Food
One’s mercy must extend to all the oppressed. One must not embarrass or destroy them, for the higher wisdom is spread over all that was created: inanimate, vegetable, animal, and human. For this reason were we warned against desecrating food stuffs ... and in the same way, one must not desecrate anything, for all was created by His wisdom—nor should one uproot a plant, unless there is a need, or kill an animal unless there is a need. (Rav Kook; First Chief Rabbi of the State of Israel)
And I will bring again the captivity of my people of Israel, and they shall rebuild the ruined cities, and inhabit them; and they shall plant vineyards, and drink their wine; they shall also make gardens, and eat their fruit (Amos 11; a messianic vision of Jews returning to their land to plant, grow and harvest their own food).
In the messianic era when the world will be perfected, Jews will return to the land and grow their own food. Today, we are so distant from our food sources that few of us really know where our food comes from, how it is grown, harvested and transported to a city grocery store for us to buy. For the most part, we are unaware of how the animals we eat are raised, transported and slaughtered. There is a growing concern about and interest in food and what we might do to encourage the food industry to provide healthier, more ecologically sound and humane sources of food to feed the 7 billion people in this world, 800 million of whom are undernourished. Jewish tradition demands that we be mindful of food and not abuse the earth from which it comes. In light of these concerns, I thought it might be helpful for us to spend some time thinking about these issues from a Jewish perspective.
We will start our exploration with the creation of a synagogue garden which we will call “Gan Kehilati” (the community garden). Fred Karp, Bob Goldman, Kim Turnbow, Miriam Greenberg and others are heading up a project to create a learning garden just south of the synagogue kitchen. We are providing garden plots for people to rent (for a nominal fee). One plot is reserved as a “teaching plot” for classes and demonstrations. After we grow and harvest the organic vegetables, we will provide cooking classes to teach delicious, healthful (and kosher) ways to prepare them. Much more information will follow. If you are interested in the gardening classes or in helping with the garden, please contact Naomi Kirshner nkirshner@headenver.org or Fred Karp fredkarp@earthlink.net. Keep an eye on our website under “Community/Community Garden,” for up-to-the- minute information about this project. You might also consider reading Michael Pollan’s book Omnivore’s Dilemma for background information.
JCC Maccabi Games
In August 2010, Denver will celebrate the JCC Maccabi Games®, welcoming over 1,500 Jewish athletes ages 12-16 with their families and friends, and more than 1,000 volunteers and 600 host families. This Olympic-style sports competition provides a unique combination of sports, cultural and social activities. From August 1st – 6th, delegates from all over the United States, Canada, Mexico, Israel, and Europe will test their skills in sporting events and experience a journey far beyond athletic competition- inspired with the values of community involvement, teamwork, integrity and pride.
By using sports as the vehicle, the ultimate mission of the games is to cultivate a deeper understanding and appreciation of Jewish values within Jewish teens by enriching their Jewish identity in an informal setting and encouraging their identification with Israel at the same time.
Would you like to get involved in this wonderful event sponsored by our community? Call Naomi Kirshner nkirshner@headenver.org or visit the JCC Maccabi Games website http://www.jccdenver.org/maccabi/.
Have a great summer and see you at the games!
Tuesday, May 4, 2010
Thursday, April 29, 2010
Works in Progress; Acharei Mot/Kedoshim
I asked a member of the congregation once, “So, how are you doing?” What I was expecting to hear, of course, was “I’m fine, how are you?” But this person said something I hadn’t heard before. He said, "How am I doing? Well, I’m a work in progress.”
A work in progress. When I was younger, I had a sense that we learn through our college years and then we go to work and the learning stops. We might take some management courses or something related to our work, but the bulk of what we know, we learned before age 21 and then we simply go out and live our lives. Perhaps that was why I was surprised when I first learned about “elder hostels.” These are programs that provide adult education classes for seniors on virtually any subject including Jewish studies. I wondered what seniors still wanted to learn that they hadn’t already learned through simply living their lives?
I shouldn’t have been surprised: there is a lot to learn at any age --as long as the mind and soul are active, it changes and develops and grows. Just like anything else that is alive, as soon as we stop growing, we start dying.
We are all works in progress: it doesn’t matter one’s age, our place in life, married, single, parents or grandparents. We are not yet what we need to be and that is true up until the time that we take our very last breath.
Last week’s Torah portion focuses on disease. If an Israelite were found to be leprous, the priest would declare him impure and the leper would be forced outside the camp. The Rabbis understood leprosy as a punishment for the sin of lashon harah; they compared the word: metzorah which means leprosy, to the phrase, motzi shem rah; which means slander. When you demean someone else in speech to a third party, you create a kind of disease in the community that can spread out of control. Lashon harah attacks the very fabric of the community like leprosy attacks the body. Speech can be used in beautiful and constructive ways: poetry, kindness, expressions of love and appreciation. Or it can be used to destroy reputations, sow the seeds of discord, envy, pettiness. Last week’s parasha focuses on what can go wrong in the hearts of people in the community, how Israelites can push God away and give in to their baser instincts.
But then we come to this week’s parasha: Acharei Mot/Kedoshim. Here we see just the opposite. We read of the Yom Kippur service in the Tabernacle. This service represents the human spirit reaching out to God, renouncing sin and using our power of speech for prayer seeking atonement. We read also about our obligation to care for the poor, respect one’s parents, observe the Sabbath, be honest in weights and measure, love one’s neighbor. Here again we see the human spirit aspiring to the good, to the Godly, to what the Torah calls, “kedusha,” holiness.
The question then is raised for each and every Jew, in fact, for every member of the human family: will we stay mired in the diseases of the spirit, to what in us is lowly and petty and driven by our baser instincts? Or will we reach out to God, to all that is the best in us, to what makes us distinctively human, and to what makes us good?
Jewish tradition understands this question to apply, essentially, to every decision we make, every day of our lives. Here is the question in other words: will I move towards God or away from God with what I am about to do right now? Works in progress.
From the second night of Passover to the first night of Shavuot, we count the Omer, 49 days in all. We are today counting the 25th day of the Omer. The Omer is a measure of grain, harvested from the new barley crop and brought to the Temple on the second day of Pesach. The Israelites would then counts 49 days at the end of which, they would bring another measure of grain for sacrifice, but this time from the newly harvested wheat crop. Why 49 days and why barley at the beginning of the period and wheat at the end?
The Rabbis understood Pesach as the time the Israelites left the degradation of Egypt. After 49 days of purification in the desert, they came to Mt Sinai and on the festival of Shavuot, they received the Torah. According to tradition, there were 49 levels of Egyptian impurity that the people had to shake off, one level each day, until they were sufficiently pure to receive the Torah.
Now the first omer offering was of barley which is a coarse grain that was used to feed animals. At the end of the seven weeks, they offered up wheat which is a smoother, softer and a more easily refined grain that was used to make bread eaten by human beings.
Can we not say then that at the beginning of the 49 days, just after the people left Egyptian slavery, they were a courser lot, robbed of their humanity, treated like animals and perhaps, even acting more like animals, baser, more instinctual, more violent and cruel? And that the seven week period was really a period of spiritual and emotional refinement: a gradual control of their baser instincts, a turning towards their better selves; from violence to compassion, from hatred to love, from treating each other like objects to respect, from cowardice to courage, from pettiness and jealousy to loyalty?
That, by the way, is why the Kabbalists attached their notion of the 7 lower sefirot to the 49 days of sefirat ha omer. Each of the seven sefirot represents human qualities to which we aspire: love, respect, compassion, courage, loyalty and so on. Contemplating these sefirot each day encourages us to refine the self. Each day we count, each day we get better. In our tradition, the number 7 represents wholeness: 7x7 or 49, complete wholeness. We don’t just refine ourselves between Pesach and Shavuot, we refine ourselves, throughout our entire life, our whole life long.
So you see, we are all works in progress. There is not a person among us who can’t improve him or herself in some meaningful way every day. It takes the simplest act of self-reflection to see where one needs the most work. God doesn’t expect of us, perfection. But He does expect of us a slow, thoughtful, life-long process of developing our better selves. So what will you work on today? Shavuot is fast approaching; we have no time to waste.
A work in progress. When I was younger, I had a sense that we learn through our college years and then we go to work and the learning stops. We might take some management courses or something related to our work, but the bulk of what we know, we learned before age 21 and then we simply go out and live our lives. Perhaps that was why I was surprised when I first learned about “elder hostels.” These are programs that provide adult education classes for seniors on virtually any subject including Jewish studies. I wondered what seniors still wanted to learn that they hadn’t already learned through simply living their lives?
I shouldn’t have been surprised: there is a lot to learn at any age --as long as the mind and soul are active, it changes and develops and grows. Just like anything else that is alive, as soon as we stop growing, we start dying.
We are all works in progress: it doesn’t matter one’s age, our place in life, married, single, parents or grandparents. We are not yet what we need to be and that is true up until the time that we take our very last breath.
