community of caring people, compassionately engaged with each other to build and maintain the fabric of interconnectedness that is Judaism, that improves and maintains our lives through all the principles of our ancestors applied with love and care.

In all of this, you volunteers and leaders of Temple Beth Zion, you embody the teachings of our tradition. The way we behave at Temple Beth Zion follows the first teaching of the Torah about building community - we model ourselves after Abraham, the first of our ancestors, who demonstrated that caring and compassion are expressed first of all through hospitality. When all of you have led through welcome, you have followed Abraham’s model.

Here is a story emphatically showing just this from the Talmud, discussing what we are allowed to do for the sake of hospitality.

The Talmud starts:

One may move baskets of produce on Shabbat for guests and in order to prevent the suspension of Torah study in the academy.
Rabbi Yocĥanan said: Hospitality towards guests is as great as rising early to go to study.
And Rabbi Dimi from Neharde’a says: Hospitality towards guests is greater than rising early to study, as it teaches: For guests, and only afterward: to prevent suspension of Torah study.
Rabbi Yehuda said that Rav said on a related note: Hospitality towards guests is greater than receiving the Presence of God, as when Abraham invited his guests it is written…

And here is the full story from Genesis, chapter 18:
1 Now God was seen by [Abraham] by the oaks of Mamre as he was sitting at the entrance to his tent at the heat of the day. 
2 [Abraham] lifted up his eyes and saw: here, three men standing over against him. When he saw them, he ran to meet them from the entrance of his tent and bowed to the earth
3 and said: My lords, pray if I have found favor in your eyes, pray do not pass by your servant!

The Torah uses very few words, so let’s expand them a little. God is seen by Abraham while Abraham is sitting at the entrance to his tent. Then, Abraham looks up and sees three men, and leaves God’s presence in order to greet the new visitors and offer them hospitality.

This is the interpretation that the rabbis of the Talmud use as they continue:
Abraham requested that God, the Divine Presence, wait for him while he tended to his guests appropriately.
Rabbi Elazar said: Come and see that the attribute of the Holy One, Blessed be God, is not like that of flesh and blood. The attribute of flesh and blood people is such that a less significant person is unable to say to a more significant person: Wait until I come to you.
While with regard to the Holy One, Blessed be God, it is written:
“And Abraham said: Adonai, if now I have found favor in Your sight, please pass not from Your servant.”
Abraham requested that God wait for him due to his guests.
[BT Shabbat 127a, Koren Talmud Bavli, The Noe Edition, Shabbat Part Two, Commentary by Rabbi Adin Even-Israel Steinsaltz, page 249]

When we are dealing with people, it is difficult to ask a more important person to wait while we go and attend to the needs of a less important person. It’s the right thing to do, but it is difficult. With God it is different. When hospitality and taking care of the needs of others arise, even if God is right there talking to us, then God will wait while we take care of other people.

The Talmud tells this story about Abraham to make sure that we understand just how important it is to welcome the stranger and attend to the needs of those around us.

And all of you at Temple Beth Zion understood this even before I brought forward this story. You understand that the life of a community is about the people in our community. You understand that we don’t communicate that by telling people how important all of you are, we communicate that by showing up for each other, by making it clear that we know that caring actions speak clearly. You have spoken clearly this year. The plans you continue to make for the months to come, with all the uncertainty around us show that you will continue to speak clearly through your actions that the people of Temple Beth Zion, the Jews of our community, and the people of Western New York are so important, that sometimes we have to ask others to hold on while we welcome and care for one another.

Thank you.

And of course, thank you to our whole TBZ team.

The whole team of us who work with and for you so appreciate the Temple Beth Zion mission. When we partner like we have, we become so much more than the sum of our parts. We accomplish something truly holy - we build a community that cares.

In the early 1970’s “Do it yourself” Judaism was made a big thing by the publication of “The Jewish Catalog” by the founders of the Havurah movement - empowered Jews who felt that formal Jewish life was lacking for participation and doing by Jews. The 2020 update, nearly fifty years later is that Judaism is “Do it ourselves”. Each and every one of you has taken up the banner of doing Jewishly together, taking an action that makes a difference for more than an individual, putting our community’s well-being first.

We may speak of the number of families who belong to Temple Beth Zion, but we don’t really act like we are multiple families. We are one Temple Beth Zion family, and we have been doing Judaism for ourselves for a long time. The crisis our society has encountered over the last six months has only brought forward the spirit that has inspired Temple Beth Zion for generations: we build a “do it ourselves” Judaism every day of the year.

On this day, as we are re-energized and reminded by the words of our sages and our prophets, that empty fasts and rote rituals are not what God demands of us. All of you at Temple Beth Zion can be inspired by your “do it ourselves” energy that you have already exerted - you are the people who will help make 5781 a better year. You are the community that will continue to care for each other. We do for ourselves because, in these words inspired by Hillel the Sage:

“If we are not for ourselves, who will be for us?

If we are only for ourselves, what are we?

If not now, when?”

We are the ones who will make the improvements we need.

We will confess and atone, remember and re-energize, and take up the task again as we enter a new year ready to continue caring for one another and doing Judaism for ourselves.

May we all inscribe ourselves for a better year in the Book of Life that we all write together.

L’shanah tovah.

Create Like God

Create Like God
Rosh HaShanah Morning 5781
Saturday, September 19, 2020
Temple Beth Zion, Buffalo, New York
by Rabbi Jonathan Freirich

Creation started by getting out of the way.
The Creation story before the one we read in Genesis starts with an idea from Maimonides, the famous Jewish Medieval scholar. The Infinite, the fundamental idea of God, by being endless started out as everything, everywhere, and always. In order to create something that was not God, since all of creation in which we live is clearly not God, or at least, it is God plus everything else, God had to shrink.

Before God could create, God had to make room.

The Hebrew for this term is tzimtzum - self-reduction.

And we know all about the need to self-reduce.

Parenting is like this. We want to protect our kids, control everything and we cannot.

We should not.

For anyone to grow we need space. Kids need to explore on their own, find their own way, make their own mistakes, and sometimes encounter difficulties that we might have helped them avoid. This is one of the main ways we allow them to grow and mature.

The same goes for anything we plant. Plants need care and sunlight and water and they also need us to leave them alone. We can over-trim them, over-water them, over-fertilize them. Figuring out the right type of attention to give to something is a key aspect of encouraging its growth. Leaving us alone to figure things out, whether we are a tree or a person, really makes a difference.

The Zohar describes it this way: God shrunk into an infinitely tiny point, and from that point, poured divine energy back into the empty space that God had left filling the universe with a new creation, one that had stuff, and in the stuff could be found parts of God.

Turns out that process wasn’t so easy.

Creation started with getting out of the way, and creation started with an accident.

Let’s read the creation story in Genesis closely:

When God began creating the heavens and the earth, when the earth was wild and waste, darkness over the face of Ocean, rushing-spirit of God hovering over the face of the waters - God said: Let there be light! And there was light. God saw the light: that it was good… (Genesis 1:1-3)

Later, after two days of creation, the Torah continues:

God said: Let there be lights in the dome of the heavens, to separate the day from the night… (Genesis 1:14)

And then we hear all the details of the creation of the sun and the moon and the stars.

So, what happened to the light from Day One?

We see this question as an opportunity to tell a story behind the story. This is when we create midrash, and imagine answers to questions in the text. The text asks us to ask questions and develop our own interpretations..

We can answer the question, “What happened to the Light of the First Day of Creation?” by retelling the story of creation from God’s perspective.

Aviva Gottlieb Zornberg, a Jewish scholar of the Bible and teacher at Pardes in Jerusalem, observed that all motivation comes from needing something - we notice something is missing and we work to fill the absence. From this perspective, Jewish mystics suggested that God began to create because God did not want to be alone. God was lonely and wanted to fix it. Later in Genesis, God expressed this sentiment by sympathizing with Adam’s loneliness. God says: “It is not good for the human to be alone, I will make him a helper corresponding to him” (Genesis 2:18). We’ll return to that.

When God starts sending divine power into the world, the first creation of light, and it is the light of God’s unfiltered raw creative essence. God forced all that power into spaces, newly created vessels that were no longer made of God. These vessels couldn’t contain God’s energy, and they shattered, spreading shards containing the bits of the essence of God throughout the universe.

This is the potential accident at the beginning of creation.

However, this is no tragedy at the beginning of time. This is how, through the act of self-reducing, and then re-entering the new creation in the stuff that God created, God becomes present in all of Creation as slivers, sparks of that original light, remnants that we uncover when we create, when we work together for a higher purpose, when we participate in repair of the universe. This story is the source of the term, tikkun olam, “repairing the universe”. Our task of repair is existential. When we recognize the spark of God in anything else we partner in the building of a better universe. When we offer a blessing we recognize the Godliness in that moment. When we connect with other people and learn and work together, we realize the Godliness in each of us that makes us all together greater than the sum of our parts.

This “shattering of the vessels” explanation gives us a story about what happened to the original light and why God needed to create smaller sources of light, the sun, moon, and stars, later in the creation story.