Last week’s Torah portion focuses on disease. If an Israelite were found to be leprous, the priest would declare him impure and the leper would be forced outside the camp. The Rabbis understood leprosy as a punishment for the sin of lashon harah; they compared the word: metzorah which means leprosy, to the phrase, motzi shem rah; which means slander. When you demean someone else in speech to a third party, you create a kind of disease in the community that can spread out of control. Lashon harah attacks the very fabric of the community like leprosy attacks the body. Speech can be used in beautiful and constructive ways: poetry, kindness, expressions of love and appreciation. Or it can be used to destroy reputations, sow the seeds of discord, envy, pettiness. Last week’s parasha focuses on what can go wrong in the hearts of people in the community, how Israelites can push God away and give in to their baser instincts.
But then we come to this week’s parasha: Acharei Mot/Kedoshim. Here we see just the opposite. We read of the Yom Kippur service in the Tabernacle. This service represents the human spirit reaching out to God, renouncing sin and using our power of speech for prayer seeking atonement. We read also about our obligation to care for the poor, respect one’s parents, observe the Sabbath, be honest in weights and measure, love one’s neighbor. Here again we see the human spirit aspiring to the good, to the Godly, to what the Torah calls, “kedusha,” holiness.
The question then is raised for each and every Jew, in fact, for every member of the human family: will we stay mired in the diseases of the spirit, to what in us is lowly and petty and driven by our baser instincts? Or will we reach out to God, to all that is the best in us, to what makes us distinctively human, and to what makes us good?
Jewish tradition understands this question to apply, essentially, to every decision we make, every day of our lives. Here is the question in other words: will I move towards God or away from God with what I am about to do right now? Works in progress.
From the second night of Passover to the first night of Shavuot, we count the Omer, 49 days in all. We are today counting the 25th day of the Omer. The Omer is a measure of grain, harvested from the new barley crop and brought to the Temple on the second day of Pesach. The Israelites would then counts 49 days at the end of which, they would bring another measure of grain for sacrifice, but this time from the newly harvested wheat crop. Why 49 days and why barley at the beginning of the period and wheat at the end?
The Rabbis understood Pesach as the time the Israelites left the degradation of Egypt. After 49 days of purification in the desert, they came to Mt Sinai and on the festival of Shavuot, they received the Torah. According to tradition, there were 49 levels of Egyptian impurity that the people had to shake off, one level each day, until they were sufficiently pure to receive the Torah.
Now the first omer offering was of barley which is a coarse grain that was used to feed animals. At the end of the seven weeks, they offered up wheat which is a smoother, softer and a more easily refined grain that was used to make bread eaten by human beings.
Can we not say then that at the beginning of the 49 days, just after the people left Egyptian slavery, they were a courser lot, robbed of their humanity, treated like animals and perhaps, even acting more like animals, baser, more instinctual, more violent and cruel? And that the seven week period was really a period of spiritual and emotional refinement: a gradual control of their baser instincts, a turning towards their better selves; from violence to compassion, from hatred to love, from treating each other like objects to respect, from cowardice to courage, from pettiness and jealousy to loyalty?
That, by the way, is why the Kabbalists attached their notion of the 7 lower sefirot to the 49 days of sefirat ha omer. Each of the seven sefirot represents human qualities to which we aspire: love, respect, compassion, courage, loyalty and so on. Contemplating these sefirot each day encourages us to refine the self. Each day we count, each day we get better. In our tradition, the number 7 represents wholeness: 7x7 or 49, complete wholeness. We don’t just refine ourselves between Pesach and Shavuot, we refine ourselves, throughout our entire life, our whole life long.
So you see, we are all works in progress. There is not a person among us who can’t improve him or herself in some meaningful way every day. It takes the simplest act of self-reflection to see where one needs the most work. God doesn’t expect of us, perfection. But He does expect of us a slow, thoughtful, life-long process of developing our better selves. So what will you work on today? Shavuot is fast approaching; we have no time to waste.
Sunday, April 18, 2010
Yom Hazikaron Commemoration
On behalf of the Hebrew Educational Alliance and the Jewish Community, I welcome you to this Yom Hazikaron commemoration.
We read in Genesis of God’s promise to Abraham and his descendents, “and he said to him, I am the Lord who brought you out of Ur Kasdim to give you this land to inherit it.” Throughout Jewish history, enormous sacrifice was required to realize this promise.
Since 1948, almost 23,000 men and women of the Israel Defense Forces have lost their lives defending the State against Arab aggression. Almost 2,000 Israelis have lost their lives in senseless and cruel acts of terrorism. We in the Diaspora must recognize that our brothers and sisters in Israel are on the front lines in defense of not just their own families and communities, but our families and communities as well. I am convinced that the fate of Jews worldwide is directly tied to the fate of Jews in Israel. As they go, so we go. To my mind, there is no world Jewry without the state of Israel.
So we commend and remember and pray for the souls of those who have fallen in Israel in the past 62 years. And we will pray for the welfare of those who stand in its defense today. God’s promise to our ancestors has been made real in our day. We must not forget the sacrifice of those who have made it so.
We read in Genesis of God’s promise to Abraham and his descendents, “and he said to him, I am the Lord who brought you out of Ur Kasdim to give you this land to inherit it.” Throughout Jewish history, enormous sacrifice was required to realize this promise.
Since 1948, almost 23,000 men and women of the Israel Defense Forces have lost their lives defending the State against Arab aggression. Almost 2,000 Israelis have lost their lives in senseless and cruel acts of terrorism. We in the Diaspora must recognize that our brothers and sisters in Israel are on the front lines in defense of not just their own families and communities, but our families and communities as well. I am convinced that the fate of Jews worldwide is directly tied to the fate of Jews in Israel. As they go, so we go. To my mind, there is no world Jewry without the state of Israel.
So we commend and remember and pray for the souls of those who have fallen in Israel in the past 62 years. And we will pray for the welfare of those who stand in its defense today. God’s promise to our ancestors has been made real in our day. We must not forget the sacrifice of those who have made it so.
Tuesday, April 13, 2010
Thank you all for being here. This is perhaps the most important program of the year for the Alliance. The Yom Hashoah committee works for an entire year to present this commemoration for the community. They work so hard with one clear vision in mind; to make sure that the young people in our community remember how human beings, if not checked by people of good will, can become beasts, violent and murderous. We call upon our young people to remember because there is great and enduring power in memory. To remember evil is to work tirelessly to prevent it from happening again. To forget the past is to invite the horrors of the past into the present yet again. You and I and our children after us, must continue to stand strong against evil as we remember. That is our job tonight and throughout the year and throughout our lives. Zachor, lo tishkach: remember, do not forget.
Our Yom Hashoah committee today feels a sense of urgency not felt so much in previous years. The urgency is that we are slowly losing the generation of the survivors who have given us first hand reports about the Shoah. That truth has been brought home to us with great poignancy this past year as we lost our teacher and friend, Jack Goldman. Jack was the inspiration for the Yom Hashoah Committee at the HEA since its founding. He worked with the committee every year sharing his personal experience in the Shoah. For those who didn’t know Jack well, I would like to say just a few words about his life. Jack Goldman was born in Mannheim, Germany: on Erev Yom Kippur, 1923. He spent his early years in Mannheim growing up with his sisters, Terry and Debby. When the Nazis came, his sisters were able to escape on the Kindertransport. They found their way to America to survive the war.
But Jack was arrested by the Nazis in 1938.
He was first brought to a prison in Berlin and then transferred to Sachsenhausen. He then went to Dachau and later to Auschwitz. In 1945, he was forced into a death march out of Auschwitz and he collapsed from typhoid just before reaching Dachau for a second time. His clothing was in tatters, no shoes on his feet. He somehow survived and lived to see the American army liberate the camp.
Jack was good with languages and knew English. When he regained his strength, he began to work for the American army: he was just 22 years old. After the war, he was able to start his life again. He married Margot in 1952 and they were married 57 years. Together they raised four loving children: and received endless naches from their 8 grandchildren. What was so remarkable about Jack is that he picked his life again, after great tragedy and strife, and went on to live a good life and become a leader in our community: teaching us all and our children and grandchildren, in the Jewish community as well as in the general community about the Shoah. He taught us all about our responsibility to ourselves, to the State of Israel and to the world to never let it happen again. We dedicate this evening’s program and all the work that we do to teach the Shoah, to our friend, teacher and mentor, Jack Goldman.
We thank all the people on the Shoah committee that have worked so hard to make this presentation to us tonight. We thank all the participants in the program, as well, for their involvement in this important work. And in particular, we thank DU Hillel for supporting our program tonight from a grant provided by Hedy Mantel (Tessler) in memory of her parents.
Welcome to you all again and may we to continue to focus our attention on the lessons of the Shoah; zachor, lo tishcach: remember and never forget.