A Late Medieval mystic, Menachem Azaria of Fano explained this need for things to break in order to create, in this way: “Just as the seed cannot grow to perfection as long as it maintains its original form, growth coming only through [the breaking of its shell]. So [creation] could not become whole as long as [it] maintained [its] original form, but only by shattering.”

What makes a seed grow is that it breaks open. The breaking of the seed’s shell is the beginning of the growth of the plant. This allows a root to emerge from the seed into the soil and stretch towards the sun. An intact seed, one that never breaks open, will never grow.

Our universe, like a successful seed, broke, and thus grew. Something needed to break open, in order for creation to happen and our world to emerge.

This mystical version says we are created in the divine image because everything is from God. Everything is filled with the shards of God. God creates through contributing a small bit to all things. And God doesn’t control everything. This is one model of creation.

God creates by getting out of the way.

God creates by shrinking and even by shattering.

And like the rest of us, God struggled as a first time parent.

It started out so well. On the Sixth Day of Creation, God creates humanity, “So God created humankind in God’s image, in the image of God did God create it, male and female he created them.” (Genesis 1:27)

God gives the humans all the fruits and vegetables to eat, God sees all that God made is very good, end of the Sixth Day, then Shabbat, then, in Genesis, Chapter 2, God formed the human, placed them, only now it is “him”, in the Garden of Eden, along with the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, and the Tree of Life. Tells the new human that he can’t eat from these two trees, brings all the animals to the human to name, none of which are suitable helper-partners for the human, and then God puts the human to sleep and creates a woman from his side.

What happened to the first humans? Why do we have these two stories? One story could be before the other, one could be a separate story all together. We have lots of questions and explanations. And, more questions. After the serpent and the fruit of the trees and leaving Eden, and Cain and Abel and murder, then Cain goes out and meets other people who weren’t mentioned before! Where did those people come from?

With all of these questions, let’s focus on just one, why did God take these newly formed people, children really, and put them in the room with the things that they were not allowed to eat? Think about it. No parent would say to their children - “Stay in this room on your own, and don’t eat from the beautiful and tasty looking things in the middle of the room. Everything else that you can eat from in here is alright, just not those beautiful, tasty-looking, special things. Leave those alone.” This would never work. And it didn’t.

Not only that, then God got upset with all the people and animals on the planet a few chapters later and wiped them all out out except for Noah and his family.

As a parent, we might call that the “nuclear option”, and it doesn’t really serve to teach good behavior any better than kicking the kids out of the garden when the parent left them there with the forbidden goodies.

God struggled to learn.

Creation happens when we get out of the way and let it happen.

Creation happens when things break and the brokenness turns into something new.

And even God doesn’t get it right on the first try.

Today we chant: Ha-Yom Ha-rat Olam. “Today the world is born anew.” Or, “Today is the birthday of the world.”

With all the mishaps in creation though, why are we celebrating? It seems like not much of a birthday.

Medieval Jewish scholars like Saadia Gaon and Maimonides argue that we should interpret the Torah figuratively if and when the stories don’t match up with observations and scientific proof. Both these mainstream Jewish thinkers from over eight hundred years ago held that belief in the truth of the Bible does not require a denial of science, what they called reason or logic, when the two seem to conflict.

So if these passages in Genesis are not about actual creation, then what are they about?

We are called to be holy because God is holy - that is at the heart of the holiness code in Leviticus which we read on Yom Kippur. I believe that we are called upon to learn from God’s model too.

We learn from God that there is a spark of all creation to which we are connected in everyone and everything. When we see ourselves as interconnected we foster greater growth and cultivate relationships that provide for mutual learning and evolution between individuals and communities. We have to make space for it all to happen. Creation is a cooperative process and we can’t do it all by ourselves and we need to make room for our partners.

We learn from God that brokenness, like the cracking open of a seed, may be the beginning of a creation. An accident is only a difficulty if it doesn’t serve as the beginning of something new.

And we learn from God that we always have more to learn as creators, as parents, as partners in the creation of something bigger and better.

We celebrate the birthday of the world to remind us that we are co-creators - the world’s birthday is a reminder for all of us to continue to follow God’s model and bring new and better things into being.

Wishing all of us a Good Year, a Shanah Tovah of creativity and humility, partnership and experimentation, bold starts and reimagining the courses we’ve chosen when we strayed.

May 5781 be better because we make it better, together.

See No Stranger - Revolutionary Love

See No Stranger - Revolutionary Love
Erev Rosh HaShanah 5781
Friday, September 18, 2020
Temple Beth Zion, Buffalo, New York
by Rabbi Jonathan Freirich

We are breathless.
Moving through this world, in our bodies, tonight, today, this week, this year, is enough to make us feel a constriction in our chests.
Maybe we are struggling or suffering.
Maybe we’re holding someone close to us who is struggling or suffering.
Maybe we are reeling from fear - for our safety from any number of concerns - from the shapes of our communities under the threat of pandemic, or hatred, or climate change, or fires, or smoke, or, or, or.
Maybe, like me, we are breathless from all of the above and more.
I often feel that my breathlessness is a sign of weakness.

The woman who inspired these words, Valarie Kaur, wrote:
Our breathlessness is a sign of our bravery.
It means that we are awake to what’s happening right now:
Our world is in transition.

In these last months and years, like many of us, I have sought out wisdom about overcoming divisions in our society. Recently I met, via a podcast, Valarie Kaur. She has written an astounding book, called See No Stranger: A Memoir and a Manifesto of Revolutionary Love, written after years of advocacy on behalf of her own minority community in the face of intolerance and hatred following September 11, 2001. She hails from a large Sikh family and her uncle was one of the first casualties of post-9/11 hate crimes.

Nearly four years ago, Ms. Kaur spoke these words on New Year’s Eve:
“The future is dark.
But what if - what if this darkness is not the darkness of the tomb but the darkness of the womb? What if our America is not dead but a country that is waiting to be born?
What if the story of America is one long labor?
What if all of our grandfathers and grandmothers are standing behind us now, those who survived occupation and genocide, slavery and Jim Crow, detentions and political assault?
What if they are whispering in our ears ‘You are brave’?
What if this is our nation’s greatest transition?”

Our world is in transition.

Right now, far-right ethnic supremacist movements are rising here at home, and everywhere else.

Right now, we Americans are in the middle of a transition of the American people - within twenty-five years, there will be more minority people than white people for the first time since Europeans colonized this continent. The minorities will become the majority.

Right now, Jews of color are demanding that we change our sense of who is normal in our communities because we are not nearly as inclusive and welcoming as we think we are.

We will be part of creating a nation that has never been. A multi-racial, multi-faith, multi-cultural, multi-gendered country. Will it be one in which power is shared and we strive to protect the dignity of every person? Will we strive to build a society based on our central teachings as expressed so clearly in Deuteronomy?

“Do not to cast aside the rights of the stranger or the orphan, you are not to seize-for-payment the clothing of a widow. Remember that you were a slave in the land of Egypt, and Adonai your God redeemed you from there, therefore I command you to observe this word!” (Deut. 24:17-18)

Or will it be something else. Will we descend deeper into national despair and indifference? Will we surrender to an America of dominion by the few at the expense of the many?

Is this the darkness of the tomb or the darkness of the womb?

I don’t know.

I do know that the only way forward for me, is to show up and fulfill our obligation to Jewish teachings, to our country, and to humanity.

We must all show up and do the work together.

וְאָ֣הַבְתָ֔ אֵ֖ת יְהוָֹ֣ה אֱלֹהֶ֑יךָ בְּכָל־לְבָבְךָ֥ וּבְכָל־נַפְשְׁךָ֖ וּבְכָל־מְאֹדֶךָ:

“Now you are to love Adonai your God with all your heart, with all your being, with all your strength!”
(Deut. 6.5)

What do we mean by love in this declaration?
We say it pretty often. Most of us know it pretty well.
This is a commandment to love.
This is not a fuzzy feeling, this is something we must do.
We are not waiting to fall in love with God. We are commanded to love God.
So what does it mean?
In the simplest of terms, the whole paragraph in Deuteronomy describes the nature of loving God with all our hearts, all our beings, and all our strength.

וְהָי֞וּ הַדְּבָרִ֣ים הָאֵ֗לֶּה אֲשֶׁ֨ר אָנֹכִ֧י מְצַוְּךָ֛ הַיּ֖וֹם עַל־לְבָבֶךָ:

“These words, which I myself command you today, are to be upon your heart.”(Deut. 6:6)

Love means placing these words at the center of our beings - placing them on our hearts.

וְשִׁנַּנְתָ֣ם לְבָנֶ֔יךָ וְדִבַּרְתָ֖ בָּ֑ם בְּשִׁבְתְךָ֤ בְּבֵיתֶ֨ךָ֙ וּבְלֶכְתְךָ֣ בַדֶּ֔רֶךְ וּבְשָׁכְבְּךָ֖ וּבְקוּמֶךָ:

“You will teach them to your children and speak them when sitting in your house and when walking on the way, when you go to bed and when you rise up.” (Deut. 6:7)

Loving God means making these into living words for our families, in our homes, and wherever we go. Love means teaching, talking, walking, in the ways of Judaism. This is concrete. Our sages have always taught that loving God means living Torah and living Torah means the active and engaged conversation about making our families, our communities, and our society better every day. Wherever we go, whenever we speak, these words are meant to be “signs upon our hands” - guiding what we do - and “symbols before our eyes” - helping us better understand what we see and how we see - and “inscriptions upon the doorposts of our houses” - reminders whenever we enter our homes or leave them that we are learners and listeners, teachers and interpreters, and constant agents of the living words of Jewish traditions.