Our Yom Hashoah committee today feels a sense of urgency not felt so much in previous years. The urgency is that we are slowly losing the generation of the survivors who have given us first hand reports about the Shoah. That truth has been brought home to us with great poignancy this past year as we lost our teacher and friend, Jack Goldman. Jack was the inspiration for the Yom Hashoah Committee at the HEA since its founding. He worked with the committee every year sharing his personal experience in the Shoah. For those who didn’t know Jack well, I would like to say just a few words about his life. Jack Goldman was born in Mannheim, Germany: on Erev Yom Kippur, 1923. He spent his early years in Mannheim growing up with his sisters, Terry and Debby. When the Nazis came, his sisters were able to escape on the Kindertransport. They found their way to America to survive the war.
But Jack was arrested by the Nazis in 1938.
He was first brought to a prison in Berlin and then transferred to Sachsenhausen. He then went to Dachau and later to Auschwitz. In 1945, he was forced into a death march out of Auschwitz and he collapsed from typhoid just before reaching Dachau for a second time. His clothing was in tatters, no shoes on his feet. He somehow survived and lived to see the American army liberate the camp.
Jack was good with languages and knew English. When he regained his strength, he began to work for the American army: he was just 22 years old. After the war, he was able to start his life again. He married Margot in 1952 and they were married 57 years. Together they raised four loving children: and received endless naches from their 8 grandchildren. What was so remarkable about Jack is that he picked his life again, after great tragedy and strife, and went on to live a good life and become a leader in our community: teaching us all and our children and grandchildren, in the Jewish community as well as in the general community about the Shoah. He taught us all about our responsibility to ourselves, to the State of Israel and to the world to never let it happen again. We dedicate this evening’s program and all the work that we do to teach the Shoah, to our friend, teacher and mentor, Jack Goldman.
We thank all the people on the Shoah committee that have worked so hard to make this presentation to us tonight. We thank all the participants in the program, as well, for their involvement in this important work. And in particular, we thank DU Hillel for supporting our program tonight from a grant provided by Hedy Mantel (Tessler) in memory of her parents.
Welcome to you all again and may we to continue to focus our attention on the lessons of the Shoah; zachor, lo tishcach: remember and never forget.
Zealotry and Its Cure
I wrote my senior sermon on this parasah, Shemini. The senior sermon in Rabbinical School is a really big deal. All your classmates are there as well as your professors. You have studied sacred text for 6 years and now it was the time to show what you learned in a 20 minutes talk. I prepared for this 20 minutes for months. I gave the sermon and got good reviews from my professors: renowned historians, Biblicists and Talmudists. So now I was supposedly ready to go out into the world of the pulpit and get reviews of my sermons from Jews in the pews. I fondly remember how gentle my professors were in comparison.
So Parashat Shemini. There is drama in this parasha which is rare in the Book of Leviticus which speaks mostly about the list of animal sacrifices made by the priests in the Tabernacle. But in our parasha there is much more; there is malfeasance, there is sin, there is destruction and death.
This is what happened. Two of Aaron’s sons, Nadav and Avihu, themselves priests, as the text says, “took up their fire pan, and they put fire in them and placed incense upon it and they brought before God, an alien fire that He [God] had not commanded them [to bring]. [Then,] a fire came forth from before God and consumed them and they died before God.” This is an incredible story. Here are two priests who bring a strange fire: an extra sacrifice that God had not commanded them to bring, and they died for it. Now, they didn’t kill anybody. They didn’t commit adultery. They were not worshipping idols. They just brought an extra sacrifice that wasn’t on the list of required sacrifices. In a sense, they just did a little more than was asked of them. Why did they have to die, as if a little more incense offered up in the Tabernacle was some kind of religious catastrophe?
There is a lot of rabbinic commentary on this episode as you might imagine. Some say that the essence of their sin was that they offered up this sacrifice in the inner sanctum of the Tabernacle that was reserved only for the Kohen Gadol (they weren’t) and only on Yom Kippur (it wasn’t). Some say that they should have used fire that had come from the alter but instead used fire that came from elsewhere (thus, the phrase, alien fire), so that was their sin. Some say that it was an appropriate sacrifice but it had not yet become a part of the regular sacrificial system; it was premature, in other words; and thus forbidden.
All interesting, I think, but not as interesting as the commentary of the Sifre, the legal commentary on the Book of Leviticus. It says there that Nadav and Avihu brought their additional sacrifice out of an extreme love of God. The sons of Aaron had already witnessed the eight day celebration of the inauguration of the Tabernacle and the elevation of the priestly tribe (the descendents of Aaron). Nadav and Avihu suddenly became two of the most important young men in Israel. They were excited. They were overwhelmed, they were, in fact, ecstatic.
So, implies the Sifre, they got carried away. They did more than they should have. They took it upon themselves to make up their own ritual, their own sacrifice, their own tradition. And God saw this as dangerous for the People so He took their lives with fire (just as they had committed their sin, with fire).
Judaism doesn’t like ecstatic displays of religious fervor. In the Talmud, Masechet Chagigah, there is the story of 4 rabbis who entered “the garden,” perhaps a metaphor for an ecstatic mystical spiritual experience. The four rabbis were, Ben Azzai, Ben Zoma, Aher (a derogatory name for Elisha ben Abuya who became an apostate) and R. Akiba. The text then reads: “Ben ‘Azzai cast a look and died.” Perhaps he looked into the face of God. It was too much for him and he perished. “Ben Zoma looked and went insane.” Alisha ben Abuya looked and left Judaism. Only Rabbi Akiva, the greatest legal mind among the four, departed from the garden, unharmed.
What happened in that garden? No one knows but it clearly was overwhelmingly powerful. It was certainly religious fervor; these rabbis went to a spiritual place to which they had no business going. They got carried away, literally. One just dropped dead, one went crazy, one had to leave the faith all together and only Rabbi Akiva made it out of there in one peace.
Why Rabbi Akiva? Rabbi Akiva was religiously and spiritually the most mature. He was steeped in tradition. He had an overwhelming experience yet was able to fall back on Jewish law and tradition to keep him sane and grounded in this world. Few of us are like Rabbi Akiva. There are places in our spiritual lives we should not go. Ecstatic religious fervor should not be part of our religious experience. It causes problems, it hurts us and it harms our community.
Examples? I don’t think too many of us are at risk of flying off into some ecstatic trance from which we will never return. But I do think there is risk today. Perhaps not from a spiritual extremism, but there is risk from religious extremism and zealotry. Religious extremists go beyond what their tradition teaches. These people look at isolated religious texts, mostly out of context, and take them too far. They can easily become zealots for some cause or ideology that they come to believe God requires of them. Religious zealots have caused a lot of suffering in Jewish history. Jewish zealots fought each other in the first century CE, convinced that their understanding of Judaism was correct. Their infighting made the community weak, susceptible to the Roman conquest which ultimately destroyed the Temple and created a Jewish dispersion that lasted two thousand years. In the second century CE, Jewish zealots believing the messiah had come, antagonized the Romans which led to the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of Jews and the destruction of some 50 Jewish towns and 1000 Jewish villages.
Zealotry. A dangerous problem in Judaism and in all religion, really, in all cultures both religious and secular.
I believe we all have, perhaps what we can call, “zealous tendencies.” How do you know whether that is true for you?
Here is a test for zealotry which I made up. You can make your own test.
First: zealots never think they are zealots; they just think they are passionate in their cause.
Second: zealots think their reasoning is impeccable and can’t believe how ridiculous the other guy’s reasoning is.
Third: zealots look to leaders for guidance and affirmation and those leaders can easily manipulate their zealot followers. Zealots never question or challenge their leaders.
Fourth: zealots believe that they already know everything they need to know. They do not listen to anyone who disagrees with them or are different from them in any significant way. Zealots rarely learn anything new.
Fifth: zealots don’t see the real people who are in front of them; people are only important if they validate the zealot’s worldview. And that worldview is usually distorted.
Sixth: zealots always have enemies who are often imaginary. Zealots believe other people are dangerous.
Seventh: zealots believe that people who don’t agree with them, are … zealots.
We all have some zealotry in us: we all at times enter that same crazy garden of the four rabbis, where we can get over-excited and self- righteous in our religious experience and/or in our ideology. The cure for zealotry and religious extremism? Moderation. There are a lot of ways to understand Jewish tradition and practice today, but I require of my approach to Jewish life –moderation. My Judaism cares less about ideology and more about practice. It encourages calm, caring, compassionate, reasonable behavior. My Judaism accepts and encourages differences of opinion (read any page of Talmud, to see what I mean). My Judaism is tolerant of Jews who practices differently than I do and does not believe that those Jews who do things differently that I do are “doing it wrong.” My Judaism respects Jewish leaders but realizes that Jewish leaders are flawed human beings like anyone else. My Judaism abhors violence and understands all human beings to be made in the image of God. My Judaism is a Judaism of moderation. I believe my Judaism and other religions and ideologies like it, control our natural tendencies to zealotry and extremism.