When Valarie Kaur then offers us this about love, we know that she means much more than the “feeling of love” - she means the commandment of love.
She writes:

“Love” is more than a feeling. Love is a form of sweet labor: fierce, bloody, imperfect, and life-giving - a choice we make over and over again. If love is sweet labor, love can be taught, modeled, and practiced. This labor engages all of our emotions. Joy is the gift of love. Grief is the price of love. Anger protects those who are loved. And when we think we have reached our limit, wonder is the act that returns us to love.

“Revolutionary love” is the choice to enter into wonder and labor for others, for our opponents, and for ourselves, in order to transform the world around us. It is not a formal code or prescription but an orientation to life that is personal and political and rooted in joy. Loving only ourselves is escapism; loving only our opponents is self-loathing; loving only others is ineffective. All three practices together make love revolutionary, and revolutionary love can only be practiced in community.

This beautiful articulation of love - especially the connections to joy, grief, anger, and wonder, the love for others, ourselves, and our opponents, can be viewed as a counterpart to Judaism.

We have already looked at loving God through V’ahavta - which places love in the realm of hearts and minds, teaching and learning, and at home and in public, in family and in community.

Here is another prominent text to expand our Jewish sense of Ms. Kaur’s revolutionary love.

“You are not to take-vengeance, you are not to retain-anger against the descendants of your people, rather love your neighbor like yourself, I am Adonai!” (Lev. 19:18)

Historically, our sages read this to apply to “our people” - to fellow Jews.

Let us go back to our central ethic, “Do not oppress the stranger, because we were strangers in Egypt.”

We can use Ms. Kaur’s words from her Sikh traditions for this as well - we must see no strangers.

To love our neighbor as ourselves, to take no vengeance, to recognize that God is demanding this of us is to revolutionarily love both ourselves and everyone else and understand all of our interconnections.

Love God - see the practices of our hearts and beings as ones that we do in every moment of every day with everyone we are with and everywhere we go.

Love ourselves - find the divine within ourselves. Know that we are partners in our own constant education and improvement. See the miraculous within our very essences.

Love those around us - whomever they are. There are no strangers. There are no enemies. There are only teachers and friends that we have yet to develop.

This is revolutionary love.

This is demanding of our time and attention.

This is a lifelong and moment-to-moment practice.

This is honoring our history of overcoming oppression as a people.

This is devoting ourselves to a future that is more just and safer for ourselves and for everyone.

When we walk out into the sunlight tomorrow afternoon, perhaps a little cramped from watching Rosh Hashanah Services on screens, let us start with a little self-forgiveness, a little self-love. Then extend it to those nearest us. Extend that love and forgiveness outward. This is a difficult time and we need all the help that we can get. And then, take this challenge with me, extend that love and forgiveness to people we haven’t yet met, to the stranger on the street, and to the people with whom we disagree.

Love means joy - the celebration with the people we love. Find someone the celebrate the new year with and bring more joy into the world.

Love means grief - the journeying with one another when we suffer and suffer loss. Grieve with each other. Build the bonds of camaraderie and companionship that show the effort and devotion of love. Go out of our way to help comfort those who grieve.

Love means anger - when those we love are hurt, when we see injustice to anyone, we must feel our anger and turn it into action. We must not suppress it nor must we surrender to it. Let our anger rise up in a love of justice for all. We must reach out to those who suffer from injustice and listen to their lament and then travel with them on the long road to repair.

And most of all, love means wonder - awe in the face of all creation, awe in the miracle of every person, and wonder in the face of all that we do not know. When we encounter the vastness of one another and the world with wonder, we open up ourselves to possibilities of love.

May this year, this 5781, be one of learning to love better

May this year be one of shared grief and shared joy that brings us ever closer.

May this year be one in which we see no strangers.

May we emerge this year into more light for us all.

L’shanah tovah.

A beautiful piece by Rabbi Joseph Meszler

Out of an abundance of caution
Rabbi Joseph B. Meszler

Out of an abundance of caution I’m staying home.
Out of an abundance of caution I’m washing my hands for at least 20 seconds, sometimes singing the ABCs, sometimes singing the itsy-bitsy spider, and sometimes saying a prayer.
Out of an abundance of caution I am telling people how much I love them every day, sometimes multiple times a day. I can get annoying.
Out of an abundance of caution I am waving frantically to the stranger across the street while I am out for my walk, making eye-contact, smiling and saying hello.
Out of an abundance of caution I am not using the expression “social distancing.” Physical distancing, yes. Social distancing, no way.
Out of an abundance of caution I have subscribed to a joke a day.
Out of abundance of caution I am looking out for people who might be stressed and hungry for food and love and giving more than I have before.
Out of an abundance of caution I am paying attention more than ever to the words of my prayers.
Out of an abundance of caution, I have faith that love and kindness are contagious, too.
Out of an abundance of caution I am telling you I am here for you, I care about us, I need you, and I want everyone to know we are all in this together.

Small Efforts Make a Big Difference

Rosh Hashanah Morning 5780
Monday, September 30, 2020
Temple Beth Zion, Buffalo, New York

On December 7, 1941, “a date that will live in infamy”, the United States military didn’t have enough rifles for the soldiers in the Army. We had no tanks and the soon-to-be-manufacturers of tanks didn’t even know what they were yet.

On June 17, 1942, only six months later, Vannevar Bush, no relation to any presidents, got President Roosevelt to sign onto a budget for a project that was so secret this was the only paper record of it. The President wrote “OK FDR” on the budget, and the Manhattan Project was born.

Like many of you here, I too have a small connection to the war effort, a massive undertaking that involved the everyday efforts of millions of real people. In 1944, my grandparents, may their memories be for blessings, moved from New York City, to Oak Ridge, Tennessee. My grandfather Jerry was a graduate student in Chemistry at Columbia University and his entire department got reassigned. Jerry occasionally commented about that time, saying that he worked on some obscure processes having to do with compounds or isotopes. He never knew any details and tended to talk about the work as a detour from his studies more than part of a massive patriotic effort.

In that small town in Tennessee that went from hundreds of residents to 85,000 in a matter of months, there were engineers and scientists, thousands of people doing every kind of work, and almost no one knew what they were working on. They were all part of the community that helped build the first atomic bomb that would eventually help end the war with Japan.

Looking back at American involvement in World War II, a mere three years and eight months - our country became the industrial behemoth that not only won a global conflict but also sowed the seeds for scientific, economic, and social advancement for decades to come. While we might be able to look back and see some grand plan at work, there really wasn’t one. There were many people with plans, and many people helping everyone they knew try everything they could. What made the biggest difference were the individual efforts of millions of people who knew that each of their small parts could make a difference. The world needed every person and everyone knew it.

As a people Jews have always taught that each and every single individual matters. Divine sparks, shards of God, are in every particle and in every person’s soul. We must reclaim the conviction of our Jewish teachers and the faith embedded in our American spirit: every one of us not only possesses potentially infinite value, but also each of us can make a difference every day. The smallest of our efforts directed in the right way, guided by good values, and coordinated together with others, can move the world. We know this as Jews. We know this as Americans.

The current events each day can confront us with a seemingly ever-expanding list of insurmountable challenges. We often feel helpless. It seems that an individual’s actions don’t matter, that history will proceed forward and things will get better or worse, and they can only be influenced by great events.

It feels like progress towards one idea or another is inevitable. We are mere cogs in the great engine of the world and really, what can one cog do to alter the direction of the ship of state, or the engine of progress?

We can succumb to the idea that great events are need to make great changes.

If only we can find the right leader.

If only we can win the War on Terror or the War on Poverty, end Racism or anti-Semitism, found the State of Israel, build the Great Society, enact the Great Leap Forward, then…

Then we would still have a lot of work to do.

This feels like too much. It is not inspiring to feel that the work will never be done. The bigger the universe gets in our minds the bigger our problems. The more people who live on the planet the more overwhelming our challenges. This is a source of our modern paralysis.

And yet, in a Jewish text from eighteen hundred years ago, our sages wrote:

You are not obligated to complete the task, nor are your free to abandon it. [Pirkei Avot 2:21, translation by Rabbi Rami Shapiro]

By thinking that our problems are totally unprecedented, we also allow ourselves to think that they are unsolvable. If they are truly unsolvable then we don’t have to do anything about them.

Our Judaism defies this.

The world has always felt too big and we have always felt too small.

Jews have always responded with a call to action, understanding that the smallest of efforts can still make the biggest of differences.

A Hasidic teaching: the universe is so finely balanced between creation and destruction, that our own personal actions, even though they are little more than grains of sand, can still tip the balance one way or another. In the face of a vast and impersonal universe we respond with chutzpah. The chutzpah that claims that even the smallest act of kindness or defiance, the smallest extra effort can transform a cog into an essential part that makes all the difference.

While we dream big, and hold ourselves to high ideals, we know that the work takes concerted effort, in small steps over time.

As I mentioned last night, while Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel talked about the lofty ideals of praying with our legs, he still had to walk in the march one step at a time.

Moses had the faith to argue with God for the Jewish people and then had to cope with the fact that he was only going to be part of the beginning of the project. He would never enter the land that was promised. Even Moses didn’t get to finish the job.

The long-term goal of the Jewish project - namely a community of fairness and justice that participates in the improvement of the world - does not demand an all-at-once solution for difficult situations. The American project - our aim to build a better country, one that provides justice and prosperity for all - has shown us that the path of progress does not actually work in grand gestures. Look closely at all of the progress that we have made as Jews or as Americans and we can see among the efforts of countless people putting in hours over the course of weeks and months and years, the individual stories of struggle and tragedy, triumph and experimentation. The massive effort to vanquish tyranny and oppression in World War II happened relatively quickly but was only effective because it was so many individual people working together.

Even a small crisis can motivate us.

Many years ago, as a college student, I saw this first hand. I volunteered on a kibbutz, in the Western Galilee. As volunteers we got to do the jobs that the Kibbutz members didn’t want to do. We washed dishes, mopped floors, shlepped bundles of bananas from the trees to the tractor cart, and did any other menial labor that, literally, fell down the hierarchy to us. Our volunteer morale was little more than the “misery loves company” of the downtrodden at the bottom of the totem pole. We did not see ourselves as taking part in the grand project of the Kibbutz.

A small crisis changed all of that.

A brush fire struck the Kibbutz and the surrounding region during my second week there threatening the agriculture of the entire region and the fate of the Kibbutz. Everyone rushed into service. Some of us went through the rows of banana trees beating out small embers and little fires with shovels. Others made way through avocado groves with water tanks on their backs attempting to put out any small fires that were catching there. While the main effort was with tank trucks and irrigation hoses, everyone knew that each of us was performing an essential task, because any ember could burst into a bigger uncontrolled blaze.

In following days no one complained about washing dishes. We knew that we were all in it together. Kibbutz members and volunteers newly understood we were all on the same team. A crisis united us. Or, we could say that a crisis sped up the normally slow process of community-building that is usually required to get people to trust that we share the same goals and mission.

Each of us can look around and see embers that might turn into wildfires. Each of us, with what we already have in us and between us, can stifle those embers. We are fighting this brush fire together.

The Hasidic teaching that the world is so finely balanced that all our actions can make a difference is borne out by some science as well. Chaos theory was beautifully expressed in the idea of the “butterfly effect” - that the “flap of a butterfly’s wings in Brazil could set off a tornado in Texas”. We are more thoughtful than a butterfly, and we believe that the conscious application of our efforts can make a much more positive, and much more powerful impact, than any tornado.

Here are three opportunities for us to make a difference.

In Western New York an amazing effort to make our city more equitable, fairer, and more just, started only three years ago. It is called the Racial Equity Roundtable, and it is a project of the Community Foundation of Western New York. Focusing on creating real change - in the lives of Western New Yorkers and in the systems in which we learn, live, and work - the Roundtable has improved the way employers hire, the way young people make their way through schools, and even the justice system. By the end of 2018 more than 1,200 people from more than 80 organizations have participated in the Racial Equity Impact training that shows how a more equal society provides real economic benefits for everyone. The efforts of the Roundtable were inspired by a national study showing that cities with greater equality among all ethnicities provide better living for everyone, rich and poor, from all backgrounds. In only three years, the use of one compelling piece of research, connections between a few people who cared deeply, all led to the coming together of hundreds of people in our community to make a real difference. 

I am one of the members of the Racial Equity Roundtable, along with TBZ member Lana Benatovich. We facilitate Racial Healing Circles that are part of the grassroots effort to connect people from different communities so that top-down systems changes are matched by real connections in our hearts and minds. Please let me know if you will join in the efforts of the Racial Equity Roundtable - I can connect you directly. We can make a real difference in our city.

Here at Temple Beth Zion a few congregants connected our synagogue to the Religious Action Center of the Reform Movement and its efforts in New York. We are handing out a survey asking all of you which cause you would like to help us take a stand on. This is a local effort, connected to a statewide effort, that has already brought real results in Albany. We can play an important role because our state’s politics are not decided on the fifty-something floor of a skyscraper in Manhattan. These things are decided through conversations between real people and our New York legislators here in Western New York who then go to Albany and know that we care. We can make a real difference in our State.

Advocacy is only one aspect of the efforts of Reform Jews in New York and the world. Please join us this December at the Biennial of the Union of Reform Judaism, from December 11-15, in Chicago. Thousands of Reform Jews learning from one another, getting excited about what we can do in our home synagogues and together, and then sharing the biggest Reform Shabbat in the world - that’s 5,000 Reform Jews in the same room. If there’s a project that you think Temple Beth Zion ought to undertake, come to the Biennial and find out how other Reform communities have pursued it, or, perhaps even more importantly, come and get inspired about what is possible when we work together. Connect with amazing authors, like A. J. Jacobs and Sarah Hurwitz and our own Cantor Barbara Ostfeld. Meet experts on Israel, like Ambassador Dan Shapiro, Anat Hoffman from Women of the Wall, and Rabbi Gilad Kariv, who runs the Israeli Movement for Reform and Progressive Judaism. Of course, all of the national leaders of the Reform Movement will be there too. We can make a real difference as Reform Jews.

This year we must take actions together. We must be more than butterfly wings affecting the weather. We must find ways to take small steps that bring all of us closer to a better world.

Theodore Parker, a Unitarian minister and prominent abolitionist, most famously quoted by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., spoke about the arc of the universe bending towards justice.

The universe needs us to bend its arc towards justice.

I have faith in the power of the Jewish people to take small steps together that will have lasting effects for ages to come.

Believe in us, called by God, to act together.

Believe in the power of all of us working together.

Let’s get started.

What God Asks of Us

Erev Rosh HaShanah 5780

Sunday, September 29, 2019

Temple Beth Zion, Buffalo, New York

An end of all flesh has come before me, for the earth is filled with wrongdoing…here, I am about to destroy them, along with the earth. (Genesis 6:13)

This is what God said to Noah.

Noah did what he was told, built an ark, gathered the animals, lined everyone up just like God told him to do, and let everyone else and every other animal die.

Noah didn’t say a thing.

Noah never spoke back to God at all.

We are not the People of Noah for good reasons.

We are the people of Abraham.

When God said, “I am going to destroy Sodom and Gomorrah,” Abraham asked, “But God, are you going to kill them all? The good ones too? Is that what the God of Justice does? Kill the righteous along with the evil?” (Genesis 18:23-25)

Fifty, forty-five, forty, thirty, twenty, ten - at what we now define as the number of people defined as a community, as a minyan - bit by bit Abraham haggled with God over the lives of strangers.

We are also the People of Moses.

Moses fought to save Hebrew slaves from oppression, not as the liberator appointed by God, but as the Egyptian Prince who still hated injustice. Before he even knew his heritage Moses killed an Egyptian taskmaster who was beating a Hebrew slave.

Moses confronted his own adopted family, the people who raised him, and brought down the plagues upon them, fighting against the greatest Empire of the ancient world on behalf of an enslaved people and a God that almost no one remembered. Because it was right and it was just.

And then, after leading us out of Egypt, after confronting Pharaoh and the Egyptian chariots at the Sea of Reeds, at Mount Sinai, when we the Israelites turned away from Moses and our God who saved us and worshipped a false idol, then Moses stood up to our God for us too. Because it was right and it was just.

We are not an obedient people.

When confronted with a world that seems unfair, we challenge the world and we challenge God.

We defy our fate, we defy our destiny, we stand up for ourselves.

We are more than a stiff-necked people.

We are a people who constantly overturn expectations.

We are the forgotten ones who keep on turning up and surviving and thriving when no one expects it. And then we help others too.

On this Rosh Hashanah, I am not talking to you about the dangers of climate change, or the perils of our current politics, or the crisis that may or may not be facing our Constitution, and how we are going to solve it all. These urgent questions, much on all of our minds, are not what we are here for right now.

Instead, I have another question for us:

What kind of God would put up with us?

Why does God allow Moses to save us time and time again?

We are so difficult, rebellious, grumpy, and let’s say it, kvetchy.

The give and take, the back and forth, the arguing seems to be what God wants.

The rabbis of the Talmud argue with God and God loves it, laughs at them, and congratulates them.

God is asking us to do for ourselves, to argue with God, and to know that when we argue, when we take a stand, especially when we cry out for justice from the universe and from God, then God will be with us.

God wants independent partners.

If God wanted people who took orders and stood in line, God would have called us the People of Noah.

And we are the People of Abraham. The People of Israel the God-wrestler. The followers of Moses who stood up for us to God.

Knowing that we can stand up to God, we can stand up to anyone.

Being this people, the ones who stand up to God, the ones who stand up against the oppressor has been hard.

The ancient stories of our rebellion and stubbornness are small comfort in the face of thousands of years of tragic struggle and loss.