So I say, let’s stay out of the garden that the four rabbis entered. Instead, let’s keep our feet firmly planted in this world and do what it right for our community and our world.
So Parashat Shemini. There is drama in this parasha which is rare in the Book of Leviticus which speaks mostly about the list of animal sacrifices made by the priests in the Tabernacle. But in our parasha there is much more; there is malfeasance, there is sin, there is destruction and death.
This is what happened. Two of Aaron’s sons, Nadav and Avihu, themselves priests, as the text says, “took up their fire pan, and they put fire in them and placed incense upon it and they brought before God, an alien fire that He [God] had not commanded them [to bring]. [Then,] a fire came forth from before God and consumed them and they died before God.” This is an incredible story. Here are two priests who bring a strange fire: an extra sacrifice that God had not commanded them to bring, and they died for it. Now, they didn’t kill anybody. They didn’t commit adultery. They were not worshipping idols. They just brought an extra sacrifice that wasn’t on the list of required sacrifices. In a sense, they just did a little more than was asked of them. Why did they have to die, as if a little more incense offered up in the Tabernacle was some kind of religious catastrophe?
There is a lot of rabbinic commentary on this episode as you might imagine. Some say that the essence of their sin was that they offered up this sacrifice in the inner sanctum of the Tabernacle that was reserved only for the Kohen Gadol (they weren’t) and only on Yom Kippur (it wasn’t). Some say that they should have used fire that had come from the alter but instead used fire that came from elsewhere (thus, the phrase, alien fire), so that was their sin. Some say that it was an appropriate sacrifice but it had not yet become a part of the regular sacrificial system; it was premature, in other words; and thus forbidden.
All interesting, I think, but not as interesting as the commentary of the Sifre, the legal commentary on the Book of Leviticus. It says there that Nadav and Avihu brought their additional sacrifice out of an extreme love of God. The sons of Aaron had already witnessed the eight day celebration of the inauguration of the Tabernacle and the elevation of the priestly tribe (the descendents of Aaron). Nadav and Avihu suddenly became two of the most important young men in Israel. They were excited. They were overwhelmed, they were, in fact, ecstatic.
So, implies the Sifre, they got carried away. They did more than they should have. They took it upon themselves to make up their own ritual, their own sacrifice, their own tradition. And God saw this as dangerous for the People so He took their lives with fire (just as they had committed their sin, with fire).
Judaism doesn’t like ecstatic displays of religious fervor. In the Talmud, Masechet Chagigah, there is the story of 4 rabbis who entered “the garden,” perhaps a metaphor for an ecstatic mystical spiritual experience. The four rabbis were, Ben Azzai, Ben Zoma, Aher (a derogatory name for Elisha ben Abuya who became an apostate) and R. Akiba. The text then reads: “Ben ‘Azzai cast a look and died.” Perhaps he looked into the face of God. It was too much for him and he perished. “Ben Zoma looked and went insane.” Alisha ben Abuya looked and left Judaism. Only Rabbi Akiva, the greatest legal mind among the four, departed from the garden, unharmed.
What happened in that garden? No one knows but it clearly was overwhelmingly powerful. It was certainly religious fervor; these rabbis went to a spiritual place to which they had no business going. They got carried away, literally. One just dropped dead, one went crazy, one had to leave the faith all together and only Rabbi Akiva made it out of there in one peace.
Why Rabbi Akiva? Rabbi Akiva was religiously and spiritually the most mature. He was steeped in tradition. He had an overwhelming experience yet was able to fall back on Jewish law and tradition to keep him sane and grounded in this world. Few of us are like Rabbi Akiva. There are places in our spiritual lives we should not go. Ecstatic religious fervor should not be part of our religious experience. It causes problems, it hurts us and it harms our community.
Examples? I don’t think too many of us are at risk of flying off into some ecstatic trance from which we will never return. But I do think there is risk today. Perhaps not from a spiritual extremism, but there is risk from religious extremism and zealotry. Religious extremists go beyond what their tradition teaches. These people look at isolated religious texts, mostly out of context, and take them too far. They can easily become zealots for some cause or ideology that they come to believe God requires of them. Religious zealots have caused a lot of suffering in Jewish history. Jewish zealots fought each other in the first century CE, convinced that their understanding of Judaism was correct. Their infighting made the community weak, susceptible to the Roman conquest which ultimately destroyed the Temple and created a Jewish dispersion that lasted two thousand years. In the second century CE, Jewish zealots believing the messiah had come, antagonized the Romans which led to the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of Jews and the destruction of some 50 Jewish towns and 1000 Jewish villages.
Zealotry. A dangerous problem in Judaism and in all religion, really, in all cultures both religious and secular.
I believe we all have, perhaps what we can call, “zealous tendencies.” How do you know whether that is true for you?
Here is a test for zealotry which I made up. You can make your own test.
First: zealots never think they are zealots; they just think they are passionate in their cause.
Second: zealots think their reasoning is impeccable and can’t believe how ridiculous the other guy’s reasoning is.
Third: zealots look to leaders for guidance and affirmation and those leaders can easily manipulate their zealot followers. Zealots never question or challenge their leaders.
Fourth: zealots believe that they already know everything they need to know. They do not listen to anyone who disagrees with them or are different from them in any significant way. Zealots rarely learn anything new.
Fifth: zealots don’t see the real people who are in front of them; people are only important if they validate the zealot’s worldview. And that worldview is usually distorted.
Sixth: zealots always have enemies who are often imaginary. Zealots believe other people are dangerous.
Seventh: zealots believe that people who don’t agree with them, are … zealots.
We all have some zealotry in us: we all at times enter that same crazy garden of the four rabbis, where we can get over-excited and self- righteous in our religious experience and/or in our ideology. The cure for zealotry and religious extremism? Moderation. There are a lot of ways to understand Jewish tradition and practice today, but I require of my approach to Jewish life –moderation. My Judaism cares less about ideology and more about practice. It encourages calm, caring, compassionate, reasonable behavior. My Judaism accepts and encourages differences of opinion (read any page of Talmud, to see what I mean). My Judaism is tolerant of Jews who practices differently than I do and does not believe that those Jews who do things differently that I do are “doing it wrong.” My Judaism respects Jewish leaders but realizes that Jewish leaders are flawed human beings like anyone else. My Judaism abhors violence and understands all human beings to be made in the image of God. My Judaism is a Judaism of moderation. I believe my Judaism and other religions and ideologies like it, control our natural tendencies to zealotry and extremism.
So I say, let’s stay out of the garden that the four rabbis entered. Instead, let’s keep our feet firmly planted in this world and do what it right for our community and our world.
Friday, April 2, 2010
Jerusalem
When the Dollin family finished their Seder last Sunday night, together with Jews throughout the world and throughout history, we sang: L’shana HaBaah, Birushalayim: next year in Jerusalem. We say the same thing as our last prayer on Yom Kippur. In the Bible, the word Jerusalem appears 667 times. In the Talmud, the word appears over 1,000 times. Jerusalem appears in our prayer liturgy dozens of times. When we pray, we face Jerusalem. When not in Jerusalem, Jews throughout history have yearned to be in Jerusalem. Jerusalem has been a part of the Jewish personality for 3010 years since David founded the city in the year 1000 BCE.
I thought I would take us on a quick historical tour this morning to give both ancient Jerusalem and modern Jerusalem some context as the holy city has been in the news lately --particularly regarding the plan by the municipality of Jerusalem to build an additional 1600 apartments in a Jewish suburb called Ramat Shlomo. It has created a bit of a stir internationally and has strained the US-Israel relationship. We will hear much more about Jerusalem in the news in the weeks and months ahead so I thought I would speak about it a bit today.
The Jerusalem story begins with King David who captured a small fortified hill in the Judean Hills from a Canaanite tribe called the Jebusites. The hill was steep and easy to protect. It also had water from a small spring adjacent to the hill.
David’s son Solomon expanded the city by building a temple just to the North. For the next 1000 years, give or take a few years, that temple, destroyed once and rebuilt, was the central focus of the Jewish people. In King Herod’s day, the Temple was expanded into an enormous complex that struck awe in the hearts of Israelites that would visit it from all over the land -three times annually. One of those times was Pesach when each Israelite family would offer up a lamb to be sacrificed by the Priests and eaten in Jerusalem by the family.
The second Temple was destroyed in 70CE by the Romans to the horror of the Jewish people. For the next 2000 years, Jews would yearn for the Temple to one day be rebuilt ---the laws of the Temple sacrifices were studied in every bet midrash in every country in the world where Jews lived. Jewish prayer would speak of the Temple. To this day on Shabbat and the Holidays, a special section of the service is reserved for commemorating the ritual that took place in the Temple. We will chant that very service today in a few moments.