And how have we responded when the world turned against us?

In the face of the Romans we rebelled and suffered and fled and survived and created a Judaism that sprang forth in books and minds and hearts. Our Judaism lasted longer than our Temple in Jerusalem and then we the Jewish people took it with us to all corners of the world and outlasted the Roman Empire too.

Centuries of European persecution of our people resulted in the worst of tragedies. We cannot count the losses that our people suffered. We cannot ever count ourselves made whole for those lives that are beyond replacing. While Europe sought to erase us, we were also laying the groundwork for a national and cultural revival that has never been seen before or since.

A people scattered and destroyed struggled and emerged and flourished again.

Against all odds we created a new nation in the Land of our ancestors. We have always known that God wanted us to be there. We know, and if we don’t, our Israeli family and friends will tell us, that there was no way we were going to build a homeland by asking nicely and following everyone else’s rules. As lovers and builders of Zion we defied history. We defied every prediction and every expectation. We are the people who will not quit even when it seems like God may be against us.

With our backs against the wall and the world against us we often have the greatest sense that God is with us. In our darkest hours the still small voice in the quiet of the cave in our hearts can be heard encouraging us to seek what is just and what is right.

Meanwhile, for those of us here, in the American version of the Promised Land, we fought for and achieved prosperity. We repeat at every Passover Seder that our freedom is incomplete as long as anyone is still oppressed. And we see that our lives here were bound up with the lives of all Americans and knew that just as God had always called us to argue with God against oppression, so we must advocate on behalf of all our neighbors as well.

We see injustice and we try to correct it. We have not yet done enough and we know that there is still more to be done, but we heed the call of God to not allow the status quo to persevere.

Susannah Heschel wrote about her father, Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel and his time marching for freedom:

He said it reminded him of the message of the  prophets, whose primary concern was social injustice, and of his Hasidic forebears, for whom  compassion for the suffering of other people defined a religious person…

When he came home from Selma in 1965, my father wrote:

“For many of us the march from Selma to Montgomery was about protest and prayer. Legs are not lips and walking is not kneeling. And yet our legs uttered songs. Even without words, our march was worship. I felt my legs were praying.”

Rabbi Heschel’s voice rings out as a clarion call for our struggles - our God demands that we march. The prayers of our lips are not enough. We must pray with our legs too.

Last week Alex Borstein won an Emmy for her work in The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, and after cracking some jokes she got serious and honored her mother and grandmother - Jewish immigrants and survivors. She retold this story about her grandmother during the Holocaust:

My grandmother turned to a guard. 

She was in line to be shot in a pit.

And she said: ‘What happens if I step out of line?’

And he said: ‘I don’t have the heart to shoot you, but somebody will.’

And she stepped out of line.

For that, I am here, and my children are here. 

So step out of line, [ladies].

Step out of line!

God has been asking us to “step out of line” from the very beginning.

We live in unprecedented times. So much so, that the word “unprecedented” seems broken.

The world has always confronted us with skepticism. Who is this small people who argue with God? How dare they presume to stand toe-to-toe with the Creator of the Universe? Don’t they know? Can’t they understand? God’s directions are simple?

We are quite certain that what God asks of us is not simple. To figure out what is just, and what is right, to figure out how to fight for it and still preserve what is just, and what is right, for everyone - this is not simple. We know this. And we know that there are many in the world who understand this too and that God is asking us to reach out to them and work together as well.

We have faith that our God is asking us to do more and to do better.

We are a responsible people. We know that at any time we must be the ones who stand up. There is no one who will do it for us. There is no higher authority that’s going to step in on our behalf. God demands that we reach up and stand up and demand justice because if we must step out of line with God then we must definitely step out of line with the people who offer oppression instead of freedom.

Abraham and Moses and the rabbis argued with God. Jacob wrestled with God and got a new name - one who struggles with God - Israel. And so we are the People of Israel - the God-wrestling nation.

As Jews who know where we come from and what we have suffered, as Zionists who pioneered in and then fought for a new nation on our ancient homeland, as Rabbi Heschel and all those before and now who march for and fight for equal rights and justice for all - as a people who argue with God throughout time, we all know that no one fixes problems for us. There is no trusting in someone coming to our rescue. We are the ones who will be doing the rescuing.

Alex Borstein’s grandmother knew that there would be no higher up coming to save her. There would be no higher authority at that moment, while she was in line to be shot, who would politely demand, “Please, this is unjust, there has been a mistake. Stop shooting the Jews.”

She had to step out of line then. And we have to step out of line now. This is what God asks of us.

“See something, say something,” is real for us. Only for Jews it is more. It is “See something, say something, do something, God demands it.”

And then we will argue with God about how to go about it, and how to include everyone it making it right, and making it just.

We are the ones, the light unto the nations, the bearers of traditions of holy chutzpah, the heirs to God-wrestling and standing up and stepping out of line.

This has always been what God asks of us.

This is our eternal charge.

Now is our time.

Not "just us"

Friday, September 6, 2019 - 2 Elul 5779

A Torah Cover from the Tree of Life * Or L’Simcha Congregation in Pittsburgh will join us this High Holy Day Season when we celebrate S’lichot as a progressive Jewish community in Western New York at Congregation Shir Shalom and during Rosh HaShanah at Temple Beth Zion.

Cantor Penny Myers’ connection with Tree of Life’s Rabbi Hazzan Jeffrey Myers goes beyond their shared family name. Their relationship as colleagues brings this important symbol of community connection to Western New York. We remember the tragedy that occurred at Tree of Life on October 27, 2018, and we turn towards a shared future with hope and determination.

This week we read the famous phrase: tzedek tzedek tirdof– “Justice, justice, you shall pursue” – in Deuteronomy 16:19. The repetition of the word “justice” calls out for interpretation.

We can say that justice must always be pursued by stepping out of our selves. We must connect with those who are not like us, who live elsewhere, who seem different, in order to truly pursue justice – because it must be more than justice for “just us”.

We connect with our fellow Jews in Pittsburgh, and we are called to connect with our fellow Western New Yorkers from diverse ethnicities and religions. We must sympathize with people who come from similar backgrounds and neighborhoods and extend ourselves to find common ground with those who seem foreign to us.

Even more, the repetition of “justice” reminds us that we cannot understand what justice means on our own. The concept of justice itself requires conversation with others so that we can explore how each of us define it in our own way.

Only when we come to a broader definition, one that stretches our minds, hearts, and souls, can we embark on a journey of justice for all.

Jews Must Stand Up For Everyone

Taste of Torah - Shabbat Re’eih
August 30-31, 2019 – 30 Av 5779
Torah: Deuteronomy 11:26 – 16:17
Haftarah: Isaiah 54:11 – 55:5, 66:1-24 

Blessings and curses – often the counterpoints coming from our ancient Torah readings, like they do this week, and often our question as we attempt to understand the news coming our way.

Last week the news was harrowing – accusations against the Jewish people from high office holders and politicking about visits to Israel and more. Members of the TBZ community were quick to contact me and chat with me about what we should be doing and saying in response.

We are blessed by our diversity. Jews are loyal Americans who vote on every side of every issue. We have proven our loyal citizenship in almost every country of the world in the millennia of our exile and alas, we have suffered the curses of being punished despite our devotion to the countries we live in.

Now we must actively advocate for a society that calls out those who speak words of hatred and organize around hatred. American society truly depends on our voices. The blessings we seek and the curses we hope to avoid will come upon us based on our behavior. The message of our teachings is clear, we cannot wait for anyone to save us, our fates depend upon our own actions.

Wishing everyone a better week,

Summer's Moods

Friday, July 5, 2019 - 2 Tamuz 5779

 School is out, summer festivals and garden walks erupt throughout our region, and it seems like everyone gets a little extra down time. Summer in Western New York provides an abundance of opportunities for joyful gathering!

 The Jewish Calendar and Torah reading cycle seem out of step with all of this celebrating. Soon we enter into the Three Weeks commemorating tragedies throughout our history and we are in the middle of the Rebellion Narratives in the Book of Numbers.

What can we do about this disconnect between the enthusiasm for summer in Western culture and what seems like a season of discontent and lamentation in Judaism?

This week in the Book of Numbers we read again about the special role of the Levites in ancient Israelite society – their elevated status as attendants to the Tabernacle on the one hand and their restrictions with regard to land ownership and choice of profession on the other. Most situations provide both upsides and restrictions.

So, it is with Summer as well. The historical Jewish understanding of summer months has been governed by the challenges of summer weather in the Eastern Mediterranean, namely the possibility of oppressive heat, and the fact that Summer was the season of waging war for civilizations in their region. The traditions we developed around this season reflect this somber attitude.

Still we can do more than one thing at a time! A Jewish strength is our ability to hold in mind multiple not always easily reconcilable ideas.

May our summers be ones of joy and reflection, leisure and remembrances of past difficulties.

May our activities renew us, and our learning deepen our experiences.

Wishing everyone a Happy July and a Shabbat Shalom!

Holocaust Remembrance - using the past to build a better future

Today is Yom Ha-Shoah – Holocaust Memorial Day.