Over time, most Jews came to believe the Temple would only be rebuilt when the messiah comes. Never the less, Jerusalem the city, retained a mystical holiness and its memory would always remain in the mind of Jews. As we read in the Psalms, “If I forget you, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning. If I do not remember you, let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth; if I do not set Jerusalem above my highest joy."
After Jerusalem fell to the Romans, the Romans created a classic Roman city on its ruins they called Aelia Capotolina in which they worshiped pagan gods. When the Emperor Constantine converted to Christianity in the fourth century, Jerusalem became a Christian city with little attention paid to the Temple Mount but a lot of focus on the development of what became the Church Middle East, and Caliph Umar captured Jerusalem from the Byzantine overlords. He cleaned up the Temple Mount that had been used as a garbage dump and built a mosque on it. That began a uncomfortable sharing of the Holy City between Christians, Muslims and Jews that exists to the present day.
In 688, work began to create a dome around a protruding rock on the Temple Mount that was believed to be the rock upon which Abraham offered up Isaac for sacrifice. Muslims also believe it was from this rock that Mohammed ascended to heaven. The Al Aksa Mosque was first built in the year 705.
Crusaders sacked Jerusalem in 1099 killing everyone in sight and made Jerusalem Christian again, creating churches on the Temple Mount. The Muslims recaptured the city under Saladin, about a hundred years later and it became a Muslim city once again. Mamluks from the Eurasian Steppes, converts to Islam, were the next to invade and they took Jerusalem in the 13th century and held it until 1516 when Jerusalem was taken over by the Ottoman Turks. The Ottoman empire held the city for the next 400 years. Then came the British. General Allenby entered the Jaffa Gate in December of 1917.
Zionism was well under way by then. The first Zionist Congress in Basel was in 1897. Jews had always lived in Jerusalem but now, many more came. Already by 1850, Jews were a majority. By 1922, there were 34,000 Jews in Jerusalem, 15,000 Christians and 13,500 Muslims. By the mid 1800’s, neighborhoods began to sprout up outside the city walls to the west. By 1880, there were 9 Jewish neighborhoods in the new city. Arabs and Christians built outside the city walls as well. Building in Jerusalem, both on the west side and the east side, continues to the present day.
There was conflict in the Holy Land between Arabs and the growing Jewish presence during the British Mandate. The British turned the problem over to the newly created United Nations. In 1947, the UN approved a partition plan: separate Arab and Jewish territories with a non-binding resolution to keep Jerusalem under international auspices, what they called a “corpus seperatum.” The Jews accepted the partition plan. The Palestinian Arabs and the surrounding Arab countries rejected it. Israel was attacked, the Jewish population of Jerusalem was under seize, the Israeli army broke the seize and captured West Jerusalem. They signed an armistice with Jordan who had annexed the Old City and East Jerusalem. The city was divided between Israel and Jordan for the next 19 years. During this time, Jordan destroyed over 50 synagogues in the Jewish quarter, one of them the Hurvah synagogue built in 1864. That synagogue was just rebuilt and rededicated last month, on March 16th. Fatah official, Khatem Abd el-Khader, called the recent renovation and dedication of the Hurva synagogue a "provocation", warned Israel that it was "playing with fire" and called on Palestinians to "converge on Al-Aksa to save it.” Violence erupted and one might ask just who provoked whom?
The Jordanians after 1948 according to the terms of the armistice agreement, were obligated to let Jews visit the Western Wall, the Kotel. They did not allow it. The Christian population in Jordanian Jerusalem fell from 25,000 to 11,000 as restrictive laws were imposed on Christian institutions as well. The Holy Sites in the Old City were completely cut off to the Jewish people. The ancient Jewish cemetery on the Mount of Olives was compromised and cut off from the Jewish people. At the same time, the Knesset, government offices, offices of foreign affairs and police as well as the president’s residence were built in West Jerusalem.
In 1967, Israel begged the Jordanians to stay out of the inevitable war with Syria and Egypt. Never the less, on May 30th, King Hussein signed an military pact with Nasser who had blockaded the Straits of Tiran, put 100,000 Egyptian troops into the Sinai and vowed to drive the Jews into the sea. Israel attacked on June 5th, surrounded the Old City and captured it on June 7th. Jerusalem was now in sovereign Jewish hands. Prime Minister Levi Eshkol announced that Jerusalem was “the eternal capital of Israel.” On June 27th, 1967, the Knesset annexed all of Jerusalem, east and west. In 1965, Teddy Kollek had become mayor of Jewish Jerusalem. After the '67 war, Jerusalem city boundaries were drawn up and Kollek began building a unified city with full access to all holy sites guaranteed by law.
Some international bodies claim that Israel’s annexation of West Jerusalem after 1948 was illegal according to international law. They also claim that the 1967 annexation of East Jerusalem was illegal. There is considerable debate on this subject. Israel claims it is not illegal and that Israel and the Jewish people have a historic right to Jerusalem that goes back 3 millennia. I, for one, agree with that position.
From 1967 until the Oslo process in the 90’s, no Israeli administration, Labor or Likkud, right or left, even considered re-dividing Jerusalem. Prime Minister Yitzchak Rabin did put Jerusalem theoretically on the negotiating table but even he held firm for Jewish sovereignty over the entire city saying, “if they told us that the price of peace is giving up on a united Jerusalem under Israeli sovereignty, my reply would be ‘let’s do without peace’.” In 2000, Prime Minister Barak considered offering some sections of East Jerusalem as a Palestinian capital along the lines of a rather tortured division of the city proposed by President Clinton. But PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat rejected the whole deal and a second Intifada broke out. At a post summit conference, Chairman Arafat revealed his designs on a united Jerusalem under Palestinian sovereignty as he said: “not only [over] the Church of the Holy Sepulcher and the Temple Mount mosques, and the Armenian quarter, but it is Jerusalem in its entirety, entirety, entirety.” So, after a 3000 year journey, we come to the present. At a ill-timed moment in history, a mid level Israeli bureaucrat announced stage four of a seven stage process in the construction of 1600 apartments in the Ramat Shlomo neighborhood in a northeastern suburb of Jerusalem. Construction in this part of Jerusalem has been going on for years with nary a complaint by Jew or Palestinian. This neighborhood itself is a large Jewish religious neighborhood surrounded to each side by even larger Jewish neighborhoods. This neighborhood would never be a part of any peace plan. The residents of this neighborhood as well as most residents of Jerusalem are scratching their heads perplexed that Ramat Shlomo became the source of an international incident. No one in Israel would consider “Ramat Shlomo” a settlement like you might find on some hill top in the West Bank. In fact, no part of Jerusalem, east or west can be considered a settlement as it is has been annexed Israeli territory since ‘67 which means all residents of Jerusalem, Arab and Jew, are full citizens of the State of Israel. This is not the case in the West Bank and that is why the West Bank has always been in play in peace negotiations.
The ill-will expressed publicly two weeks ago between the US administration and Israel has pretty much blown over. I suspect, however, that the issue of Jerusalem will come up again if any kind of peace process actually begins again. But perhaps the conflict of the past few weeks is an important one. It brings to light that re-dividing Jerusalem in any meaningful way would meet severe resistance by the overwhelming majority of Israelis. That would make it unlikely that an Israeli administration would be able to offer it up again at the peace table.
So that’s Jerusalem. The name means city of peace but it has engendered conflict throughout its 3000 year history. We can only pray that one day, Jerusalem, as the capital city of the State of Israel, will be able to live up to its name.
I thought I would take us on a quick historical tour this morning to give both ancient Jerusalem and modern Jerusalem some context as the holy city has been in the news lately --particularly regarding the plan by the municipality of Jerusalem to build an additional 1600 apartments in a Jewish suburb called Ramat Shlomo. It has created a bit of a stir internationally and has strained the US-Israel relationship. We will hear much more about Jerusalem in the news in the weeks and months ahead so I thought I would speak about it a bit today.
The Jerusalem story begins with King David who captured a small fortified hill in the Judean Hills from a Canaanite tribe called the Jebusites. The hill was steep and easy to protect. It also had water from a small spring adjacent to the hill.
David’s son Solomon expanded the city by building a temple just to the North. For the next 1000 years, give or take a few years, that temple, destroyed once and rebuilt, was the central focus of the Jewish people. In King Herod’s day, the Temple was expanded into an enormous complex that struck awe in the hearts of Israelites that would visit it from all over the land -three times annually. One of those times was Pesach when each Israelite family would offer up a lamb to be sacrificed by the Priests and eaten in Jerusalem by the family.
The second Temple was destroyed in 70CE by the Romans to the horror of the Jewish people. For the next 2000 years, Jews would yearn for the Temple to one day be rebuilt ---the laws of the Temple sacrifices were studied in every bet midrash in every country in the world where Jews lived. Jewish prayer would speak of the Temple. To this day on Shabbat and the Holidays, a special section of the service is reserved for commemorating the ritual that took place in the Temple. We will chant that very service today in a few moments.