Recently I saw these estimates:

In 1939 there were 2.3 billion people on the planet and 17 million Jews.
Today there are 7.7 billion people on the planet and 15 million Jews.

We cannot calculate the immensity of our loss as a people.

We cannot imagine what was lost to our world without 6 million more Jews. 

We must make sure that their memories serve as constant reminders for us to make the world better.

We must fulfill our calling and be a light unto the nations. We must be like Aaron in this week’s Torah reading following the death of his sons. As he sanctified himself to enter the Holy Tent in the desert, so we must sanctify ourselves with the teachings of our traditions and become holy.

How can we become holy?

Leviticus answers this question too. The holiness code that comes next week, directs us.

-      We must care for the poor and the dispossessed

-      We must not steal or deal deceitfully or falsely.

-      We must pursue a society of fairness for all.

 On this day, in these times, and at this time of year our mission as Jews continues to be crystal clear – take care of one another and the entire world – pursue justice.

 Hoping that on this day of remembrance of the worst tragedy to befall our people in the last century, on this week of mourning for another despicable act done against us, and during this season of contemplation, we may still turn our mourning into a spark that kindles our inspirations to seek repair for everyone.

The Omer and the State of the World

Even in the wake of our tragedy this past week, we are called to an ancient tradition of daily mindfulness – the Counting of the Omer.

 What is this?

 In the Torah the Omer are the forty-nine days between the Second Night of Passover and our next festival – Shavuot. We count them because Shavuot, which means “weeks”, is reached when we finish counting the seven weeks’ worth of days. Shavuot was not given a date in the Torah so that we would have reason to count towards it.

 Every year I look forward to this season. It is meaningful to take a moment every evening to note and count the day.

There are apps to remind us when to count, and books and reflections to help us find intellectual, spiritual, and emotional depth in this season of counting.

Here are a few great Omer resources:

-      Counting the Omer App,

for iPhones: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/omer-count/id311719474and

Androids: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.cooplogic.omercounter3

-      Counting the Omer reflection for today the 13thof the Omer by Rabbi Rachel Barenblat: https://velveteenrabbi.blogs.com/blog/2015/04/day-13-of-the-omer.html

-      Omer: A Counting, by Rabbi Karyn Kedar: https://read.amazon.com/kp/embed?asin=B00O2AMUBQ&preview=newtab&linkCode=kpe&ref_=cm_sw_r_kb_dp_j8gYCb2C2TCQN

When we feel minutes, hours, and days slipping through our fingers in the rush of life, counting each day gives us a minute or two to keep track, to notice, and perhaps to turn our attention to Jewish values and practices that might enhance our lives in small and large ways, in moments both normal and sacred.

 The foundations of our Jewish communal life knit us together through shared cultures and religious traditions and help us cope, connect, and change the world for the better.

Missing Lincoln, missing America

A little more than a week ago I was listening to the final chapters of Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln, by Doris Kearns Goodwin, as I ran in the darkness of a Buffalo early morning, and found myself in tears, as I crossed Lincoln Parkway and heard this passage below.

Last week, with Congressman Higgins, Erie County Legislature Majority Leader April Baskins, Reverend George Nicholas of Lincoln Memorial United Methodist Church, Richard Lipsitz, the President of the local AFL-CIO, and Judge Lisa Bloch Rodwin, we reflected on addressing intolerance, hatred, and incivility, and Lincoln’s words and life arose in the conversation numerous times.

We need the spirit of our most brilliant ancestors to inspire us to new actions, greater humility, broader understanding, and a more effective dedication to equality for all.

Here are the words that both inspired me and brought me to tears as I jogged in the pre-dawn darkness of autumn in Buffalo:

“In 1908, in a wild and remote area of the North Caucasus, Leo Tolstoy, the greatest writer of the age, was the guest of a tribal chief ‘living far away from civilized life in the mountains’. Gathering his family and neighbors, the chief asked Tolstoy to tell stories about the famous men of history. Tolstoy told how he entertained the eager crowd for hours with tales of Alexander, Caesar, Frederick the Great, and Napoleon. When he was winding to a close, the chief stood and said, ‘But you have not told us a syllable about the greatest general and greatest ruler of the world. We want to know something about him. He was a hero. He spoke with a voice of thunder; he laughed like the sunrise and his deeds were strong as the rock....His name was Lincoln and the country in which he lived is called America, which is so far away that if a youth should journey to reach it he would be an old man when he arrived. Tell us of that man.’

“‘I looked at them,’ Tolstoy recalled, ‘and saw their faces all aglow, while their eyes were burning. I saw that these rude barbarians were really interested in a man whose name and deeds had already become a legend.’ He told them everything he knew about Lincoln’s ‘home life and youth...his habits, his influence upon the people and his physical strength.’ When he finished they were so grateful for the story that they presented him with ‘a wonderful Arabian horse.’ The next morning, as Tolstoy prepared to leave, they asked if he could possibly acquire for them a picture of Lincoln. Thinking that he might find one at a friend’s house in the neighboring town, Tolstoy asked one of the riders to accompany him. ‘I was successful in getting a large photograph from my friend,’ recalled Tolstoy. As he handed it to the rider, he noted that the man’s hand trembled as he took it. ‘He gazed for several minutes silently, like one in a reverent prayer, his eyes filled with tears.’

“Tolstoy went on to observe, ‘This little incident proves how largely the name of Lincoln is worshipped throughout the world and how legendary his personality has become. Now, why was Lincoln so great that he over-shadows all other national heroes? He really was not a great general like Napoleon or Washington; he was not such a skillful statesman as Gladstone or Frederick the Great; but his supremacy expresses itself altogether in his peculiar moral power and in the greatness of his character.

“‘Washington was a typical American. Napoleon was a typical Frenchman, but Lincoln was a humanitarian as broad as the world. He was bigger than his country - bigger than all the Presidents together.

“‘We are still too near to his greatness,’ Tolstoy concluded, ‘but after a few centuries more our posterity will find him considerably bigger than we do. His genius is still too strong and too powerful for the common understanding, just as the sun is too hot when its light beams directly on us.’

Doris Kearns Goodwin continues:

“His conviction that we are one nation, indivisible, ‘conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal,’ led to the rebirth of a union free of slavery. And he expressed this conviction in a language of enduring clarity and beauty, exhibiting a literary genius to match his political genius.

“With his death, Abraham Lincoln had come to seem the embodiment of his own words - ‘With malice toward none; with charity for all’ - voiced in his second inaugural to lay out the visionary pathway to a reconstructed union. The deathless name he sought from the start had grown far beyond Sangamon County and Illinois, reached across the truly United States, until his legacy, as Stanton had surmised at the moment of his death, belonged not only to America but to the ages - to be revered and sung throughout all time.”

[Doris Kearns Goodwin, Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln, pages 747-749

Forgiving the Unforgivable

“Forgiving the Unforgivable”
Rosh haShanah Morning
1 Tishrei 5779
Monday, September 10, 2018
Temple Beth Zion, Buffalo, New York

Every year at this season people come to rabbis asking this question: “How can I forgive this person who has done the unforgivable to me?” How can we forgive those who don’t seem to even know how much they’ve hurt us? This turns out to be the same question. In both cases we are dealing with situations when no apology is likely to arrive or ever be good enough. How do we forgive without apologies?

Earlier in this season of repentance, I was reading about John McCain’s life, in the wake of his funeral. Charlie Pierce told this particular story as he reflected on the Senator’s life:

In 1998, when I was traveling with McCain for a profile in Esquire, I asked him if there was anyone involved with the Vietnam War that he couldn’t bring himself to forgive. By then, he had made his peace with the antiwar movement; he delivered the eulogy for an antiwar activist whose speeches from Hanoi had been piped into his cell. He – along with John Kerry – had succeeded in normalizing relations between the United States and Vietnam. He had taken Walter Cronkite on a tour of his old prison. He’d even forgiven the guards who’d beaten and tortured him. A couple of years earlier, former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, one of the architects of that bloody misadventure, had written a memoir in which he confessed that he'd known the war was un-winnable as early as 1967, but that he had kept his mouth shut while the country slid more swiftly toward disaster. As it happens, October 26, 1967 was the day that John McCain's fighter jet had taken an anti-aircraft missile over Hanoi. So, I asked him if there was someone he couldn't forgive, or at least talk to, about that awful time. He got all quiet and took a long time to answer.

“McNamara,” he finally said. “That's the worst to me—to know you've made a mistake and to do nothing to correct it while, year after year, people are dying and to do nothing to stop it, to know what your public duty is and to ignore it. I don't think any conversation we could have would be helpful now.”

[From “John McCain’s Funeral Was a Council of War – Just as He Meant It to Be”, by Charles P. Pierce, appearing in Esquire, September 1, 2018]

What about McNamara - did he ever try and apologize? In the Fog of War, a 2003 documentary he said: “I'm very sorry that in the process of accomplishing things, I've made errors.” As annual Season of Atonement visitors to the art of apologizing, all of us here do not count this as an apology.

While he never issued any other formal apology for his role in the quagmire, McNamara, who died in July 2009 at age 93, made clear he was haunted by the blunders made under his watch that cost the lives of thousands of U.S. troops. “People don't want to admit they made mistakes,” he explained to the New York Times. “This is true of the Catholic Church, it's true of companies, it's true of nongovernmental organizations and it's certainly true of political bodies.” We can see him continuing to not apologize here by explaining it away instead of owning his part and his responsibility.

Here, on the scale of thousands of lives, is a massive mistake, a transgression that hurt so many people - how is this different from what we’re asked to do on this day, at this season, by our tradition?

Maimonides makes the clearest and most thorough Jewish description of atonement. The process starts with confession, leads to a sincere apology, culminates in an agreed upon course of making amends, that finishes up with atonement, the return to a state of peace between the wronged and the transgressor. The transgressor’s transformation needs to be significant and remarkable so that when faced with the situation a subsequent time the mistake is not repeated. The person who is wronged needs to believe this in order to participate in granting full atonement. Atonement is the arrival at a new state of repair and wholeness after the tearing apart that happens with an injury done by one person to another.

This time of year asks a lot of us. Just look at the to-do list even before we get to the prayerbook and its lists of confessions:

• Prepare our nice clothes

• Put in the brisket

• Get or bake challah

• Ask for forgiveness from everyone I wronged.

We really want to fit forgiveness into a list - it would be so convenient if we could check it off.

Since there is an expiration date on this command to seek forgiveness - we’re supposed to get it done before we come back to worship together on Yom Kippur - the calendar itself may help us reinforce the idea that there is a storehouse of forgiveness that we can easily hand out to people offering a steady supply of apologies from their own box.

Our feelings are not commodities. There is no storage cabinet containing trust, forgiveness, friendship, sisterhood, or brotherhood to dispense at will. And since there’s no storehouse, and while we give ourselves these rigorous times and dates to try and make it all work better, there is no neat and comfortable working out of emotional difficulty.

And this is really very difficult.

The transformation that is required of the transgressor is difficult, and so is finding a way for the wronged person to feel forgiveness towards even a sincere seeker of apologies. When the transgressor comes to us, hat in hand, confessing, apologizing, and offering a path of making amends, it is still difficult to forgive. What do we do when no one comes apologizing, and for all we know, they never will?

You can’t go to someone and say “I’m sorry you made me so angry, apologize, and I will forgive you.”

When you can’t do anything about the person who has wronged you, you feel powerless. You feel cut off from any sort of relating. Again, you are not being asked to apologize in this situation - you want to receive an apology.

We are not commanded to go to someone who has wronged us and ask them to apologize because we did nothing wrong. It’s not our responsibility. Still, you suffer the injury as the person who was wronged.

In order to re-establish our sense of self, our sense of control, we want to reach out and confront that person.

Otherwise, you are stuck with unresolved feelings.

And while the High Holy Days ask us to take responsibility as a transgressor - a doer of wrongs - we who feel wronged are left with a passive role. We are non-actors in a drama that seems to keep on picking on us.

We need to retake control of this story. 

We cannot forgive someone who has not apologized.

Forgiveness, like trust, is not a gift. We cannot open up a box a forgiveness and give it away.

What we can do is explore our anger and our hurt.

We may be attached to the idea that we have to give forgiveness because we want to reassert some control over whatever happened. We want to stop feeling resentful, upset, hurt, and offended. We want our minds to rule over our hearts which continue to feel even when we know it is irrational and we should just heed everyone’s good advice and let it go, let bygones be bygones, and admit that we cannot make changes to relationships and interactions by ourselves.

What we’re looking for is some internal relief. We may call it forgiveness but forgiveness is about the progress between two people not the progress inside my soul. I want to feel “not powerless “ in the face of my own sense of being wronged.

On the other hand, forgiveness could actually be the right word. Maybe we have been applying forgiveness in the wrong direction.

I don’t have to forgive the person who never comes and apologizes.

I have to work on forgiving myself in the face of my own powerlessness.

This is the act of forgiveness I need.

If the formula for atonement requires confession plus apology plus making amends and then leads to atonement, to becoming whole, and we are on our own for the whole process - we are stuck at confession - then we have to work this process in a different way because the expected partner, the transgressor, is not participating.

We start here. We confess to being hurt. We own our own sense of injury.

We apologize to ourselves for judging ourselves so harshly. We didn’t deserve the injury. It came from outside of us. And while we may have been victimized, we don’t have to be victims. 

Think of John McCain - may his memory be for a blessing. He made his peace with the anti-war movement, normalized relations between the United States and Vietnam, and then he resolved to not allow this to happen to other people and fought for it. McCain turned his victimization into a campaign against torture in the wake of the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, when many people all over the political spectrum were entertaining the idea of “enhanced interrogation” as justifiable. McCain stood up as a former victim on behalf of other victims.

To turn our injury into making amends with the world creates a process of atonement, of forgiveness, that liberates us from the person who did us wrong.

Between Rosh haShanah and Yom Kippur we say that our fates are written and sealed for the New Year. We are in the in between time when we still can make changes before they get sealed, and the gates close at the end of Yom Kippur. I can’t help but feel that we need to give ourselves a little bit more time, and a lot more personal power, to take over this process.

We can be the ones who author our own fates.

Our personal growth and progress is independent of other people’s inability to take responsibility for their actions, and how they impacted us. Let us free ourselves from the people who hurt us.

We can begin this by changing our seasonal greetings a bit.

Instead of “may you be written and sealed” I offer you, “may you find ways to write yourself a better year.”

May we all take control of our stories, find the forgiveness we need for ourselves, and create a narrative that gets us past the people who will never apologize.

May we write ourselves a better book of life, for a better New Year.

L’Shanah Tovah.

Are we there yet?

Rosh ha-Shanah Evening
1 Tishrei 5779
Sunday, September 9, 2018
Temple Beth Zion, Buffalo, New York

by Rabbi Jonathan Freirich

Torah opens with God speaking the world into being:

וַיֹּ֥אמֶר אֱלֹהִ֖ים יְהִי־א֑וֹר וַיְהִי־אוֹר:

And God said, “Let there be light”, and there was light. (Genesis 1:3)

God’s words bring the universe into being, and God’s words banished Adam and Eve from the garden, but then God’s words could not prevent Cain from murdering his brother.

God sets things in motion with words and then the effect cannot be undone by words. We know that we cannot control what happens after we have spoken, and we also know that we cannot avoid the responsibility for the impact of what we have spoken. We are powerful creators when we speak, and limited when trying to control what we have done with our words. We know we are responsible and that we cannot undo what we have spoken.

The truth of communication is that as soon as we speak, gesture, or release anything into the world - written word, video, audio, image - then we no longer control what it means. People read into words and images things that the artist or author or director or actor never intended.

Today, instead of having a public conversation about the power of speech and its impact and the frequent difference between intended meaning and the meaning heard, we face a dire problem.

We currently suffer from a persistent, pervasive, and nearly absolute refusal to understand that what we say makes a difference. Public figures regularly deny that saying something to get attention in the moment makes irreparable ripples that we cannot undo. Our leaders must now address so much more than politics. We have reached the point when we need bold and honest and public conversations about what is right and what is wrong - what is moral and immoral - what contributes to the downfall of our country or lifts it up. 

Let us be thoroughly clear: this is not about red or blue or green affiliations. This is not about right or left. This is about what we as Jews and Americans must bring to our public discourse so that we will have a future.

Heinrich Graetz, Nineteenth-Century Jewish Historian, observed that, “Judaism is not a religion of the present but of the future,” which looks “forward to the ideal future age…when the knowledge of God and the reign of justice and contentment shall have united all men in the bonds of brotherhood.”

As Jews we need no reminder of the power of words to incite violence. Admittedly, we can be oversensitive. There is no denying that our experiences give us good reasons for our sensitivities.

More than our history makes us sensitive. Our central teachings demand that we pay attention.

We are commanded to listen to God’s words, to strive to understand them, to grapple with them, to turn them into a good way of living and being together.

שְׁמַע | יִשְׂרָאֵל, יְיָ | אֱלֹהֵינוּ, יְיָ | אֶחָד:

“Listen Israel, Adonai is our God, Adonai is One.”

When the rabbis who fashioned our Judaism began to craft the customs and traditions we follow, they started here, with these words.

“Listen Israel, pay close attention…”

In the Torah scroll, two letters in Sh’ma visually stand out. The last letter of the word “Sh’ma-Listen”, the “ayin”, and the last later of the word “Echad-One”, the “daled”, are written much larger than the rest of the letters of the Torah. These two letters form the word: “eid-witness”. One message of Sh’ma is “bear witness”, pay close attention, listen and then decide what should be done in response to what we hear, see, and notice.

I cannot tell you what we need to bear witness to - there is no easy list of signs of wonders and offenses that we must notice. Rather I appeal to our consciences to trust our communal norms and refer back to them and each other. We witness together, and must turn to each other with our questions about what we notice.

And, we must do more than notice.

When is the right time to raise the alarm? I worry about this because I wonder if I am just being an oversensitive and paranoid Jew.

We know that our survival relies on paying attention. We all have heard the stories of Jews who listened and figured out how to leave in time. We hear the Holocaust survivors noting that the current rhetoric reminds them of what they heard in Germany in the 1930’s.