Over time, most Jews came to believe the Temple would only be rebuilt when the messiah comes. Never the less, Jerusalem the city, retained a mystical holiness and its memory would always remain in the mind of Jews. As we read in the Psalms, “If I forget you, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning. If I do not remember you, let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth; if I do not set Jerusalem above my highest joy."
After Jerusalem fell to the Romans, the Romans created a classic Roman city on its ruins they called Aelia Capotolina in which they worshiped pagan gods. When the Emperor Constantine converted to Christianity in the fourth century, Jerusalem became a Christian city with little attention paid to the Temple Mount but a lot of focus on the development of what became the Church Middle East, and Caliph Umar captured Jerusalem from the Byzantine overlords. He cleaned up the Temple Mount that had been used as a garbage dump and built a mosque on it. That began a uncomfortable sharing of the Holy City between Christians, Muslims and Jews that exists to the present day.
In 688, work began to create a dome around a protruding rock on the Temple Mount that was believed to be the rock upon which Abraham offered up Isaac for sacrifice. Muslims also believe it was from this rock that Mohammed ascended to heaven. The Al Aksa Mosque was first built in the year 705.
Crusaders sacked Jerusalem in 1099 killing everyone in sight and made Jerusalem Christian again, creating churches on the Temple Mount. The Muslims recaptured the city under Saladin, about a hundred years later and it became a Muslim city once again. Mamluks from the Eurasian Steppes, converts to Islam, were the next to invade and they took Jerusalem in the 13th century and held it until 1516 when Jerusalem was taken over by the Ottoman Turks. The Ottoman empire held the city for the next 400 years. Then came the British. General Allenby entered the Jaffa Gate in December of 1917.
Zionism was well under way by then. The first Zionist Congress in Basel was in 1897. Jews had always lived in Jerusalem but now, many more came. Already by 1850, Jews were a majority. By 1922, there were 34,000 Jews in Jerusalem, 15,000 Christians and 13,500 Muslims. By the mid 1800’s, neighborhoods began to sprout up outside the city walls to the west. By 1880, there were 9 Jewish neighborhoods in the new city. Arabs and Christians built outside the city walls as well. Building in Jerusalem, both on the west side and the east side, continues to the present day.
There was conflict in the Holy Land between Arabs and the growing Jewish presence during the British Mandate. The British turned the problem over to the newly created United Nations. In 1947, the UN approved a partition plan: separate Arab and Jewish territories with a non-binding resolution to keep Jerusalem under international auspices, what they called a “corpus seperatum.” The Jews accepted the partition plan. The Palestinian Arabs and the surrounding Arab countries rejected it. Israel was attacked, the Jewish population of Jerusalem was under seize, the Israeli army broke the seize and captured West Jerusalem. They signed an armistice with Jordan who had annexed the Old City and East Jerusalem. The city was divided between Israel and Jordan for the next 19 years. During this time, Jordan destroyed over 50 synagogues in the Jewish quarter, one of them the Hurvah synagogue built in 1864. That synagogue was just rebuilt and rededicated last month, on March 16th. Fatah official, Khatem Abd el-Khader, called the recent renovation and dedication of the Hurva synagogue a "provocation", warned Israel that it was "playing with fire" and called on Palestinians to "converge on Al-Aksa to save it.” Violence erupted and one might ask just who provoked whom?
The Jordanians after 1948 according to the terms of the armistice agreement, were obligated to let Jews visit the Western Wall, the Kotel. They did not allow it. The Christian population in Jordanian Jerusalem fell from 25,000 to 11,000 as restrictive laws were imposed on Christian institutions as well. The Holy Sites in the Old City were completely cut off to the Jewish people. The ancient Jewish cemetery on the Mount of Olives was compromised and cut off from the Jewish people. At the same time, the Knesset, government offices, offices of foreign affairs and police as well as the president’s residence were built in West Jerusalem.
In 1967, Israel begged the Jordanians to stay out of the inevitable war with Syria and Egypt. Never the less, on May 30th, King Hussein signed an military pact with Nasser who had blockaded the Straits of Tiran, put 100,000 Egyptian troops into the Sinai and vowed to drive the Jews into the sea. Israel attacked on June 5th, surrounded the Old City and captured it on June 7th. Jerusalem was now in sovereign Jewish hands. Prime Minister Levi Eshkol announced that Jerusalem was “the eternal capital of Israel.” On June 27th, 1967, the Knesset annexed all of Jerusalem, east and west. In 1965, Teddy Kollek had become mayor of Jewish Jerusalem. After the '67 war, Jerusalem city boundaries were drawn up and Kollek began building a unified city with full access to all holy sites guaranteed by law.
Some international bodies claim that Israel’s annexation of West Jerusalem after 1948 was illegal according to international law. They also claim that the 1967 annexation of East Jerusalem was illegal. There is considerable debate on this subject. Israel claims it is not illegal and that Israel and the Jewish people have a historic right to Jerusalem that goes back 3 millennia. I, for one, agree with that position.
From 1967 until the Oslo process in the 90’s, no Israeli administration, Labor or Likkud, right or left, even considered re-dividing Jerusalem. Prime Minister Yitzchak Rabin did put Jerusalem theoretically on the negotiating table but even he held firm for Jewish sovereignty over the entire city saying, “if they told us that the price of peace is giving up on a united Jerusalem under Israeli sovereignty, my reply would be ‘let’s do without peace’.” In 2000, Prime Minister Barak considered offering some sections of East Jerusalem as a Palestinian capital along the lines of a rather tortured division of the city proposed by President Clinton. But PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat rejected the whole deal and a second Intifada broke out. At a post summit conference, Chairman Arafat revealed his designs on a united Jerusalem under Palestinian sovereignty as he said: “not only [over] the Church of the Holy Sepulcher and the Temple Mount mosques, and the Armenian quarter, but it is Jerusalem in its entirety, entirety, entirety.” So, after a 3000 year journey, we come to the present. At a ill-timed moment in history, a mid level Israeli bureaucrat announced stage four of a seven stage process in the construction of 1600 apartments in the Ramat Shlomo neighborhood in a northeastern suburb of Jerusalem. Construction in this part of Jerusalem has been going on for years with nary a complaint by Jew or Palestinian. This neighborhood itself is a large Jewish religious neighborhood surrounded to each side by even larger Jewish neighborhoods. This neighborhood would never be a part of any peace plan. The residents of this neighborhood as well as most residents of Jerusalem are scratching their heads perplexed that Ramat Shlomo became the source of an international incident. No one in Israel would consider “Ramat Shlomo” a settlement like you might find on some hill top in the West Bank. In fact, no part of Jerusalem, east or west can be considered a settlement as it is has been annexed Israeli territory since ‘67 which means all residents of Jerusalem, Arab and Jew, are full citizens of the State of Israel. This is not the case in the West Bank and that is why the West Bank has always been in play in peace negotiations.
The ill-will expressed publicly two weeks ago between the US administration and Israel has pretty much blown over. I suspect, however, that the issue of Jerusalem will come up again if any kind of peace process actually begins again. But perhaps the conflict of the past few weeks is an important one. It brings to light that re-dividing Jerusalem in any meaningful way would meet severe resistance by the overwhelming majority of Israelis. That would make it unlikely that an Israeli administration would be able to offer it up again at the peace table.
So that’s Jerusalem. The name means city of peace but it has engendered conflict throughout its 3000 year history. We can only pray that one day, Jerusalem, as the capital city of the State of Israel, will be able to live up to its name.
Thursday, March 25, 2010
D’VAR TORAH
BAT MITZVAH OF AVIVA ORIT DOLLIN
MARCH 20, 2010
5 NISSAN 5770
FIRST DAY OF SPRING
PARASHAT VAYIKRA
Wake up! Wake up to this moment. And what an exquisite moment it is! Our fourth child, our only daughter, one of two Dollin natives born here during our (what is now 16 year) tenure at the Hebrew Education Alliance in Denver, CO (Rose Hospital), becoming a bat mitzvah. Thank you all (family and friends) for being here to celebrate with us.
I have been patiently waiting all my years as a mother for this moment…the moment my only daughter celebrates her coming of age as a Jewish woman. I’ve written this speech a dozen times in my head. In it, I share with all of you what I have finally figured out…how to be a modern, and religious Jewish woman; how to reconcile tradition and modernity; how to make your voice heard while maintaining tzni’ut, modesty; how to infuse old rituals and traditional woman’s roles with new meaning (significance); How to be fluent in deciphering passages of Torah and Talmud, while adding one’s own distinct voice to the conversation of our patriarchs; how to care for others when they need help, while knowing how to make a good brisket for Shabbat. How to be a ‘mother in Israel’ without being subservient and relegated to a supporting role in history.
Needless to say, it’s been a humbling experience. Because I realized that I haven’t yet figured it all out! In many ways, I find being a woman in religious Judaism as challenging to me personally as it was 20 years ago. Actually, more so, as twenty years ago, at least I knew I was right! Now, I’m not so sure. Women in Judaism have come really far…the fact that you, Aviva, attend a school that unapologetically teaches Talmud to girls is proof of that. At the Denver Academy of Torah, a modern orthodox school, you have been taught Torah, Jewish law, Hebrew, prophets, and Talmud alongside your male classmates.
The question I have for myself, for Vivi and for you today, is ‘what will your role be in the history of our people’?
I have been privileged this year to be the teacher for an extraordinary group of women. This minyan of women, including many female leaders of our Jewish community, and I have been studying leadership and looking at our biblical foremothers as models. What do we learn from them? How do we learn it? When we look at women who came before us, what lessons of leadership do we glean? How have we exercised leadership differently than the men in our world? What are the different ways we make our voices heard? We found we could learn quite a lot from our biblical foremothers. And we were a bit surprised…while the techniques and strategies they employed were different than the patriarchs, their actions often led directly to redemption: of the Jewish people, and even of humanity. I’d like to introduce you to some of the women we have studied.
Sarah is our most ‘traditional’ woman. We don’t learn much about her from the biblical text, but the midrash (rabbinic commentary on torah) fills out her personality. The grammatical nuance in her name change, from ‘Sarai’ to ‘Sarah’ takes her from Abraham’s wife to the princess of a nation. And it is in her tent (her home) that God’s female presence (Shechina) dwells.
At the same lesson, I introduced two other Sarah’s of Jewish history: Sarah Schenirer, a fervently Orthodox woman, recognized that women needed to be Jewishly educated so their commitment to traditional observance stayed strong. With the blessing of the Belzer Rebbe, she founded the first Beis Yaakov school for girls. Agudat Israel adopted the Beis Yaakov model as its educational arm for women. Absolutely revolutionary in her time.
Sarah Aaronsohn forged a new role for women in the resettlement and regeneration of Palestine as a Jewish homeland. Born in Zichron Yaakov in 1890 to a prominent family, she never completed her formal education, yet spoke Hebrew, Yiddish, Turkish and French, some Arabic and taught herself English. She learned agronomy and botany, widely traveled the land of Israel (Palestine). Around the time Sarah Schnirer was organizing Beis Yaakov in Poland, Sarah Aaronsohn, a secular Jew, joined ‘Nili’, a pro-British underground movement of Jews in Palestine, determined to create a new Middle East by liberating the country from corrupt Turkish rule. She worked in intelligence and espionage, was captured and tortured by Turkish authorities, and committed suicide rather than divulge further information. She was called a “Jewish Joan of Arc”, and her martyrdom shattered many myths about Jewish women.
I asked my ladies to share the Sarah they most identified with; the maternal, pious, home-based biblical Sarah, the fervently religious Sarah who believed the perpetuation of Judaism depended on Jewishly educated women, or the brave, Zionist Sarah who forged new paths for women engaged in the enterprise of creating a Jewish homeland? We learned from each other as each of us chose the Sarah with whom we most identified: some of us choosing a quiet, home based life of devotion to faith and family, some pushing religious boundaries from within, and some shattering established norms of femininity.
Judges 4:5; “Devorah the prophetess, wife of Lapidot (Barak)…would sit under the date palm, between Ramah and Bet El on Mt. Ephraim, and the children of Israel would go up to her for judgement.” Devorah is history’s first female prophetess and judge; highly unusual, considering traditional Jewish law does not allow women to be valid witnesses. Her placement between two cities teaches us she had an innate sense of fairness, not favoring one over the other. She prophecies that the general Barak will be victorious, but that his success will come through the hand of a woman, which in fact happened. God had plenty of men around to choose as prophets. Why did God choose Devorah? She apparently, had something to bring to the table that a man did not. She referred to herself a ‘mother in Israel’. It is her maternal faith in the people, similar to what a parent feels for a child, that is needed at this moment in Jewish history. Devorah reignites the peoples’ sense of value as God’s chosen.
From Devorah, we studied the question “In a man’s world, how have you exercised leadership differently than a man?” We learned about empowerment rather than imposition, invigorate rather than force, cultivate rather than command. The skills Devorah used as judge and prophet in Israel were very different than the skills men brought to the job. At that time in Jewish history, patience, insight, and the ability to inspire and nurture were required, and God purposefully chose a woman to lead the people in that way.
We just celebrated the holiday of Purim, where we read the book of Esther. God’s name is absent in the book of Esther – God is not mentioned in the whole book. Yet by the end, God’s presence is felt. We learn from this that even when things appear hopeless, miracles can and do happen; and they can happen through the hand of man (OR, as in this case, through the hand of a woman). We further learn about the role of a woman. Esther, like other Persian maidens in the king’s palace, spends a great deal of effort and time focused on her beauty. As the Jewish people are threatened with extinction, her uncle Mordechai admonishes her, “Who knows but for this very moment you were destined to be in this place…in a position to save your people?” And in a transformative moment of clarity, showing exemplary courage, Esther accepts the challenge, saying “I will go to the king on behalf of my people, and if I should perish, I will perish.” Esther leads us to the question, do any of us experience such moments of clarity? Would we realize it, or would we need someone to point it out to us?
In just over a week, we will celebrate the holiday of Pesach. We will recount the story of the exodus from slavery in Egypt. We will recognize the sorrow of the Egyptians as they suffered through the plagues. We will feel the fear of uncertainty, doubt about our future as we rapidly bake our matzah and prepare for our leaving. We will joyously recognize the miracle of the parting of the Red Sea. And as we arrive safely on the other side, and our enemies are vanquished, Moses will sing a song of deliverance, and we will celebrate the crossing of the Red Sea, following Miriam’s lead, where she takes her timbrel and leads the women in song and dance. Miriam teaches us that God chooses women also as prophets; and that their way of prophecy may be different than a man’s. Miriam added the element of spirituality to our lives. We learn from her that God is not only served through the mind and through deeds, but also through the heart…the spirit. Miriam’s reward is no less than to be the progenitor of the Messiah.
Sarah, Devorah, Esther, Miriam, each exercising leadership of the Jewish people, yet in so many different ways. I used to think there was one way…lead like a man…out in front, bold, charismatic. But now I feel differently. Getting a bit older, learning from biblical and historical role models, engaging with modern women and their leadership choices, I am not so sure about the one way…the right way. So I ask Vivi today, and all Jewish women here, ‘what will your role be in the history of our people’?
Many of you don’t know that this is Vivi’s second bat mitzvah. Her first took place last year, as she turned twelve, quietly, among her girl friends and some family members and congregants present to hear her deliver a d’var Torah at mincha, followed by a gathering where we made blankets for Newborns in Need… and ate ice cream sundaes. This is what Vivi wanted. And to respect her as a young Jewish woman coming of age, this is how we honored her.
And this morning, is how she honors her father. As the rabbi’s daughter, he expected her to do what other 13 year olds did at our congregation, lead the service, read torah and haftorah, and speak before the kahal. And she did, beautifully, dutifully and happily. Through her actions, she taught me a lesson in humility. She was not so strident to think that there is only one way to behave in the world; she recognized that she was faced with competing priorities, each of critical importance in her life. She didn’t agonize, criticize or complain. She was not grouchy or resistant or mean. She accepted her world the way it was. She made peace with her place in it. She is a model to me of a righteous Jewish woman.
To wear a hat in shul or not? To accept an aliyah to the Torah or not? To speak out in front of others or to lead the way through subtle modeling? To cook a good brisket or to fight for our homeland? Who knows what is the ‘right’ way? In the words of your favorite country music song, (written by a man) “the only thing for certain is uncertainty.” So it is with humility, and uncertainty that I move forward. Perhaps I will be able to look back on my life and see clearly what my place was in the history of our people.
What I wish for you is not certainty, but security in knowing that before you came many, many Jewish women who all made their place in the history of our people in a different way. Know that all around you are amazing Jewish women, adding their unique spirit to our people. Know that this moment is precious, and will not ever be repeated. Don’t wait until you have it all figured out…you may never…but accept each moment for what it is. My wish for you is that you find your way, you add your unique voice to the history of our people, and I think, you are well on the way to doing just that.
Shabbat Shalom.
Tamra Dollin
BAT MITZVAH OF AVIVA ORIT DOLLIN
MARCH 20, 2010
5 NISSAN 5770
FIRST DAY OF SPRING
PARASHAT VAYIKRA
Wake up! Wake up to this moment. And what an exquisite moment it is! Our fourth child, our only daughter, one of two Dollin natives born here during our (what is now 16 year) tenure at the Hebrew Education Alliance in Denver, CO (Rose Hospital), becoming a bat mitzvah. Thank you all (family and friends) for being here to celebrate with us.