No matter how much we want to ignore the signs, we are unable to do so. We ask ourselves, over and over again: “Are we there yet?”

At the time of the Civil War anti-immigrant hostility raged, Jews were suspected of treason, of profiteering with the South, and expelled from the Union Army in the West. Rabbi Isaac Mayer Wise, the main promoter of American Reform Judaism, and the man whose visit inspired Temple Beth Zion to become Reform in 1863, publicly hedged on supporting abolition because of concerns that if America stopped persecuting African-Americans, then Jews would be next. Rabbi Isaac Meyer Wise was clear about the wrongness of slavery, still Rabbi Wise was realistically afraid that the oppression and persecution of the Jews in this country would come as it had in Europe.

As North and South argued the questions - especially whether or not to expand slavery beyond the original slave-holding States, civility was abandoned entirely. In 1856, a Southerner responded to insults and anti-slavery rhetoric by physically beating Senator Charles Sumner on the floor of Senate. Sumner’s injuries were so severe that he could not serve in the Senate for three years. The North proclaimed Sumner a hero and the South proclaimed the violence against him both warranted and insufficient.

The United States that Abraham Lincoln faced four years later was even more divided. Lincoln was the moderate candidate, the reconciler, and his mere election was enough of an excuse for the Southern States to secede and begin the Civil War.

And still, with all of that, in the face of anti-immigrant fervor towards others, the overt anti-Semitism by the North, and the violence everywhere, we careful and oversensitive Jews stayed here.

Is there something so much more alarming today?

Should my sense of alert lead me to abandon our home and drive across the bridge seeking refuge in Canada?

Are we at a new point of alarm that must spur us to action, or have we passed the point of effective action so that we must instead be silent, like Rabbi Wise, for our own safety?

Our public discourse is in a state of failure not unlike the one that allowed violence to erupt on the floor of the Senate more than one hundred and fifty years ago. Irresponsible leaders choose to embrace positions solely to grab headlines. We the public must remind them that they were elected to pursue principles and policies, not “likes” and Twitter followers.

Leaders shout the most outrageous things in public now and then later claim that what we heard was not what they meant. That what they said meant something else. This is worse than an argument. This is absolutely demeaning to every person who listens and every convention about shared meanings that makes society possible.

Judaism demands that we learn and teach. The verses that follow Sh’ma Yisrael, “Listen Israel”, command us to “place the words on our hearts, ,teach them to our children, speak them in all places and at all times, bind them and write them.” We understand this as a commandment, an imperative, to internalize meanings so as to better understand and develop and clarify words and transform them into meaningful actions.

The claim that I can say something and then, tomorrow, with all of you as witnesses, claim that I said something that meant the opposite of those plain words - this claim destroys the very foundation of the language and speech upon which civilization is based.

We knew this long before we could turn to a video record of every word uttered in public. We knew this because we listened, learned, wrote, and then rewrote - such is the Jewish project. Turn words into teaching, teaching into practice, and practice into a better society.

We stand today as Jewish sentinels on the threshold of a New Year looking out and seeing and remembering and knowing that violence lays just beneath the surface of human society - held at bay by the thinnest of community agreements on civility and law.

In this time of seemingly shifting and emerging facts, of perspectives and opinions constantly claiming firm ground on insubstantial foundations, I struggled to bring words before you today. How could I possibly think that something I wrote yesterday, or last week, or last month, would still be relevant, meaningful, or even truthful in the next minute?

I imagine that being a border guard during a time of relative peace can be stressful - soldiers often speak of guard duty as a battle with boredom and the difficulties of maintaining vigilance. We are in a different place altogether. Each day, gazing out at the potential maelstrom, wondering if warning is needed, half-deafened by a tumult that only seems partially real - would any warning I could offer be heard? And if so am I justified in crying out or merely crying wolf?

We know that there is substance to be found beneath the noise. Principled and foundational teachings still help us sift through the overwhelming volume of questionable data thrown at us every day. We use these foundations to aid us in deciding: have we reached the precipice yet?

So we listen and bear witness.

Our witnessing demands knowledge and memory - we bear witness to a history filled with tragic terror a good deal of which has been directed at us. Our witnessing demands that we fulfill the commandment from Leviticus [19:16]:

לֹ֥א תַעֲמֹ֖ד עַל־דַּ֣ם רֵעֶ֑ךָ

Do not stand idly by while your neighbor’s blood is shed

We must interfere. We must prevent bloodshed. We must stop the violence. And there is bloodshed, and violence is here.

To witness is to take responsibility for what happens in our presence.

We are responsible, one for another, as Jews, as Buffalonians, as Americans, as Humans, as inhabitants of this planet. We are all interconnected and we must remember to act with conviction to threats to the entirety of our existence together.

Attention seeking leaders stand in front of us every day, saying that they uphold principles, and turn around acting in total disregard of everything they claim.

We must call this out. We must demand reason when nonsense is put forward as justifications for injustice. We must call out bigotry when it is expressed.

We can stand aside no longer. If for no other reason that if we stand aside, then history has shown us that we are next.

The Nigerian poet and novelist Ben Okri offers us this advice:

“A nation is shaped by the stories its children are told. A nation is sustained by the stories it tells itself. The good stories can liberate its potential, it helps it face the dragons of its evils.”

The story we tell as American Jews can start with the words of George Washington to the Touro Synagogue of Newport, Rhode Island: 

It is now no more that toleration is spoken of as if it were the indulgence of one class of people that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent natural rights, for, happily, the Government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance, requires only that they who live under its protection should demean themselves as good citizens in giving it on all occasions their effectual support.

[“Letter to the Jews of Newport”, 18 August 1790, Washington Papers, 6]

We remember what it is like to be welcomed as good citizens and so we welcome others, newcomers like us.

Unlike everywhere else we have been, when our history followed the brutal pattern of persecution, pogrom, and expulsion, here we are not outsiders. Yes, we face challenges and anti-Semitism, and yes, we are concerned, but we are truly both American Jews and Jewish Americans - we are part and parcel of the struggle to make the United States both complicated and beautiful, truly “e pluribus unum” - “out of many one”.

After centuries of horror in Europe, after our unsure stance during the Civil War, we here in this country stood up for our fellow citizens. As co-founders of the NAACP, as freedom riders, and as advocates for equal rights, civil rights, and voting rights, we have known when actions were needed, and taken them.

Our story as Jews is an American story, perhaps best expressed by the words of hope spoken by Lincoln in his First Inaugural address, words that still cry out to us today as we attempt to bridge the gaps between us:

We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battle-field, and patriot grave, to every living heart and hearthstone, all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.

This is a story we can tell to each other, to our children, and to their children.

Ben Okri also wrote that “the true storyteller works with the future.”

We retell and repeat, reinterpret and reimagine, the stories of our Torah, and the stories that become our Torah, to remind us what to do in every age, and in the face of every crisis so that we can build the future.

How will we tell the story of these days?

Were we silent when we should have spoken up?

Were we seated when we should have stood up?

Did we stand idly by as blood was shed?

I may yet be wrong. This may not be the moment of action. I am not advocating we all cross the Peace Bridge never to return. We stayed through the Civil War, and we should stay now. We are needed more than ever.

We must not allow our country to get there.

I believe in us, and I believe in America. America needs us to do more than believe. We must participate. We must vote and get out the vote. We must hold our leaders accountable. We must unite around the principles that make this place a miracle for Jews and so many others.

We cannot wait.

We must make this year a good year so that there can be more good years.

L’Shanah Tovah.

Numbers and Israel and Gaza

Shabbat B’Midbar
May 18-19, 2018 – 5 Sivan 5778
Torah: Numbers 1:1 – 4:20
Haftarah: Hosea 2:1-22

What a week in Israel – the recognition of a fundamental truth that everyone already knows – that Israel’s Capitol is in Jerusalem – and deadly days on the border with Gaza.

Meanwhile, we read from the opening chapters of the Book of Numbers, reminding us of the need to count people for the sake of fielding a military, and the hazard of viewing people as mere numbers and not unique individuals at the same time. Instead of numbers of people Moses takes a count of names. While we end up with a final tally in numbers, the counting itself was much more personal.

How do we calculate the difficulties that our Israeli family faces?

In a world filled with tyrants and terror, the United Nations Security Council observed a moment of silence for those killed on the Israeli border with Gaza when they threatened another country in an act of war, disguised as an act of protest.

Israel withdrew unilaterally from Gaza, dismantled Israeli Settlements and instead of peace and partnership the Gazans chose war and terror, resulting in blockades and shortages.

Here is an article that offers this struggle from the perspective of an Israeli, by Rabbi Dr. Donniel Hartman: http://blogs.timesofisrael.com/the-moral-challenge-of-gaza/

I wish I had easy answers for the situation. I ask that all of you join me in learning more. Connect with Israelis, visit Israel, explore our heritage and our homeland. Sit down with Israelis, Jews and Arabs, and listen.

Maybe if we can get beyond the numbers, and recognize the people, the persons, involved, then we can begin to make progress and find hope amid difficulties.

Wishing all of you a good week, and a Shabbat Shalom to come,

Jonathan