I have been patiently waiting all my years as a mother for this moment…the moment my only daughter celebrates her coming of age as a Jewish woman. I’ve written this speech a dozen times in my head. In it, I share with all of you what I have finally figured out…how to be a modern, and religious Jewish woman; how to reconcile tradition and modernity; how to make your voice heard while maintaining tzni’ut, modesty; how to infuse old rituals and traditional woman’s roles with new meaning (significance); How to be fluent in deciphering passages of Torah and Talmud, while adding one’s own distinct voice to the conversation of our patriarchs; how to care for others when they need help, while knowing how to make a good brisket for Shabbat. How to be a ‘mother in Israel’ without being subservient and relegated to a supporting role in history.
Needless to say, it’s been a humbling experience. Because I realized that I haven’t yet figured it all out! In many ways, I find being a woman in religious Judaism as challenging to me personally as it was 20 years ago. Actually, more so, as twenty years ago, at least I knew I was right! Now, I’m not so sure. Women in Judaism have come really far…the fact that you, Aviva, attend a school that unapologetically teaches Talmud to girls is proof of that. At the Denver Academy of Torah, a modern orthodox school, you have been taught Torah, Jewish law, Hebrew, prophets, and Talmud alongside your male classmates.
The question I have for myself, for Vivi and for you today, is ‘what will your role be in the history of our people’?
I have been privileged this year to be the teacher for an extraordinary group of women. This minyan of women, including many female leaders of our Jewish community, and I have been studying leadership and looking at our biblical foremothers as models. What do we learn from them? How do we learn it? When we look at women who came before us, what lessons of leadership do we glean? How have we exercised leadership differently than the men in our world? What are the different ways we make our voices heard? We found we could learn quite a lot from our biblical foremothers. And we were a bit surprised…while the techniques and strategies they employed were different than the patriarchs, their actions often led directly to redemption: of the Jewish people, and even of humanity. I’d like to introduce you to some of the women we have studied.
Sarah is our most ‘traditional’ woman. We don’t learn much about her from the biblical text, but the midrash (rabbinic commentary on torah) fills out her personality. The grammatical nuance in her name change, from ‘Sarai’ to ‘Sarah’ takes her from Abraham’s wife to the princess of a nation. And it is in her tent (her home) that God’s female presence (Shechina) dwells.
At the same lesson, I introduced two other Sarah’s of Jewish history: Sarah Schenirer, a fervently Orthodox woman, recognized that women needed to be Jewishly educated so their commitment to traditional observance stayed strong. With the blessing of the Belzer Rebbe, she founded the first Beis Yaakov school for girls. Agudat Israel adopted the Beis Yaakov model as its educational arm for women. Absolutely revolutionary in her time.
Sarah Aaronsohn forged a new role for women in the resettlement and regeneration of Palestine as a Jewish homeland. Born in Zichron Yaakov in 1890 to a prominent family, she never completed her formal education, yet spoke Hebrew, Yiddish, Turkish and French, some Arabic and taught herself English. She learned agronomy and botany, widely traveled the land of Israel (Palestine). Around the time Sarah Schnirer was organizing Beis Yaakov in Poland, Sarah Aaronsohn, a secular Jew, joined ‘Nili’, a pro-British underground movement of Jews in Palestine, determined to create a new Middle East by liberating the country from corrupt Turkish rule. She worked in intelligence and espionage, was captured and tortured by Turkish authorities, and committed suicide rather than divulge further information. She was called a “Jewish Joan of Arc”, and her martyrdom shattered many myths about Jewish women.
I asked my ladies to share the Sarah they most identified with; the maternal, pious, home-based biblical Sarah, the fervently religious Sarah who believed the perpetuation of Judaism depended on Jewishly educated women, or the brave, Zionist Sarah who forged new paths for women engaged in the enterprise of creating a Jewish homeland? We learned from each other as each of us chose the Sarah with whom we most identified: some of us choosing a quiet, home based life of devotion to faith and family, some pushing religious boundaries from within, and some shattering established norms of femininity.
Judges 4:5; “Devorah the prophetess, wife of Lapidot (Barak)…would sit under the date palm, between Ramah and Bet El on Mt. Ephraim, and the children of Israel would go up to her for judgement.” Devorah is history’s first female prophetess and judge; highly unusual, considering traditional Jewish law does not allow women to be valid witnesses. Her placement between two cities teaches us she had an innate sense of fairness, not favoring one over the other. She prophecies that the general Barak will be victorious, but that his success will come through the hand of a woman, which in fact happened. God had plenty of men around to choose as prophets. Why did God choose Devorah? She apparently, had something to bring to the table that a man did not. She referred to herself a ‘mother in Israel’. It is her maternal faith in the people, similar to what a parent feels for a child, that is needed at this moment in Jewish history. Devorah reignites the peoples’ sense of value as God’s chosen.
From Devorah, we studied the question “In a man’s world, how have you exercised leadership differently than a man?” We learned about empowerment rather than imposition, invigorate rather than force, cultivate rather than command. The skills Devorah used as judge and prophet in Israel were very different than the skills men brought to the job. At that time in Jewish history, patience, insight, and the ability to inspire and nurture were required, and God purposefully chose a woman to lead the people in that way.
We just celebrated the holiday of Purim, where we read the book of Esther. God’s name is absent in the book of Esther – God is not mentioned in the whole book. Yet by the end, God’s presence is felt. We learn from this that even when things appear hopeless, miracles can and do happen; and they can happen through the hand of man (OR, as in this case, through the hand of a woman). We further learn about the role of a woman. Esther, like other Persian maidens in the king’s palace, spends a great deal of effort and time focused on her beauty. As the Jewish people are threatened with extinction, her uncle Mordechai admonishes her, “Who knows but for this very moment you were destined to be in this place…in a position to save your people?” And in a transformative moment of clarity, showing exemplary courage, Esther accepts the challenge, saying “I will go to the king on behalf of my people, and if I should perish, I will perish.” Esther leads us to the question, do any of us experience such moments of clarity? Would we realize it, or would we need someone to point it out to us?
In just over a week, we will celebrate the holiday of Pesach. We will recount the story of the exodus from slavery in Egypt. We will recognize the sorrow of the Egyptians as they suffered through the plagues. We will feel the fear of uncertainty, doubt about our future as we rapidly bake our matzah and prepare for our leaving. We will joyously recognize the miracle of the parting of the Red Sea. And as we arrive safely on the other side, and our enemies are vanquished, Moses will sing a song of deliverance, and we will celebrate the crossing of the Red Sea, following Miriam’s lead, where she takes her timbrel and leads the women in song and dance. Miriam teaches us that God chooses women also as prophets; and that their way of prophecy may be different than a man’s. Miriam added the element of spirituality to our lives. We learn from her that God is not only served through the mind and through deeds, but also through the heart…the spirit. Miriam’s reward is no less than to be the progenitor of the Messiah.
Sarah, Devorah, Esther, Miriam, each exercising leadership of the Jewish people, yet in so many different ways. I used to think there was one way…lead like a man…out in front, bold, charismatic. But now I feel differently. Getting a bit older, learning from biblical and historical role models, engaging with modern women and their leadership choices, I am not so sure about the one way…the right way. So I ask Vivi today, and all Jewish women here, ‘what will your role be in the history of our people’?
Many of you don’t know that this is Vivi’s second bat mitzvah. Her first took place last year, as she turned twelve, quietly, among her girl friends and some family members and congregants present to hear her deliver a d’var Torah at mincha, followed by a gathering where we made blankets for Newborns in Need… and ate ice cream sundaes. This is what Vivi wanted. And to respect her as a young Jewish woman coming of age, this is how we honored her.
And this morning, is how she honors her father. As the rabbi’s daughter, he expected her to do what other 13 year olds did at our congregation, lead the service, read torah and haftorah, and speak before the kahal. And she did, beautifully, dutifully and happily. Through her actions, she taught me a lesson in humility. She was not so strident to think that there is only one way to behave in the world; she recognized that she was faced with competing priorities, each of critical importance in her life. She didn’t agonize, criticize or complain. She was not grouchy or resistant or mean. She accepted her world the way it was. She made peace with her place in it. She is a model to me of a righteous Jewish woman.
To wear a hat in shul or not? To accept an aliyah to the Torah or not? To speak out in front of others or to lead the way through subtle modeling? To cook a good brisket or to fight for our homeland? Who knows what is the ‘right’ way? In the words of your favorite country music song, (written by a man) “the only thing for certain is uncertainty.” So it is with humility, and uncertainty that I move forward. Perhaps I will be able to look back on my life and see clearly what my place was in the history of our people.
What I wish for you is not certainty, but security in knowing that before you came many, many Jewish women who all made their place in the history of our people in a different way. Know that all around you are amazing Jewish women, adding their unique spirit to our people. Know that this moment is precious, and will not ever be repeated. Don’t wait until you have it all figured out…you may never…but accept each moment for what it is. My wish for you is that you find your way, you add your unique voice to the history of our people, and I think, you are well on the way to doing just that.
Shabbat Shalom.
Tamra Dollin
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